Your “you’re not with us so you must be against us” is an old Fascist trope.

Might want to tone down that rabid tribalism as your “arguments” are awfully close to the other guys style of argumentation.

It doesn’t even need to be alone to gain energy and still works fine with just one or two people who you’re close to.

It’s the “lot’s of people” and the “people I barelly know” that are exhausting.

If everything was started from scratch tomorrow, the likelihood of present day California and Texas naturally ending up together in the same nation is pretty much zero, IMHO.

Those two are kept together by pretty much a country-sized version of a Sunken Cost Falacy.

One can’t even count on language or culture as a unifying element, otherwise the whole of Latin America would be 2 countries, Brasil & Everybody Else.

Well, since I will also browse Lemmy quite literally “at Work” it makes sense to check the Profile option that blurs the Not Suitable For Work stuff even if having the Show NSFW content also ticked.

Explicitly going back and forth changing the option depending on where you’re accessing Lemmy from is a recipe for mistakes, at best embarassing but, depending on where one works, which can go all the way up to being fired for cause.

It also depends on the sorting used under All.

In my instance you generally need to scroll a lot before finding NSFW stuff when sorting by Top for anything longer than Day.

Ticking the option in user settings to “Show NSFW content” because of scientific curiosity…

That’s the rational take and I’m sure plenty of people will vote Biden following that rationale.

The top poster’s “pestilence is a good thing” (i.e. Biden is a “good guy”) statement on the other hand is insanelly tribalist and pure fantasy.

Being a Lesser Evil by comparison with an extremelly Evil option is not at all the same as being Good.

Lots of talk, no action: that’s bullshit Political Propaganda 101 when a politician in power wants to do something which most of his voters are strongly against.

His Administration’s actions are exactly the opposite, from the weapons shipments to Israel going around Congress that included 2000lb bombs to UN Vetos and saying that the ICJ shouldn’t even be evaluating the case against Israel for Genocide (clearly this Administration fears a veredict of “guilty”, which means they do believe Israel is likely comitting what amounts to Genocide under International Law).

The non-sociopath path for America would’ve be “Perfect Neutrality” (no action at all), yet Biden choses actual military and diplomatic support, including condemning anti-Genocide demonstrators as “anti-semitic” and condoning the use of police violence against them all the while in this specific subject lying just as shamelessly as Trump.

Well, they seem to be replenishing their submersible fleet in the Black Sea with lots of new under water vessels: for every ship they lose they get a new sub…

Also a lot of the late Soviet Union military technology came from Ukraine, plus their military were also trained in the same kind of school of thought as Russia and still know it.

So it makes sense that, when push came to shove, the Ukranians would fast come up with asymetric war solutions against Russia, that Russia wouldn’t be as fast in effectivelly countering them and Ukraine would be quicker at developing new or adjusted solutions once Russia found a counter (or, more generally, that Ukraine would remain ahead of Russian in the cycle were each side develops a counter to the other side’s counters).

Had Russia’s initial blietzkrieg attack worked, it would’ve been a different story, but at this stage it makes sense that Ukraine has the technological edge, not just in the weaponry it gets from the West but also in their own weapons development, especially now that it has much better AA to protect the installations far away from the frontlines working on weapons tech.

Russian Propaganda: “Our Glorious Nation has acquired a brand new submersible to help its fight against NATO in Ukraine”

I’ve noticed that the loudest the politicians in a country rant about how great a Democracy that country has, the less of a Democracy it is.

In Europe, for example, you get British Politicians going on an one about how the country has the “Oldest Democracy in The World” (this in a country with a King who a few years ago - well, his mother - was found to actually have some power over what legislation gets passed, an unlected second chamber with members who inherit their seat from their parents and First Past The Post for Parliament) all the while in The Netherlands (who, IMHO, have probably the most Democratic system in the World, including Proportional Vote, though with a powerless King) politians pretty much never rant about the quality of their Democracy.

At least in the West, the most loud and relentless proclaimers of how great their Democracy is by a large margin are American politicians.

The American voting system is not Proportional Vote and instead is massivelly Mathematically rigged with (for Congress) huge single representative electoral circles which in some cases have borders designed exactly to make it near impossible to defeat incumbents (aka Gerrymandering), with (for the Senate) even larger electoral circles (literally, each state) with 2 representatives, and something somewhat similar for Presidential elections (though worse since ultimatelly it all adds up to a single representative electoral circle with 300 million voters for a position with lots of power, unlike most European countries - with some notable exceptions like France - which either don’t have a President or have one which is mainly symbolic and has little power).

Further, the very nature of the system will, beyond the Mathematical rigging, push the people who would otherwise go for a 3rd party to instead go for the “useful vote” (i.e. chose an electable candidate instead of the one they want) - it’s not by chance that the heaviest argument of the Biden campaign was “vote Biden to defeat Trump”.

Since new parties take various electoral cycles to grow, it’s pretty impossible for them to do so because it’s Mathematically near impossible for them to even establish a foothold that shows its earlier supporters they do have a chance to one day influence what laws are made in the US and how the country is ruled, so new parties invariable lose steam after the first or second election they go through.

You can see something similar to this in the UK, were for example the Green Party gets 1 million votes out of 40 million (2.5% of votes) but only 1 member of parliament out of 300 (0.33%), and remember this is with lots of people chosing electable candidates from other parties, so the Green Party natural vote would likely be larger in a different system

This stands in marked contrast with, for example, The Netherlands, were vote is Proportional and there are 15 parties in their Parliament (Tweede Kamer).

Please don’t become the thing you likely abhor (Trumpists and alike) by reacting in a knee jerk fashing to things that “insult” your tribalist morals with a variant of the Fascist take “If you’re not with us, you’re against us”.

It’s perfectly rational and reasonable to think that Biden is not a “guy with good intentions” whilst also thinking that Trump is no better, whilst it’s irrational and unreasonable to think that just because one doesn’t like Person A, one must like Person B.

By any human being standards anybody who supports somebody mass murdering children with weapons is a shit person, hence Biden is a shit person. That doesn’t mean Trump is any less shit.

Even by American President Moral standards (which, sadly are way lower than Normal Person Moral standars, when they should be higher), activelly supporting with weapons a nation committing Genocide is pretty bad, though far from novel.

The point being that trying to pass that specific sandwish as “gourmet” doesn’t make this less of a contest of shit-sandwish vs double-shit-sandwish.

The take of top poster of this thread - that Biden is an “old man with good intentions” - is quite a different and far more tribalist and propagandistic take than your “the one that’s a bit less enthusiastic genocide supporter”.

Your take is perfectly reasonable, whilst the original take is, as the previous poster pointed out, complete total bollocks for anybody but a complete total sociopath (who would be ok with mass murder) or ultra-tribalist numpty (who is ok with whatever their tribe’s leader supports, no matter how inhumane).

A guy that supports a Genocidal ethno-Fascist regime doesn’t have “good intentions”, not even by the lousy standard of the subset of politicians that climb their way into the position of “leader of a major country” - normal human beings don’t give guns to people purposefully murdering tens of thousands of children, starving 2 million people and targetting journalists and medical personnel.

“Not quite as extremelly bad intentions as the other guy” would be a more correct take.

Trying to spin this as a “good guy vs bad guy” is quite a tribalist take on a plague vs pestilence contest.

Clearly the profound racism never disappeared, otherwise the German power elites wouldn’t “unwaveringly support” a nation because of the ethnicity of the majority of its people and its leaders: the more visible artifacts of ancient germanic symbols, goose stepping and the brown shirts might be gone but the thinking that some people are more worthy than others purelly because of their ethnicity is still just as strong.

Additionally, that the German authorities are now going so far as shown in this and other news in support of the ethno-Fascists of a specific ethnicity, also indicates that the authoritarian tendencies too are alive and well in the mindset of the German power elites.

It looks a lot like the foundations of Nazism are alive, well and returning to prominence, with a different symbology and façade, but still the same view of humans as ethnics and the same authoritarian forceful imposition of a race-based view of the worth of human beings on others.

It’s actually quite scary to watch from the outside as Germany goes back to overtly using force to suppress dissent on its power elite’s racial supremacist views for the benefit of an extreme form of ethno-Fascism, even if this time around it’s not the Arian Race that’s being “supported”.

Democracy requires its 3 pillars - the Judicial, the Press and the Political - to be independent.

In the US all three are tied, some even Constitutionally.

It’s thus not surprised that the country only ever got close to being governed for the Many rather than the Few at times when other Civil Society movements (such as Unions) were strong and healthy. Certainly that’s not the case nowadays, not even close.

You were supposed to have an antenna.

Belgium has an unusual constitution that lets its regions have veto power over some of its decisions in the international stage and adding a member to the EU is actually a change to a major Treaty that Belgium is part of.

For most EU member countries, there is no such thing, though I believe some (Luxemburg, Malta?) are actually smaller than Walonia in terms of population.