Aceticon @ Aceticon @lemmy.world

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2 yr. ago

Agreed.

The reason why I simplified it down to "bullshit" is because my post was too long already without going into details about the what the "bullshit" actually was. ;)

And yeah, having returned to my homeland with all the political experience from abroad, I also see here the cultural factors that keep the system as is, as well as how the voting system written into the constitution mathematically creates a pair of "winners" - not as bad as the US but not all that much better - who are the only ones who could change said Constitution to make the system more Democratic, which they will never do).

The US is, IMHO, even more calcified socially and politically (some years ago I would've said "not so much in the personal freedoms axis" but lately all the attacks on things like women bodily autonomy and trans-sexuality make me think otherwise) and hence far harder to steer away from Ultra-Capitalist dog-eat-dog Far-Right thinking and into even just the minimum subset of Social Democracy ideas (such as Universal Healthcare).

I don't really know what might work to change things there. I can only thing of grassroots campaigns against specific congressional candidates (like plastering posters with pictures of Palestinian childrens' corpses - tiltle "This is what X has been paid to defend" - all over the place in the areas of were candidates who got AIPAC money are running and doing the same on the run up to the next Democratic Primary).

That said, that doesn't change the point that the Democrats are not a party "of the people, for the people", which probably explains how so many less well off and less educated people ended up being drawn so fast to the populist rhetoric of Trump and his wannabe clones - most of the Democrat Party has become so bad at ruling for normal people (and the Press so riddled with slick lies and manipulation in defense of doing things for the benefit of the few) that any old loud raging bollocks that just sounded different was enough to attract lots of votes.

Looking from the outside, it seems to me that the field that Trump sowed and already harvested once was plowed and fertilized by all those years when both parties were ruling for the few whilst using the Press as nothing more than Propaganda outlets to deceive and swindle the many.

I've been following politics in various countries and have even been a member of small political parties in two of the countries I've lived in (as an EU citizen I get to vote in Local and EU Elections in any EU country I live in) and the lies and deceit also cover the "causes".

I would say the deceiving goes at least 3 levels deep, sometimes more. You're being fed spin and misinformation to make you draw the desired conclusions and are even being fed spin and misinformation to make it more likely that you would trust the former kind of spina and misinformation.

What really openned my eyes to the deep stack of lies upon lies in modern politics, especially in Anglo-Saxon countries, was being right smack in the middle of the Investment Banking Industry in London during the 2008 Crash and the "Recovery" years after it: the "causes" we were being told about were bullshit if you looked at the Industry from the inside, the official economic figures we were provide were bullshit if you dug down on them (in at least one case doing the calculations from publicly available raw figures using standard Economic formulas yielded very different results from the Official figure) and the people they ended up helping were the ones who least needed any help (pretty much the opposite side of society that needed it).

A lot of what you see might look like good things because you're fed a carefully crafted picture of the "we have no other option" kind as rationale or you're given some of the reasons but not the full picture so that you yourself naturally reach the conclusion others desire using that half-picture and hence think they're doing the right thing. Further, there are various cognitive shortcuts in the human mind, one of which is called "Anchoring" - things look much or they look little always relative to other things - which is used in Sales to get people to accept higher prices (basically, you given them an even higher figure upfront in some way and then the real price doesn't look so much because the brain is judging that price relative to the first figure), and also in Politics to make barelly benificial measures (or even measures that merelly remove detrimental previous measures) look like they're great things because that how it looks for people who are used to only getting shit.

Mind you, this kind of manipulation impacts me as much as it does you. It's just that as the slant is different here and I have a different experience of politics in the various countries I lived in, I can look at what's done in the US with lots of examples of how governing can be so much more for the majority of people than it is in the US even by the Democrats.

It's like when I first moved out of my own country, Portugal, to The Netherlands - with the broadening of experience from seeing how things were done elsewhere, looking back at my own homeland revealed all sorts of quirks and ways of doing things which were pretty bad, at all levels (not just Politics) that before I thought "that's just the way things are". By having a broader experience of "what can be done" and having my axis of reference moved by that broadening of experience, suddenly things that for me before looked like good things were now viewed as being "the minimum they can get away with", symbolic and purposefully innefective or similar.

I live in Europe.

In my country the politics of the Democrat Party would fall between those of our most rightwing mainstream party and the far-right parties. We do have a Communist party here and they're seen as far-left so it's not as if the policies in Healthcare, Education, Public Transportation and Social Safety Net supported and expected by pretty much everybody here are "Communism".

And this is Portugal, which is a disgrace next to, say, Scandinavia when it comes to being a proper State that properly represents the interests of most people.

You only think the political "weekly reaming" (not in a good sense) over there is great because you know no other way to live and the other guys are the "daily reaming" party.

The US is just horribly bad when it comes to treat all people in a fair and humane way, so being thrown a sweet after their weekly reaming is enough to make many think they're so priviledged and led by such wonderful politicians, as is normal in an abusive relationship.

Oh, I'm pretty sure there's a lot of Racism involved in politicians supporting the extermination of the natives by the last White Colonialist Nation (who even tell us they have "Western Values" and that the natives "are violent and homophobic" to try and get us to see them as "westerners - i.e. whites - surrounded by evil savages") still in existence, especially given that said natives are Muslim, which is the one group which in the West is actually fashionable to be a racist about.

The loud anti-Racism of neoliberals in the West for the last 3 decades was purelly performative for them to distinguish themselves from the even more rightwing parties (i.e. the Fascists) and capture minority votes, which is why they still support Genocide abroad as long as it a "superior" race (in this case, "the chosen people") doing it to a "lesser" race (or as they call them, "human animals")

Rights are things all people have equally and unconditionally.

Charity is something that gets given arbitrarilly and under whatever conditions the "givers" of Charity decide and which can stop at any time for anybody and any reason.

I come from a country which used to have a Fascist Dictatorship were pretty much everybody but a handful of people were crushingly poor and while a handful of very rich families who helped maintain the system of oppression and exploitation that caused so much misery, the "ladies" of those families boasted about how much "Charity" they practiced.

Charity is a moral-salve (makes them think and seem to be "good people") of the better to reduce the moral weight on the from being part of and benefiting from the exploitation and at times even pillaging of the rest of Society.

There is no such party in the US.

The best you can get is the "Let's make the rich richer by avoiding equality like the plague and never undoing the regressive measures from the Other Party whilst claiming to be charitable" Party.

It's still better than the "Let's kill everybody not like me" Party, but lets not try and deceive people with the preposterous fantasy that they're actual Good Guys rather than Not Quite As Bad Guys.

Personally the Democratic People's Republic of Korea is the one I find that really beats all others in this.

In some things there is veto power and in some a majority vote (by states and by population) suffices.

Whilst I do not know for certain in which category Sanctions fall, I would expect that given the implications at a geostrategical and trade level of them there's a veto power there. Also I vaguelly remember Hungary blocking sanctions against Russia coordinates at the EU level and countries having to go around it and organising their own sanctions, which would mean it's a vote were there is a veto.

Even beyond that, German is certain to lobby and even bully (were it can) other EU countries so that they don't sanction Israel.

It's a well known phenomenon that the more people self-compliment about some great quality they have, the less that is the case.

A similar thing seems to happen at a political level - the countries were politicians just harp on and on about how great their Democracy is (in the case of the US) or how old it is (in the case of the UK) have the most flawed Democracies (if they even count as Democracies given how far they stray from the "all votes are equal" criteria) whilst in the best Democracies out there (like The Netherlands where they have Proportional Vote) they never talk about how great a Democracy they are.

I believe it's called Overcompensation.

Personally ever since I figured this out I treat such self-complimenting boasts (both at an individual and at a nation level) as big red flags and so far that rule of thumb hasn't failed me.

Germany keeps on sucking Netanyahu's dick and will always block any concerted action at the EU level.

The Germans have already stated they have to stand by Israel and will continue to send weapons to them.

It seems the Germans have never stopped being fine with the "right" races doing a little Holocausting on "lesser" races.

Including 2000lb bombs, which the US Military refuses to use because the collateral damage is so massive and which Israel used in residential areas in both Gaza and Lebanon.

The useful idiots that have been going around for months defending Biden whilst he was sending Israel some of the worst conventional weapons the US has in the full knowledge that they would use them and with his own military advisors telling him how much collateral damage they cause, have a lot of blood on their hands for enabling this.

Holocausting still gives German Politicians hard-ons.

In my own experience learning Dutch when living in The Netherlands (were, like in Denmark, almost everybody speaks good English) you learn very little and very slow with formal lessons and a lot very fast in situations were you have to manage with the local language (basically sink or swim).

I spent years living there with only basic Dutch and then ended up in a small company were I was the only non-Dutch person and the meetings were conducted in Dutch and within 1 to 2 months my Dutch language skills had taken a massive leap forward.

I also get similar effects with other languages I speak when I go visit those countries: persist in talking to the locals in the local language and that will push your language knowledge up.

That said, at the very beginning language lessons will give you the basic structure for the language, but for going beyond the basics I find that just being forced to use it yields the fastest improvements.

(Might wanna try to start watching local TV at some point too)

By the way, if the Danish are anything like the Dutch, they'll pick up from the accent that a person is American and switch to English. Do not follow them! Keep talking in Danish even if it feels like it's pretty bad and hard to use. When I lived in The Netherlands most of my British acquaintances had really poor dutch speaking skills even after over a decade there because of this effect of people picking up their accent and switching to English.

I'm pretty sure somebody who died because they didn't made sure to check freely available information beforehand given the very loud and widespread advanced notices that "serious shit might be coming your way" counts as Natural Selection.

Femme Fatale

I'm afraid it doesn't take much spine to speak up online, especially since I'm an European and hence with little at stake on the US Presidential race.

(Mind you, I do go beyond words and have a been a member of small Leftwing parties in two of the countries I lived in).

None the less, thanks for the compliment.

A rabidly racist society whose leaders keep telling the West that they have "Western Values".

Yeah, 19th Century White Colonialist Values, same kind that the Belgians in Congo and the Afrikaneers in South Africa had.

Being alive has both a 100% morbidity rate and a 100% mortality rate.

Until vastly larger numbers of people get trained in Advanced Mathematics and Degree Level Scientific disciplines, the human norm will never be anywhere near Mathematicians and Scientists.

It's quite literally abnormal to be a Scientist or Mathematician.

Then again, so is being Homeless or an Olympic-level Athlete.