Bush, Obama, and Biden and presidents before all did the same in Afghanistan and Iraq and elsewhere. If a person in a certain area was a “military aged male” they were a valid target, and they would rarely verify who they actually killed after doing a drone strike. They would bomb a families house based on a tip from one person with no other evidence and never check to see if it was accurate. Trump is just more open about it now and doing it closer to home.

What do you mean? He worked for Constellis, formerly Blackwater, a private mercenary company, in Afghanistan. This company changed it’s branding partly because of bad publicity from civilian massacres committed by it’s soldiers.

I don’t know a single person who accidentally got a nazi tattoo or made a whoopsie by going to Iraq for three tours then enjoying killing so much he signed up to do it for profit. I agree people change but that doesn’t mean they should be trusted as a senator. There is still time for a better choice.

What do you mean? It helped me

Russian people don’t deserve that, most people actually hate Nazis even in Russia.

It’s possible to go to a protest, meet some people, and then go kick some Nazis together. Not everyone just holds a sign and stops there.

The king during the American Revolution, King George III died in 1821 at 81, the revolution wasn’t that bad for him really.

I am seriously tired of hearing this shit, what point does that matter now? Are you going to change the election? Move forward, we can’t do anything about how people voted now and it’s just alienating and irritating people.

Definitely, we have been trending further toward anti-intellectualism for a while, not just history but people of all ages need to recognize that learning is a lifelong process, you can’t just graduate high school and be done with it. Things learned in school even ten years ago or less can be outdated, society as a whole is learning more about the past all the time.

It’s not anyones responsibility to risk their lives, I wouldn’t blame anyone for not standing up against the Nazis in 1938 Germany, but in light of what we know, it’s becoming more and more impossible to maintain a clear conscience without fighting back.

I don’t see it as ‘condemning’ someone for not doing more, just a belief that anyone capable should do more and they will likely feel regret if they don’t.

How do you know people posting that aren’t doing it? It already is ignited, it’s at a low burn, only because people aren’t fighting back en masse yet, but in some places there is resistance going on. I agree though, “don’t speak about it, be about it”.

It’s in Florida where there are a ton of alligators, essentially the ‘Gator State’

Essentially all history education in the US is heavily politicized except for WW2, the only thing Americans could agree on about the last 200 years is that Nazis were bad, and even that is now becoming ‘controversial’, with some schools like in Florida wanting to teach more about “both sides” of the holocaust. There’s a reason my mom really loved the quote “Don’t let school get in the way of your education.”

The average knowledge of the things you mentioned would be “isn’t Jackson the guy on the $20?” “Weren’t gulags in Siberia or something? What even is a gulag exactly?” And “‘Know Nothings’?? Yeah I literally ‘know nothing’ about that.”

It’s up to individuals and families to teach their kids actual history, and most parents both work and have little time to teach their kids anything that the schools don’t teach them. And now I see kids leaning history from youtubers, it’s a pretty depressing situation.

a lot of republicans are pretty damn stupid and short sighted, including the president.

They aren’t just stupid, many on the right are religiously dedicated to the idea of a judgement day and devastating war between ‘good and evil’. They are convinced ‘God is on their side’. Evangelical Christian fascists have been pushing this for years, it was almost guaranteed to come to direct conflict from the course the US has been on unless there was some kind of intervention long ago.

In what way is that what Marxism is about? And anyway there have been a lot of developments in socialist theory since Marx. What implications of the phrase “late-stage capitalism” are you referring to?

But if the majority of the productive forces are primarily privately owned it is a capitalist system. Capitalist and socialist as adjectives are separate from ‘Capitalism’ as an economic system. What you are describing is a capitalist system with socialist elements and sounds like what most developed nations have today.

I don’t know any serious leftist who would assume once we have a socialist system we are just done, any society will require work and civic diligence until we could build the technology to be in as some call it ‘Fully-automated luxury gay space communism’ or FALGSC.

How is the definition I posted any different from what you quoted? I said the essence, the core required part that defines it as capitalism, there are other historic aspects but I was saying what the most basic elements of it are. And those are what I believe we should have an issue with, and if you remove that essence, it’s not capitalism.

You can own your own stuff with socialism, even a home, that is one of the common misunderstandings of socialism. People want to see a lot of things but dreams cannot always become reality. The fact of the matter is that the state will be co-opted by capitalists and they will remove protections, it’s a natural cause and effect of the capitalist system. It might be possible to manage this tendency but requires so many controls that it gets further from the definition of capitalism and may as well begin to be called market socialism or another term.

I’m not trying to convice the average westerner who has essentially zero history and political education. Not everyone needs to be convinced anyway, most people right now have little agency in politics and don’t care to.

What does it mean for socialism and capitalism to co-exist in one system?

Any democrat that just comes out and says “capitalism bad” as a blanket statement is going to have a much harder time in the general election.

This is because the entire political establishment is aligned with capitalists, not because there isn’t popular agreement with that statement. But I’m not sure if that’s true anymore for a Dem politician.

Which “specific components of capitalism” would you say are not objectionable? It’s essence is the private ownership of the productive forces of society and the derivation of profit by selling the product. The core of it is objectionable from the view of democracy or egalitarianism.