If Putin was a rational actor he probably wouldn't be putting up WWI casualty numbers to capture podunk towns in east Ukraine that few people care about
It's because people in positions of power can safely ignore nonviolence. They can't ignore the other option. Nonviolence on it's own is not productive.
Thats what disturbs me about yesteryears's protest marches, like MLK's March on Washington, compared to 50501 and No Kings.
MLK wanted a non-violent showing of force as to stay "legal", but a strong implicit threat of "well, you know, theres a LOT of us. We're peaceful for now". The bus boycotts almost bankrupted down in Atlanta, so money attacks also work.
But now, we have No Kings and 50501. The whole idea of mass protest as a 'nonviolent but imminent threat' is completely gone. Protests were a prelude to something to be done. Now, its more of a political action rally, with not much of anything to follow up the initial energy.
Which is also why the protests; pussy hat rebellion, 50501, No Kings - they've all failed. Theres no goals. Its just chanting and some signs.
Imo this is what happened once protests became a “right”. I know most people here won’t agree with the Canada trucker protest, but I remember when it happened, people were saying “ok, you’ve had your protest and exercised your rights, you’ve been heard, you can go home now” - framing it just like that, as a rally to show an opinion rather than a threat. It felt to me like “the establishment” just treats them as peformative, because as you say they usually are, and then doesn’t know what to do when it’s actually something they have to react to.
I'm still rocking a couple of 30 inch dell 2560x1600 monitors. They're about the perfect size and not dealing with scaling in Linux is nice. I'd pay a ton of money for a modern equivalent.
They absolutely are for consumers but not so much in business. Vans are superior for most trade jobs within the US and pretty big sellers. Yes there are some gaps like if you in parts of Alaska or other very rural parts of America but largely trade jobs are spending all of their time on pavement.
If the option of owning my own computer is taken I'll own old computers. If they somehow take that away I'm giving up and moving to a cabin in the woods.
Depends on where you were during those decades. If you're in one of the unlucky countries that didn't do what the US wanted you likely suffered enormously.
Part of it is ideas and ideals. America represents ideas of liberty, liberalism, democracy, and individualism. The USSR/Russia and China represent the exact opposite.
America has failed to live up to those ideals (slavery, plunder, toppling democratically elected leaders to install military dictatorships, unnecessary wars with mass civilian casualties) on multiple occasions, but if you at least look at things on paper, America is selling a better product. And with the (now gutted) aid we provided to the world, and the economic boons of American consumer demand helping to speed up industrialization of poorer countries, benefits weren't just lofty principles.
One nice thing about American ideals is that, domestically, Americans who respect them can fight for them and fight for their preservation and expansion. There exists a noble thing to fight for which can in fact be fought for, and that thing encompasses the principle of not ever permitting people in other countries to suffer so that the United States may gain. Good luck doing any of that in Russia or China in 2025, and likely also in 2050.
“ Part of it is ideas and ideals. America represents ideas of liberty, liberalism, democracy, and individualism. The USSR/Russia and China represent the exact opposite.”
This is just pure John Birch society propaganda and at no point has the US actually ever attempted in any real way to realize this
This just seems pretty wrong. Obviously there were also lots of bad things the Americans did, but that doesn’t mean they weren’t attempting to realize those ideals. The US was quite influential in ending colonialism by Britain and France across much of the world after WWII for example. The US also helped to set up west Germany and Japan as liberal democracies after the war (they certainly weren’t before or during it, and Britain and France were not so fond of helping Germany recover), as well as helping German reunification (again opposed by France and Britain) and post-Soviet states with their recovery (sure, in all these cases the thing that was good for realizing these values was also good in the long run for the US (especially its Cold War political goals) and the affected countries but I don’t think that’s a very good argument that the US doesn’t care about these values).
I think there’s a lot of nuance here, and you have not expressed nuanced or detailed opinions in this thread, so I’m a bit curious about what your actual claims are, but I’m also not particularly interested in debating them.
> The US was quite influential in ending colonialism by Britain and France across much of the world after WWII for example.
The colonized people were a lot more influential there, though the US did exert some force in that direction (as well as plenty in the other direction) depending on its perception of the value of the particular colonial arrangement on its own geopolitical interests.
America has often stomped on the ideas it claims to fight for but to say it has never attempted to realize it is very silly and itself just reflexive anti-America propaganda. Look at FDR's words and actions during and after WWII, look at Eisenhower, look at Carter, look at JFK, imagine a future trajectory where Al Gore won that election.
America has sometimes done the exact opposite of helping other countries become healthy democracies - but they also very obviously have sometimes in fact helped other countries become healthy democracies. America's staunch pro-liberty pro-democracy stance is a big part of why the immediate aftermath of WWII led to Europe becoming a mostly democratic, stable quasi-union.
I am saying it's a gray area but that at least on paper America says nice words. You're just saying it's all bad.
Anything the US does that is beneficial is 1. Incidental to th goal 2. Will eventually benefit them US interest if only because it’s used as further propaganda
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