What I mean is that the actual POLICIES of that party when in government are at best sprinkled with social democrat concepts, and that’s only in certain years when the party is led by the center-left faction. As far as I know the PSOE hasn’t been controlled by the Leftwing faction since the days just after the fall of Fascism in Spain.

I’m actually in Portugal and am a member of a small leftwing party here and am well aware that amongst members there is quite a range of political positions. However the actual ideas pushed by the party publicly are but a subset of that range, one which mainly matches the ideas of the faction which has the most seats amongst the “national board” and which controls the leadership and most parliamentary seats. In fact the party has recently collapsed in votes because (IMHO) the dominant faction are middle-class posh boys and girls with no life experience who had no strategy or vision for the Future of the country and weren’t really trying to be a leftwing party for all Portuguese but in practice only for people like them, so amongst other things they did a lot of parroting of shit they found on Twitter from New Labour in Britain and the Democrats in the US, which are actually rightwing so they were all identity politics whilst ignoring broader impoverishment in the country and not noticing obvious phenomenons like a massive realestate bubble killing the chances of any young people who don’t have a “bank of mommy and daddy” to back them.

(As you might have deduced, I’m not aligned with the views of that faction).

“It couldn’t possibly be the fault of Americans, it must be the fault of foreigners.”

– Both American Fascists and American NeoLiberals

In Spain, like in Portugal, the name of a party and their actual ideology are two entirelly different things, maybe because in both countries the modern day parties only formed in the 70s when the Fascist dictatorships in those countries were overthrown and replaced by Democracy.

Anyways, the PSOE is at best Social Democrat (in a good year, in a bad year it’s mild neoliberal, so center-right).

I’m not so sure the US was a proper ally of Europe (there has long been overt talk in the US about Europe as a competitor and a lot of effort from US sources to try and weaken the EU with for example funding campaigning for Brexit) but I do believe that before Trump the US was an ally of Ukraine.

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.