Dems lost the election for many reasons. Supporting Ukraine was definitely not one of them tho.

They shed 12M votes between 2020 and 2024, in large part thanks to failing to deliver on promises to their constituents. While Biden was throwing up his hands and insisting he couldn’t afford to relieve student debt, extend health care subsidies at the tail end of COVID, or defend the civil and labor rights of his constituents, he was shoveling money out the back door for Israel and Ukraine.

Russian bribery and blackmail only works on politicians

They work just fine on American business interests. But then American businesses are perfectly happy to bribe people directly. You had Elon promising to cut $1M checks to GOTV in swing states and TPUSA dropping much of its $85M war-chest across the critical swing state of Arizona in the run up to the election. Both groups pulled their fortunes from the post-COVID asset inflation of the American plutocracy. And they spent the money to buy up voters that Biden had allowed to languish.

Always curious to hear how NK has no electricity, but they manage to hack the systems of a trillion dollar conglomerate on the opposite side of the Pacific Ocean.

The contradictions abound.

You can only do so much with forced labour.

There’s a certain irony in this statement, coming from folks who consume it regularly.

Yeah, and its curious to see you getting downvotes for the intra-departmental outsourcing that’s been rampant through the tech sector for a while now.

What we’ve got isn’t some nefarious plot by the Chinese-Adjacent to invade our precious trillion dollar tech industry. Its the deliberate consequence of sanctioning a country to the hilt to devalue local labor, then exploiting the sanctioned locals to extract labor at below market rate.

Democrats stand up

They already caved on Obamacare subsidies. But surely this time will be different.

I’ve been a bad, bad little boy. I haven’t achieved any of the goals on my five-year plan. My gym membership has lapsed and I don’t think I’ve done any laundry in over three weeks.

What are you going to do about it? French maid’s outfit? Very kinky. And… degreaser? A sponge? Okay, what are we planning here? These are not the sexiest rubber gloves. Why are you pointing me towards the oven like that?

Drink more water

I swear to fucking god, I can be in the middle of chugging a gallon jug and people will say this.

Lolz. How soon until Schumer-crats bring them back to caving.

You idiots voted for this!

It’s the steady support of Ukraine that would cause Russia to turn back one way or another.

Has it worked in the last twelve years? NATO has been fully in support of Ukraine since Maiden. Nothing has improved as a result.

If trump and the gop hadn’t been such idiots, and just held the line, Russians would see no possibly advantageous end game and putin would probably be in exile or hung by his balls in red square by now

Dems lost the general election in 2024 because they were more interested in bailing out Ukraine than covering domestic priorities.

These people have made their own bed.

A lot of the work is shoddy. The businesses doing the work have some kind of quid pro quo. Financing is involved, so the real bag holders will be lenders pitched a job they can never collect on.

There’s a lot of different ways to pass the bill around in the modern economy, such that landing a $300M job on-paper can be leveraged to cheat and swindle people down the line.

Good luck getting hardware in this market

This organization will be bankrupt from embezzlement and donor collapse by the end of next year

Will Republicanism become the tip of the spear for the Israeli state? Or will it become a more traditional Protestant-aligned reactionary organ of corporate power?

Find out next election cycle on Who Grifts Best!

There are a million non-violent ways to oppose authoritarianism such as boycotts, labour strikes, voting blocs, etc. but since they involve at least some amount of effort and inconvenience no one (in the USA, at least) wants to do them.

These economic levers typically need a critical mass of participation. And one way to get that participation is via buy-in from the government (regulation) or capital (BSD). Random people refusing to shop at Starbucks doesn’t mean much. But when a location is shut down for violating ordinances or because the landlord kicks them out, that’s a material hit to their pocketbook the owners can’t ignore.

Rallying that critical mass of support is difficult and frustrating. I’ve heard more than one organizer describe it as “herding cats”. This isn’t a trivial issue of inconvenience or effort. It requires an industrial scale of activism.

However, by wanking about a revolution that you know will never come you can claim to be on the right side of history while still taking the path of least resistance in every way that matters.

“The Revolution” is a critical mass of critical mass events. Its something you can only really talk about in hindsight, because it requires a bunch of constantly moving social parts to kinda line up at the right moment and move in the right direction together.

Revolutions aren’t uncommon. Large institutional shifts in composition, function, and ideology happen regularly. But they’re a lot easier when the people executing them already have a bunch of institutional controls to operate. “Wanking” often feels like the only thing you can do, because you’re so cut out of the so-called democratic process.

I mean, I volunteer with Food Not Bombs, and their politics is well to the left of the DSA. But if you ask them what their accomplishments are, its a pretty straightforward “We feed the homeless people that the police would rather see starved to death”. That’s it. Every week, getting out and distributing food, even if people get arrested for it.

Now, there’s definitely other people who just spend all their days shitposting and doing nothing else of consequence. But they’re not typically the people I meet in person when I’m out trying to make my neighborhood a better place.

Or sick. Or simply overworked.

Starving the supply to Ukraine wouldn’t stop this war.

The tens of billions squandered on an ill-managed war would have been far better spent on refugee services and industrial development in the surrounded Eastern European block to absorb displaced peoples.

Rather than aiding actual Ukrainians and fortifying the NATO block against further Russian aggression, Europeans have pissed away a meager military surplus trying to bleed Russia into defeat. Meanwhile, the 7.7m displaced Ukrainians face joblessness, homelessness, poverty and a multitude of legal hurdles and sanctions that prevent them from resettlement.

If Europeans actually gave a shit about “Ukraine” the population rather than “Ukraine” the physical territory, we wouldn’t see Polish political leaders denying Ukrainian expats civil rights

A steady and resolute supply of arms and other resources to Ukraine would allow Ukraine to make Russia’s efforts clearly useless

This is a bald-faced lie. Arms into Ukraine didn’t help the country in 2018 when Trump championed it. It failed to grant Ukraine the ability to retake the Donbas, much less Crimea, even when Putin’s own mercenary company turned on him.

And that’s what this fight is supposed to be about. Zelensky’s government wants the Donbas back. Putin is refusing. And now we’re asking… how many more Ukrainians to die over a real estate negotiation? 10k? 50k? Another 100k?

We’re already talking about a war that’s killed roughly 400k Ukrainians and displaced a full quarter of the country’s 44M population. And we want to keep this up until when exactly? Until Russia stops existing? Until we get a more favorable territory settlement? Until the next US Presidential Election?

This is the same stupid shit we did in Iraq and Afghanistan. Vietnam and Korea, too. An endless war against an Ontologically Evil enemy that fuels a massive market bubble for the MIC and still ends in dismal failure.

How dare he just be good

He’s not.

Newsom is a walking self-parody. Doing podcasts with Steve Bannon and Charlie Kirk while vetoing legislation to benefit transgender children and criminalize low-caste discrimination (huge problem in the Hindu community). Dude has been on the warpath against homeless people since his mayoral days.

But he’s friends with the Getty Family so he gets some very generous headlines

A tram will not go full looney toons.

The tram will drive through the tunnel successfully after the car crashes into the wall, with roadrunner as the conductor sticking his tongue out as he passes