Wrong method, right answer kind of thing. NATO is far too much of a US sock puppet.

Waste it doing random shit. If I was in your position I’d start getting through my watch and read list. Oh and learn a new language, that never hurts.

That’s a surprise given that Ukraine was still ruled by its pro-Russian regime at that point. I guess I have a few more people to wish a slow and painful death now.

I mean, yes, but this “victory” came at the cost of two hundred thousand dead, God knows how many wounded, twenty years they could’ve used to develop their country and even tighter Taliban control than before the US invasion. Afghans managed to kick the US out, but they did not succeed at defending anything. If I was Venezuelan my lesson from this would be “absolutely don’t get into war with the US,” because such a war would leave their country in ruin just like Afghanistan.

If they do that will you protect them from the wrath of the US war machine? Exactly.

What? You’re not making any sense.

there’s simply 0% chance that any family anywhere in this country is living in poverty with that kind of income.

The original Substack addresses this point, but the short of it is: Most income gains from 35k to 100k are cancelled out by a loss of government benefits, so there’s a lot less difference between these than you’d expect. You only start making real gains starting from 100k. Now a family making 100k will have expendable income that’s true, but the vast majority of its income will still go towards essentials so it’s still one emergency away from insolvency.

Edit: This means that a family with two incomes and two young children making 50k is getting a market price equivalent of 50k in government benefits, so we can crudely approximate families straddling the poverty line as making 100k net. In that case the difference between the effective official poverty line and the proposed poverty line is a large but realistic 40%.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_the_United_States#Poverty_income_thresholds

TL;DR: “The U.S. poverty line is calculated as three times the cost of a minimum food diet in 1963, adjusted for inflation.”

Uh… right where they are? The American welfare state is insufficient across the board, so it needs to be strengthened across the board, and employers across the board should be forced to pay living wages.

I mean those are technicians, not factory workers. For those see: https://www.bls.gov/oes/2023/may/oes519199.htm

By this point, I am almost afraid to think that even voting as the solution is beyond us.

Exactly. Trump is a symptom, not the cause (and that’s before we get into how he’d probably rather launch a coup than lose his majority in 2026).

It’s almost like the same thing can have different causes.

It can, but in this case it doesn’t, simple as.

their consequences are social democratic implementations in places like scandinavia.

Their consequences are basically all labor rights in the world. The problem isn’t that the bad discredited the good, it’s that the good is intentionally ignored by mainstream politics. That’s why the average person doesn’t know how much of their quality of life they owe to militant leftwing action. You shouldn’t treat political discourse as a truth seeking exercise because it isn’t.

Holy bootlicking batman. You already had your argument dismantled elsewhere so I won’t do so myself, but what the fuck how delicious does the boot have to be for you to so persistently defend such blatant cruelty? This is “you don’t know why those IDF soldiers shot children in the head” levels of apologia and you should think deep and hard about why you’re doing this.

We have no idea what actually transpired here, but there’s no viable chain of events that would make it acceptable to evict a 93 years old. Full stop.

Protest doesn’t, direct action does.

These clauses don’t apply to the rich.

Or the middle option: She’s incompetent but this is what the people guiding her want.

I mean depends on execution but giving members even a cursory view of socialist literature and ideas would make it a worthwhile affair. This is the sort of thing that would have real teeth if widely implemented.

I wasn’t expecting much from a literal banker, but what the heck Carney? Just… what?