Patriotism doesnt automatically mean america.

My point is that your entire perspective is already warped. You have no way to get me and you to communicate and effectively work together. The very fact that you and I are disagreeing is the very point I’m trying to make.

Now an American who discusses things with me, that’s different. Because we can at least hold commonality between our country, and both of us would benefit from our country moving forward and progressing.

I know you skimp on your education system

Exactly. You hate us, look down upon us, etc. etc… That’s fine. I’ll work with the people who are willing to talk with me, work with me, and think about the betterment of our country. I honestly don’t need people like you in my life.

And if you want to talk to Americans about american problems I suggest a less international community dedicated to such musings, instead of self centeredly derailing a random, at best tangentially related comment section.

This is a discussion about Patriotism. IE: things we do for the love of our country. If we don’t share a country, there’s not much we can share being Patriotic about, now is there? And thus, the discussion goes sideways and there’s no hope of us ever possibly coordinating with each other.

Alas: such is life.

Again, why are you even talking about america?

Because this is a topic about Patriotism and who is actually going to help my country. And building a culture that encourages people to help my country.

but outside your bubble

I’m happy with “Americans” being my bubble. I honestly don’t need to care about others, and as you point out there’s plenty enough to worry about if we keep it to Americans alone.

SMBC-comics is obviously itself an American comic strip as well (A PH.D who lives in USA in any case), so you’re coming over here to talk about an American comic, talking about American issues that’s bringing up American political discussion and… like shitting on it? Okay, no one asked you to come over.

Now my question to you is: what are you doing in this topic? Are you seriously trying to discourage me from improving the country where I live? Or are you trying to say your country is better or something? I don’t even know what your perspective is.

If you’re not American then we don’t have any shared political system for which we can improve America. And therefore we have no serious system to help each other out.

None of this works unless we’re working to build the same thing or same concept.

Good luck building up a coalition of people who will cooperate with you.

And worse: good luck politically defeating those who are smart enough to use basic psychology to coordinate the masses. Its not evil to do so, its just practicality. We know how people act and how they think. Its not so hard to then use psychology and sociology to build up our own coalitions.

As Terry Pratchett wrote in The Hogfather : We tell little likes like Santa Clause because we’re training children to believe in the big lies like Truth and Justice. And only when we all believe in that stuff can it possibly work. “We’re the best country in the world” is part of that, its a little lie that helps smooth over problems and helps us work together. And in my experience, its effective at it.

Last time I checked, we were able to deploy the Office of Censorship to censor US Postal Mail. Conscript Disney and Loony Tunes to build up a massive database of wartime propaganda. Use it to influence the entirety of the US Civilians. Use it to drum up support for War Bonds to help expand the US Debt to pay for the war, raise taxes to 90% on the highest end and build a better country while defeating both Fascism and Communism.

We, as a country, decided that desperate times called for desperate measures. And not only that, we also got rid of these dangerous emergency powers (of explicit Censorship / War Information / Propaganda) before we corrupted our society into an irreversible state.

And therein lies the problem with people who just yell “fascism” whenever they disagree with someone. Yall obviously don’t know the history of this country.

We need to build a shared culture so that we can work together.

My house will become the best house should be a message we all can get around. Otherwise, why should I work with you to build society?

If you don’t like shared work or shared culture to begin with, it’s a bit problematic in that your own political ideologies are destined to die. At the very minimum, your ideology must be self sustaining.

Winnie the Pooh is also Xi Xinping’s nickname on Chinese bloggers. It was a way to avoid Chinese Censors and still talk about him without explicitly getting disappeared by the Chinese secret police. It worked for a while, but the jig is up and everyone knows that Pooh is codeword for Xi now.

Its a nickname embraced by Chinese specifically. Its not racist at all but instead its us Americans trolling Xi Xinping by taking an codeword/insult used by the internal Chinese dissenters.

Over a dozen paragraphs and no name brought up to replace Biden if he leaves. (Kamala? Kamala is team Biden)

Glad to see that the prioritization is to attack Biden before you even have a replacement lined up. Good job media, you’re whipping the dumbasses into a frenzy and taking unnecessary risks.

Lets just say Biden is out. Start listing names. Serious contenders. If Kamala (effectively on Biden’s team anyway) is your best shot, then it doesn’t matter if she’s VP or Top of the Ticket, if the plan is for Biden to resign after November anyway.

I stand that Kamala’s best chance is to hold the ship steady as is, and then ask Biden to resign in December or January.

There’s a lot of racists out there. I feel like if she’s at the top of the ticket, she’s gonna get dragged down. Biden truly is serving as an effective shield for her. Either way, Kamala is the implicit vote if anything wrong happens to Biden (which I admit is increasingly likely given his age).

It makes no sense for Kamala to rush to the top of the ticket given her position.

Dude, your insult is so fucking old that there’s literally movies making fun of your insult.

It don’t work very well when you spam the insult for 8 fucking years. Yes, liberals think everyone they disagree with are fascists. You’re not making news here. Your overuse of the phrase is not helping.

Seriously, protip. I’m trying to help you here. I don’t care if you ignore me, because eventually you’ll get it. I’ve just got to push you so you are at least introduced to this concept of overuse of a phrase.

For fucks sake man, I’m here to try to help you beat Trump

You’re lucky I’m not easily discouraged. But your attitude about this is quite wrong.

Everyone else in this topic: you see the problem with your rhetoric or strategy yet? Let’s point out what does and doesn’t work here.

So you’re going to kill this discussion with me just because you don’t like my opinion? Cool. Lets see how that plays out this year. Its a fucking election year, get used to hearing people’s opinions you don’t like.

People will vote one way or the other on this issue. With any luck the Democrats put a good moderate on board who can keep my vote (as well as the Arizona, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Georgia voters). Biden vs Trump already was looking sketchy before you progressives literally destroyed your best chance at beating Trump.

And suddenly, you’re blaming me for your own mistake… because I have the audacity to try to talk with you and share my opinion.

I’m sorry, that I’m not sorry.

In any case, Trump needs to be defeated, so I’m going to stay loud about my message. Yall progressives can’t Occupy Wall Street into Republican wins again this year. This is too important for me to stay silent. You fucking dumbasses are destroying your own election chances as we speak, and its best if I pointed out this before its too late. (And yall have done it before, and you’re doing it again).

If you really are going to switch candidates this late in the game, then for the love of god please put someone I can vote for (and other voters like me). That’s all I’m asking. Don’t lose the anti-Trump Republican vote over this self-defeating move you all seem intent upon inflicting upon yourselves. Please be at least a little bit politically expedient about the situation?

FYI: “Hey Fascist” is so passe it was in the Barbie last year. Its a bad argument now. Come up with a new one. You’ve been calling Republicans Fascists for 8 years now, the phrase has lost its effect. You’ll need to try harder if you actually want to convince people or surprise us.

Did everyone forget Biden’s 2020 performance?

When Biden is being forced and trained like this, he’s awful. It wasn’t until the 2nd or 3rd debate where all the debate-prep finally decided 'Let Biden go out there without prep and just be more honest with himself / honest personal style" that Biden did well.

I should have known that “Weeks of debate prep at Camp David” was a bad idea.

Ideally not.

Hopefully you can offer me a good enough candidate where I don’t feel like supporting the fascist. But if you go too far left, there’s a point where fascism doesn’t look as bad. No joke.

But the further left you go, the more points you lose out on me. I’m relatively religious (not the most compared to my family, but moreso than you guys I’m sure). I’m Republican, conservative. Etc. etc. There’s threats to me and my way of life that the far left seriously have, and nothing yall say here are changing my opinion on that (or removing said threats from me).

I would have preferred if the Republicans fielded Niki Haley, but apparently that was too hard for them too. So now I’m seeing who the Democrats want to field. Ideally someone I can vote for, because trust me, I don’t want to vote for Trump.

I promise you, there’s a ton of other people like me in the center who are thinking the same thing. The name-of-the-game is figuring out a candidate to keep enough of us voting Democrat this fall (not necessarily me, but hopefully enough to gain and counteract the loss of my vote).

I’m here to discuss my opinion with all of you openly, because I know that Lemmy leans so far left that yall are fucking nuts and need my opinion to tie you back down to where reality is. Believe it or not, I’m here to help, and that’s why we’re having this discussion right now at all.

This isn’t about just picking the most progressive candidate you can think of. Biden was the perfect choice for me and yall are now thinking of getting rid of him. Okay, so are you fine losing my vote? Or alternatively, do you think you can give me someone who is at least moderate enough (like Biden) to handle my concerns about the world? (IE: Ukraine and Taiwan in particular).

Alternatively, you can consider me to just be a nutcase and ignore me. But I don’t think that’s beneficial to you as a group either. Mostly because I know who the real nutcases are (ie: full on MAGA Trump supporters over there). I’m the one who have switched from Republican vote from 2008 / 2012 over to Democrat vote with the rise of Trump in 2016+, so I think I am actually an ideal case study for this discussion. That’s all.

The manual is hosted at a “.tw” address, so its Taiwan. Which… is “mostly not China”.

If we nominate Bernie it’s not to win you over. It would win over leftists who otherwise wouldn’t vote Democrat.

Dude: Kamala is seen as too far left that she’s probably going to lose to Trump on a head-to-head matchup and you’re talking Bernie still.

That’s cool and all, but GDP is related to… You guessed it. Inflation.

I recognize that Republicans overemphasized GDP but it’s a chief metric for a reason. If our top line GDP drops it will absolutely be a problem.

If you want to bring up easy inflation gremlins into your argument, be my guest. But inflation is already a weak point for Democrats and I expect y’all to get hammered on it even harder moving forward.

Medicare For All is not free healthcare, as in on the government’s dime, it is entirely paid for by taxes.

Yeah, no shit sherlock. Socialist / Communist countries like Cuba also pay for Health Care.

That doesn’t change the fact that several important examples (Soviet Union, Cuba, and now most recently, Venezuela) have collapsed… or are currently collapsing under that load and those costs.

We know plenty of examples of countries who have done that. My question is why the fuck do you want to bring it to the USA?

By having free healthcare for all you actually save money if basically no other change is made.

https://www.cbo.gov/system/files/2022-02/57637-Single-Payer-Systems.pdf

In this analysis, we found that economic output would be between 0.3 percent lower and 1.8 percent higher than the benchmark economy 10 years after the single-payer system was implemented, without incorporating the effects of financing the system. Under a single-payer system, workers would choose to work fewer hours, on average, despite higher wages because the reduction in health insurance premiums and OOP expenses would generate a positive wealth effect that allowed households to spend their time on activities other than paid work and maintain the same standard of living. If the system was financed with an income or payroll tax, gross domestic product (GDP) would be between approximately 1.0 percent and 10 percent lower by 2030, depending on the specification of the single-payer system and the details of the financing policy.

Sounds like we pay by having a loss of GDP measured between 1% to 10%. That’s rather substantial.

CBO is the non-partisan accountants of the US Senate/House. They are our best estimate on the true costs of various programs.

Except the racists did vote for Biden in 2020, despite Harris being the VP.

Arizona ain’t exactly a happy-go-lucky civil rights state. Do you really have assurances that Arizona goes to Kamala if she’s on the top of the ticket?