It wouldn’t at all be surprising if part of the US actually survives and prospers as an independent nation whilst other parts fall down to an Economic level that matches the wealth producing capability of their economic frameworks and their workers (I reckon a post-Oil independent Texas would be at basically the same level as Argentina).

Better even: an outcome such as Britain after the Empire - a long drawn fizzle from primacy into mediocrity with delusions of grandeur - is realistic and possibly the best possible one.

Even post Imperial Britain had periods were most had a pretty decent life, such as the one that followed WWII and the rebuilding of the country, though the societal structures that underpinned that have been progressively destroyed since Thatcher and the results are pretty visible by now.

American merely stopping being top dog ain’t too bad, but some of the other possible outcomes can be pretty nasty and that’s just the ones were one or more Democratic nations are what’s left of it. Descent into Authoritarianism would be the really ugly shit, not just for America but also the rest of the World on account of all the nukes.

Whilst in 2 millennia we massively evolved the tools we use, we barely evolved socially and did not at all evolve Psychologically or Physiologically.

I’m pretty sure it had equally stupid moments, like the still today infamous moment where Nero played whilst Rome burned.

Whilst when it come to History decades blur into a handful of stories and us non-Historians just learn it like that with explanations about why it happened, living in the actual thing moment by moment without the benefit of hindsight and an overview of the whole thing to put all pieces together is a very different experience.

I wouldn’t at all be surprised if in the fullness of time all of what’s going on now will be pieced together with what came before and what comes next, with some nice explanation about, say, how the the neoliberal political experiment of the late XX century with it’s heavy emphasis on weakening Governmental oversight of the Economy re-enacted in the early XXI century many of the same problems with the Economic structure and the Political capture by the Merchant class of the early XX century causing a similar resurgence in Fascism and the fall of Democracy in several nations. (Certainly History seems to rhyming again).

Future generations will mainly see it as bunch of high level descriptions of the main events knowing fully what the outcome was, without the fear and anxiety of experiencing it as it develops without knowing what comes next.

You got me there chum.

Well done!

👍

Mate, I’ve been a member of two political parties in two different countries.

“Compromise” is way too often just an vague hand-waving excuse politicians give to act in unprincipled ways that ultimately only benefit themselves and their careers. This claim is more often misused by politicians of large mainstream political parties - the self-proclaimed “moderate/pragmatic center”.

In America “compromise” is what right now some Democrat politicians are claiming to support just about every Republican measure in Congress (stuff which is way, way, WAY beyond what I thought AOC voted for).

Indeed, and as you say, Politics is more often than not compromise. However a politician who comprises on everything and has no red-lines whatsoever by definition has no principles at all, or in other words, stands for nothing and in my naivety I expect leftwing politicians to have at least some principles and hence some red lines they will not cross, and I expect that anything that supports a state mass murdering children for their ethnicity is a natural red line for a leftwinger.

So as I see it, in the present day because of just how abused and hence devaluated that kind of claim has been by politicians in major parties, more than mere vague claims of “compromise” need to be provided by any politician in such a party who is supposed to be principled to justify actions that at first sight seem to go against the principles they claim to have.

That said, AOC did explained it in detail and somebody else actually explained here those details (which is really what I was asking for in order to judge if the “compromise” was really an acceptable one rather than and abuse of the “compromise” claim to excuse crossing what should have been a red line) and the resolution she voted for is actually a lot less scary than what I feared and manages to, IMHO fall into an actual grey area of that subject - even if I think she should have at least abstained, I can see how a “yay” vote would be understandable.

Hopefully, I was totally wrong in my fears about her being just another politician that talks the talk but only walks the walk when it suits her - I’ve seen politicians from afar, but at this point I’ve also met some personally, so I have good reasons to be suspicious of the carefully managed public image of celebrity-level politicians not matching their real nature, so want way more proof of their honest and are far more fickle with my trust on them.

Before I got involved in political parties I was more trusting, but not anymore.

Insulting random internet strangers is really just the discourse equivalent of public masturbation: you’re doing it for self-pleasure and most passerbyes just turn their face away so as not to have to see it, except for a tiny fraction of people who actually enjoy seeing somebody have a good wank in the middle of the street whilst caring naught for whatever bullshit they’re saying whilst they wank.

Insulting delivers pleasure to the kind of intellect and type of personality that believes others have a low enough mental age that they will feel bad when a random internet stranger which they’ve never seen before insults them, something that they themselves only believe because they would feel like that in the other person’s shoes.

Meanwhile a fraction of passerbyes will give positive feedback, same as a fight on a street might get a handful of people who stop, stare and maybe even egg on the combatants. However on the street it’s plain to see that almost everybody just moves on and tries to ignore the fight, whilst on the Internet, one can’t seen those who just “move one trying to ignore it” and might convince themselves that they have support for their style of comment.

The real reason for Politeness is not the “you should do it because it’s the right thing to do” that parents tell their rebel teenagers before their brains have fully developed, it’s that the pleasure some people get from being rude, is often more than outweighed by the long term effects on the audience of being frequently impolite, which are worse the smaller the environment and hence the bigger the chance others will cross paths with you having made their minds about your character by a previous display of rudeness.

Whilst Reddit is a city, were people can get away with a lot of shit (far beyond mere rudeness), Lemmy is still more of a village, so the negative effects will be greater.

I shouldn’t have to explain in a step by step way this pretty basic adult knowledge that most people figure out by themselves when they become mature adults about the actual concrete benefits of behaving in certain ways rather than others in social contexts.

Well, for starters you’re one of the first whose response wasn’t merely insults or vague political hand-waving slogans like “compromise”, so thank you for that.

From what you wrote it does not seem as bad as I though it was.

Personally I see supporting any kind of associating Jewishness with Israel as likely politically defining, but even I have to admit that like is so many levels of indirection beyond the actual resolution that it hits an grey area, even in such a subject were the gray area has been squeezed to a very, very narrow band.

I still think she should have abstained rather than voted in favor, though my alarm about the possibility of her true nature being something else than what she portrays has significantly subsided with your explanation.

As a side note:

The third lost her primary after AIPAC targeted her for criticizing Israel.

I am not American, and I have been thinking really hard about “What could I do if I was one, given the deeply flawed Democracy in the US” and fighting against this kind of thing and the politicians gaining from them is it.

Specifically things like actively deploying techniques from political guerrilla propaganda against AIPAC-supported candidates and AIPAC campaigns - we’re talking leaftletting exposing AIPAC’s candidate’s voting records or just hammering pamphlets denouncing those in poles - and actively giving your own time campaigning for the anti-AIPAC (or AIPAC-targeted) candidates in Primaries. AIPAC has money, but people have their own time and have numbers (yeah, even lefties - I’ve been part of political parties in two countries I lived in and only a tiny tiny fraction of all people actually help out campaigning, so motivated lefties can add up to a lot of extra campaigning for a candidate targeted by AIPAC or targeting and AIPAC supported candidate). If you will, grassroots campaigning but at a level more likely to succeed than what Bernie Sanders tried against Hilary Clinton in the Democrat Presidential Primaries.

Such approach also means that the likes of AOC need not fear the effects of being targeted by AIPAC and hence has no need to “compromise” for the sake of keeping representing her constituents.

As I see it the only way that might pivot American politics from its Ever More Rightwing path in a grassroots effort at the basis of the Democrat Party (the Republicans are well beyond salvation, plus their supporters aren’t really the thinking kind) that changes it enough at lower and then higher and higher levels that the next Presidential Primary featuring somebody like Bernie Sanders doesn’t get torpedoed by a thoroughly corrupt DNC.

Well yeah, that’s exactly my point and why I am critical of anybody actively voting for the ADL-backed definition (even the “darling” of the leftwing of the Democrat Party) exactly because of that.

Israel is a nation state, which definitely is not the same thing as Jewish People. In fact the idea that a political entity like a Nation can represent an entire people defined by ethnicity and religion is the real Racism, since it relies on the idea that “they are all the same”, which is the very foundation of Racist thinking.

Worse, there are actual Jewish Groups which are against the very existence of Israel, so anybody claiming against that the Israel represents all Jews is actually denying the very words (loudly expressed, even) of many Jews.

Even worse (or yeah, this shit has so many layers of bad), given the acts being committed by the Nation State of Israel, equating Israel with Jewishness is the same as implying that that which is Israel does is that which Jews As a People do, or in other words that murdering others for their land, Genocide and even mass murdering children merely because of their ethnicity are, as logically follows from the claim that Israel represents the Jewish People, all in the nature of being a Jew.

In my view it’s harder to, given that Nation State’s actions, be any more anti-semitic than linking Israel to the entirety of the Jewish People.

I can barely begin to describe the level of disgust and repugnance that I feel at anybody who would directly or indirectly (by claiming criticism of Israel is anti-semitism) link the depravity of Israeli politics, actions and even extreme colonialist racism to all members of an entire ethnic and religious group. That this shit is then leveraged to given military help to Israel in their execution of a modern day Holocaust against the Palestinian people just multiplies this disgust and repugnance several fold.

I can understand many people’s arguments about “compromise” and so forth but, shit, if a supposedly leftwing politician cannot even just merely refrain from actively vote in favour of such an extraordinarily racist (at many levels) thing like adopting an ADL supported definition of anti-semitism that actually links the entirety of the Jewish People to the most repugnant and inhumane of crimes being committed right now and second only in their depravity to what the Nazis did, then you have no principles whatsoever.

There are very few truly politically defining acts on can take, and as I see it nowadays “I supported Zionist goals” has risen to be up there with “I supported Nazi goals” in their power to define somebody politically.

PS: But, hey, maybe AOC’s vote is merely the equivalent of Chamberlain’s “peace in our times” - naively “compromising” with Evil ultimately for no actual gain.

From what I read, she diverged from the rest of the Progressives in voting for the resolution so clearly the rest of the Democrat left didn’t share her worry about giving their enemies ammunition

Could she not have abstained? Also why would this be any more damaging for her than for the other ones or than her previous votes?

If indeed she is the only hope of the left-of-center in America (which would explain why some here respondent to my posts by talking about the “need to vote for the lesser evil”) I really hope this was a mistake or had a concrete gain for at least her constituents rather than a start of “becoming pragmatic” - I’ve seen the whole descent into “pragmatism” with Labour MPs in the the UK and it invariably turned out to be them selling out for personal political gains rather than a hard-nosed weighing of pros and cons and deciding to do something they heavily disliked for the sake of a genuine greater gain for their constituents (not the “what’s good for me politically is good for everybody” self-serving open-ended excuse) further down.

Lets hope I’m totally wrong and she’s at the very least deriving concrete gains for her constituents for that (rather than merely political horse trading for her own gain) or just made an honest mistake.

Oh man, that’s the second response I had today at the level of a 5-year-old.

Cheers for another laugh.

“Israel is saving Palestinians like me from the Hamas terrorist regime”

I was going to suggest that it would be done with lots of tearful emotion, but then I remembered that Gal can’t actually act, so maybe it would be more of a “after saying the words, turning and looking towards the horizon in an heroic pose” medium shot moving into a panorama showing little children in the background.

(With the right music to pull people’s emotional strings, obviously)

Sure mate, keep up doing the same as until now and not demanding consistency and honesty from supposedly left-of-center politicians.

Blind following politicians making tall promises and not demanding that their actions match those promises (just like the MAGA crowd does) clearly and with now shadow of a doubt is the way for the country to be ruled in the interest of the many rather than the few, as the last 50 years of doing exactly that clearly prove.

Keep on doing the same and expect different results, just like Einstein advised!

Oh man, that was something else as arguments go.

Consider your “Russian troll” thoroughly crushed (and entertained) by that argument.

You have a good day: you gave me a good laugh and as I see it you deserve a good day for it.

Oh man, that explains the rage I’m getting for just being a Skeptic and daring criticize AOCs “inconsistency”.

Sorry for you guys!

It’s always easy to be pretty strict about Principles and Skeptic about the motivations of those in politics, when one sits outside with no real stake in a race and hence no real emotional investment in it.

(Mind you, I’ve been just the same towards the leading figures of the political parties I was a member of in the countries I lived in, so maybe it’s something else - as I see it, the more important the person the more important it is that they behave beyond reproach)

That said, America didn’t seem to always been fucked - surely there was a post war period up until the late 70s were for most things were pretty good (certainly as a kid I used to look up to that America), though with the caveat that it was only true if one wasn’t an Afro-American.

Even if we agree that the US was always somewhat fucked, surely the current level of being fucked is pretty record setting?!

Anyways, you take care and good luck.

Sure mate.

You insulting others is a veritable public service - it quickly signals to everybody else how much of your point is the product of “reasoning” and how much it is mindless emotionalism (exactly the same way MAGAs operate, so congrats on that) so saves everybody else time and effort.

Do keep up tagging yourself like that random internet stranger! 👍

Mate, given the style of your interaction with heavy recourse to personal insults and the low (low, low, oh so very low) reasoning and intellectual level it proves, going away from your posts is a great advice.

Ok, I’m not an American so clarify this for me: was he also not a Democrat when he was a Candidate in the Democrat Primaries against Hillary Clinton (hence then it was allowed only because of that) or has he left the party in the meanwhile (hence we would not be able to run for it now) or was he always an Independent and it was always allowed?

Because if AOC trully is the ONLY hope for the American left, you people are indeed trully fucked if she turns out to have “flexible” principles.

The desperation of having no other viable option would explain the “She’s CANNOT be criticized” style of feedback I’m getting to criticizing her for, in this subject not actually standing for the principles she claims to have, including people talking about the whole “we have to vote for the lesser evil” part, which only makes sense if there is literally no other viable candidate from the left side of the Democrat Party and hence AOC being less than honest being panic inducing for anybody not a full-on neoliberal (which would explain the number of people whose response to me was little more than personal insults)

Sure mate, I’m a Russian troll and a stupid one even who thinks AOC very important for Ukraine whilst Bernie Sanders (who I very clearly supported) would be deliver Ukraine to Russia.

Keep on arse licking your “sacred cows” and not holding them to the principles they claim to have, because that has been so great for America (TWO Trump Presidencies and, if its up to him, counting) and thus by extention to the Ukraine who you claim to want Glory for.

Cheers.