Isn’t it your job to show that voting for Harris would be meaningful? If my vote is meaningless, then you should have no problem with me voting however I personally prefer.

i have previously stated why kamala is a good pick in the first post. I laid out why your reasoning was faulty, you were the one originally claiming that your vote had a meaning behind it, since you were going to bother protest voting, otherwise you admit you've been sitting here and screaming at a wall for like a year.

Ultimately what defines a vote as meaningful or meaningless is up to the individual voter, you could do math and statistics to figure out how much it matters, but that's extremely complicated, and not completely accurate (as polling demonstrates) it's simply more effective to shift broad public opinion on things like policy and issues, rather than a specific candidate vote.

How does there being more congress members change anything about the dynamics we’re discussing?

by dilution, this is the reason the house has so many members, technically its for population representation, and that is true. But you're still fighting against an n/500 or so people, as opposed to like n/2 people. It's harder to influence the president, but the president is also more wholly encompassing of power, whereas it's easier to put a congressman in power, but they have a lot less power.

I genuinely cannot even begin to follow your logic. Walk me through how you got from point A to point B here.

that was a shitpost, because your statement about downballots made no sense lol.

No, I think that would be worse than not voting at all, because my vote in down ballot races is more important than the presidential race.

ok so let me get this one straight, you think electing kamala voting republican downballot is worse than not voting at all, but you also think voting down ballot is simultaneously more important because? I don't understand your comprehension of the voting system at all, it makes no sense. Why would voting down ballot be more important than voting for presidential? Do you not want there to be a president at all?

I don’t know what this is even saying.

i listed your available options, the first one being pulling the most optimal strategy to minimize impact as much as possible, vs thinking voting is useless unless the result is exactly equivalent to what you want, which would mean you wouldn't care about voting for downballot, because very few people in downballot are going to agree with your positions, and even less of their positions will matter in the government. Simply due to the dilution of power.

Again, I am extremely confused by your logic here and cannot even begin to fathom how you got from point A to point B.

again, shitpost because i didn't understand what you were saying, but it appears you were talking about kamala harris not running for mid terms, without mentioning that, (unless i missed it) who is currently running for president. I thought you were implying kamala couldn't have a second presidential term, because yknow, she's running for president. Which would be really weird.

I’m not invested in protecting the capitalist, imperialist state. It doesn’t represent me at all and frequently makes my life worse, I have zero loyalty towards it.

trump is literally akin to a fascist, his actions are matched to that of a literal dictator, the only difference is that he's so stupid it didn't work. People like hitler, the current president of Venezuela, Haiti i think is currently run by a gang. You would probably also consider netanyahu a dictator, which is probably a reason for you to dislike him.

also, democracy != capitalism?? democracy is just a mechanism for voting, whereas capitalism is a mechanism for moving goods through an economy in the most effective manner.

Trump is bad but his presidency was nowhere near as bad as that of Bush.

trump, you mean the guy who thinks haitian immigrants are eating dogs? The guy who literally tried to overthrow democracy, i cannot overstate this enough, this is objectively worse than what bush did. The guy who hired and fired people at will, because they disagreed with him? You mean the guy who fired his AAG (because he couldn't get a real AG who agreed with him) for 3 hours, until his entire fucking DOJ threatened to resign because a guy who deals with oil spills was the current and acting AG?

You mean the guy whose personal attorney said to the public, that chris krebs should be "taken out at dawn and shot" The guy that fired the same guy previously mentioned, chris krebs for saying the election was "the most secure election in history" The same guy that literally told his DOJ to commit a federal crime and lie to the states saying there "was actual voter fraud" when there wasn't. Fun fact, trump suggested multiple times, while in office, that we "use nuclear weapons" as you can imagine, this went nowhere, very fucking quickly, because this is fucking insane.

like obviously the war on terror was bad, and it had implications for security and privacy violations, as well as some rights violations, but i'm not sure those would've even applied considering that was likely within a military context, and we have a separate court for those problems. Also, none of these issues are new. Literally just look back through history, every military everywhere has done this stuff at least once.

But you think that this was worse than what trump tried to do? Which was just straight up ending democracy. Presumably so he could ravage the rest of the global world.

Yes, I was discussing Democratic foreign military policy because that is the topic that we’re discussing. I don’t mind discussing domestic policy, but those issues are not unrelated. The only way we’d have the funds to do the kinds of things that need to happen domestically is by cutting the unbelievably massive military budget, which is higher than the next 9 countries combined.

i would like to know what percentage of GDP that the US military budget is. As of the last ten years or so.

But even if we could, I am opposed to imperialism even if the spoils of that imperialism were distributed to the people. So bad foreign policy but good domestic policy would not be satisfactory. But even that isn’t on the table, the profits of all this killing go straight to the top.

but would you consider overthrowing dictatorships in other countries to also be imperialism? Unrelated, but this is something i've been thinking about lately, with the talk about the border crisis among republicans. There are two things we can do that will ultimately solve it. 1 is to get rid of the cartels, 2 is to improve the living standards of the countries these people are fleeing from.

allowing immigration is good, but the cartel abuses it quite excessively, blocking it helps, but again, doesn't solve the problem. There's not really a great solution here.

anyway getting back to the topic on hand here, even if you don't like imperialism, how do we effectively combat the imperialism of other countries like china? The most effective ironically, seems to be more imperialism. Imperialism in some capacity, whatever definition you have of it, because the classical one doesn't really fit, seems to be a constant throughout human history.

And no, it’s not over. The war in Afghanistan is (now replaced with sanctions to impose starvation), but we’re still involved in other places like Gaza and Yemen. We may not have boots on the ground, but my priority is not on whether American soldiers are being placed in danger, it’s with stopping the violence towards the people living there.

sure, but sanctions aren't a war. Also, as far as sanctions go, they aren't meant to be a good thing, they're meant to be bad, that's the whole fucking idea. If they weren't bad nobody would be using them. And even if it is imposing starvation on afghani people, it's only because of the whims of the taliban. Also due to governmental failure as well, but that's more complicated, especially since this has been a multi decade problem. (the pull out can be blamed on trump btw, just an indication of his foreign policy)

you realize american soldiers literally volunteer to be placed in dangerous situations right? It's not like these people are getting drafted like in vietnam.

What on earth are you even talking about? Going to war with Mexico or something?

the cartels, the mexican government is actively trying to combat it, but it's not going super well, and we have a very clear and definite benefit in assisting the mexican government with that goal as well (trade and illict smuggling of drugs) also the people of mexico as well, they would probably appreciate not being extorted and killed by the cartels.

Not a single one of these applies to me but your lazy condescension is noted.

again, mostly a shitpost to the IP shit especially, for some reason IP people are issues voters, and i don't understand why. They're going nowhere pretty quickly with that one.