Ah, Ecuador, one of the countries not in pink in the map above, is showing the rest of the world how it should be done:

Since June 13, hundreds of thousands of Ecuadorians have been mobilizing across the country as a part of an indefinite national strike against the right-wing government of President Guillermo Lasso and his anti-people economic policies. The strike was called for by various Indigenous, peasant and social organizations, with a set of ten demands that address the most urgent needs of the majority of Ecuador’s population.

...Their demands include: reduction and freeze of fuel prices; employment opportunities and labor guarantees; an end to privatization of public companies; price control policies for essential products; greater budget for public education and health sectors; an end to drug trafficking, kidnappings and violence; protection for people against banking and finance sectors; fair prices for their farm products; ban on mining and oil exploitation activities in Indigenous territories; and respect for the 21 collective rights of Indigenous peoples and nationalities.

You quoted it. Squint a bit.

Cool. Now in keeping with the notion that everything is relative, one must measure said rights according to a nation's own past trajectory, rather than making meaningless cross comparisons. Since we started talking about Georgia, let's see how they're doing hey? Nope, completely shit and getting worse. How about some of Ukranie's NATO neighbors. Say, Hungary? Oh would you look at that, completely fucking atrocious and also getting worse. Poland? Nope, totally crap and getting worse. As it turns out, the entire Baltic region basically fucking sucks if you're a worker, and continues to suck worse and worse.

It's going to be so great when Ukraine joins this list. Oh wait, Ukraine was very much on track to join this list which is why they started to fuck over their workers long before this war started, a process initiated by Western 'hero' Zelensky himself.

All of this is common knowledge, and the idea that "the EU is the only place on earth that takes workers rights seriously" would count as the stupidest fucking thing you've ever said in your life, if your life wasn't one stupid fucking thing said one after the other.

Wait are you actually under the impression that workers rights are counted as human rights in the West?

And you know of a non-EU country doing any better? Let me guess, Australia? — Olivier5

I don't need to know of a "non-EU country doing better" to know that the EU fucks the poor.

You're welcome to keep directing attention away from the fact that the EU fucks the poor - and that you know nothing about it - but I will keep on topic.

*yawn*, says the person who says with a straight face that "the EU is the only place on earth that takes workers rights seriously". This is the stupidest statement to ever be made since the idea that the West cares about human rights and sovereignty in Ukraine.

Like, it doesn't take a moment of looking to see that the EU fucks poor countries and poor people everywhere it goes.

it does not follow that a good strategy is to lie about it. — Olivier5

I don't think you understand what a lie means. I won't hold it against you, English not being your first language and all.

the EU is the only place on earth that takes workers rights seriously. — Olivier5

I'm sorry that you know nothing about the institutions you like to defend. It's a tough spot. Very admirable I guess.

You guys keep building straw men, over and over again. Ask yourself why you need to lie about what this article is saying, why you need to deform reality all the time. You're too shallow to deal with the truth. — Olivier5

I don't need to lie about what the article is saying because the article is a bunch of propaganda. Just as I don't report Russian propaganda as truth, I don't need to report EU propaganda as truth either. Anyone who knows anything about the EU knows it is a intuition which exists to turn poorer European nations into tyre factories while austricizing them into submission by means of strangling any fiscal autonomy and with it, any semblance of democracy. It's a vehicle for corporate power and those who suck its boots are similarly suckers for that corporate power.

Who cares about the GDP if I do not know what is the real value of being born in Spain, Japan, USA UK, etc...? — javi2541997

There is no real value in being born anywhere in particular. There is only the life you make with the people around you. "The economy" is just the ways in which we reproduce our societies across time. Being kidnapped by markets or money is no different than being kidnapped by tradition, which in some cases far worse because of the total caprice and arbitrariness of so-called 'traditions' - which are all invented and reinvented in real time anyway.

Your whole contribution on this thread can be paraphrased to read: "EU and NATI caca". — Olivier5

I wonder if the constant train of insults and snide remarks from the anti NATO camp is indicative of something, some fragility, a fear. Otherwise, why the constant put down? It's symptomatic of something. Perhaps just an attempt to protect the banal nihilism or whataboutism of our times against the return of the seemingly clearcut. — Olivier5

It writes itself :blush:

I do not even understand when you say fascism with "Japanese characteristics"... was Francisco Franco a fascist with "Spanish characteristics?"... — javi2541997

It's an allusion to the idea of "capitalism with Chinese characteristics" that sometimes used in reference to China. And yes, Mishima was looking to escape from the upheavals of the West by means of a regression into the past. It so happens that the withdrawal into 'tradition' always takes place at the expense of living, breathing people. It is usually accompanied by mass death. It is no accident that Mishima's suicide was followed soon after by a military coup that unleashed some of the worst horrors the Earth has ever seen in the pacific theatre of WWII.

Isn't this a right path to choose to? — javi2541997

There is literally nothing worse. A regression to feudalism without even the minimally positive aspects of capitalism.

Whenever someone presents a political philosophy that they purport to be neither left-wing or right-wing it's always just rephrased right-wing sentiments; as was the case with Mishima, who was definitely right-wing. — Maw

:up: Mishima was two steps away from a reworked "fascism with Japanese characteristics". When popular resentment is not rooted in class politics, it always ends up tending toward this kind of reactionary nationalist identitarianism. If anything Mishima was a warning about what is happening exactly right now all across the world: a drastic pitch to the right as societies disoriented by the ruination of capitalism desperately search for something to give their lives meaning.

This whole article can be paraphrased to read: "you must reform your economy so as demolish worker's rights, give international capital free reign over your society, and allow us to kill any local industry which is not subservient to Northern EU interests, and then maybe, maybe maybe, after we have blackmailed you for another ten years, you will be considered a 'candidate'". It's disgusting.

The US conducted a protracted global holocaust in the wake of 9/11. There is no chance that that mindless murder does not work its way back in the form of children shooting other children in the face in school, en masse, among other things.

Good things coming!:

https://www.bbc.com/news/business-61906236

Hundreds of British Airways workers at Heathrow Airport have voted to go on strike over pay. Unite and GMB union members who are mostly check-in staff backed industrial action on Thursday. A total of 700 workers are set to strike during the summer holidays, when demand from travellers is expected to be near pre-pandemic levels. The unions said the action was due to a 10% pay cut imposed during the peak of the pandemic not being reinstated. Some 500 Unite members recorded a 94.7% vote in favour of industrial action, while 95% of GMB members backed the walkouts. The strike dates will be confirmed in the coming days.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-06-21/nsw-teachers-to-strike-over-pay-and-conditions-next-week/101171092

Tens of thousands of NSW public and Catholic school teachers will walk off the job next week to demand reform. The Independent Education Union (IEU) and the NSW Teachers Federation agreed unanimously at a meeting on Tuesday to hold their first joint action in more than 20 years on June 30.
More than 85,000 teachers and support staff from 2300 public schools in NSW and 560 Catholic schools across NSW and the ACT will be directed to take part in the unprecedented 24-hour strike. Teachers will rally in Sydney’s Macquarie St as well as in regional locations across NSW and the ACT. The unions say the strike is the result of the “manifest failure” of the NSW government and Catholic employers to address the crises in the education system.

I'm sure you'll take great comfort in believing in the imaginary promise of 'the system' when the theocracy (continues to) force your women into labour and ramps up the murder of sexual deviants. And the stochastic murder of school children, among others.

It would simply take alot less mental gymnastics on your part to accept that the US has always been a country founded on mass murder the immeseration of all those without means. The three successive phrases of American history that sum up the entirety of that miserable country's existence is simply: genocide, slavery, and war. The fourth will be theocratic totalitarianism. Your excuses for the system simply perpetuate it. You are on the side of the same fascists you worry about.

The Republican party is the party of America and all that it stands for. If you don't accept that then you've never understood America's function and place in the world. It helps of course that Biden is a reverse-RINO - a Republican in everything but name.

Broadening your brush only reveals the lack of precision you had prior to.

You know better than this. — creativesoul

Meaningless.

In order to know that you'd have to be privy to the framers' thought and belief. — creativesoul

No. I do not give one single damn about the lost daddy syndrome that Americans have. The framers were rapists and slave owners and what they thought means less than nothing. The constituion is largely a decorative piece that happens to be interpreted by another set of rapists and power mongers who are worth even less. America is shaped by those who govern, and those those govern are quite happy to let Americans - and the rest of the world - eat dirt so long as they accure power and wealth.

IS NOT THE RESULT OF TOO MUCH GOVERNMENTAL REGULATION — creativesoul

No, it's the result of the American system working exactly as intended, regulation or not.

That's fine. But the American system is working exactly as intended, and those who think otherwise know nothing about either America nor systems. @Issac was wrong in one thing: what is happening now is not an index of systematic failure, but of systematic success.

The Republican Party is not a clear and present danger to the United States, but the ultimate expression of the United States in its unblemished purity. You cannot be a danger to what you fundamentally embody.

Liberals who apologize for the system are just slightly milder ushers of the full coming of American fascism. America was founded on genocide and the protection of the rich. It has now offshored it's genocide and remains militantly protective of the rich. The constitution was fundamentally written to protect against democracy. It is working.

In addition to what @Banno said, in the civilized part of the two Americas, the left are experiencing a golden age (everything pink is governed by a left party, the latest inclusion being Colombia, whose left party won just the other day):



In the barbarian regions to the North, the rule of capital has largely dismembered worker power, and the place is devolving quickly into religious totalitarianism. When fascism properly takes hold in 2024, what dregs that exist of the left will likely be even more cowered, if they are not all rounded up and placed in camps. One hopes that the coming violence will be self-contained, but the US is not known for not inciting mass death and suffering on a global scale.

The rail strike going on in England right now is a bright-spot, and the union leader Mick Lynch has been absolutely murdering the corporate media who have been trying to play 'gotcyha' games with him all day. In France, Macron has been newly strung-out between fascists who are more to the right than he already is, and humans to his left, so things can go either way. Mélenchon's left-coalition seems to be doing a decent job, even though they are being hamstung by centrists who predictably, given the choice between fascism and the left, choose fascism.

Just some of the things Assange exposed:

1: American gunship helicopter opening fire on Iraqi civilians as American soldiers laugh behind.

2: US military abusing the minor Iraqi children in most brutal inhumane way; They made them chant "Fck Iraq, I love pork"; They make thirsty kids run for a water bottle from running military vehicle.

3: Apache helicopter of US military firing over a residential street as civilians run to look for shelter.

4: US marines cheer after shooting down an Iraqi civilian.

5: British soldiers beating Iraqi minors to the pulp, as the other soldier cheers with commentary.

6: US personnels opened fire at a bus full of civilians.

7: A US soldier talks about the rape he & his teammate committed with 15 y/O Iraqi girls.

8: Famous video of Wikileaks where US warplane bombing an Iraqi street full of civilians in Fallujah.

9: US soldiers celebrate after setting fire in an Iraqi wheat field.

10: US army bombarding the outskirts of Baghdad where civilians suffered had the most number of casualties.

11: US soldiers firing at a mosque for fun & burst in laughter after demolishing it.

Clips to be found here:

This is the American dream.

Gilles Châtelet - Figuring Space: Philosophy, Mathematics, and Physics
Gillian Rose - The Melancholy Science: An Introduction To The Thought Of Theodor W. Adorno
Dominco Losurdo - Hegel and the Freedom of Moderns

--

Oh, that's a big one. Let me know if worth, if you can! (I plan to actually read Losurdo this time...)

Yeah that level of response is what I would expect from an American. It tracks.

If you oppose this, you are anti-American:

The clear and present danger to the USofA are those who do not recognize that the above just is the USofA. Jan 6 hearings? Anti-American AF. And the Republicans, insofar as they are the embodiment of everything America stands for, were correct to boycott them.

The interesting question in the OP is not who or what is 'the clear and present danger'. It's what this entity 'The United State of America' is. Because if it is not in "clear and present danger", then it's in trouble.

Biden was the only electoral means to that end. — 180 Proof

Then you're already in a fascist state and you just haven't clued in yet.

-

I've been thinking that when right-wing nut jobs accuse liberals and the left of being Anti-American, they are fundamentally correct. Tump and his like are the American dream - they are the essence of 'what it is to be American', distilled to a tee. Those who oppose them, are, in fact, anti-American. To be American means exactly what the right-wing understands by the term: to be nasty, self-centered, infused with racial hatred and a utter contempt for those worse off. Trump is American as apple pie, the most American thing to have been produced since its cowboys genocided Indians all across the plain.

Consider: The failure and loss of "White's Only Democracy" has been, for over fifty years, driving the increasingly violent movement to "repeal and replace" it with a White Nationalist Autocracy, which is now the overt agenda of the Republican Party. The Counter-"Revolution" Is Being Televised, comrades, and hyper-partisan paralysis-by-design of the Federal and State governments is bringing Murica's paramilitarized populist gumbo to a boil. The organizing principle and driver is post-Civil Rights "white grievance" (no doubt catalyzed – not, however, caused – by the ravages of rapacious neoliberal policies that most of these MAGAs (and too many fucking Dems) still support). — 180 Proof

I don't disagree with any of this. Other than to add this trajectory is still one that you're on, and one that democrats are largely A-OK with, even as they like making loud noises about how not OK they are about this. So 81 million people voted for a war criminal and corporate sponsored creator of poverty and international misery. Not sure how that's supposed to be a counter-point anyway.

To be fair, I don't blame any of these people. Insofar as America is not a democracy and its voting rituals are efforts to pick the PR wing of unchanging corporate lawmaking, these choices were always going to be depraved to begin with. If you have not been the direct cause of mass and ideally global immseration, you're not allowed to be a candidate to begin with.

Look at the Supreme Court, to take the obvious example. If Clinton had been elected, we wouldn’t be seeing the end of Roe — which will have very real effects for years to come. As will the upcoming ruling on guns and on restricting the EPA’s ability to regulate emissions. That’s not nothing. That’s not an endorsement of Clinton, of course, but it’s true nevertheless— I think we can all agree?

Given this alone, if things like abortion rights and the environment matter to you, it would be preferable if we didn’t go backwards. — Xtrix

Pelosi was fighting tooth and nail for anti-abortion democrats over left candidates right as she released sop-story press statements about the importance of woman's rights in the wake of the supreme court leak. Clinton's unbeliveable incompetence and the Democratic party's anti-democratic internal corruption all but ensured - and continue to ensure - that Republicans will be in place to continue America's march toward its fascist future. Democrats are the same insofar as their existence leads to the same results, not because of hypotheticals that one can take imaginary comfort in apres coup.

If there is one point of major difference it's that there is no more effective tool than the Democratic party is murdering left and progressive energy. Not even the Republicans can do it as effectively and with more devestating results than the Dems.

Edit: Not to mention that the person who similarly fought tooth and nail to ensure that a sexual abuser like Clarence Thomas got onto the court was none other than the current sitting president. And all he had to do was humiliate and retraumatize Thomas' victim in congress on national TV to do so.

Ironically, Trump supporters would fight you tooth and nail on all of that. — RogueAI

Not sure what's ironic about that so much as obvious?

Democrats impeached Trump twice. — Jackson

Oh what's that? They said 'boo' very loudly twice?

If they keep going, they'll get to do it a third time. A fourth even. What fun they'll have.

It's not that the Democrats in power can't make sense of the reason why Trump came into power, it's that they don't like the implications of the answer. Better to think that they're not the problem and that they don't need to change then to go through the trouble of stirring up the status quo. — Mr Bee

To be fair to the Democrats, I was referring to this bloke:

Why is the GOP clinging so hard with so much nearly religious devotion to such an inept politician as Trump is beyond me. It doesn't make any sense. — ssu

But yes, the Democrats are Trump enablers. They have been ever since Hillary Clinton's brilliant campaign strategy to elevate Trump in during the Republican primaries, and they have been ever since. Or maybe it was since Trump was a registered Democrat back in 2001. Of course it doesn't really matter because the two parties are the same party with differing heraldry.

It's utterly astonishing that as soon as less than 100% support for the Democrats is raised, the alternatives are assumed to be some kind of bloody revolution. I mean, I'm as up for a bloody revolution as the next man, but is that really the limit of these people's imagination? — Isaac

Yes.

I don't even want to know what else you would add to this blueprint of wholescale destruction. — Tzeentch

More destruction obviously. If there is something on my impromptu list that is not utterly destructive of the US as it currently stands, I'm not doing it right.

Are you, like me, a socialist? — universeness

Hmm, was it something I said? :sweat:

It's just very tiring to have a rising tide of fascism and the response of liberals is 'we need a more robust set of committee hearings'.

Or, as it turns out, this elitist, bourgeois crap about 'stupid people', that @Wayfarer just posted.

Abolishing capitalism would be good, but in lieu of that, get money of out politics, abolish the Electoral Collage, pack or abolish the Supreme Court, rewrite that stupid piece of shit document they call a constitution, bring back the corporate income tax rate of the 1940-1950s, massively limit speculation on housing, massively raise the capital gains tax, establish a decent fucking healthcare system, fund the ever living daylights out of public housing, gut to the point of death funding for the military and for cops, so and and so on.

All the things that the democrats and republicans are united on opposing. Biden, that war criminal piece of shit corporate fuck with an approval rating lower than Trump's, is, as it stands, a red carpet to Trump, and refusal to criticize him to the point of his near-death makes one the equivalent of a Trump supporter.

The Biggest Clear and Present Danger To The United States of America is the Current Composition of The United States of America.

So is there anything short of total revolution that will address the problem? I mean, what would a solution consist of? Do you think if the current order completely broke down and anarchy prevailed, it would make it easier for those suffering masses to pay their rent and get along? — Wayfarer

What a stupid, inane response. I argued that one should focus on people's living conditions rather than the spectacle of what happens in little rooms and you think this amounts to a choice between the status quo and 'order completely breaking down and anarchy prevailing'? What the hell is wrong with you?

So I take it that you think the solution to the political problem posed by Trump is outside of politics. — Wayfarer

"Outside of politics"? Not in the slightest. Outside of the narrow, poverty-stricken and anmeic idea of what you think 'politics' consists in, absolutely. Politics consists in people being able to pay their rent - or alliteratively live in their own houses - in being able to feed their babies, in children not shooting other children in the face while in school, in not being subject to ruinous, car and mall-centric city planning, in not having the children who survive school not getting murdered overseas for American imperial ambitions. Literally all of the things that both the democrats and the republicans couldn't give a shit about actively work against, and all of which feed directly into people like Trump. Trump is not a political problem. Trump is a political solution.

But yeah, let's focus on 'reports' and 'hearings' and 'insurrections' and things that are irrelevant to anyone's day-to-day because politics is a fucking Hollywood movie with set-pieces made for the liberal commentariat to oogle over. If your idea of 'politics' is 'what happens in small rooms where people talk for a bit then sign a piece of paper' then you do not have an idea of politics.

74 million Americans voted for Trump. Trump is enormously representative of American values, ideals, and aspirations. Unlike the liberal condescension that these people 'lost their way', it is far more productive to ask why these people found a way in Trump, and what kind of rot - deep in the heart of American institutions and life - made Trump a palatable option. Any honest analysis of that rot will find a toxic sludge built right into the democratic party, the supreme court, American media - all of it. The effort to isolate and sequester Trump and the Republican party as some minor blemish on an otherwise perfectly fine body politic is utterly insane.

If 74 million Americans voted for Trump and you are stupid enough to respond 'OMG the GOP lost its way' then you are the idiot, and the reason why the GOP will continue to win.

It's been 6 years since Trump was elected. If you still can't "make sense" of why the GOP backs him after 6 years - when 74 million people can - then you, specifically you, are stupider than every Trump voter in existence.

It's so insane to me that people think Trump - or Trumpism more widely - will be defeated in courts, hearings, reports, and the like.

Trumpism will be defeated in places where people eat, sleep, work, and play. But because the difference regarding policy between the democrats and republicans in these spheres in exactly zero, people think Trump will be defeated in small rooms where a tiny coterie of well connected and excessively rich people will dispense democracy from on high. These being the only places where the pseudo-opposition to Trump can play out for the sake of spectacle to pretend to be doing anything. It's idiotic and a begging for fascism.

If your political focus is on 'trials' and 'hearings' and other small-room round-tables, you're part of the problem. You are the problem to which a Trump is the logical solution. People like @Wayfarer are complict in Trumpism from top to bottom.