Lotta scratched liberals around these days.

No not at all, hence why I’m not antidemocratic. Democracy didn’t give us Trump, the dictatorship of capital did.

Apparently it’s too subtle for anyone who didn’t interpret it as antidemocratic.

The joke is how unfortunately prophetic it is.

Do you think the US is meaningfully democratic? When’s the last time any leader did something that favored the people over capital?

It implies that the people are too dumb to govern themselves; that as they get get closer to a perfect democracy, the choose dumber leaders.

It states that in a perfect democracy, the masses would elect morons because they themselves are morons.

What kind of antidemocratic horseshit is this?

I love that scene, you have a table of vicious killers and sociopaths, and even they’re disgusted at the idea of someone not tipping.

From the things I saw about the US election, the Dems were the side with plans for the economy - minimum wage adjustments, unions, taxing the rich, etc

The dems are in power now, they didn’t do those things, so nobody believed they’d actually do it if they were elected again.

Additionally, parading around endorsements from Dick and Liz Cheney, and promising to build a border wall, tax breaks for small businesses, and other republican policies from 2016 didn’t help the perception that the dems weren’t going to help people.

Minsk II was never enforced, after Zelensky got elected on a peace platform, he told told Azov and co to disband. They threatened to kill him, and kept at it. They were shelling Eastern Ukraine until they very day of the invasion.

But in any case, my analysis is not based on trusting Putin, it’s based on what Russia is capable of and what the expected effects of such actions would be. They don’t have the manpower to fight an insurgency in Western Ukraine, let alone invade the rest of Europe at the same time.

Short of a revolution and dismantling the military industrial complex, we were always the bad guys for WWIII.

~20 million die of lack of clean water, preventable disease, etc each year due to dictators the US arms to prevent economic development and keep resources and labor cheap.

If the leftists were enough to sway the vote, don’t you think they should have listened to us?

Between 2014 and 2022, fighting never stopped.

By February, Ukraine is gone

So if Russia and Ukraine instead sign a peace deal with borders similar to where the Russian/Ukrainian speaking majorities are, and Russia doesn’t invade the rest of europe and Georgia, will you do any introspection?

WWIII start, you will be on the Axis side.

The evil empire that prevents the global south from developing economically to keep resources and labor cheap by providing weapons to dictators is the axis side for WWIII. Like no matter who we end up allied with, most of humanity recognizes us as the bad guys.

The only way we could survive this is by being a united, social-liberal democratic beacon of hope for the rest of the western world, but we’re fucked.

Yup, letting neoliberalism hollow out your states created the conditions for fascism. Same thing happened over here.

Ukraine

You’re not understanding, the arms and money we send Ukraine enables them to continue the war. Last year, Russia offered a peace deal, giving up a portion of the territory they occupied at the time. Ukraine declined and says they won’t settle for less than all their territory, including Crimea. Without the weapons, they’d be forced to agree to a deal. Given that Russia probably knows they can’t deal with the insurgency outside of Russian-speaking Ukraine, they’ll probably agree to borders similar to what exists now.

China would have wanted Taiwan regardless

I mean the Republic of China is a part of China, it’s eventual reunification is inevitable, but they obviously see that reunification by invasion would be very expensive, both in cost of the invasion, cost of the insurgency, and resulting sanctions from their third-biggest trading partner. The only case where they’d waste billions of dollars and hundreds of thousand of lives is if the US made that option better than the alternative.

The same calculation happened with Russia; after the maidan coup, the civil war on their border caused them to strategic infrastructure and terrorist attacks. They erroneously calculated the cost of having a hostile, NATO-backed state on the border would be greater than a quick invasion and replacing the US puppet with another Russian one.

You need to look closer to understand what pressures cause countries to do things, these places aren’t cartoons who just decide to self-destruct their economies and send an entire generation into a meat grinder because aUTHoriTariaNism.

We’ve already sent troops to help Israel in Palestine, remember that aid pier that Israel used to do warcrimes, and now there’s troops operating aircraft and a missile defense system to prevent anyone from interfering with Israel’s genocide.

help out Russia in Ukraine

Just not sending weapons and money should be enough to get Ukraine back to the peace table and stop the bloodshed.

help out China in Taiwan

Ironically if we didn’t try to use Taiwan for geopolitical goals, China would have no reason to invade, since a peaceful reintegration over time is far more advantageous than the destruction and insurgency that comes with a military option.

I guess it’s easier to avoid speculation as to why we all can’t win.

We literally cannot all win, we have mutually exclusive interests. When you appeal to racists, you lose anyone who is or cares for immigrants. When you appeal to the capitalist class, you throw out the workers.

After throwing out the entire base to go after “moderate republicans”, 5% of Democrat voters were registered republicans. That’s down from 6% in 2020.

Did you envision a worse outcome than the one we got?

That remains to be seen. Currently we’re at the part where dems call black people, latinos, and the left racist, homophobic misogynists for not having higher turnout, and ignore white men and women who voted Trump. The outcome I envision will be the dems internalizing that and doing the same thing again in 2026 and 2028, preventing any electoral solution to the rise of fascism.

too many leftists and progressives seemed comfortable with flirting with disaster

Leftists had no power to affect the outcome of the election. When they tell you that what the dems are doing is a losing strategy, they’re not saying they, personally, are going to cause the dems to lose, they’re observing that what the dems are doing will cause them to lose.

the USA is now going to join WW3 on the side of the bad guys

What do you mean “join”?

The evil empire that militarily supports dictators across the global south to prevent economic development and keep cheap labor and resources flowing out are the bad guys, this hasn’t and will not change short of a revolution or the empire’s control collapsing.

See you’re doing it again, every time you shift the blame away from the people who decide the things that determine whether or not people vote, you convince the dems they can do it again.

This is exclusively the fault of the democrats. You can’t change the reality that running on policy your base doesn’t like, and then telling them “fuck you gonna do, help trump win?” decreases turnout.

The only reason they pushed Biden out was that they saw they had zero chance at victory if they didn’t change.

Yes, it’s a shame the democrats ran on building a wall to keep immigrants out and tax cuts for small businesses.

Seats were lost because the presidential election is what brings people out to vote. ~15% of the electorate stayed home because they saw a choice between the 2016 republican and a dem with the 2016 republican platform. The down-ballot races suffered as well as a result.