Hey there bud, we’d totally be down to help you out there but whatever you caught seems to already be making Alberta sick and we don’t want it catching on any worse up here, eh. We’re not really big on the whole conquering thing these days either (turns out there’s consequences to that). We’ll bring some matches and have a good 'ole pork roast at the White House when you’re ready though, eh.

~Sincerely, Canada

No, they can’t. They can’t see that their family, their friends, their communities are as good as dead, regardless of which set of monsters are butchering them. They want to believe that there’s a world this ends in freedom for their kin, often because it would cost them too much to give up hope.

I didn’t say more money always wins, there’s plenty of evidence of that, but money is fundamental in the US to building the communications apparatus to be heard over the unhinged rants being amplified by the corporate class. You want to be heard over the fire hose of bullshit, you need full-time dedicated staff and they need to eat. The game is rigged in favour of the corrupt, even you can’t deny that one, and with the wild imbalance of current wealth inequality in the US the progressive left is not well positioned to break the siege. There are regional bastions that can hold the line like Minnesota, New York, and Seattle but it’s not enough to actually win given the way the US electoral system is structured to favour dollars over people.

You want my honest take? It’s going to take a decade of community organizing, union organizing, and a whole lot more blood, sweat and tears to break through the point where the progressive left is able to drop the center-right DNC and stand on their own against the plutocrats trying to break people’s spirits. Can it be done? Yes. Are we there yet? I don’t think we are, not in most of the country. It’s a much longer road than I think a lot of people appreciate. That doesn’t mean it isn’t worth walking, but it’s going to take a lot longer to right this ship than a few years, and we need people with the commitment to do the ground work, to build community groups, to organize in places that no progressive has ever stood a chance before.

I’m not going to carry water for the pathetic old guard that are failing to effectively fight the fascist right. Call their bullshit out. But at the end of the day, the left by itself isn’t big enough or strong enough to overcome the oligarch’s propaganda machine. Not yet. Not where they need to be.

You kiss your mother with that mouth? I said national scale You can do it on a mayoral scale, even a city the size of New York but the closest anyone ever came to pulling it off at a national scale was Bernie and he still couldn’t fund a full war chest at a time with much better financial conditions for small donors.

There does seem to have been a pretty widespread shift around 5000-3000 BCE (7000-5000 years ago) where a number of different populations across Europe, Asia, and North and East Africa all shifted in a relatively small time window to a patriarchal (literally “father-lead” for people who aren’t familiar with what the term actually means) social structure. Interestingly this also coincides with a rapid loss of genetic diversity in the y-chromosome suggesting it was highly hazardous to the health of most men when this shift happened. Some have speculated that this is the point at which we went from minor territorial disputes and some mild raiding to the emergence of organized “warfare”, though the evidence is circumstantial. While cultures still often went back and forth between being more egalitarian and more patriarchal, that seems to be a major historical turning point. In the (roughly) 300,000 year history of Homo sapiens, and the several million year history of the Homo genus, that’s a relatively recent.

I think it’s important to remember that the Democrats are not a single unified party, it’s a coalition of two. One that has strong convictions, and well reasoned and popular plans for correcting the course of country, but an inability to raise the funds to support a coherent organization or run a campaign, and a second party that has no coherent values or convictions and importantly, no functional plan to govern, but significant funding from corporate owners and the resources to manage a large, national scale organization. This is how you end up with a party with AOC and Bernie at one end and John Fetterman and Andrew Cuomo at the other end. A tent that big doesn’t have an ideology, a consistent platform, or any positive mandate. But also neither party is viable on its own because of the structure of the US electoral system.

From one angle it is certainly true that the DNC is parasitic on the popular movements of the day. From another angle, it can look like the progressive movements are parasitic on the structural and financial machine of the democratic party. In both cases though if you zoom out far enough, it becomes apparant that both of those are true, and more, but also that it’s ultimately a dysfunctional symbiosis of convenience to survive in a system that is structurally incapable of producing a result that disadvantages the capital owner class. You can’t actually use the US political system as it stands to correct its current failures. It’s designed to fall apart if you try.

This is an explicit statement of intent to commit genocide. His entire administration is now party to war crimes. He’s crossed a line that cannot be uncrossed.

Openly committing genocide

Makes sense that they hate children. It must really scare them, with the constant reminder that some day their reign of terror will end and they will be outlasted.

The word professional is so ambiguous as to be effectively meaningless, bearing no resemblance whatsoever to its original definition.

No one but the most shallow and superficial among us cares what you’re wearing. Thinking a suit does anything but make you look self-important and pretentious is an anachronism.

“I don’t think I’ve ever heard…” friend, you literally live in an information silo. Do you speak Spanish? Because you probably aren’t hearing anything about Spain if you don’t. Do you follow any British media? Because they’re not coming to an American forum to bitch about Britain. You probably don’t care enough to even notice if someone was talking about another country, so how would you hear anything?

What’s uniquely American is making your internal drama everyone else’s problem.

I ask myself the same question every time a company raises its prices.

You killed a coral reef because you couldn’t figure out how to create headers and footers? No, there’s no AI integrated Open Source word processor.

Iron Man and Batman can only do what they do because they have the time and access to resources to do it. Guardian from Alpha Flight, for example would be something like “Working Class Ironman.” Common engineer who found out the mining suit he was building was going to be sold off to the military so he stole the prototype and became a superhero. He’s kind of an “Iron Man’s brain, Captain America’s heart” kind of character, so if you wanted the non-rich Iron Man, it exists, it’s just not Tony Stark. Tony needs to be rich or he’s not Tony Stark.

Same with Batman. The Shadow is a former soldier who uses stealth, martial arts and magic tricks to fight crime. But he’s not Bruce Wayne because being a billionaire playboy is what makes Batman possible.

Why recharacterize heroes with totally new backstories when the not-rich version is already a different superhero.

Volkswagon was similar for a while until the monied class realized someone, somewhere was making money without them and bought their way into a controlling position. Still have significant, though no longer controlling union ownership.

And now you’re completely characterizing my statements and lying to make yourself feel better. Good day.

I mean if your go to is to personally attack anyone who disagrees with you I don’t know why anyone would bother to have a serious discussion with you, but for the cheap seats I’ll try.

Yes, Criminal Psychopaths can, in certain circumstances be good people, other than the fact that they brutally kill some people. No mass murderer has ever been arrested that their neighbours weren’t standing there saying “but he was such a nice guy!” That doesn’t mean I don’t think they should be dealt with harshly, but the reality is, there are people who are good husbands, wives, fathers, mothers, and friends who also do absolutely monstrous things when no one else is looking. While we’re at it, there’s no such thing as someone who has never harmed anyone. We’ve all done things that hurt people, and no, just apologizing doesn’t make it all go away. Some harms are more serious than others but no one is blameless. There are absolutely people who tend more toward good, and some that tend more toward bad, but I’ve also watched “good” people rationalize and try to justify some absolutely wild levels of cruelty under the wrong circumstances.

Look, I get it, you’ve been through some shit. I’ve been there and the idea that some people are good and some people are bad and as long as you find the good people you’ll be safe is really comforting. Unfortunately it’s not true. There’s no such thing as someone who is always cartoonishly evil, and there is no one who is perfectly safe, not even you.

There are no objectively good and bad people. Never have been, never will be. Every one of us is a grab bag of contradictions. Objectively good people are not rare, they’re fictional. If you seriously look under the surface, we’re all both monsters and angels on some level. Some of us just have better self-control and/or fewer opportunities to be actively transgressive.

As others have pointed out, there’s no “black-and-white” (if you’ll pardon the irony) way of categorizing people. Bad or good people are fictional. Even the best of us have ugly parts to how we behave, and otherwise terrible people can show surprising compassion. Our values can conflict and in the moment we chose to do something wildly out of character, or indulge in impulses we didn’t even realize we had.

In the real world there are no absolute heroes or villains. A man who gave his boots to a homeless man one moment, could beat another to death a few months later. Human beings are wildly inconsistent.