The simplest explanation is that the US in not an ally of Ukraine (or Europe).

Alternativelly, they’ve just been competent in the execution of their less savory intelligence operations and thus not been caught doing something too outrageous.

It makes a lot more sense for China to arrange an “overdose” than shoot somebody in the middle of a busy street in broad daylight from a car with diplomatic plates and a Chinese flag.

Same for all other countries, by the way, though in Autocracies politicians have less to worry if the country ever gets caught murdering people in foreign soil than politicians in Democracies do (though, judging by a century of American murders, even those in supposed Democracies almost never have to worry about it)

What we’re talking about is “The Great Game”, not Tit-Tac-Toe.

“Striking Hezbollah” is the new “Hamas tunnels” and just like for the last one the Press in many places (most notably the UK and US) is purposefully using that messaging.

This is why in this article in The Guardian (which has a long track record of Consent Manufacturing and cheerleading for Israel) the subtitle they use is:

‘Largest coordinated strike’ against Hezbollah since war began prompts warnings Iran could pull out of ceasefire

rather than

Claimed by Israel ‘Largest coordinated strike against Hezbollah since war began’ prompts warnings Iran could pull out of ceasefire

Do you have a source for that or is it just a conclusion you reached?

The reason I ask is that I vaguelly remember of seeing somewhere that the way the front of modern ICE cars is designed makes the engine literally fall when a high-speed frontal collision happens exactly so that the front can act as a crumple zone rather than the engine being pushed inside the passenger compartment. That being so, things aren’t quite as simple as you say and I think we need actual real world test results showing that difference in safety rather than mere expectations extrapolated from superficial knowleged about cars.

Yeah, the falacy that over a hundred million of people in the US just suddenly woke up and decided that they wanted their country to be controlled by a derranged multi-millionaire extremelly high on the Narcissist spectrum parroting near-Fascist and outright Fascist ideas, doesn’t hold up to even the most cursory logical analysis.

Only tribalist supporters of the “other party”, who thus desperatelly want to believe their tribal chiefs are not at all to blame in any way form or shape for America going down the path that led to a double Trump victory, will cherry pick and twist “evidence”, and be very selective in the logical explanations they’re willing to consider, to create logically-sounding (for the unthinking) theories that exhonerate their own chiefs that are so beyond real Logic that they’re akin to using “Magic” as explanation.

The field from were votes for somebody like Trump were a bountiful harvest has for decades been plowed and fertilized by American politicians and by American billionaires using the Press and Think Tanks their own.

Time for the Pope to start using the excomunicato hammer again.

Why would progressives stay home to “teach democrats a lesson”?

I mean, people don’t just do things for no reason at all, unless they’re crazy.

The most logical explanation is that they did it ultimately because centrists (i.e. the DNC) were unwilling to appeal to an electorate they want to ruie instead of serve.

A simple logical analysis shows that framing from “centrists” (I added quotes because they’re not in the political center, but rather are hard-right) as actually being an indirect admission of their own guilt - they did not do what politicians are supposed to do, which is appeal to the electorate, hence the electorate did not vote for them.

In Democracy the blame for politicians not being appealing to voters and hence failing to get their votes lies not with the voters, it lies with the politicians.

Sure, “centrists” and their useful idiots loudly cry that people have an obligation to vote for them, but that’s not a mindset of Democracy it’s a mindset of Autocracy.

Not an American, but as I see it, the only chance for a big change is to build things from the ground up block by block starting at the local elections level.

Another option is to bypass traditional politics as much as possible by using the power of civil society groups which are independent of political parties, such as Unions and politically independent single subject groups (for example, groups of people formed to combat setting up a data center in a specific region) - as shown in Europe a couple of General Strikes tend to focus politicians back into actually working for the interests of voters, at least temporarilly.

Yet another option, though weaker and much more indirect, is to consider that the vote in one electoral cycle affects which candidates are fielded in the next cycle, which is my main counterpoint to the OP’s point of view since such a perspective justifies not voting for the lesser evil to send a message to Democrats that they need to field better candidates.

That said, personally I think Americans are seriously fucked and I doubt any change will happen before things properly break in terms of quality of life (I’m thinking proper dystopia with widespread starvation and homelessness) and people rebel and even then the reaction of the powerful will probably be to turn the place into and overt Autocracy rather than the current Oligarchy with some Theatre of Democracy.

Agree.

Just pointing out that the entire system is designed to make that almost impossible.

That doesn’t alter the fact that the entire electoral system in the US is Mathematically rigged to make it pretty much impossible to succeed in a candidate from a 3rd party being elected as president - the level of difficulty is that of getting over 100 million people to switch their vote in a single election (you can try it over multiple election cycles, but what happens is that after years of trying and failing, most people give up, so it has to happen quickly or it won’t work).

As I see it, for a 3rd party to grow in the US it has to start by winning local elections since the number of people who need to change their vote to it is much less and then build on such victories to win seats in Congress, then build on that for the Senate, and only then for the President.

Anyways, my original post was about what can be done and how things should looked at “in the context of how the election system is in the US” (as fucked up as it is) and what it is realistically possible in it, rather than what it should be.

Good point!

Venezuela, Iran, and Iran’s proxies are …

… better than genocidal fake Democracies like the US and Israel.

Which is not at all the same as being fine.

They’re spoiled food to the US and Israel’s shit sandwishes.

Libya is an even better example of a situation of were Western attacks claiming to be meant to “Overthrow a murderous dictator and bring in Democratic values” made things vastly worse.

Oh yeah, as I mentioned there is a lot of closed-doors choosing going on before the Primaries.

Then the Primaries are rigged (with things like super-voters in Democratic Primaries).

All, of course, all assuming there are Primaries.

This does not add up to Democracy, IMHO, it’s just slightly better than only having a 2-choices Vote with no Primaries at all.

Well, in Accounting terms, once you sell your investment you have realized the gains on it (and if you’re a person or a company, are now liable to pay tax on those gains), even if you use the money from the sale to buy the same thing again.

Gains on an investment which hasn’t been sold yet are unrealized gains (in common parlance “paper gains”) and don’t really count in accounting terms until you sell that investment so you don’t have to pay tax on it.

Amongst other things billionaires use this to pay no tax when the share value of the companies they own goes up: if they need money rather than sell their share holdings they take loans using the shares as collateral, and because the shares aren’t sold any gains aren’t realized, hence no tax is due.

The number of combinations of choices in social and human affairs is pretty much infinite so politics in a real Democracy could theoretically be infinite-sided (though only if there were no “representatives” of citizens and people directly voted on everything - i.e. direct Democracy)

Because the US isn’t really a proper Democracy (more like an attempt at one), the vote itself in American has only 2 real options, but there are other ways to expand the number of choices because the two main parties in America are umbrellas for ranges of possibilities and they do have somewhat democratic (rigged, but still with more choices than the actual vote) internal selection systems in the form of Primaries.

If one properly analyses it, it turns out the presidential selection system in the US is really a multi-stage affair in which two of the stages - the Primaries and the actual vote - are open to the public (though there is quite a lot of selecting going on behind closed doors even before the Primaries).

So if people participate in both Primaries and the actual vote, they de facto have more choices than 2.

Also another thing to keep in mind is that this is a cyclical process and the outcomes in one cycle - i.e. who won and by how much - influence what happens in the next cycle so the vote itself defines not just what happens in one election, but also which choices will be made available - i.e. which candidates will be fielded - in the next.

All this means that if one actually cares and makes an effort, there’s more “Democracy” to be had than it might seem at first sight and the vote itself has more influence than just that immediate choice, so anybody claiming that “you have no choice but to vote lesser evil” either has a simplistic view of things or are purposefully trying to deceive others.

This is without going down into the whole local politics and civil society participation, which in the US is almost as livelly Democratic as in Europe.

Only true if you think the entirety of politics fits in 1 bit.

It’s pretty sad that we didn’t even got a straightforward Dystopia like, say, Mad Max.

Instead we got a 1984-wrapped Stupidocracy.