Depending on how you define merit, it never was.

Only lemmings would use comparison operators to explain political topics and then have the replies evaluate the expression lol.

I said that multiculturalism was the norm, not that everyone was holding hands and singing kumbaya. I also am not saying that colonialism is new or unique to Europeans, it just so happens that European nations are the most recent colonial powers and we happen to be living in the historical period immediately following their rise to hegemony. Obviously conflict and colonialism existed prior to European colonization, but it has never before had the global reach and dominance that European nations achieved. The fact remains that prior to colonization by Europeans, many regions around the world were more diverse and politically complex (i.e. multiple cultural, religious, and organizational paradigms existed parallel to and in conversation with one another). Though there was conflict, it was more local and restrained with different groups finding ways to coexist even if the relationship was tenuous. It’s impossible to deny the profound impact of Europe’s global conquest on the political environment in which we all currently live.

This is such an ignorant take. Multiculturalism is actually the norm in most of the world throughout history, and the rare instances of isolationism are more often a result of geography than culture. The current xenophobic and nationalist state of the world is an aberration resulting from rampant and ongoing colonialism in the past few centuries. Many nations that exist today encompass regions that were far more multicultural and politically complex prior to their colonization by Europeans.

As for the West, our current secular humanist values are the result of the enlightenment period in which European colonizers appropriated and synthesized the ideas of colonized peoples around the world. The reason we don’t live up to them is because we stubbornly refuse to reckon with our colonialist past and present, such that we just go on living with the contradiction to the detriment of the world and ourselves.

It’s honestly kind of amusing once you stop giving a shit.

Not caring doesn’t make you cool, it just makes you another cynical asshole among many. IMO the world could do with less cynical assholes.

The reason it doesn’t work out that way is because we aren’t organized. Yeah, sure, a lot of Americans are armed, but they’re armed and alone. The intention behind the second amendment was that groups of citizens would form their own local militias and effectively be a distributed standing army ready to defend their liberty at a moment’s notice, but the pervasive culture of individualism has twisted the second amendment into something else.

You’re tilting at windmills, no one accused the DNC of engaging in election fraud (that’s MAGA’s ballpark). The person you replied to said DNC leadership “conspired against” Bernie, which is broad enough to mean a lot of things, including that they coordinated messaging to manufacture controversy around his campaign (as was proven true by the leaked emails).

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/top-democrat-racist-tirade-zohran-mamdani_n_6861aab5e4b08e0b4a741231

https://www.jezebel.com/democratic-leaders-join-republicans-islamophobic-attacks-on-zohran-mamdani

https://newrepublic.com/article/199293/democratic-establishment-shunning-mamdani-disqualifying

https://newrepublic.com/post/196734/andrew-cuomo-ad-edited-photo-zohran-mamdani

It’s always interesting to see how what kinds of things go viral change with the times. The recent trend of cute or weird animals becoming internet-wide mascot sensations for a while before moving on to the next one says something about our current cultural moment, but I’m not sure what exactly.

Hopefully a lot more to go. We even got a progressive who won the Democratic primary for Senate in Kentucky, Charles Booker. Though he hasn’t called himself a socialist, he’s running on the same social democratic platform as the DSA-aligned socialists have been.

I mean, small businesses are petite bourgeoisie. That’s just the definition of the term. That doesn’t mean they are an enemy of socialism and I don’t think that’s what the person you’re replying to was saying. Of course it would be ideal for small businesses to adopt a cooperative structure but it would be foolish to suddenly try and push that on existing small business owners. In the meantime it’s good to change policy to favor small business over corporations because it distributes wealth more evenly, enables greater social mobility, and fosters community.

Progressives showed up to the primary for New York mayor and the DNC responded with Islamophobia, an anti-socialist manifesto, and threats of splitting the party.

The People’s Temple (led by Jim Jones, had a settlement called Jonestown where they committed mass murder-suicide, and is the origin of the term “drinking the kool-aid”) was a progressive religious cult that combined Christianity with communist and socialist ideology, with an emphasis on racial equality. Before the whole murder-suicide thing they provided a bunch of social services including soup kitchens, rent assistance, job placement services, free canned goods, clothing, and coal for winter heating. It’s pretty wild reading about Jim Jones himself and seeing parallels to some modern online tankies (there’s a quote of Jim Jones suggesting they should all kill themselves because the world isn’t ready for socialism and then referring to a group of defectors as “Trotskyite defectors” and “Coca-Cola revolutionaries”).

GEO Group is a prison contractor that’s been hired by ICE to build, run, and maintain their facilities. The shooter is an employee of a private corporation but the corporation he works for is on the public dime. ICE isn’t protecting him like they protect their own employees because as private security he will be held accountable as an individual rather than having the agency or even the private corporation he works for held accountable. They’re more than happy to throw one guy under the bus to avoid accountability for themselves, and while they can’t do that with ICE agents they can with private security.

If any local police department were capable of arresting a world leader it would be the NYPD. For decades the NYPD has operated more like an intelligence agency than a police department, even making arrests outside the country. I don’t consider that to be a good thing (in my opinion what the NYPD has been allowed to become is criminal), but it sure makes the suggestion that they might be used to arrest the Prime Minister of a foreign country a lot more plausible.

It’s not a good idea at all. The problems it creates are greater in both number and difficulty than the problems it solves.

He’s only saying this because he’s seen the polls on support for Israel and the Iran war and he wants to be a viable presidential candidate in 2028.

This was when he thought Trump was telling the truth about “no new wars.” The evil bastard was scared he wouldn’t get to keep the murder machine running.

I doubt working for BYD is any worse than working for Amazon. China just has more manufacturing jobs which tend to suck more than other jobs and exploit workers in more visible ways. It is still the case that by most metrics (quality of life, affordability of homes, income inequality, etc.) China is better. That doesn’t mean they don’t exploit workers or that we should adopt their system, because it has flaws of its own that we can learn from. IMO it was a mistake to require that all labor unions be formalized under the ACFTU (All-China Federation of Trade Unions). By banning independent unions the state becomes a magnet for corruption and a barrier to working class progress. The business community forms relationships with government and is able to exert influence over the ACFTU to control workers. That being said, even a bureaucratic union constrained by the state is better than no union at all because they at least have to maintain the appearance of protecting the interests of the working class.

His base has been convinced that all renewable energy development is just a big grift for people to get rich off of government subsidies, which coincidentally is exactly what fossil fuel subsidies are for. The “no you” defense is the most successful strategy in history, so successful that it’s enabling our own extinction.