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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: February 13th, 2024

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  • Lemmy is full of “vote blue no matter who” libs who think the party cannot fail, it can only be failed.

    It was failed by its voters in 2010, when it failed to make a meaningful impact in peoples lives despite having the executive, 60 senators, and the house.

    And then voters failed it again in 2016 when they didn’t turn out for “America is already great” while paychecks remained stagnant and rent continued to increase.

    And again in 2022 after Joe “nothing will fundamentally change” Biden failed to use his power to change anything.

    And again in 2024 after Kamala “How would my administration be different from Biden’s? I would have a republican in my cabinet” Harris ate shit.

    These people understand at a deep level that the democratic party would rather lose than embrace left policy, so the only lever they feel they have to influence outcome is to silence any criticism.



  • Territories are still citizens, who can vote when they reside in states. If 2-3% of Canada immigrated, that’s 1 million people, which would shift the balance in a lot of places.

    Of course, even if you shifted 10 seats in the Senate, the democrats would probably give republicans half the budget and let them write their own bills in the name of bipartisanship (again), and you’d quickly become as hopeless as the average american is in the democrats helping them.




  • The Khmer Rouge was never socialist, they were some weird feudal ideology, hence why the CIA supported them and the US recognized them as the legitimate government of Cambodia for like 30 years after Vietnam liberated them and put an actual socialist government in power.

    Russia hasn’t been socialist since 1992; Putin’s Russia is what happens when you overthrow a democratic state run by the workers for the workers with a vibrant, multiparty capitalist “democracy”.

    “Socialism with Chinese characteristics” is more democratic than the US; the average Chinese person feels they have far greater influence on the government than the average American. They tend to be confused why Americans hate and fear the police and why we aren’t able to vote for politicians who will fix the problem.

    There’s also Cuba, who had a referendum on a new constitution a few years ago. After years of debate at the community level, they came up with a final draft that 92% of Cubans voted yes on. Could you imagine if we had that level of influence over our own government?

    See the thing you’re missing is that the communist parties of these countries themselves democratic; they’re typically structured such that every member above the rank-and-file is elected, with instant recall and “give us a better candidate” options.






  • The quality can’t be that much worse than the plane that can’t fly in the rain and has a risk of decapitating pilots on ejection. It’s not as good at killing American soldiers as the Osprey, but it’s not exactly the epitome of quality.

    In any case, Chinese manufacturing builds to specification. The reason they’re perceived as low quality is that you’re buying goods designed to be literally as cheap as possible, both in the development and manufacturing costs, and companies wouldn’t make a profit outsourcing if they spent the same amount manufacturing the product in China.

    When your cheap electronic fails because a .5 cent capacitor explodes after a month, it’s not because the country with the biggest manufacturing sector didn’t have access to 5 cent capacitors or the country with the most engineers didn’t have the engineering man-hours available to design it correctly.