Literal schoolyard bully behavior on display here. “No one is above the law, and the law is what I say it is.”

“Mr Xi, the most powerful Chinese leader in decades, calls his one-party model efficient, equitable and dignified. In case foreigners miss his coded message—that competent government, equality and order matter more than freedoms—officials boast of ‘two major miracles’ that shaped China’s rise, namely ‘fast economic development and long-term social stability.’”

“Here in the liberal West we may not have such frivolities as ‘competent government, equality and order,’ but you can bet your last dollar you’ll have Freedom™ coming out of your nose. You’ll fucking drown in it!”

Thanks. What freedoms, again?

Holding a referendum on this is pure cowardice. Zelenskkky insists on being the President of Ukraine to the point that opposition parties are banned and no presidential elections are being held. But now, since there is an unsavory choice to make which puts him at risk of running afoul of either the Russians, his own citizens, or his western handlers, he decides to have the Ukrainian public make the decision for him through a majority vote. Now, he can just wash his hands of everything. Here I was thinking it was the job of the head of state to make tough calls, but it seems the comedy president isn’t up for the task. Who would have thought?

They probably are aware how awful the system is, but the insidious thing about the party dichotomy is that “a slightly better alternative” is all it needs to work. It frames politics as something to act upon by voting correctly. This is, fundamentally, buying into the assumptions of liberal democracy. Your friends may understand that problems exist, but they likely don’t have much of an idea about what to do beyond engaging in this dance.

I also wouldn’t be so doom-and-gloom about your prospects with your “former” friends. I’m sure things are fine after one political disagreement. Gay people especially can be a little dramatic. Take it with a grain of salt.

If you find yourself in these discussions in the future, be keenly aware of yourself and the implications of what you say. It’s very easy to antagonize someone unintentionally when we butt heads like that. I would try asking questions that expose weaknesses in their worldview. But be subtle when you draw attention to those vulnerabilities. Let them think they noticed it themselves.

“These politicians are fucking liars. I can’t tell how many people there are on either track. Or even if there are different tracks.”

Seems to me like you have an excellent grasp of what’s happening. I made a similar text post a few months back where I highlighted a related phenomenon. “Sure, Joe Biden is bad, but wouldn’t Donald Trump be even worse?” It’s never explained how or why Trump would be worse than Biden. It’s just a habitual assumption they make about the two parties. Dem equals good, Rep equals bad, and there’s not really anything more too it. They struggle immensely with the idea of exploring political action outside of electoralism because they have too much misplaced trust in the system, reason being that acknowledging the failure of the system is a lot more stressful than simply voting and praying that Trump doesn’t win another term.

The immune response of liberalism when challenged in this way is just to insist that everything is fine, that the machine is running smoothly and efficiently, and that all the problems people describe every day are imaginary. Upholding the Democrats as an ideal serves this purpose, as does vilifying Republicans, because any good thing that happens can be attributed to Democrats, and any bad thing to Republicans.

Don’t stress yourself getting into these arguments either. Not worth it.

“‘It’s been surprising they’re adapting over time through trial and error,’ Justin Bronk, an airpower expert at the UK’s Royal United Services Institute, said.”

Justin Bronk, “airpower expert,” thinks a major military power with a long-established air force “adapting over time through trial and error” is “surprising.” Quite the scoop.

“Since there is no good reason not to like us, is God’s disfavor toward the Jews something akin to the United Nations or the European Union, which just despise us irrationally?”

This literally has the cadence of a joke. I cannot get over the persecution complex.

He misspelled “ruining.”

You might want to consider World-Systems Theory as a good starting point. Workers in the imperial core do not experience the same kind of exploitation as people in the periphery. The USA is a high-income country.

And nothing lasts forever. Nothing is necessarily so. We are in the midst of a massive global paradigm shift. Multipolarity is on the rise. Things are changing everywhere fast.

Settlers by J Sakai is a brilliant expose of American settler-colonial culture and vital history book that attempts to answer this question, but if you decide to give it a read, I would advise you not to draw too many hard and fast conclusions about its contents. Discussions about this book get explosive because they touch on very sensitive racial tensions, and a lot of people get very ridiculous about the whole thing.

I highly doubt most local libraries carry a copy of Settlers. Where are you seeing this?

You gotta love that old bait-and-switch. Whose fault is the corruption again?

“We’re giving the president and his cronies more discretion and shielding them from the consequences of their actions to fight the deep state.” I would’ve thought if anything qualified as “the deep state,” it would look exactly like this.

MBTI is fine as far as personality systems go, but the reason I bounced off of it was that it eventually became clear there’s zero method to objectively distinguish one type from another. Every single person who gets typed and classified by this system is categorized by vibes, and that’s pretty much it.

All I know about Carl Jung is that he features in every piece of pop-psych “connect with the energy” nonsense published or printed in the past several decades. The instant I hear his name in any conversation or read it in any article, my eyes start to glaze over.

Can I travel back in time and stop you?

Not allowed to use Russian, though. Strange…

US Cannot Will Not Control Israel

I cannot wait to see libs try to say with a straight face that Biden is still better than Trump after this.

Once again, I’m the idiot for thinking crackers couldn’t sink any lower.

Putin “injects potential threats” into east Asia, a “region already strained by Taiwan tensions and South China Sea clashes.” Putin and Russia are cast as actively menacing the globe while all these other issues caused by the USA/NATO get to just passively exist with no discussion as to where they came from or what caused them.