We are all bathed in propaganda and distraction and false consciousness, so many things that should be obvious in a better world would actually be shocking and rejected out of hand by most people if you just told them the conclusive facts. Liberals invested in the voting system already conflate it with democracy and repeat propaganda against “enemy” states when they deviate from this model, calling them undemocratic. Those same liberals are unhappy with their governments and do not feel represented (correct!) but simultaneously justify and entrench their own systems as great and buy the propaganda that the real problems are things like those who vote wrong or immigrants, etc.

Underneath this propaganda is the greater mover of white supremacy and the colonizer mindset. A false sense of superiority salves the wound.

Capitalism is not about individuals being greedy. Calling capitalists greedy is like calling fish greedy for needing water. The capitalist system requires constant profit maximization to prevent firms from crumbling, the capitalists are tasked with ensuring this, generally by (at first) maximizing exchange value of their product and minimizing costs (usually labor), then later using monopoly position to charge economic rent. In the heart of empire, financialization has meant trying to skip the first step via large financial investment up front, like with tech monopolies. The system itself forces exploitation, dispossession, colonialism, and ultimately crisis and war.

Historical empires conquered for reasons we often don’t really know specifically, as the accounts we have are written by victors with limited access and understanding. But ancient peoples were just as sophisticated as us and subject to material forces as us, so it was certainly not just being greedy. The economic base can force hands, for example. The Roman slave and debt system was unsustainable and required debt jubilees and war and invasions to be maintained, for example. For the ruling class of Rome, was maintaining the empire only greed or was it what they were taught to do as the moral and right thing?

Ranked choice wouldn’t actually fix the problem. If anything it would do PR for bourgeois democracy while the exact same major forces dictated outcomes.

All of them

“Tankies” is just “pinkos” and “commies”, words that are not really offensive or describe anything actually bad but challenge the chauvinist and reactionary positions of liberals.

Lemmy is tankie because it’s cool. You should try to be as cool as us.

Andrew Jackson would probably be happy that the US genocide of indigenous people was so extensive and the country was so large. And upset at how many people living there semi-equally weren’t white.

He’d think those things for the few minutes before I shot him.

You could’ve been cool like that horshoe crab. But you just had to be difficult and be a smart monkey.

What is the bias?