The only problem I have is with the whole “foreign backed” language. It’s technically not wrong, but please, as a reminder: It was not simply manipulation from Russia and others, putting Trump into power and creating MAGA. It is a homegrown problem, fascism has been smouldering in the US for a long time, and just as another reminder, it is also glimmering in the EU as well.
The country is “occupied” by its ruling class, and in this case, a specific clique of them benefitting themselves even against other capitalists, but overall, this is much more about class-, than it is about nation-dynamics.
Oh, yes, that’s also why I mentioned it being technically true, as in, Russia is very interested in helping anything that destabilises and hurts their enemies in mutual imperialist struggle, as well as help them establish the new world order of imperialist powers acting however they want in their spheres of influence, instead of international responsibilities and laws.
It’s like: Technically the October Revolution in Tsarist Russia was also, because the German Empire really, really wanted a destabilised enemy on their Eastern Front (Thus sending Lenin with a generous packet of financial support to do some destabilising). That does not negate that at the core, it was already burning as a potential historic outcome, because of the squalor class relations had caused there - and the geopolitics were just additional fuel that got the tensions into explosion mode.
Well said. I would even go so far as to say that facism is the bones of America.
American colonialism served as inspiration for Hitler, and the history of America is packed solid with violent othering of various groups. To pretend that any of these problems are new or came from elsewhere is an incredibly naive and whitewashed point of view.
American colonialism served as inspiration for Hitler, and the history of America is packed solid with violent othering of various groups.
It’s not wrong, although I would stress, that fascism is not just that, and there is a reason why we only call those systems starting in the 20th century fascist.
It is also class collaborationism, and trying to somehow have the advantages of capitalism without its utter destruction of social norms and traditions. It is intertwining state and capital with the ideological aim to create a “strong nation” in the fight against other nations. It is imagining society as a body with people being its organs, who should serve their allotted place in society, and not rebel against it. America also had non-fascist tendencies woven within into history, and the settler-colonial era was still too early to be called “fascist”, lacking the kind of developed industrial capitalism and violent reaction to socialist class struggle 20th century fascism was born in.
We (the USA) were smoldering fascists prior to WW2. Let’s not kid ourselves.
The human race is a bunch of smouldering fascists. Balkans, Rwanda, Chechnya, Iraq, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, India, and Darfur. Nigeria, Mali, Sudan, and other countries in the Sahel region. Take a look at this list of ethnic cleansings.
World history is rife with people trying to gain power so they can kill all the people who don’t look like them.
We (the USA) were smoldering fascists prior to WW2. Let’s not kid ourselves.
Eh, I actually disagree. The US did a social democratic turn after the Great Depression, I think it was one of the eras where the US was furthest from fascism. It ultimately still created and maintained the conditions of fascist tendencies later on and only very partially did the work analysing their own history of imperialism, but I really dislike overuse of the word fascist, because it blunts the analytical edge. The implicit neoliberal social contract was different than the implicit fascist one (which was different than the more social democratic one solidified under FDR, etc.) - and the system no longer having to wear the mask of humanity has real life consequences and creates its own dynamics.
World history is rife with people trying to gain power so they can kill all the people who don’t look like them.
Indeed, but I think it is a fallacy to use that as an ideological framing of inevitability (unsure if that was your aim here). Ingroup-Outgroup thinking is one of the few things, that I think is indeed fundamental to the human condition, but the way it materialises is dependent on the interaction of that tendency with material and historical conditions. Without colonialism, the specific framing of race, for example, would not have existed in the same way. And universalism as a current within modernity is not just a fluke or illusion, but a proper potential tendency within human behaviour as well, one that relies on cultural and material conditions of its own.
Cynicism is in its own right an ideological distortion, where it leaves analysis and tries to impose its interpretation on reality.
Well you do sound like a pretty smart person. I don’t think I can get on the intellectual playing field with you, but I think there was plenty of Nazi sympathizers prior to World war II in America. Here’s just one example from NPR.
As to ethnic strife and tribal warfare, I’m not saying it’s inevitable, just that it’s the default mode. Sort of like entropy, it asserts itself unless we actively act against it.
That, I can agree with. There needs to be active work and conscious moulding of material dynamics, in order to allow for it to be overcome.
As to ethnic strife and tribal warfare, I’m not saying it’s inevitable, just that it’s the default mode
Funnily enough, there are huge parts of pre-historic mankind, where they were the exception instead of the rule (although, when it did happen, we have evidence it was often very genocidal and total).
Organised warfare can be traced to the beginnings of class society, where societies started to have the surplus necessary, so that risking a large part of their population could be “worth it” to acquire labour power (slaves) and surplus (property) of other societies. At least, that is my current understanding of archaeological and anthropological evidence (e.g. tracing when weapons of war, explicitly not just as tools, or palisades around settlements appear in the archaeological record).
Not necessarily disagreeing, just adding that, to highlight that defining a “default” is basically impossible. Mankind has always acted within its historical and material context.
I was tracking pretty well with you until the last line
Mankind has always acted within its historical and material context.
I’m not sure what you mean by that. People have an aspect that is dictated by historical and material context. But there are also natural abilities, like speech, and propensities, like social organization, that are part of being human itself.
Surely, to my way a thinking, it’s the whole nature/nurture thing, and your last sentence seems to leave nature out of it.
Even if you view man as a machine it doesn’t change that. A windshield wiper doesn’t cook eggs.
Some things do what they do because of what they are, not their material and historical context.
Ah, I can see how that reads. So, short answer: I agree, but with the caveat that that simple truth can be misrepresented.
Of course, there are things that are inherent in “our nature”. You mention speech, which is a great example - the ability of language and being adapted to being born into a complex system of language is one of the main reasons why I think humanity is acting so much within a material and historical context - more so than more intuitively acting animals adapted to a biome.
It is indeed my thesis, that besides some smaller things, “human nature” is being adapted to “culture”, adapted to dialectically interacting with reality around us, and creating a new context that then influences us again. We aren’t specialised to one biome any more, for example, or one circumstance in climate, but naturally inclined to change ourselves and our surroundings. And I agree, that we are indeed specialised for complex social organisation, too.
My issue comes there, where very specific behaviours or systems are presented as human nature, where I would claim, they are better explained as “how something within human nature is filtered through its historical context.” Think of how people may say “private property” is human nature. Or “racism” is human nature. No, both are dynamics of something within human nature in a very specific context.
A windshield wiper doesn’t cook eggs.
True, but for humanity specifically, it can be damn hard to clearly define if we are a windshield wiper, an egg-cooker, or whatever. Because everything we study about our nature, will always appear to us filtered through the surrounding context. So it is only through hard work and building up theories to ever be falsified again, that we come closer to the essentials. (Like language, social organisation of high complexity, etc.)
This study, and others like it, would be to my mind the right way to go about finding out what the baseline is for humans.
Look to the great apes, see what great apes do - because we are great apes. Old World monkeys would provide clues as well. We’re absolutely going to be somewhat different, but that’s where research comes in.
We don’t have to guess.
PS. I know I was way out of my depth here. I really appreciate you taking the time to chat with me. It’s always nice to talk to somebody brainy.
Thanks for the study, I only glossed over it, but it does indeed fit with the view I fundamentally have there as well. My own personal, more philosophical speculation added on top being, that the observed guilt and resentment, for example, are - again, in my own opinion, not stated as fact - intertwined with the foundation of language and being born into language. Interesting here, I think, is that children from traumatic upbringings without language acquisition, so-called “feral” children, do lack this aspect of mutual/joint commitment, as far as I know. But I am now starting to get out of my field of obsessive interest/expertise, myself.
Looking at behaviour of children in early childhood especially, can be very useful for some fundamentals, and using other Great Apes as a reference, can help a lot, too. But the older the observed humans get, the harder I think it is to use the observation, and studies have to be very carefully crafted. But I would agree, that it is part of the toolbox, as well as anthropological studies that can then be cross-referenced, and just because everything is always within a context, does not mean absolutely no things can be deduced from observations. (I realise now I made a mistake when I think I earlier said “basically impossible”, when really it’s just amazingly hard, and possible only for very general things).
PS. I know I was way out of my depth here. I really appreciate you taking the time to chat with me. It’s always nice to talk to somebody brainy.
Thank you, and you’re welcome. In the end, I am also just another ND person on the internet, currently hyper-talkative about a special interest. So I don’t know how much “brainy” is really fitting, I always think it might be too positive of a description - but I guess I can’t escape that I am indeed prone to geeking out about the Humanities at times without a proper filter. That has definitely caused me to make mistakes before, too, so you shouldn’t take my word where what I say is in clear contradiction with facts.
As a categorical answer: Where it conflicts with reality more generally.
As a more specific answer: Good ways to double check are - how does my perspective gel with historians, anthropologists and philosophers, that study that field? Do they also agree on a cynical view there? When they dissent, what are the ways they do so?
Where did I get that cynical view? Is the cynical interpretation one, that benefits the status quo, so it has a higher likelihood of being ideological instead of a proper analysis? Is it backed up not only in contemporary empirical social sciences, but also when processing that data through interpretation. (e.g.: A group committing more crimes can be fact in studies, but racists will interpret that completely differently, than communists for example, concerning causes and solutions.)
In addition to that - personal experience is always valid, take for example someone with PTSD, it would be ludicrous to claim, their outlook on things concerning their trauma is “wrong”. However, when applied to larger reality, it may not describe it properly in the whole context. That does not take away the validity of their experience and how it shapes them, specifically.
It was not simply manipulation from Russia and others, putting Trump into power and creating MAGA.
Yes, it is that simple. Not only do we have Trump as a Russian assets, but I’d wager there are also other politicians and judges that are assets too. Not to mention all of the dark money that flooded our government (thanks to Citizens United), and the whole of social media misinformation campaigns across Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, etc.
There is nothing homegrown about this; we’ve been under attack for a long time. Ow, and we’re only starting to notice it because of the repercussions.
Not to mention all of the dark money that flooded our government (thanks to Citizens United)
Oh, yeah, sure, and that was Russia and not your own capitalists and corporations creating the financing structures of CU.
the whole of social media misinformation campaigns across Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, etc.
Which was indeed fueled by Russia, but also dependent on the basic problem, that journalism is structured around the profit motive, in the hands of a few oligarchs and the attention economy, and gleefully embraced by platforms like meta and twitter, because it just so happened to be also in the class interest of the owners.
Russia is taking advantage of it and has been doing destabilising actions in Europe and the US for decades - but no, you have home-grown your culture of corporate America and we all share the culture of international capital on top of that.
Don’t act like it would be the land of the free and the brave without Russia, they did not invent Citizens United, they did not create the structures that allowed 3-digit billionaires to exist, they did not buy out Rupert Murdoch or Elon Musk (seriously, they could not afford them, even with Kompromat - after all, people are easy to pretend like Trump didn’t have connections to Epstein, too. No Kompromat couldn’t be pushed to the sidelines considering the media and social media is controlled by those people, not Russia directly.) The vast majority of cooperation of people like that with Russia is because of self-interest within the economic dynamics aligning with Russian interests - Russia only fanned the flames and took the opportunities that were there.
Russia is an imperialist shithouse with oligarchic capitalism, but the US is, too, and has been for a long time. Closing the eyes to that is allowing yourself to live in ideology-driven ignorance, which is also why my answer is so hostile, because sometimes that is necessary in debating things like this.
I’m not going to argue with you, because you are not my enemy nor my adversary. But I did want to point out that just because I focused on Russia in my previous comments does not mean that I’ve ignored all of the other problems that America currently has working against it.
I do wholeheartedly agree with you that capitalism is a malignant stage 4 cancer that is killing my country (assuming you’re not American). In this particular circumstance I was focusing on what I feel the more immediate threat.
As for your tone; I get it - I’m angry as Hell too. America failing affects many more than us Americans. It’s a shit situation for everyone.
You didn’t “focus on Russia”, you declared that they were the sole and entire problem, and that fascism in America is entirely the result of the ruskies corrupting your precious bodily fluids.
Not taking a position because my perspective is different sort of but pointing out that they actually didn’t say “only Russia”, their comment (at least the 2 I see) could be interpreted as implicating any number of external influences.
I do think this is not just foreign influence but a natural extension of the world the USA and related groups and various influences throughout history with overlapping goals sometimes have created, and it must be undone in what I can pretty much only imagine as a global shift towards people centered policies that actually get needs met as effectively as possible and without motivation to impede progress built into the system.
It was not simply manipulation from Russia and others, putting Trump into power and creating MAGA.
Yes, it is that simple. Not only do we have Trump as a Russian assets, but I’d wager there are also other politicians and judges that are assets too. Not to mention all of the dark money that flooded our government (thanks to Citizens United), and the whole of social media misinformation campaigns across Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, etc.
There is nothing homegrown about this; we’ve been under attack for a long time. Ow, and we’re only starting to notice it because of the repercussions.
This comment? I’m seriously not trying to be nitpicky, if that is what they meant I’m not like defending their position necessarily, but if I understand this comment correctly, it didn’t exclude money from American oligarchs, other countries, etc. Which is consistent with my understanding (the money comes from all over). That’s all I meant to point out, if I’m wrong no offense intended. I understood to mean that it’s not what a majority of people actually want. More of a semantic disagreement.
The only problem I have is with the whole “foreign backed” language. It’s technically not wrong, but please, as a reminder: It was not simply manipulation from Russia and others, putting Trump into power and creating MAGA. It is a homegrown problem, fascism has been smouldering in the US for a long time, and just as another reminder, it is also glimmering in the EU as well.
The country is “occupied” by its ruling class, and in this case, a specific clique of them benefitting themselves even against other capitalists, but overall, this is much more about class-, than it is about nation-dynamics.
I’m pretty sure Russia help with that. It is about class but not only.
Oh, yes, that’s also why I mentioned it being technically true, as in, Russia is very interested in helping anything that destabilises and hurts their enemies in mutual imperialist struggle, as well as help them establish the new world order of imperialist powers acting however they want in their spheres of influence, instead of international responsibilities and laws.
It’s like: Technically the October Revolution in Tsarist Russia was also, because the German Empire really, really wanted a destabilised enemy on their Eastern Front (Thus sending Lenin with a generous packet of financial support to do some destabilising). That does not negate that at the core, it was already burning as a potential historic outcome, because of the squalor class relations had caused there - and the geopolitics were just additional fuel that got the tensions into explosion mode.
Well said. I would even go so far as to say that facism is the bones of America.
American colonialism served as inspiration for Hitler, and the history of America is packed solid with violent othering of various groups. To pretend that any of these problems are new or came from elsewhere is an incredibly naive and whitewashed point of view.
It’s not wrong, although I would stress, that fascism is not just that, and there is a reason why we only call those systems starting in the 20th century fascist.
It is also class collaborationism, and trying to somehow have the advantages of capitalism without its utter destruction of social norms and traditions. It is intertwining state and capital with the ideological aim to create a “strong nation” in the fight against other nations. It is imagining society as a body with people being its organs, who should serve their allotted place in society, and not rebel against it. America also had non-fascist tendencies woven within into history, and the settler-colonial era was still too early to be called “fascist”, lacking the kind of developed industrial capitalism and violent reaction to socialist class struggle 20th century fascism was born in.
Yeah, we’ve rarely been the good guys in history.
No, Jim crow was the inspiration for Hitler, he wrote about it explicitly in mein kampf as the model that must be followed.
The Nuremberg Laws are actually, I shit you not, Jim crow but watered down as Germans wouldn’t tolerate the 1 drop rule.
The south was so impossibly evil even the nazis blanched, and we never did anything to solve their unimaginable inhumanity.
We (the USA) were smoldering fascists prior to WW2. Let’s not kid ourselves.
The human race is a bunch of smouldering fascists. Balkans, Rwanda, Chechnya, Iraq, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, India, and Darfur. Nigeria, Mali, Sudan, and other countries in the Sahel region. Take a look at this list of ethnic cleansings.
World history is rife with people trying to gain power so they can kill all the people who don’t look like them.
capitalism is smouldering fascism. the signs are mostly on the capitalist world (which tbf is most people).
also, humans doing bad things does not necessarily equals fascism.
Okay Karl
i wish, comrade.
Eh, I actually disagree. The US did a social democratic turn after the Great Depression, I think it was one of the eras where the US was furthest from fascism. It ultimately still created and maintained the conditions of fascist tendencies later on and only very partially did the work analysing their own history of imperialism, but I really dislike overuse of the word fascist, because it blunts the analytical edge. The implicit neoliberal social contract was different than the implicit fascist one (which was different than the more social democratic one solidified under FDR, etc.) - and the system no longer having to wear the mask of humanity has real life consequences and creates its own dynamics.
Indeed, but I think it is a fallacy to use that as an ideological framing of inevitability (unsure if that was your aim here). Ingroup-Outgroup thinking is one of the few things, that I think is indeed fundamental to the human condition, but the way it materialises is dependent on the interaction of that tendency with material and historical conditions. Without colonialism, the specific framing of race, for example, would not have existed in the same way. And universalism as a current within modernity is not just a fluke or illusion, but a proper potential tendency within human behaviour as well, one that relies on cultural and material conditions of its own.
Cynicism is in its own right an ideological distortion, where it leaves analysis and tries to impose its interpretation on reality.
Well you do sound like a pretty smart person. I don’t think I can get on the intellectual playing field with you, but I think there was plenty of Nazi sympathizers prior to World war II in America. Here’s just one example from NPR.
https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2019/02/20/695941323/when-nazis-took-manhattan
As to ethnic strife and tribal warfare, I’m not saying it’s inevitable, just that it’s the default mode. Sort of like entropy, it asserts itself unless we actively act against it.
That, I can agree with. There needs to be active work and conscious moulding of material dynamics, in order to allow for it to be overcome.
Funnily enough, there are huge parts of pre-historic mankind, where they were the exception instead of the rule (although, when it did happen, we have evidence it was often very genocidal and total).
Organised warfare can be traced to the beginnings of class society, where societies started to have the surplus necessary, so that risking a large part of their population could be “worth it” to acquire labour power (slaves) and surplus (property) of other societies. At least, that is my current understanding of archaeological and anthropological evidence (e.g. tracing when weapons of war, explicitly not just as tools, or palisades around settlements appear in the archaeological record).
Not necessarily disagreeing, just adding that, to highlight that defining a “default” is basically impossible. Mankind has always acted within its historical and material context.
I was tracking pretty well with you until the last line
I’m not sure what you mean by that. People have an aspect that is dictated by historical and material context. But there are also natural abilities, like speech, and propensities, like social organization, that are part of being human itself.
Surely, to my way a thinking, it’s the whole nature/nurture thing, and your last sentence seems to leave nature out of it.
Even if you view man as a machine it doesn’t change that. A windshield wiper doesn’t cook eggs.
Some things do what they do because of what they are, not their material and historical context.
Ah, I can see how that reads. So, short answer: I agree, but with the caveat that that simple truth can be misrepresented.
Of course, there are things that are inherent in “our nature”. You mention speech, which is a great example - the ability of language and being adapted to being born into a complex system of language is one of the main reasons why I think humanity is acting so much within a material and historical context - more so than more intuitively acting animals adapted to a biome.
It is indeed my thesis, that besides some smaller things, “human nature” is being adapted to “culture”, adapted to dialectically interacting with reality around us, and creating a new context that then influences us again. We aren’t specialised to one biome any more, for example, or one circumstance in climate, but naturally inclined to change ourselves and our surroundings. And I agree, that we are indeed specialised for complex social organisation, too.
My issue comes there, where very specific behaviours or systems are presented as human nature, where I would claim, they are better explained as “how something within human nature is filtered through its historical context.” Think of how people may say “private property” is human nature. Or “racism” is human nature. No, both are dynamics of something within human nature in a very specific context.
True, but for humanity specifically, it can be damn hard to clearly define if we are a windshield wiper, an egg-cooker, or whatever. Because everything we study about our nature, will always appear to us filtered through the surrounding context. So it is only through hard work and building up theories to ever be falsified again, that we come closer to the essentials. (Like language, social organisation of high complexity, etc.)
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12110-023-09464-0
This study, and others like it, would be to my mind the right way to go about finding out what the baseline is for humans.
Look to the great apes, see what great apes do - because we are great apes. Old World monkeys would provide clues as well. We’re absolutely going to be somewhat different, but that’s where research comes in.
We don’t have to guess.
PS. I know I was way out of my depth here. I really appreciate you taking the time to chat with me. It’s always nice to talk to somebody brainy.
Thanks for the study, I only glossed over it, but it does indeed fit with the view I fundamentally have there as well. My own personal, more philosophical speculation added on top being, that the observed guilt and resentment, for example, are - again, in my own opinion, not stated as fact - intertwined with the foundation of language and being born into language. Interesting here, I think, is that children from traumatic upbringings without language acquisition, so-called “feral” children, do lack this aspect of mutual/joint commitment, as far as I know. But I am now starting to get out of my field of obsessive interest/expertise, myself.
Looking at behaviour of children in early childhood especially, can be very useful for some fundamentals, and using other Great Apes as a reference, can help a lot, too. But the older the observed humans get, the harder I think it is to use the observation, and studies have to be very carefully crafted. But I would agree, that it is part of the toolbox, as well as anthropological studies that can then be cross-referenced, and just because everything is always within a context, does not mean absolutely no things can be deduced from observations. (I realise now I made a mistake when I think I earlier said “basically impossible”, when really it’s just amazingly hard, and possible only for very general things).
Thank you, and you’re welcome. In the end, I am also just another ND person on the internet, currently hyper-talkative about a special interest. So I don’t know how much “brainy” is really fitting, I always think it might be too positive of a description - but I guess I can’t escape that I am indeed prone to geeking out about the Humanities at times without a proper filter. That has definitely caused me to make mistakes before, too, so you shouldn’t take my word where what I say is in clear contradiction with facts.
Where does one draw the line between cynicism and experience?
As a categorical answer: Where it conflicts with reality more generally.
As a more specific answer: Good ways to double check are - how does my perspective gel with historians, anthropologists and philosophers, that study that field? Do they also agree on a cynical view there? When they dissent, what are the ways they do so?
Where did I get that cynical view? Is the cynical interpretation one, that benefits the status quo, so it has a higher likelihood of being ideological instead of a proper analysis? Is it backed up not only in contemporary empirical social sciences, but also when processing that data through interpretation. (e.g.: A group committing more crimes can be fact in studies, but racists will interpret that completely differently, than communists for example, concerning causes and solutions.)
In addition to that - personal experience is always valid, take for example someone with PTSD, it would be ludicrous to claim, their outlook on things concerning their trauma is “wrong”. However, when applied to larger reality, it may not describe it properly in the whole context. That does not take away the validity of their experience and how it shapes them, specifically.
Yes, it is that simple. Not only do we have Trump as a Russian assets, but I’d wager there are also other politicians and judges that are assets too. Not to mention all of the dark money that flooded our government (thanks to Citizens United), and the whole of social media misinformation campaigns across Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, etc.
There is nothing homegrown about this; we’ve been under attack for a long time. Ow, and we’re only starting to notice it because of the repercussions.
Oh, yeah, sure, and that was Russia and not your own capitalists and corporations creating the financing structures of CU.
Which was indeed fueled by Russia, but also dependent on the basic problem, that journalism is structured around the profit motive, in the hands of a few oligarchs and the attention economy, and gleefully embraced by platforms like meta and twitter, because it just so happened to be also in the class interest of the owners.
Russia is taking advantage of it and has been doing destabilising actions in Europe and the US for decades - but no, you have home-grown your culture of corporate America and we all share the culture of international capital on top of that.
Don’t act like it would be the land of the free and the brave without Russia, they did not invent Citizens United, they did not create the structures that allowed 3-digit billionaires to exist, they did not buy out Rupert Murdoch or Elon Musk (seriously, they could not afford them, even with Kompromat - after all, people are easy to pretend like Trump didn’t have connections to Epstein, too. No Kompromat couldn’t be pushed to the sidelines considering the media and social media is controlled by those people, not Russia directly.) The vast majority of cooperation of people like that with Russia is because of self-interest within the economic dynamics aligning with Russian interests - Russia only fanned the flames and took the opportunities that were there.
Russia is an imperialist shithouse with oligarchic capitalism, but the US is, too, and has been for a long time. Closing the eyes to that is allowing yourself to live in ideology-driven ignorance, which is also why my answer is so hostile, because sometimes that is necessary in debating things like this.
I’m not going to argue with you, because you are not my enemy nor my adversary. But I did want to point out that just because I focused on Russia in my previous comments does not mean that I’ve ignored all of the other problems that America currently has working against it.
I do wholeheartedly agree with you that capitalism is a malignant stage 4 cancer that is killing my country (assuming you’re not American). In this particular circumstance I was focusing on what I feel the more immediate threat.
As for your tone; I get it - I’m angry as Hell too. America failing affects many more than us Americans. It’s a shit situation for everyone.
You didn’t “focus on Russia”, you declared that they were the sole and entire problem, and that fascism in America is entirely the result of the ruskies corrupting your precious bodily fluids.
Not taking a position because my perspective is different sort of but pointing out that they actually didn’t say “only Russia”, their comment (at least the 2 I see) could be interpreted as implicating any number of external influences.
I do think this is not just foreign influence but a natural extension of the world the USA and related groups and various influences throughout history with overlapping goals sometimes have created, and it must be undone in what I can pretty much only imagine as a global shift towards people centered policies that actually get needs met as effectively as possible and without motivation to impede progress built into the system.
Yes, they did say only Russia, I’m not sure how you’re managing not to see that.
This comment? I’m seriously not trying to be nitpicky, if that is what they meant I’m not like defending their position necessarily, but if I understand this comment correctly, it didn’t exclude money from American oligarchs, other countries, etc. Which is consistent with my understanding (the money comes from all over). That’s all I meant to point out, if I’m wrong no offense intended. I understood to mean that it’s not what a majority of people actually want. More of a semantic disagreement.