No one argue that this includes the ones who actually voted

Is that a typo? Surely you mean that no one would argue that it doesn’t include the ones who actually voted.

Right, because you’re doing zero analysis of the economic or political structures involved and playing fast and loose with terminology.

There are other monarchies in the world today that do hold political power. That doesn’t mean that they’re governing over a feudal system. The noble system I described is one of the defining characteristics of feudalism.

That’s both not true and also not what I asked. The UK has a king and noble family, does that make it a feudal system?

Does North Korea have the noble class I described? Do you have any evidence that such a class exists?

Neither of those countries returned to a feudal system. Where are the nobles, with entrenched legal privileges, with titles passed down on a hereditary basis, commanding their own armies? What a ridiculous claim.

Name one time when that’s happened.

Alice and Bob. Alice wins. She says that Bob can only blame himself for neglecting his training, but Bob blames Alice and says that if she wouldn’t have ran so fast, he could have won.

This analogy has literally nothing to do with anything. What’s happening is that Bob is saying that if he loses, it’s not because of himself or because of Alice, but rather because of Charlie, who isn’t even involved.

But for the very act of him getting their candidate elected? They should not feel guilty for that. They should feel pride - or at least, as much pride as casting a vote into a ballot can entitle.

Why should they feel guilt or pride? According to your insane “logic,” they bear zero responsibility for getting the candidate they voted for elected. The reason a candidate wins, apparently, has nothing whatsoever to do with the number of votes they receive, but rather, it’s entirely the people who don’t participate in the process who determine the outcome, somehow.

If he didn’t need to appease the hawks, he’d probably be dove-ish because that’s better for business, and a booming economy gets his name in the news and dollars in his pocket.

War is great for business. You just have to make sure that you’re in on the cut and that the costs are borne by other people. You get to use other people’s money through taxes to take other people’s money through plunder, and in the process you get to give lucrative contracts to military contractors and get kickbacks for it. And Trump doesn’t really benefit from a booming economy, especially since he can’t get a third term.

I’ll agree that he’s not as ideologically driven as some of the more dangerous hawks like John Bolton. But in office he was/would be surrounded with those types and can be influenced in their direction. Apathy can just as easily mean telling them, “sure, go ahead, do whatever.”

But in any case I would agree that I rate Chase Oliver well above Trump and Biden, so I’d say this is a minor disagreement.

When I say libertarian, I’m referring not solely to the libertarian party, but to Republicans who hold libertarian values. I suppose I was unfair to people who actually vote libertarian.

Idk, he seems closer to a realist dove trying to appeal to hawks. He wants to invest in business, not democracy, so anything he does militarily is largely saber rattling to try to get more favorable trade deals. That’s it.

That’s the image he puts on but it’s not consistent with his record. He nearly started a war with Iran and bombed Syria and Yemen, for example. As I pointed out, his rhetoric is contradictory and contains both dove and hawk elements, but his actual governance indicates that the hawkishness is more in line with how he’ll actually behave.

But don’t vote for Trump, he’s not genuine on any issue, he just wants power and prestige.

On that we agree.

If Biden loses to Trump the only people to blame are the ones who didn’t go out to vote. If Trump loses to Biden the only people to blame are the ones who didn’t go out and vote.

Funny, I would’ve thought that the people voting for a candidate are the ones responsible for the candidate getting elected.

“And the Trump administration kept to the pact, reducing U.S. troop levels from about 13,000 to 2,500, even though the Taliban continued to attack Afghan government forces and welcomed al-Qaeda terrorists into the Taliban leadership.”

So should the withdrawal have been stopped at that point? Exactly how much longer do you think we should’ve stayed in Afghanistan?

And that criticism was always bullshit. There’s no “right” way to retreat, it was always going to play out the way it did. Journalists criticized it in bad faith, because it generated clicks and because they never actually opposed the war, because again, war is great for clicks. In reality, what happened when the US pulled out was the culmination of 20 years spent doing nothing to stabilize the country and only making the Taliban stronger.

But go ahead then, armchair strategist, and describe to me what specifically could’ve been done differently about the withdrawal that would not have resulted in things playing out the way they did.

Opposing the withdrawal is the same as supporting the war. The withdrawal was one of the only good things Biden did in his whole career and liberals will never forgive him for it. Worse yet, you want to allow Trump to claim credit for it when Biden’s the one who actually saw it through and had to deal with the flak from it.

Liberals will criticize ending a pointless 20 year war and somehow still not realize that they’re jingos.

People are freaking out that the president can legally kill people now but that was essentially already the case, de facto. Obama did it via drone strikes, for example, Anwar al-Awlaki, who was involved with the Taliban but never given due process, and later his 16 year old son Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, who was never even accused of terrorism - both American citizens. Of course, Bush also set up a completely illegal system of detention without trial at Guantanamo Bay, which also included American citizens and which continued long after his term. There was also of course the illegal mass surveillance program that began under Bush and continued through Obama, Trump, and Biden, with the only legal action being against the person who exposed the crime.

In all of those cases, the Justice department simply chose not to investigate or press charges, as is within their power to do. If the president straight up shot someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue, it would be up to the Justice department to decide whether or not to prosecute, and if they say no, that’s that (though it would also be possible for congress to act via the impeachment process, which would require a majority of the house and 2/3 of the senate to be on board).

This ruling doesn’t give the president a blank check, but rather, it gives the court an easy legal argument to give the president a pass on any case they hear. The court can still rule that something wasn’t an official act. Practically speaking, before they still could have still found the president innocent for whatever bullshit reason they could come up with, but they’re now saying that they don’t even have to pretend to have a reason.

Of course, if the president wanted to start killing Supreme Court justices or other political opponents, a piece of paper was never going to be the thing that stopped that. Whether the president can order the military to gun down congress is just a question of whether the military decides to listen to them and whether anyone manages to stop them. It was always the case that if you can kill anyone who could find you guilty, you can do whatever you want. On the other side of that, even if the ruling did legally give the president to kill all of his political opponents on some technicality, he would still face the same obstacles if he tried to do it.

What the law says only matters insofar as it can be enforced, and ultimately laws represent threats made by the powerful towards the rest of us, and among the powerful the way of settling disputes is power, with legal power being but one of many forms that can take.

I didn’t say the relations were good, but they were certainly a lot better 5 years ago.

I’m glad that the US has suddenly started caring about labor rights and the well-being of Muslims, and I’m sure that it’s just pure coincidence that it happens to be aligned with criticizing and fear-mongering it’s largest competitor.

There are plenty of poor countries with worse conditions than China. Major multinational corporations set up shell corporations to run their sweatshops and if they get exposed they say, “We had no idea,” maybe pay a tiny fine, then set up another company to do the exact same thing. Many of these countries are in the US’s sphere of influence, and many have to sign away control of their own domestic policies as a condition for entry into the global marketplace, while their resources, stolen by force by colonizers, remain in foreign hands.

Why isn’t the US concerned about their labor conditions? I’ll tell you why: because one of those cases means giving more money to rich corporations in the form of defense contracts, and the other means restricting the ability of rich corporations to exploit the poor. All the bombs the US is building will do nothing to improve the conditions of anyone living in China, while there are plenty of people who the US could be lifting out of poverty if it cared to.

The sudden decline in relations was not because the whole US just woke up one day and decided to start caring about the conditions of laborers in China, which used to be much worse than today. Don’t feed me that nonsense.

Not a dude, and the US got along much better with China, until around 2019 when the wars in the Middle East were winding down and the US needed a new justification for defense contracts, and when it needed to shift blame for botching COVID. That’s when all of a sudden everyone started hating China for no other reason than the news said to.

The US chose to saber-rattle with China before the war in Ukraine, which destroyed any possibility of this that might have existed. China was never going to agree to diplomatically isolating Russia when it would so obviously be next.

It’s the candidate’s responsibility to win over the voters.