Because the United States has been the bedrock of the Western World for the past seventy years. It's an incredible track record considering what happened over that time: the Cold War, the division of Europe, oil crises, vast cultural and economic shifts within the US. Four rocky years is nothing compared to the long-term trend.
You guys are acting like the past year-and-some-change of Trump spells the end for the post-World War II order. He's done his damage, yes, but I can't agree with the hysteria. The only thing keeping Trumpism on the world stage is Trump himself. Pull out the keystone and it's all over, because for better or worse, there's no replacing Trump.
We were going to get this response from a US president eventually as the country continues to take on debt and a large trade deficit, this was a long time coming.
Europe should focus on improving their infrastructure and tech industries as well as helping out rebuilding Africa while making allies with African countries before China succeds in doing that, conduct trade with Africa and parts of Asia while cutting out Russia and the US as much as possible.
That's funny we're thinking the same thing over here...
I know, which is why we should help rebuild and ally with them to trade for resources and other goods. I'm pretty sure most African countries would rather have a benefitial partnership rather than being put in debt and controlled by China.
After grossly misrepresenting US trade deficits from "bad deal" G7 alliances, Trump has threatened to end all trade deals with G7 nations.
To rephrase, Trump is threatening to catastrophically self-destruct the economic foundations of the entire Western world if our allies and trade partners don't do what he wants -- including giving us a "better deal" than the one he's made up, and allowing Russia back into the alliance.
Again: Trump is demanding that G7 let Russia back in, and that our allies stop giving us the "bad deal" he's just pulled out of thin air, or he will usher in the catastrophic collapse of the global economy for essentially every Western nation.
... Do you think Putin is pleased with his investment in Trump?
I love watching this destructive fuck's fragile ego get turned down a peg.
Keep in mind this is the man that raped his wife over comments about his hair, and this is the first time in his life he's legitimately being told "no" by somebody (short of his Russian handlers), powerless to change it into a yes without compromise.
Thats the dumbest thing they could do, yeah cut off the richest country in the world and largest contributor to NATO, and cutting off Russia? Good luck covering oil/gas supply and demand, not like every country could immediately switch 100% to alternative energies overnight
Ideally the solution is to dismantle the Republican party completely
Democrats, too. But they're not nearly as high a priority. They're a bunch of bumbling fuckwits with their heads so far up their own asses it's amazing they can even see to make the baffling mistakes they make, but they're nowhere near as outright malicious and driven by pure greed as the Republicans, despite what the hackneyed platitudes spewed out by unthinking faux centrists who watched a George Carlin soundbite from a special in the nineties and two minutes of that one South Park episode where they call both parties a shit sandwich might have you think
Oh and one thing I should probably make a habit of being clearer about when I go on these little tirades: When I refer to the Republicans or the Democrats I am not referring to the voter bases or people who make their alignment a major component of their identity. I am exclusively speaking in reference to the parties themselves
I think a great first step would be to aggressively stamp out defeatism and apathy. One of the absolute largest reasons the problems persist so readily is apathy. Apathy is the ultimate tool of the politically corrupt. People will go to astonishing lengths to uphold their apathy, they'll go to incredible lengths to justify all the reasons you just shouldn't bother trying to change anything because the system is rigged, the parties are the same, the odds are against you, the deck is stacked, all politicians are the same, you can't fight big [COMMODITY], money talks more, and oh but what if this goes wrong or that doesn't work or they can't be trusted or they're not who we think they are and this goes wrong and that breaks and on and on and on and on, and all of that works out really well for the people benefiting the most from the broken system. There's no more valuable tool for the corrupt than a disenfranchised, disillusioned, apathetic voter
The US is in some pretty serious need of political overhaul, and they're never gonna fucking get there if they're all too busy dragging each other down while the corrupt are buoying each other up
This all sounds good but it will mean very little if FPTP continues to be used.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MOyj1_mtI6E
Hey, yeah, no shit? Annihilating FPTP is a big part of it. The US is in pretty dire need of electoral form and that's one of the most important first steps, it's a big reason why Maine is so important right now and it's hilariously brazen that the second ranked choice got any footing the GOP started screeching
Did you miss that whole part of the post where I talked about voter apathy and the way people will find any excuse not to push for change?
You are doing exactly what I was talking about with this post
That sounds really bad for big money, so maybe the GOP will actually step in and remove him from power if he tries.
A massive reformation, if not the complete restructuring, of our democratic processes may well be in order to ensure that the voters can have the greatest input possible. However, to suggest as much in our current political landscape is not feasible. After all, remodeling your house while it's actively burning down isn't a productive use of focus. Even still, any major changes to our constitutional framework and electoral processes need to be handled with extreme care and over a long enough period of time to carefully measure the impacts and ensure we're heading in the direction that we want to be heading in. A hasty restructuring without fully realized consequences could result in irreparable damage.
I'm not suggesting we should just be apathetic, just that working within our current system, to safeguard it against the threats and failures that caused this catastrophic turn of events, will help enable the long term conditions needed to begin putting into effects the changes we'd like to see.
And I'm not suggesting a hasty restructuring all at the drop of a hat
Obviously there needs to be a great deal of care taken but too often people use that as an excuse to not do anything at all. It's impossible to get it done without any risk, and it's incredibly difficult to break people out of the political rut of apathy and complacency by constantly emphasizing the dangers
It sort of tacitly pushes the message forward that it's too risky. That it's too dangerous, and maybe now isn't quite the right time, and maybe if we wait a longer a better candidate will come along, and maybe we can be a little slow there, maybe that will take care of itself, I'm sure my input won't matter right now, I'm sure I won't be helping that much. It can wait just a little longer. Things are bad, but other people have it in hand, maybe I'll just wait and see
This is also what apathy and complacency looks like
The system didn't just get broken one day out of the blue. It got broken by much more brazen, much less tempered individuals taking some serious god damn risks. The entire Southern Strategy was a massive risk at the time and would you just look at how much it has paid off in subsequent decades coupled with the constant gerrymandering and redistricting the Republican party is so fond of? There was no guarantee that was going to pay off, there was no way to tell it was going to create a steadfast voter base that could be relied upon to support the party no matter the circumstance nor the controversy, and they've only made it all the stronger in the 24 hour news cycle era with propaganda outlets like FOX and more sinister propaganda from Sinclair snapping up local news stations to push a lite version of that same propaganda
All of these things carried immense risks, but the people taking those risks felt the risks were worth the long term gains
I don't think there's enough people willing to take those risks on the side of the nation and her peoples, and that's a fucking problem. The US progressives are gonna have to start taking some fucking risks if they want to see some positive change, and this constant emphasis on how dangerous it is and how careful everyone should be isn't helping
At best, it creates a breeding ground for inaction, at worst it drives people away from progressive causes because of their seeming unwillingness to ever do anything and tendency to just sit on their heels and see what happens. It drives the sort of people who crave some kind of action away from progressive causes straight into the arms of the less scrupulous, more questionable causes
Does nobody remember the primaries? Just how galvanized into action people were because Bernie was just doing things? He didn't even get to do that many things, But the attitude he fostered wasn't a wait and see, not the right time, just too risky one. It was an attitude of change is possible, and we're going to do it! And that really resonated with people
They were so enamored with that attitude of action and that break in the unbearable, bogged down rut of 'slow and steady, don't rock the boat! Not the right time! Too risky!' that they were willing to follow just about anyone else who exemplified that call to action, and they did
Again, and I'm genuinely asking, does nobody remember the primaries? I understand quite a hell of a lot has happened since then, and it might be easy to lose track of some details in the interim, but an awful lot of important lessons were learned during those primaries, and I can't help but feel people have forgotten most of them
Does nobody remember just how much vitriol there was for Hillary across the board? How she was seen as exemplifying that exact same complacent, stick in the mud, status quo of the failed Democratic cause? Does nobody remember how many people on this very forum pledged that they would never vote for Hillary for how close she was to that same unsatisfactory status quo?
So many people got bogged down in that 'But her policies were just like Bernie's!' argument, but what her actual policies were just wasn't fucking important. They should have been, yes, absolutely, we should judge more by policy, but what mattered then is the way she was seen. Hillary Clinton is a very familiar political face and she hasn't just got the baggage of years and years of right wing propagandizing against her during her whole career driving right leaning fence sitters over the other side of the fence, she's also got the baggage of being a familiar political face. She's been around for years and years and she definitely didn't do a goddamn thing to look less familiar or give any impression that she was anything more than just another status quo Democrat content to just let things sit for a little bit longer because now's not the right time. She was content to spend her time hobnobbing with political and entertainment elites in closed off parties with white noise generators to jam audio recording equipment and security keeping the press out. She was everything people were and still are tired of, and that's not even getting in to the shenanigans the DNC pulled to ensure their golden girl got the nomination, which only served to make things even worse
And would you look at that, when she got the nomination, a pretty fucking substantial number of people were pushed into the arms of far more unscrupulous causes. You can talk about how horrible a mistake that was until the cows come home, and how awful those people are for voting Tinyhands, but I don't think anyone can pretend like he did not have, for the downtrodden, dirt poor, disillusioned and aching for change voter, a very appealing platform
Just like Bernie, he was getting chummy with the people, and he was talking action and he was talking risks, and to pretend like there isn't an incredible appeal in that, something far greater than the platform of 'slow and steady wins the race!', is just plain naive
I don't think Americans can afford to be worrying about the risks anymore
I think it's time to starting thinking about how big the risks are if they don't start taking those risks
Maybe this complacency could be afforded back in the nineties, when both parties were much closer together and on the whole generally a bit more benign, but it absolutely can not in the here and now. The US cannot afford to not take risks. Something has to give and it has to give now
Stop talking to people about all the risks and dangers of change. They're already halfway convinced it's impossible at any given moment, and filling their head with dangers and worst case scenarios doesn't do a god damn thing to help. Take a chance on people. Be willing to accept that they're not going to make the best decisions 100% of the time. Show that you yourself are willing to take that chance, set an example
You're going to have a lot more chances to temper their behavior later than you are going to have chances to convince them change can happen
Obviously caution is going to be needed and obviously people need to be ever vigilant, because there's never a shortage of unscrupulous and questionable influence, but you need to break people out of the rut first, and you're not gonna do that with doom and gloom
You need to give people something to believe in, first
That's why Tinyhands and Bernie were such a galvanizing political force
There were more than twenty Republicans vying for a place during the primaries, and most of them got as far as debates and through most of the caucuses before finally dropping, but I'll bet most people can name only two or three of them, not counting Tinyhands. The ones they two remember off the top of the head are probably Jeb and Cruz, and mostly only for the amount of meme potential they held. Please clap. Zodiac killer
They were a bunch of milquetoast exemplars of that same status quo that people were so eager to see shaken up, and Tinyhands swept the fucking floor with them
I want people to break out of the sickly rut of apathy and complacency
I'm worried about the ways things can go wrong and what problems might come up, no question. But I'm not nearly as worried about those things as I am the things that are wrong and the problems that have come up right god damn now
But none of these problems can be fixed if people don't believe they can be fixed, and telling people all the ways things might go wrong and all the problems that could come up as a result of so much as trying to fix them is unbearably discouraging. It does the polar opposite of what those galvanizing political forces did so well to inspire such a great voter turnout
People need something to believe in, they can't believe in failure, and constantly, jawing on about all the ways things could fail doesn't do what is so important for driving positive change forward. It's wildly dispiriting and only reinforces the disillusioned, apathetic complacency that so burdens the United States
People need something to believe in
I'm setting the best possible example I can. It's not much, but I do believe in change. I believe in America. I believe in the people. I'm willing to take a chance on them
And I think at this point it's time for the people who claim to want change and then fall back on that oppressively dispiriting mindset of how careful we need to be and how many things can possibly go wrong and how some chances just can't be taken and some risks must be avoided at all costs to ask themselves an important question
Do they believe in their cause?
Do they really think it's worthwhile?
Do they really believe in change?
And if they really believe in these things:
Why the unholy goddamn fuck are you trying to drag me down by exemplifying everything I just railed instead of buoying me up and actually showing me you believe in change?!
There's always a chance things can go wrong no matter what you do. You might get t-boned at an intersection on your way to work. You're taking a chance every single day, every single time you get in your car and turn that key
It's true, pushing for change might fail horribly, everything could go wrong and the United States could burn to ashes. The worst of all the worsts that could happen certainly could happen
But there's also a chance it could succeed, and if progressive causes in the US are unwilling to take the risks for that chance of success, they've already lost forever
The GOP gambles constantly on that unwillingness to take risks, and it constantly pays off in spades
They're already winning. They're already pulling the US apart at the seams and selling it off to the highest bidders right now as I type this
What do you really have to lose?
