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The whole world feels like losing a big brother to the agony of drug addiction, forced to watch all the stupid decisions that impact millions of lives across the globe.
It's such a hurtful thing, as someone who experienced the optimism of the nineties, when the cold war appeared to be over. It's been downwards from there, through Bush all the way up to Trump.
Get well big bro. Pull through, pls.
Crazy that the red scare happened in America but now, now they're just playing into foreign takeovers. I guess hollowing out education and starving the population worked.
Idiots, absolute idiots.
Conservatives, absolute conservatives.
Yeah it seems like every time a decision on education comes up THIS party is all "more money for education and teachers, better working condi-" and the OTHER party is all "fuck that we want a make-believe jet fighter, and new coal plants - money taken!"
And I'm not talking about the last ten or twenty or thirty years. I mean the last fifty at the very least.
This is why the "both sides bad" and "baby Dems big mad @ Biden lolz" is classic russian troll meat. It's really. that. simple. Democratic supermajorities across the country, we'll fix this shit. Or, y'know, stay the course.
Can't describe how stupid it is Russian Propaganda is just repackaged conservative media.
There’s a growing sense among foreign diplomats that moral or national security arguments — about defending a country unjustly invaded, deterring Russia, preventing a bigger war in Europe and safeguarding democracy — don’t work on the American far-right.
50 years ago the far right fought the “Red Menace “, today they embrace it. /smh
GOP in 2016 = We need to elect Trump because the world is laughing at us.
GOP in 2024 = Who cares what the rest of the world thinks about us?
They stopped caring the second Trump got elected and the whole world turned against us except for Putin and his cronies.
They quite obviously never cared. Obama was more respected among America's allies than any president since JFK or some shit. Meanwhile their candidate was globally treated as a fucking joke.
Not even a funny joke - one of those racist sexist jokes your drunk stepfather tells. And the Kremlin were the only ones laughing.
Remember when they muddied the waters claiming Hilary was a pedophile because their guy hung out with the dude who ran a pedo ring.
Both sides, tho.
I always took it as a given that any American pol was in favor of the US being 'leader of the Free World.'
On the other hand, I always thought that the American voter would turn away from a guy who constantly spoke ill of America's veterans.
A core aspect of the fascist playbook is to undermine everyone's trust in everything. By sowing chaos and distrust, you can create an environment sufficiently uncomfortable that people clamor for someone to come in and simplify things, at any cost.
It's worked before, and it can again. Nothing stands in its way except us, and our ability to explain to people that might, possibly trust us and be reachable.
It's funny how few people understand how fragile democracy really is, just because our American version has proven fairly robust. Education is a tool for preventing its decline, but treatment options once decline is established are far more limited, and rely on grassroots civic engagement.
Nazi Germany had agents working across Europe to undermine the will of the locals to fight.
MAGoos are doing it here for free.
I was thinking about this in terms of messaging, and one idea we can try is to take a page from the Ross Perot playbook. One weakness we tend to have as more humanities-trained thinkers is we don't really try to communicate numerically.
Numbers and mathematics are harder to fudge than words, and that can work in our favor, for anyone involved with communicating to an actual audience. Particularly with regards to economic messaging though. It's one thing to say companies are profiteering, it's another to take the time to provide graphs, figures and historical data as evidence of your claims.
imho, it's not about the presentation. The MAGoos saw Herman Cain and thousands of others die and they brushed it off.
Just convince people to vote Blue. At this point, it's the only alternative. Voting for a 3rd Party is a vote for Trump.
I don't think anything can crack a die hard MAGA repub. But different strategies can work on different subsets of on-the-fence repubs who might just be semi-bubbled, but not totally insulated.
Frankly, not everyone has a problem with fascism, and you can't necessarily make them, either. Let's not kid ourselves. An economic argument provided with evidence of corrupt behavior might convince some, and would be well worth trying in certain situations.
Trouble with an economic argument is that we have two different economies.
Right now, it's almost impossible for a single income family to survive, but the stock market is booming.
Also, numbers can be manipulated. Back in the 1980s the USA was far ahead of the Soviets by almost any measure. The GOP invented a new category for missiles; throw weight, the size of the payload a missile could carry. Because the West had better tech, they could build smaller weapons. But when you showed a Congressional committee scale models, the Soviet low tech giants seemed magnificent.
I don't understand how this disagrees with me from a messaging standpoint. Certainly numbers can be fabricated, it's simply more troublesome, because they're easier to check. When you show why the stock market is booming, and how companies are making record profit, then I think it shows in another way how Biden can demonstrate what the real culprits behind American QoL decay are.
This makes sense as a message, regardless of whether it is perfect or not, which no message is.
You can either claim to be leader of the free world or you can say you want to get rid of NATO.
It can't be both.
The first is still bullshit, but it definitely can't be both.
This is the analogy I've been using for years.
Richard Nixon's Southern Strategy gave the base beer. Ronald Reagan gave them grain alcohol punch, and Bush Jr. gave them straight moonshine. Trump gave them meth.
The past decade of American politics has convinced the world there is merit in reducing reliance on the US and the next decade will reinforce that. The US economy is nothing if it cannot remain a competitive investment option for foreign dollars. Id wager the majority of the reason the fed jacked rates was to keep the dollar as a great investment for those foreign investors. The unemployment boost they said they were looking for didn't happen but they say they're done raising rates, so they did get something they wanted it seems.
And since American loves to import necessities, should those foreign investments halt and stop helping to keep the dollar competitive internationally, America will go from a third world country with shiny commodites, to a third world country with nothing but the largest military on earth.
Conditions like that give rise to even more authoritarian right wing populists who would end up assuming control of a country with a poor economy but immense military might. What do you think is going to happen? Because my guess is exactly what Russia is doing now. That is what is at risk for the future of a US that doesn't get it's shit together. If you think stopping Russias military is hard, Imagine the USA decides it's time to leverage military might for economic gain.
Imagine the USA decides it’s time to leverage military might for economic gain.
I see what you mean in general, but it's a bit funny to assume the US hasn't been leveraging its military for economic gain (see: the whole Mmiddle East).
A less controversial example is that the USA provides security for many shipping lanes. Few countries are in a position to do that currently.
Fair enough, but as it stands the US is tolerable as a security guarantor because they use that force "fairly" enough to other powerful states. Without other states invested in the US econ theres much less to lose and instead of protecting them, the US could easily use their existing global reach to extort anyone who needs that security, pay up or you're on your own. And that money would go right to the presumably despotic government, not even routed through multinationals that buy the government representatives. Neither is preferable, but if the government becomes nothing but a military, more money directly to them would likely cause more bad things.
fed jacked rates ... they did get something they wanted
Fewer loans issued by member banks means less new money entering the economy via private spending, which means the federal government can spend that much more money without impacting inflation. And there is plenty that needs to be bought, from pandemic related expenses, to scaling up weapons production in anticipation of WWIII, infrastructure modernization and other measures to encourage manufacturing to return from China to the American continent, and social programs to treat the worst mass poverty seen since the Great Depression.