How do you come to this conclusion? What I see is the administration consistently failing to execute on their domestic agenda and backing down. Their National Guard deployments were shut down by the courts. ICE is nowhere close to meeting their stated goals, and becoming less popular by the hour. They can’t even fill the positions they have, nevermind growing it larger with the new budget. Even Jimmy Kimmel is still on the air.

That user is saying that the fact that Russians face more danger for protesting means that any lack of protest reflects less poorly on Russian people than on Americans

And, as I said, Americans face plenty of risk too, but only if they do the kinds of protests that actually might achieve something. No, the US government isn’t going to murder a protester’s entire family, but they will lock up the breadwinner and leave the kids with no safety net programs. Plus, you can forget ever getting a decent job once you have a conviction on your record. Americans also have more, so they have more to lose. The risks are different, but just as real.

You are making a separate argument.

Of course I am. It would be pretty silly to make the same (bad) argument - even flipping the sides. Do you think they are prepared to admit that the US has more freedom, because I sincerely doubt it.

the average American is fairly content (and often even thrilled) to live with the violence their government has perpetrated

Absolutely false. These foreign interventions are always extremely unpopular, including the topic at hand. The ruling class is another matter entirely, but average Americans do not back these interventions. I will agree they have a tendency to ignore many of the less noisy interventions, but that’s true everywhere. If things are working in people’s favor, they don’t tend to dwell on them - unfortunately.

Also, the majority of Americans do not support Trump or the Republicans. Were it not for our fucked up election system and a whole lot of help from mother Russia, the Republicans would have zero power at the national level.

How familiar are you with recent Russian history?

Familiar enough. I’m not unsympathetic, but it doesn’t invalidate anybody the arguments I made.

people are obviously terrified that life will go back to how it was in the 90s before he took power.

You don’t think that MAGA is motivated by terror? Rural America is collapsing, and they have been taught to fear the cities their entire lives, not to mention the fact that they have no skills to get a job there, and no money to find a place to live. Russia has no monopoly on fear.

This judgement of blaming Russian “culture” for this rather than the neoliberal shock therapy

How familiar are you with extended Russian history? Russia was like this long before they could blame it on “the west”. I do blame Russian culture, just like I blame American (especially southern) culture for it’s problems. We’ve all got cultural baggage.

rampant nazism and social murder of the 1990s

Bullshit. There is no more Nazism in the US than anywhere else - at least until fairly recently. (And it would be great if the Nazis weren’t all getting Russian funding). There has certainly been an odor of fascism in the neoliberal consensus. I’ll give you that but, again, I’m not sure America is different from anywhere else in that regard.

So people who live in a country aren’t responsible for the actions of their government? Then why hold the American people responsible for Venezuela? Why should they be expected to protest? The government just does what it does.

Russia brutality suppresses dissent because, at some level, the Russian people and culture accepts it. A handful of rulers can’t control a much larger population unless that population at some level consents. Millions of individual self interested decisions form the web that keeps everyone in line. That’s true in Russia, and it’s true in America.

Also, as I pointed out, brutal suppression also happens in America, it’s just that the elites use different tools to make protest irrelevant, and only resort to brutality when other methods fail. They use protest as a mechanism to vent unrest harmlessly.

One reason you don’t see as much protest in the US is that people don’t believe it works because it pretty much doesn’t. A bunch of people hold out their signs, then either get mocked or ignored by the media. Break out of that system and actually start disrupting society in a meaningful way, and then the brutality comes out.

LOL, Russia brutality crushes protest and America doesn’t. Point Russia? You guys are hilarious.

The reality in America is a bit more complicated. There are two kinds of protests, those that are pointless and easily brushed aside, and those that might actually achieve something.

America sets up “free speech zones” and a whole myriad of laws to make sure the second kind of protest is always illegal, and it has no problem using brutality to shut them down.

Protest in America is almost always performative and relatively pointless. What matters is political activism and educating and energizing voters. That’s the only thing that has ever made a difference in the US. For protest to be effective at all it has to move voters, but opportunities to do that with corporate media pushing back are rare.

To any leftist that sentence is gigabased

I’m a leftist. I think that sentence is empty virtue signaling. What specifically do you mean by death to America? How do you plan to achieve it?

A specific objective and an actionable plan would be “gigabased”. Then “any leftist” could evaluate both and decide how leftist it actually is. As it is, you’re just noisy.

It actually shows in the attitude of the workers there. Workers at Walmart always seem worn down and irritable while workers at Costco always seem awake and engaged. It really is noticable.

The smart home has been broken for over a decade. From day one the goal was always to lock in users to an ecosystem and invade their privacy. Actually providing useful and reliable products didn’t even register as a goal.

The one way to do decent home automation is with locally run He Assistant and Zigbee or Z-Wave. It should only rely on the Internet for resources that are truly non-local like weather reports.

Thread/Matter might also be becoming an option. At this point I’m still watching to see what they do with it.

Assuming that the cable hadn’t already been manipulated, in which case they were protecting it from being read.

I was assuming an imperfect narrator. The only person who knows why the cable was locked up was the one who locked it up.

Not actually an insane practice. There are compromised cables that look normal but have hidden storage to record data for later retrieval.

Modern Israel was founded in 1948. Before that it was “British Palestine”. If you really want to push it back it time, you might as well go back to the 17th century BC, but that would also be rather silly.

You no guys are a waste of my time. I’m done. Later.

The Holocaust industry only took off after the 70s and mostly because intense Israeli lobbying efforts.

What the fuck? Where do you think Israel as a Jewish ethno-state came from? Nobody gave a shit about Jews and the Holocaust, yet the western world decided out of nowhere to create a new state for Jews right after the Holocaust?

There is no such thing as the “current Israeli government”. Israel is a Jewish supremacist ethnostate

Yes, it is, and the current government is the worst possible instantiation of that. An Israel that wasn’t continuing to colonize new Palestinian land and wasn’t committing a Palestinian genocide would still be a Jewish supremacist ethno-state. Even so, it’s entirely within Israel’s power to reform an egalitarian government with equal rights for everyone - not that I’m expecting it. That’s three different models of Israel that are all entirely possible, so yeah, the current government is a thing that matters.

Israeli citizens are, as a group, pretty damn fascist. However, Jews outside of Israel are largely against the settlements and the genocide. Those Jews have to deal with the stain of the Zionist enterprise.

The entire industrial revolution was powered by slavery. Your logic makes no sense.

The entire industrial revolution? Uh, nope. Would the industrial revolution have happened without slavery? Yeah, I think it would have. Economically, slavery wasn’t as efficient or “necessary” as the South claimed. Cotton farming or other slavery dominated industries didn’t suddenly cease when slavery ended, (or technically was curtailed in most cases).

Zionism is awesome for Jews.

After WW2 Jews essentially had a cultural golden ticket. They could have perpetually ridden the wave of being treated as the world’s most victimized group forever. There was almost nothing worse a person could be than an anti-semite or Holocaust denier. Zionism broke that spell, and “anti-semite” has become a bad joke.

80%+ of Jews worldwide support Israel

Support Israel how though? 80% certainly don’t support the current government, or the settlements. Also, look how many Americans support(ed) Trump. Does that mean Trump is “awesome” for Americans, or even for his supporters?

Slavery … directly benefitted them.

I disagree. There were certainly material benefits but, ultimately, I don’t think anyone is better off because of slavery. America still is unable to reconcile with it’s own history, and that has had some pretty obvious consequences for everyone.

I get the sarcasm, but I think the case can be made that it’s the exact opposite. Zionism is terrible for the Jews, both in the mythology and real wold consequences.

I think there are simpler explanations for Clinton and Gates’ presence.

Hell, $37.5k would do so much good. Just 1% and it would give so many people a fighting chance again.

High effort is not a great thing to count on. Once these things are discovered there are all sorts of clever (or not so clever) ways to automate the effort away. Especially now with AI.

I did something similar after Trump was reelected. Anyone still in Trump’s camp, or playing the “both sides have good points” game with white supremacy is someone I don’t need in my life.

Time based morality doesn’t make any sense to me

Sure it does. You just start the clock right after your last evil ancestor.

I’m aware. However, in the context of this conversation, I’d still rather be in an an American prison than an Israeli.