If voting isn't enough (I didn't think it is) then do more. Go knock on doors for the candidate that you like. There are a million ways to participate in democracy.
Love to door knock for Heinrich Himmler.
These "both choices bad. Better to not vote" people really don't make any kind of sense to me.
Hey, listen. I vote every year. This year, 90% of my ballot is going to be blank, because so many of the candidates are absolutely abhorrent. But when I am presented with the Himmler / Hitler choice, I will be firmly bubbling in (C) None of the Above. I might even knock a few doors and tell my neighbors about how great (C) None of the Above would be. If I could figure out where to send my money, I could even see myself donating.
Image being unhealthy and saying "it's going to take more than a 20 minute walk once a week to get in shape. Better not even do that then cuz what would be the point?"
Its funny, because I'm picturing you trying to recover from a broken leg with that mentality.
We won't be like China. We'll be more insulated and divorced from Chinese media, culture, and conversation.
That's the stated end goal. Bringing up sharp walls between nationalities in order to control the flow of information between people.
If we keep TikTok open, we risk exposing American young people to Chinese norms, ideals, and social standards. We might even be exposed directly to Chinese mass media (ie, propaganda).
This is a real security risk, as it raises a possibility that younger Americans won't accept American mass media at face value.
Alright, imma need you to tap the breaks for a minute. The Soviet Union was a lot of good things, but it still had all the old hang-ups of Western White Chauvanism dragging it down, even to the bitter end.
be 25 years away from reaching parity with the Western world
I feel like this was the mentality that crippled the USSR. They were still always and forever playing catch-up to the Western World's consumerist imperial core. It was never enough to simply live well. They all had to live as well as the marginal petite bourgeois suburbanite. They bought into the lie of "Every Man A King" and traded out old petty bureaucrats for new oligarchs and despots.
original communist party becomes so popular
It did not become popular. United Russia subsumed the Communist movement and transformed it into the modern white supremacist state. The folks who were rebelling against Yeltsin hated the Shock Doctrine economics imposed by the newly integrated Russian economy. But they did not hate the Pizza Huts. They did not hate the Mercedes cars or the Kentucky Bourbon or the various treats that came with the end of the Cold War. They did not hate the system that made the treats, just the treat-eater at its head.
So when Yeltsin's government fell apart, Vladimir Putin was able to make of his nation a new Treat Machine and appease all the angry Russians who so desperately wanted to be as fat and happy as the Americans they saw on TV.
We would probably be excited about something like gas prices coming down but it ultimately didn't actually mean anything to us.
I definitely get that at some level, but the idea that you'd actively be celebrating a strong economy really implies that it does mean something to you.
Like, I can get landing a big salary bump or year end bonus at the end of a year and feeling celebratory. If it's 1999 and my earning for the year shot up 20% from the year before? Fucking awesome. Break out the fireworks.
But is that happening right now? I'm not seeing it.
Gotta wonder if we're going to be reading Op-Eds from Netanyahu heads in a few years.
Something about how the Israelis were ready to pull back, but they just kept getting green flags from Blinken and Biden to push further into Gaza territory.
![zifnab25 [he/him, any]](https://hexbear.net/pictrs/image/16834d2e-60b9-423e-8882-6552cb49486b.webp?format=webp&thumbnail=128)
It's a shame we never invented a Space-Time machine