I have less hope for two reasons:

1. These are still capitalist countries and thus the incentive for fascism still remains even if it gets delayed a bit.

2. The US is the largest, most dangerous military superpower the world has ever seen and it has shown time and time again that it’s willing to use that might to bully other nations into economic submission. No country is really safe if it decides to start going after them. The US hasn’t always won these wars, but even when it fails like in Vietnam or Korea, it does enough damage on the way out to cause massive destruction and suffering which has long lasting consequences. I seriously doubt the rest of the world is just gonna get to sit this one out and watch America self destruct.

Trump, may I remind you, installed a number of those judges.

Right, after a lot of opportunities by Democrats to do things to stop him. The Republicans were willing to fight dirty and the Democrats kind of just rolled over and let it happen. That’s not even considering the world where they didn’t choose to run 2 deeply unpopular presidents on nothing platforms in multiple critical elections.

Those things have nothing to do with the subject at hand however. Let’s keep it in between the lines.

Is the subject at hand not “Why have we gotten into this situation?” The comic certainly seems to be about that in the most reductive way possible. All of this is relevant in trying to explain how we both have the president we have and why he’s able to do the bad things that are hurting people.

So you believe they should be allowed to install a sock puppet? I believe that was what we were talking about about, was it not?

I just don’t think that a country that hasn’t be relevant in 30 years can have more influence over our politics than the richest people in the world regularly pouring their money into the system. Trying to pin our problems on some external enemy is just missing the point. The Republicans don’t need foreign encouragement to strip the country for parts and sell it to the rich.

Sorry I figured someone familiar with our system could interpret that as checks and balances. Something trump is currently trying to break. In what language should I provide your native translation?

You wrote a sentence that didn’t have the information you were talking about in a comment that didn’t talk about what you say the “it” was referring to in a thread with several points of discussion. No reasonable person could just divine what you meant there. It’s just not worth having this conversation if you’re going to be this aggressive about pointless stuff.

It’s not about this being the same. It’s about what has contributed to allow this moment. Regular failures of institutions and vast wealth inequality that has been left undressed by the political system has made for a lot of angry people. Concentration of ownership in media has guided that frustration away from its true causes for the benefit of the rich and powerful. The electoral system is set up to favor conservative results and to squarely shut out left leaning candidates. The various expansions of presidential power and the tools needed to exercise that power has made it easier for someone like Trump to get away with things he theoretically shouldn’t. The courts being slowly corrupted. Etc.

What Russia is doing is besides the point. The US has plenty of it’s own oligarchs to mess with our elections already and we’re definitely messing around in other countries. If they weren’t touching anything, do you think we’d suddenly get some great elections that represent the people?

however; it is a feature of our system that has allowed us to retain some semblance of humanity and good will - despite the rot.

What is a feature of our system? You didn’t specify. As to us maintaining our humanity: We do terrible things regularly, but most people are so disconnected from those actions that they can’t really conceptualize the horror of it enough to care and do something about it. There’s always some excuse that helps them rationalize it. I don’t think most people WANT all the bad stuff. But in the absence of better education and media, it’s really easy to trick people into thinking all of this is actually good or at least not bad enough to do something about it.

Legally the president doesn’t have the power to unilaterally go to war, but that hasn’t stopped them from doing it for the last 70+ years.

Basically ever modern president has grabbed more power for the executive branch without being properly checked by congress or the courts. Combine that with an ever expanding military and surveillance apparatus and it turns out you can do some pretty bad stuff, regardless of the legality.

As for the rest of it, idk man. Clearly you have your rosy view of history where the US was a super great place before the scary Russians came in to corrupt democracy. All I can say is you have more reading to do.

idk. If western governments had any ability to learn or care, WWII surely would have been that moment. But after beating the endpoint of imperialism, they without irony or self awareness, just kept doing imperialism. I’m not holding my breath.

Oh I must have been confused. I forgot that history doesn’t exist. Everything started with whatever was last on TV. Donald Trump is just randomly the president for no reason. There must not be any reason he has the power to do the things he’s doing. Nope. It’s a mystery. Carry on.

I mean, over half a century of neolibs gutting the small semblance of social democracy we had did this. And Biden was certainly one of those people. It’d just be more accurate to say Trump, Biden, Obama, Bush, Clinton, Bush again, Regan…

Even if it would, how would it ever get passed when the people who would need to pass it are the ones who are only in office because the system works the way it currently does?

This is just a recurring theme I’ve found when talking with liberals. They like to think about and suggest all sorts of policy ideas as though all we’re missing are some smart ideas nobody has thought of. It’s one thing to say we should have this, but it’s another to have any idea of how it’d be possible to do. Since they have no actual analysis of the system, they’ll just turn around and tell you to vote or call your representative. “We should get money out of politics!” “Yeah, well we checked with the people giving us money and they said no. So…”

We live in a country that was stolen then we stole some other people so they could do the work for us. Then conquering half a continent wasn’t good enough for us, so we went around ruining other places if they didn’t want to give us all their stuff. If people think we only recently crossed a line, I’d generously hope they were just ignorant because the alternative is horrific. Every piece of the past is a step that got us to where we are.

There’s a difference though. To the extent that a communist society fails in it’s goals, it’s because of people’s failure to achieve them.

The problems with capitalism are inevitable consequences of the system. Competition is theoretically supposed to keep things in check, but that just doesn’t really pass the smell test for real life. We essentially never have markets that work like the mythical economic model of many sellers and many buyers so that nobody can be a price setter. Plus, competitions are meant to be won. Companies aren’t working to keep each other in the race. The goal is to drive out your competition and become a monopoly. Maybe there are brief periods where things stay competitive, but even small differences in success can compounded to further solidify your advantage, in turn making it easier to keep doing that. And that’s just if everything started our fairly, which it obviously didn’t.

Then there is the divide between capital and labor. In order for there to be wage workers, there must be a population of people who don’t own what they need to keep themselves alive. Otherwise there wouldn’t be capitalists, there would just be people using their own property to produce their own goods. And once we’ve established that this is a necessary part of capitalism, we have to acknowledge that workers wanting to be paid the most possible and to buy things for the cheapest possible is in direct opposition to the capitalist’s need to pay workers as little as possible and sell their goods for as much as possible. This isn’t some anomalously evil behavior, it’s the kind of optimization required to be the winner in the market competition. So even if you had a benevolent capitalist who decided to pay more and sell for less, they would just lose to someone else who is actually playing to win. And thus in the long term, the system filters out this altruistic behavior as a natural consequence of it’s mechanisms.

Furthermore, this need to divide capital from labor is in tension with the possibility that people could just take the stuff you’re hoarding. Because if they have nothing, you have an abundance, and you’re just one person, then it’d be the rational thing to do to take the stuff without having to work for you. Thus, in order for this divide between capital and labor to be maintained, there must be a concept of property rights that is enforced with some kind of organized violence, either by the state or by private security.

The other symptoms of capitalism naturally flow from these core principles.

• Corporate capture of the political system? Aside from the state existing to enforce private property rights in the first place, the inequality created by the outcomes of competition and the capital/labor divide creates power imbalances that can be used to influence governments more than those with less power.

• Climate change and environmental destruction due to over-consumption? You don’t make money from selling less stuff or from paying for things you don’t need to pay for. So you do things to induce demand like advertising, planned obsolescence, and influencing policy to kill green energy and public transportation, etc. There’s no reason for a corporation, a profit maximizing machine, to do anything that wouldn’t optimize it’s profits. If it did anything else, it would lose to someone who did do that.

• This meme: Privatization of public goods. If there is something you could make a profit from, a corporation must exploit that thing to maximize profits and win the competition. So there is an incentive to take things that aren’t commodities and turn them into commodities. This is sort of related to the divide of labor and capital as well. In order to be able to sell people things, they need to not have those things and not have a means of acquiring those things outside of buying them from capitalists, which in turn means needing to work for capitalists. If you had adequate access to food, housing, water, clothing, and medical care, you’d have no reason to buy those things from capitalists and would therefore have way less of a reason to put up with working for them. So those things must be withheld. This is also part of why there has been a problem with loneliness and the destruction of communities. Communities support each other. If your friend is willing to drive you to the doctor (or better yet, if there’s public transportation), you don’t need to call a taxi/ride share. If someone is willing to help feed you when things are going bad, maybe you don’t need to work another shift at some shitty job. If you have people you can enjoy socializing with by just talking or doing some free activity like taking a walk in the park, then maybe you don’t spend money to buy as much entertainment as you would if you were alone. Maybe you don’t have a social media account or don’t spend a lot of time on it just so that you can get some kind of socializing.

These are all bad things done to us by bad people. But the problem isn’t that the specific people in power happen to be bad and ruin what would otherwise be a good system. The bad people being in power is the inevitable end result of the system.

True, but also don’t allow perfection to be the enemy of good.

I think this logic fundamentally misses the point. This isn’t me not starting a project because I don’t think I could do it perfectly so why bother. It’s someone else showing me their outline for the project and telling me that I don’t need to do anything, they’ll get it done on time. Then it doesn’t get done because they never intended to do anything, they just didn’t want anyone else completing anything.

If we were just doing small things because that’s all we could feasibly do for now and we’re working our way up to big things, that’d be fine. It might not be enough, but it’d be what we’re working with. But the small actions being taken by capitalist governments aren’t designed to chip away at the problem slowly. Their purpose is to give the appearance that the current system is capable of solving the problem and someone is working on it, so we don’t need to think about more radical solutions. The goal is to block progress, not merely to work on it in some slow and responsible way. “Look, the government joined a non-binding agreement saying that we’re working on climate change! We should totally keep voting for them because it’s better than nothing!”

It’s even worse than that though. They’re not just doing things for show to dampen political will for greater change. These are the same people that keep giving the military, surveillance, and police state more and more money and power. We are allowing them to build the tools they need to keep us in our place. By continuing along this path we’re making it harder and harder for us to eventually do what needs to be done.

The reality is that we’re not going to be able to save ourselves while capitalists are in charge. Capitalism fundamentally demands endless growth and a concentration of wealth and power. Efforts to curtail that growth will be stopped and the costs of that growth is distributed to those with less power.

As for the science/science communication part of this: I think it should be pretty clear that that isn’t the problem. The science is well known at this point. The problem is that the people who have the power to fix things don’t care and are so invested in the status quo that they’d sooner ratchet up violent repression before they’d actually try to solve the problem.

I think this message has good and bad uses. As a way to stop people from being doomers and not taking any action? Great. But I’ve also seen this kind of argument be used to justify an incrementalist approach to an issue that we absolutely cannot afford to go slow on or half ass. “Something is better than nothing” isn’t good enough. If we take 1 step forward and 2 steps back we’re going to lose. And that’s if the problem was linear. The fact that feedback loops accelerate the problem means we lose more and more ground the longer we wait to rip the bandaid off.

If the best allowable solution is to keep electing liberals who take money from capitalists to promote symbolic progress or “market based solutions” while continuing to approve new fossil fuel projects, then we really are doomed.

Actual greatest thing you could do for climate change: destroy the US military industrial complex. Not only is it a massive polluter, it also enables the capitalists to maintain their ability to extract fossil fuels and other resources around the world.

Quit it with the anti-human shit. If we’re not saving the environment for us what’s the point?

You’d think it wouldn’t be that hard for publishers with billions of dollars to hire enough competent devs for enough time to make a halfway decent storefront, especially when they don’t even have to reinvent the wheel on a lot of UX and marketing research that’s already been done for them by Steam existing as long as it’s had.

That none of them have even come close to that is a monument to their incompetence.

That’s fair, but I think it comes down to what the actual power dynamics of the space is. If you’re in a group that’s systemically discriminated against, just ignoring it means putting up with discrimination. Not getting good jobs, getting harassed by police, etc. you have to actively fight back against that.

Some dipshit online complaining about seeing a black person in a movie? They only have power proportionate to the attention they get. Let them scream into the void. If they get a comment, it validates what they were saying and gives them another opportunity to respond with even more bullshit that they know will have an engaged audience. If they get nothing, what are they gonna do? Reply to themselves? Keep making posts that get no attention? At some point they’ll just get bored or demotivated. If they do keep being a nuisance you block and/or ban them silently. EDIT: Oh, also, besides the personal validation, there is the algorithmic aspect to consider. Algorithms direct people to things that will hold their attention and get more engagement. The more you talk to these people the more people will get them shoved in their faces.

People talk about not platforming these people, well, every comment interaction they get is a new tiny stage for them to stand on.

What’s Britain’s excuse then?

I feel like we should have just ignored these people. Deal with the ones who become problems, but otherwise not dignify their nonsense with a response. “Why is this movie so WOKE?” … “So anyway the CGI in this movie was pretty bad right? lol.”

We spent the last 2 decades feeding the trolls. Making them think they mattered even if it was to be hated or ridiculed by their enemies.

Oh. Yeah. Maybe he just meant “last” as in the one prior and not last as in final? Idk.

Idk if this distinction works for anyone else, but in my mind places like Reddit or Lemmy aren’t the same thing as “social media” because they maintained the anonymous forum structure. The activity on the site isn’t centered around people and personalities, it’s the content being discussed.

I’m sure he would have appreciated some AC though.