Inb4 they discover that the cameras are there, but the footage is not...

Trump: 465k corona deaths

Biden: 713k corona deaths as of February

Total: 1178k and counting, the admin still denies basic reality like the fact that it's airborne, lest alone do something about it, like put proper ventilation in school and so. Not saying one prez is better or worse than the other. Both of them didn't give a fsck, rolled their dice, and let 'er rip the same way.

I'm not saying that democracy does not work. But I am saying the US current political landscape is pretty much as far as you can get from fulfilling the conditions for democracy to work.

Back in the day the US did elect FDR, and that was pretty much the best thing that could happen. This goes to show that democracy can work. Roosevelt built up the country for what it was at it's greatest. But in the last 50 years the US has been getting pretty much the same government whatever the party in the office - destroying the middle class to enrich the 1%, waging imperial wars overseas, and later also the addition of building the country towards a police state. Everything about this 50 years of policy is as bipartisan as it gets. This goes to show that democracy can also horribly horribly not work at all.

I have no data to back up the claim that team D is committed to the flawed but still democratic system. Neither the idea that the party is committed, nor the idea that the system is still democratic.

First, the Democrats talk a wild talk, but the fact that they are also building the surveillance state tells me the walk they walk is in the opposite direction.

Second, check out this study from Princeton: https://www.princeton.edu/~dav... . If voter preference has no influence on policy, there is no democracy, whatever the show that is put on to make it appear there is.

But most importantly, if we should believe you can influence policy by voting in the contemporary US political system, then if you vote for what you think is the lesser evil, you are still voting for evil, you will be getting evil, and you will be complicit in it. I feel no need to play along.

The idea that there is only two options is the oldest trick in the book. You're damned if you pick A, and damned if you pick B. Either way you will be getting pretty much the same government that has been going on the last 50 years, destroying the middle class to enrich the 1%, waging imperial war overseas, and now with the little bit newer addition of building the country towards a police state. Everything about this as bipartisan as it gets.

If you want actual change in the country, you need a new party. Fat chance of that happening as long as people believe everything would be fine if everyone just picked the right party out of two wrong ones.

Seriously, man. The US does not have a party of good and a party of evil. It has two parties of evil. One of them plays the good cop and the other plays the bad cop, but when the push comes to shove, both of them are out there to get you.

The surveillance state is a bipartisan matter. No matter who is in the House or the Hill, they work to advance it. Case in point Obama renewing the Patriot Act, or this https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/...

If you see me raising awareness of what is going on as throwing up my hands, I should ask you, what is it that you are doing to help?

Did the public get a vote on the Patriot Act though? And were they explained what they were gotten into, when it was voten in for them? The Act had been written in 1995 already as the Omnibus Counterterrorism Act. But the people back then would not have taken it, so it was waiting on the desk for the right moment when it was possible to manufacture the consent for it. 9/11 provided just that, but it was going to happen sooner or later no matter what.

But the issue is more than just the Patriot Act. The Act is just the tip of the iceberg of the US surveillance state. And most of it is kept in secret out of the public view and never it is asked what the public thinks of it. Even though as we know from the Snowden revelations, the public does not really care.

And that's part of the wider problem with democracy. People don't care about most of the things, and they care even less once the observational data comes in that about the things people do care about, the elected representatives do not. The very premise of democracy is flawed here in exactly the same way as the pipe dream of libertarianism - both of these assume people have all the time in the world to keep track of everything that is going on, and are able to make decisions based on total visibility into everything that is going on. Which is just never going to happen, we have division of labor for a reason. Democracy also assumes there are actually good candidates to choose for. Sorry to break it to voters everywhere, but if all you are offered is to vote for the lesser evil, you are still voting for evil, and you will be getting evil.

I'm not saying that I have something better than democracy to offer, but I am saying that democracy, like every other form of government has not solved the problem of getting honest people with integrity to work in the public office in the public interest. The only thing that we know that can make it happen is the ethos of the ruling class, and the culture of the country that is able to reproduce and safeguard that. No law or system will be able to help with it, because any law and system can be abused, circumvented and replaced, and people can be made to cheer on it. You need people who are able to say no without fail every time, without regard for personal cost. How many of these can you think of in our public sphere? How many in politics? You cannot climb the political ladder like that, you will be sidelined, and buried, if necessary. But if you cannot make it happen, you have no democracy, you just have a show that is put on to make you think that it is somehow your fault that everything is fucked up.

As to what the ethos of the current US political class might be, let's just consider that the existence and proliferation of the surveillance state is a decades long bipartisan undertaking of obvious evil directed against the very people of the US. There is no other way to see this but to realize the US government considers it's own people to be it's enemy. And the only way you can end the surveillance state is to pry it from their cold dead hands. They will never give it up alive.

To say that there is a recourse to it, it's just that people don't care, is the same as to say that I can quit smoking any time I want, it's just that I don't want to. If a tree falls in the forest, but no one is there to hear it... If there is a recourse available, it's just that there is no way to ever make it happen, is it really there? Not in any meaningful sense of the word. The surveillance state is there, it is going to be here, and it's going to be growing, and you have to suck it up and take it, like it or not. If you manage to convince yourself it's the people's will, the better for you, it will make it easier to swallow, but swallow you will.

My take is it's not the foreign opinion thrust in the face of the people that is the problem. The problem of the current situation is the domestic politically sanctioned opinion. The sheer volume of it drowns out any differing opinion, and the boogeyman of foreign influence is used to delegitimize any critizism of the powers that be. This is great for the higher ups, because policy has in effect been given a free reign to do whatever they want, and boy, they are using it.

It used to be that you need to know and understand both sides of an issue to understand the issue. Now you are instantly made the enemy if you even hint at the possibility that there might be anything out there but the right side of the issue. There is only two acceptable views on anything anymore, the party political view, and the government official view. But by now even the party and the government themselves are drinking this their own kool-aid and have removed their ability to analyze ongoing issues, and seem to be snatching defeat from every jaws of victory.

This game has played out before in history. It's going to get much worse before it gets any better.

The US was moving the direction of an authoritarian police state long before Trump, it's also going to move that way with or without Trump being the next president, and it's going to move that way until it's there. There is nothing the people can do to stop it, it's a bipartisan matter that is never going to be part of electoral politics, and the police have been already armed to the teeth with army gear to be ready for it if it should be tried to change by other means. If anything, the horror of Trump is being used as a reason to double down.

As to the government using it's powers for it's own desires, not ours, that ship sailed a long time ago, didn't it?

Do you seriously think the US citizens have any influence on any of this? Who voted for the spying on the US citizens? Who voted for all the crap in Snowden revelations? And most importantly, where on earth do you get the idea that you have any chance to get rid of this all? Go on, take the recourse you have, and put a stop to this. You are buying every single bridge in the US here...

I thought we learned from the Twitter files this is also exactly what happens in the US.

Some might say we are on track to feudalism again. Governments giving zero fsck about the people nor their problems, playing power games and spending their time in office distributing state resources between elites, and the creeping in of the you will own nothing economy sure looks like it.

China is no longer a cheap labor country. This is why you see much outsourcing go to other Southeast Asia countries now.

What China does have going on though is they put $890bn into renewables in 2023, which almost beat total global investment in /fossil/ fuels, and 40% of their gdp growth came from renewables last year. Basically renewables are their new economic engine now. They are about to meet 10% of Paris 2030 /global/ targets of renewable use by end of 2026, and 100% of their own targets by 2025. China knows they are going to be hit hard by climate change, probably already by the middle of the century, and they are working hard to not make it worse than it is already going to be.

As to the constant cries of their construction sector somehow meaning trouble for their economy, meh. They have now built most of the real estate they need, so they are switching gears to the next problem. Expect to hear a bit of grinding while they do that.

Not really, once you go volume significant to influence a whole country. The oil/gas has to come from somewhere, take some route, and go through some processing. There will be talks and (geo)politics and infrastructure built, taking years, if not decades, and billions of investment. Once all of this is set up, the tendency is to stick to it, because the opportunity cost to switch is huge.

And no one pays market prices. Political deals are more important than money on that level.

For the military tech, if the Clintons and Biden were not supposed to have it, but gave it to China, China did not steal it, Clintons/Biden did. You can check criminal law for smaller stuff for a similar case. If I steal something and sell it to someone else unsuspecting, that someone else gets to keep it, but I get to go to jail. Now if you go and say that China was not unsuspecting, then that means Clintons/Biden did not just steal the tech, they conspired with a foreign power to sell what was probably state secrets. The ramifications of that I'll leave as an excercise to the reader.

As for the fact that they steal a little here or there, these peanuts is not what I am talking about here, as these do not rise above the background level of all of the other international tech stealing that is going on. Good ol' industrial espionage was not invented by China in the end on the 20th century, it has been around forever as a constant. I am talking about the fact that for every manufacturing that was outsourced to China, there occurred a technology transfer of everything necessary to manufacture it. The US schooled China to manufacture everything it knew how to; the rise of China as a manufacturing superpower is a product of US trade and foreign policy. A self-inflicted wound of a once-in-a-civilization scale, a story of corruption and incompetence on the largest scale. China is not the biggest enemy of the US here, DC is.

The Chinese did not steal American technology. The US handed the tech over on a silver platter, because the Chinese demanded technology transfer be part of the outsourcing deal. The US business elites didn't give a shit, called for it to be done, because they were going to, and indeed did get insanely rich off the deal. US politicians, if they even understood at all what they did, didn't give a shit either, delivered the deal, got their kickbacks and retired as respected statesmen. Now that the results are in, all they can do is blame China, and it's not like China is going to be able to defend itself in US media either.

But even if China had stolen the tech, you could not call it anything but karma, because guess what, how do you think the US manufacturing got started? By stealing British tech. It's the circle of life. The way I see it, upstarts do what they can do to get on their feet, and established ones do what they can to keep everyone else down. If you think the US gaining a tech lead was a good thing, you can not deny anyone else from following the same path. Have your cake, or eat it.