Yeah, the idea that the Native peoples of the Americas are one bloc that would all get along is just a different way to exoticise them. Same story with “all Natives are environmentalists”.

The old hatreds between tribes have more or less died out in the face of irrelevance relative to the troubles with settlers, but every band still has their own culture and internal politics. Because they’re people.

I mean, Rupert’s land is still here and alive, even.

Yeah, maybe. Or maybe that’s at least a part of it. There definitely was rivalry, even if an American communist revolution was never remotely close.

Nice talking to you!

Like everywhere except maybe an uncontacted island we have racism, but I’m not sure what country would have less. Multiculturalism is part of our national ethos.

Rural Canada is all white and full of hate.

Yeah, I’m here. We have minorities (for some reason - you crossed an ocean, why Buttfuck, AB?) and everyone seems to get along at least in public. Not sure how much worse it is than the city on race issues, honestly, although I’m white and it makes it hard to tell. You’ll have a lot more trouble if you’re gay, and I try very hard to hide my politics.

Interestingly, Evangelicalism has been hit especially hard with a demographic shift as their missionary converts come back, and their white members leave.

It offers protection from crackers and cybergangs too, because they always follow laws. /s

Love you too.

Yeah, but usually there’s other ways, right? Blame immigrants or minorities, or let the wealth naturally move away from the poor slowly enough a casual voter won’t notice. That’s what everyone else did the whole time, and the US itself before and after.

Even today, with all the information you need at your fingertips, a lot of the people in the US who want a shift left on wealth issues are actually in the 9% after the 1% (which ironically is the class that owns the most stuff). The real poor lean pretty pro-Trump.

One quote vs. a bunch of hard statistics, sources available on request.

It’s not even a quote that contradicts what I said, when put in context, where it was about tax policy. Warren buffet is well aware of the gradualness of the wealth gap, and that there’s no free lunch for corporations. His whole investment philosophy is built on the latter fact.

Correct, most voters don’t understand enough to demand effective redistribution policies. Speaking from experience, if you get involved in politics this becomes the bane of your existence.

There is some redistribution now, and it’s gone up recently in Canada, although I’m not sure off the top of my head what the global trends have been. It’s just slower than the natural self-accumulation of wealth.

How the New Deal got so much traction in the US is a big mystery, honestly - it really was a unique event. People weren’t smarter or more educated back then, and on the other side of the Atlantic they just elected fascists, who can tell a hell of an emotionally appealing story. (The USSR definitely managed redistribution, although they came straight after a brutal monarchy and a war without a significant liberal democracy phase, and struggled to keep growing over time)

Well, since you’re not OP.

Most stuff in the West, including businesses, is owned by kinda rich but mostly ordinary people - the 9% after the 1%. Furthermore, people have always tried to make money, and while big businesses are a lot more efficient at it today margins are much lower to compensate. There’s no self-contained, small club getting easy money at the public’s expense, which is what OP was implying.

A few things have gotten more expensive relative to wages. Some things are actually less expensive (clothes are a minor expense post-globalisation, a basic TV costs less than a really nice meal now), other things are kinda the same. The real trend has been the split between well paying jobs (like most of Lemmy has) and poorly paying jobs widening; the rest is “everything used to be better”, which people are recorded saying all the way back through Socratese.

I want to argue with this, but it wouldn’t be much of a rant community if it talked back.

Intelligence does seem like the white-collar kind of thing which might be left to fancy degreed officers.

I didn’t know military intelligence had noncoms. How does that work?

Dying naturally tends to be an excruciatingly painful and slow process.

eating, drinking water, moving out of the way of danger, etc.

Not eating and drinking is a definite thing.

Good argument

Thanks!

What gave the voters then the opportunity to make better decisions for themselves?

The voting. If it’s anything like Canada, there have been socialist fringe candidates all along, it’s just that there hasn’t been much interest.

You could say people have been railroaded into not supporting socialism, but they don’t. No amount of extra democracy will change that.

No problem. The internet should be fun, not stressful.

I would still have to see any evidence that what I said (essentially that the US has been the biggest bully in the world for the last 80 years) is way off the mark.

If we’re including post-WWII decolonisation, pretty much point to any former colony - which is a rather large map area. The British or French didn’t just let them leave, but did atrocities to stop them until they couldn’t anymore. I went looking for casualty figures, but it turns out there’s not much information known. Maybe we’ll have to wait until the guilty parties are all dead.

I think you’d arrive at the same conclusion that it was a two-sided competition if you were to read up in detail on a few times and places during the Cold War, as opposed to just the US coup greatest hits. Mao did not fight alone. The thing is, it’s hard to capture that all in one number. The USSR spent maybe 20% of it’s GDP on it’s military, while being a third the economic size of the US, to give a sense of scale of the kind of resources that were piling in from the communist direction.

Over a period that long and the area of the whole world that’s about as good as I can do in a Lemmy comment.

Social media manipulation is in no way equivalent to supporting or initiating coups.

Ukraine comes to mind (did we talk about that already?), as does Georgia. Globally it’s in no way just social media, either. In places like the Baltics there’s your classic people with suitcases full of money going around and paying for sabotage, access or votes. That’s not just hearsay - some have been caught.

In the West they’re more limited because it’s harder to get away with, so yeah, they mostly mess with social media. I’m pretty sure there was somebody that went to jail in the US during Biden’s time, though.

I’m not sure I understand your second point here,

It wasn’t a point, I just won’t/can’t argue with the basic idea that they’ve been too aggressive. I’m arguing with the first thing.

why should anyone support the US or any of its closest partners?

I mean, the most conservative stance would be just to support nobody and say every country is awful. Why isn’t that in consideration?

have not supported the US/West position in either Ukraine or Palestine.

Ukraine has lots of third world support (see the votes in the image). Palestine has some Western support; Canada just went against the US to recognise it in what is a very sensitive period in our relations. Sweden did long ago.

The claims that it’s “for democracy” is very weak when there are examples in the recent past of the US either supporting or not opposing coups against democratically-elected foreign leaders. The first example that comes to mind is the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt after the Arab Spring. From what I recall, there was hardly a squeak from the US when that happened, because it benefited the US.

Support for an anti-democratic coup hasn’t happened since the “stop communism” era. If you include not getting involved, neutral Switzerland is a massive bully, and I actually can show it in a Lemmy comment.

I would guess Obama was concerned and disappointed, but also wanted some kind of stability, and to not alienate a new government he was going to have to deal with one way or another. Starting another ground war in the Middle East was obviously out of the question at that point - even closing Libyan airspace was very controversial.

Does one of them have alsimoneau’s number in it (that’s who I meant)? You yourself gave a number closer to 15%.

Having been involved in campaign treasury myself, you absolutely can run a campaign on a shoestring budget. A good campaign costs a bit more, but at the end of the day it all comes from small dollar donations, and if you’re getting a meaningful amount of votes you should get some of those as well.

People tend to blame the government if their services aren’t working or the economy preforms poorly, working class solidarity be damned. That’s why it’s tempting to shut strikes down even if you endorse the basic concept in theory.

Obviously there are regional differences, e.g. US vs Canada vs EU. I think the tendencies are the same but the degree is different at any point in time.

I will point out that in Canada, there’s not much money in politics. We don’t have a Citizens United equivalent. Pretty sure European countries are more like us, although each one has a distinct system.

It’s an essay format, not a deductive argument so the thesis is stated, then it’s given support. Not saying you should be convinced, just explaining why it seems like this.

Alright, I guess I’ve delivered as much rebuttal as is appropriate, then.

It’s also a light year away from an exhaustive analysis. I can’t do that here and now. It takes books to do this.

You know, too much length on each analysis itself actually reduces strength, in my experience. If one’s idea is that complicated, they need to put it in a modular, structured form (so not prose), or are guaranteed to have made logical errors somewhere inside.