He’s 67, that means he was born in '58. That generation got totally fleeced by the banks via hard selling of home equity loans. The man probably only has 10% equity in his home after all these years because he kept taking out loans to renovate or go on vacation or buy a new car or a boat. Huge problem.

I think it’s a absolutely a goal and signals potential risk that the US is advancing along the path to war

And was it Turkey that recently intercepted a bunch of explosive pagers?

Socialism and social democracy are diametrically opposed. Social democracy is capitalism managing its captive populace through concessions to avoid socialism.

It’s a trap

I can’t imagine what you’re going through, and it sounds difficult. You my empathy and my sympathy. There are some complementary practices you can engage with via video call. I find direct person-to-person works better for me. But many people I respect have found benefits from working with people via video call. There is something out there for you. You are not trapped and you are not doomed. I know you’ll find something.

I gotta say, as someone who has been both a deep skeptic and a cancer survivor, it is worth exploring complementary practices. It sounds like there is a strong mind-body connection to your symptoms based on your reports that changes in social dynamics (being alone -> going to doctor; waiting for guests -> guests arrive) cause changes in your experience of your symptoms. I have engaged in multiple types of “woo” and I have experienced things my skeptic history tells me I should not have been able to experience.

Since looking into it, it seems this is actually a common story - a person has chronic, persistent, or long-term dynamic and medical professionals only take them so far, so they explore the scores of different “woo” out there and end up finding some things that change their experience of their symptoms. Different people respond to different things, efficacy is suspect, but the person reports alleviation of symptoms and achievement of desired outcomes.

If you haven’t explored complementary modalities, I would recommend them to you based on my experiences.

I think we’re at the point where we have to say: we’ll see

I dunno. I think the Rs and Ds, both leadership and voters, have strong anti-China alignment and war against China will have desperate unemployed people happy to enlist to “fight for freedom and liberty”. Plenty of Ds that I know say shit like “if we’re not careful we’ll all be speaking Chinese soon”. I think anti-China sentiment and patriotism is strong enough to unify a desperate US population.

I think it’s a huge risk because such desperation could easily precipitate internal conflict before external conflict kicks off. I think it’s a huge risk because external conflict may never happen if military analysts realize they can never win.

And there are even more knock-on effects! Dismantling the NSF while simultaneously defunding universities and other grants while simultaneously making student loans more toxic means that a lot of research will be grinding to a halt in the US. That puts the US in further behind China than it already is, and potentially will slide it so far it falls below India or maybe even Russia. Without that research edge, there’s no high tech manufacturing coming to the US. There’s no next gen chips, there’s no new energy tech, there’s no quantum, AI will lose ground, and many other tech trees will all be non-viable for investment in the US.

And since property is so over valued, cost of living is so high that low tech manufacturing won’t be viable either because the required wage level is just too high. So there’s really nowhere for the labor pool to go because there’s no incentive for investment.

At this point, it’s almost as if the US isn’t creating a reserve army of labor but an actual literal military army of desperate people that can be focused into a meat grinder for a world war. With no prospects at any level, people will be forced to consider violence and the jingoism, racism, and orientalism will continue to ramp up until people can only understand their suffering as a result of what those foreigners did to us and sign up to go get killed in a war.

There is no single answer to this. Society itself is experimental and iterative. Each nation’s starting point for communism will be different, therefore administration of each communist experiment will be adapted to unique circumstances. Each nation’s development path of communism will be different, therefore each nation’s administration of that development will be different.

We do not yet know if all communist experiments will converge towards some shared administrative phenomena. There are plenty of people who have explored this in thought experiments, there are 6 communist experiments we can look to for real world lab results (China, USSR, Vietnam, Laos, DPRK, Cuba, am I forgetting one?), there are several other experiments we can look at (Paris Commune, Gotha Programme, Rojava, Zapatismo, others) but none of these could be considered the answer, just empirical evidence we can use to understand your question better and explore the set of possible answers, which is far larger than the experience we have so far.

Cool. So anyway. The commenter said Xi is correct about the US being fascist under this administration but implied that it would be incorrect to say the US was fascist under prior administrations, so, I wrote my comment to provide the context to show that this implication was wrong. The US has been a fascist force for many decades. Some points of view grounded in historical analysis posit that the US has been fascist since inception because it was formed from a colonial society that was fascist.

But yeah, Trump is more isolationist in some ways than a bunch of recent presidents. That’s also true

Are you saying Russia isn’t under sanctions right now? Are you saying that the private wealth of Russian corps and citizens stored in North Atlantic institutions wasn’t frozen and then spent?

Bernie has been so useful to them, consistently, and they know he has no intention of disrupting the empire. He’s not a hawk, but he’s really good at keeping the war machine humming.

Sometimes I wish Bernie had won just so that people like you could have seen exactly how bad it would have been and lost all hope, but this is Bernie’s role, to sheepdog all the strays that would normally wonder off into revolutionary politics to make sure they firmly stay in the blue-no-matter-who camp, just waiting for the day that they’re definitely gonna kick that football

It was such a short comment that they wrote. Do you have short term memory loss?

Under the current administration, Xi isn’t wrong about fascist forces.

Is this saying Trump is isolating America? No. It is saying that Xi isn’t wrong about fascist forces but specifically under this current administration, contrasting it with prior administrations.

I’m not sure about the “hegemony” part, the way the US is isolating itself.

Here’s where they said Trump is isolating America.

A full 50% of their comment was NOT about isolating America.

You don’t think the US-directed NATO bombing of Yugoslavia, the US invasion of Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya, the training of death squads in the School of the Americas, the genocidal rampage of the US in Vietnam and Korea, the annual vote in the UN against resolutions condemning the glorification of Nazis, the staffing of NATO with Nazis officers, the collaboration with the Vatican to save Nazi officers and give them new identities and lives all over the US and Latin America, the development of neo-nazi sleeper cells (called stay-behind militias) throughout Europe, the protection of the rights of the KKK and of white people lynching black people, the systemic eugenics programs, the forced sterilizations of undesirables, the mass incarceration of their population, their use of slave labor to produce billions of dollars of goods for for-profit companies, and the collective punishment of civilians in a dozen countries over the past multiple decades…

You think all of that doesn’t reveal the USA as a fascist global hegemon but electing Trump does?

I doubt it’s only a feud based on optics. I think it’s likely bourgeois factionalism

US exceptionalism is the belief that the USA is the exception to the rules by which others are governed, not that the US is awesome. So no, we are witnessing the continued escalation of US exceptionalism wherein the US continues to act more and more like everyone else has to follow rules and the US is the exception in that it need not follow any of those rules.

No, it’s not bad in the least. No one of any importance will even notice it, let alone ask you about it. I’m great at school and I took 5 and half years to finish college. It had no impact on my life at all

I really love this trend of DPRK socializing and normalizing its presence.