Earth is pretty much just a big one. Jury is still out on our ability to maintain it.

Anybody who calls themselves a libertarian without specifying “left” or “socialist” is a right winger. There are no exceptions.

Modern Israel was founded in 1948. Before that it was “British Palestine”. If you really want to push it back it time, you might as well go back to the 17th century BC, but that would also be rather silly.

You no guys are a waste of my time. I’m done. Later.

The Holocaust industry only took off after the 70s and mostly because intense Israeli lobbying efforts.

What the fuck? Where do you think Israel as a Jewish ethno-state came from? Nobody gave a shit about Jews and the Holocaust, yet the western world decided out of nowhere to create a new state for Jews right after the Holocaust?

There is no such thing as the “current Israeli government”. Israel is a Jewish supremacist ethnostate

Yes, it is, and the current government is the worst possible instantiation of that. An Israel that wasn’t continuing to colonize new Palestinian land and wasn’t committing a Palestinian genocide would still be a Jewish supremacist ethno-state. Even so, it’s entirely within Israel’s power to reform an egalitarian government with equal rights for everyone - not that I’m expecting it. That’s three different models of Israel that are all entirely possible, so yeah, the current government is a thing that matters.

Israeli citizens are, as a group, pretty damn fascist. However, Jews outside of Israel are largely against the settlements and the genocide. Those Jews have to deal with the stain of the Zionist enterprise.

The entire industrial revolution was powered by slavery. Your logic makes no sense.

The entire industrial revolution? Uh, nope. Would the industrial revolution have happened without slavery? Yeah, I think it would have. Economically, slavery wasn’t as efficient or “necessary” as the South claimed. Cotton farming or other slavery dominated industries didn’t suddenly cease when slavery ended, (or technically was curtailed in most cases).

Zionism is awesome for Jews.

After WW2 Jews essentially had a cultural golden ticket. They could have perpetually ridden the wave of being treated as the world’s most victimized group forever. There was almost nothing worse a person could be than an anti-semite or Holocaust denier. Zionism broke that spell, and “anti-semite” has become a bad joke.

80%+ of Jews worldwide support Israel

Support Israel how though? 80% certainly don’t support the current government, or the settlements. Also, look how many Americans support(ed) Trump. Does that mean Trump is “awesome” for Americans, or even for his supporters?

Slavery … directly benefitted them.

I disagree. There were certainly material benefits but, ultimately, I don’t think anyone is better off because of slavery. America still is unable to reconcile with it’s own history, and that has had some pretty obvious consequences for everyone.

it was claimed that there were no logs, no IP addresses, etc.

…by default. They never claimed that they would defy court orders.

I get the sarcasm, but I think the case can be made that it’s the exact opposite. Zionism is terrible for the Jews, both in the mythology and real wold consequences.

I think there are simpler explanations for Clinton and Gates’ presence.

It’s because of greedy capitalist fucks who are squeezing you

A healthcare system that makes everyone dependent on employers really makes it easy for them.

Medicare For All is about a lot more than just healthcare.

Agreed.

But Harris did support genocide. It’s kinda hard to convince people that you are the one to save democracy when you refuse to stand up against something so obviously evil, especially when we never got a real primary.

Not voting Harris was a bad move, but 2/3 of the American electorate did it. Of those, the ones pissed about a genocide were the most justified. Why single them out?

It sounds directly contradictory from the inside too. Biden didn’t “give up” he just didn’t take the most radical approach that many on the left wanted him to take (including me). When the courts shut down his original program, he started to forgive a bunch of more specific but smaller groups of loans. It never totalled close to his original attempt, but it was significant. He could have tried to do the original by a different legal justification, but he never tried it, probably because it would have opened the door to even more loan forgiveness.

That’s why I said he is doing “very little” and not “nothing” that wasn’t where we were already headed. Trump has been a national embarrassment in regards to Ukraine, but I’m not sure he’s really hurt them. It’s not like Biden was doing a great job there. Venezuela has been “screwed up” for a very long time, and the US is largely responsible for that - both Democrats and Republicans.

I also don’t buy that the U.S. was headed to fascism with military on the streets

Then you haven’t been paying attention. What do you think the militarization of police has all been about? That’s something that Republicans and Democrats have both been pushing, right alongside mass surveillance. Look into how the “Cop City” protests were responded to.

and ICE taking naturalized citizens off the streets violently

Trump is a far worse than any Democrat on that front, but lets not pretend ICE wasn’t draconian under Biden as well.

So no, the parties are not the same. At all.

WTF? Why is it impossible to have any kind of discussion about the Democratic establishment without this bullshit? Where did I say both parties are the same? They are very different, but the dynamic between the two has always been leading us to certain inevitable outcomes. Republicans push politics to the right, while Democrats follow the polls and don’t try to lead the country anywhere. The end result is a steady march to the right.

And specifically villainizing the idiots who helped Trump win by ‘protest’ voting against the democrats is valid.

I think the term “villain” is a little over the top, but I didn’t criticize you for calling them out, I criticized you for calling them out exclusively. That’s a toxic attitude and a strong indicator of establishment brain-rot. It’s repeating the exact mistakes that drove people away from voting for Democrats in the first place. You aren’t trying to win elections, you are being smug. I hold you personally more responsible for Trump’s win than any protest voter. A curse on you both.

There is still a significant pro Ukrainian resistance operating in both Crimea and Donbas. Russian has had to resort to brutal tactics to suppress them, but has still not been entirely successful. Many of the resisters retreated to fight with the rest of Ukraine, and they are certainly giving Russia a fight. In any case, it’s still imperialism.

I see you have your cut and paste propaganda all ready to go there.

The people in Crimea and the Donbas wanted to join Russia, to protect them from Ukraine,

Sounds an awful lot like claiming Iraqis wanted the US to overthrow Sadam and would welcome it with open arms. It worked out about the same too, except for the Russian military embarrassing themselves. Even taken at face value, all you are doing is justifying the imperialism, not showing it doesn’t exist.

China is the biggest debt holder nation in the world. Zambia just had to default on loans for infrastructure that largely served Chinese needs, and Kenya and Ethiopia are not far behind. Meanwhile, the DRC is falling into debt paying for infrastructure to ship Copper and Cobalt to Chinese. China has not been as abusive as the west was, but they aren’t that much better either. It’s still the same tactics.

New Labor Forum: Chinese Investments in Africa: Twenty-First Century Colonialism?

I’d rather blame every party that did their best to put Trump in power, whether intentionally or not.

But you didn’t. You blamed one tiny segment of voters.

The Republican and Democratic establishments are both to blame, but they are largely the same group. The Republican establishment just lost control of their populists while the Democratic establishment lost the loyalty of theirs.

Trump himself has never been the real problem. He’s just a symptom of the rot in both establishments. He is doing very little that wasn’t already where we were headed. At worst he sped up the process a bit.

Russia isn’t imperialist, it has no colonies nor neocolonies

Yeah, tell that to Crimea, the Donbas, or even Siberia or the puppet states like Belarus, Georgia and Moldova. Russian neo-colonialism is all over Africa.

China isn’t imperialist either, it’s a socialist country wituout any financial domination of the state or economy.

China is a kinder imperialist, but they are using largely the same playbook that the west used in Africa, including debt-trap diplomacy, undermining local sovereignty and regulation, and undermining labor movements.

They also have a mix of socialism and capitalism, sometimes getting the best of both, and sometimes the worst. They definitely dominate the state economy through control of banking and the use of capital controls to direct funding to national priorities. The current real estate crisis and “ghost cities” are a pretty obvious example.

Tell us what a non-authoritarian leader of Venezuela would look like

Presumably they would look not-authoritarian, a description that doesn’t fit Maduro at all.

It could well be that, in the face of US policy regarding Venezuela, only an Authoritarian could hold onto the country. That still doesn’t make Maduro not an Authoritarian.

it seems to me that leftist leaders are always denounced as authoritarian by North American and European based NGOs and governments.

That’s a fair observation but, again, that doesn’t mean they are wrong when they say it about Maduro. Maduro is referred to as dictator by Human Rights Watch, the Organization of American States, and other human rights organizations, including some inside Venezuela.

Maduro is a dictator. It’s largely the fault of the US that Venezuela has a dictator. If the US succeeds in ousting Maduro, it will almost certainly replace him with an even worse Dictator. All of that can be true with no contradictions.

1/3 of eligible voters went for Trump. Another 1/3 stayed home or made protest votes. Of those who didn’t vote for either party, the vast majority were (de)motivated by straight up apathy. Those trying to teach the Democrats (or Republicans) a lesson were probably the least significant bloc of all, yet some people seem stuck on blaming them for the outcome.

The fault lies with the Democratic establishment that pissed away every opportunity to win what should have been an easy victory. They really had to work to loose that election. If you really want to blame the voters, then start with Trump voters and the Democratic voters who nominated Biden in 2020.

Americans already overwhelmingly oppose an invasion of Venezuela. It will be interesting to see if that’s enough to prevent it.