Society is in a rotten state. People don’t care about others or others’ rights, they only care about themselves in the depraved delusion that one day they will have “made it”. Look back 4 years ago when people were too selfish to cut out their weekend binge drinking or simply wearing a mask to protect others (and themselves). Introspection, empathy, consideration, those are gone, it’s all about self-worth, “confidence” (god how I hate that word) and self-respect to push the inevitable realization that what one is doing is unsustainable and damaging to everyone else far, far back into the future.

I don’t know why you take so much offense that I wrote that it doesn’t surprise me one bit that a fascist is elected over someone who people are sure to not benefit from. The 40 users of lemmy who show respect and care are not representative to society as a whole from what I’ve seen.

You also underestimate the stupidity of the average voter/person. Most people vote on vibes, not policy, and don’t pay that much actual attention to politics.

Exactly. Nonvoters didn’t vote against insane evil, that is fully on them no matter how they spin it.

Exactly. I don’t care how ineffective the not fascists are. Both sides should have done better

But what if the candidate denied he had leprosy?

It’s like if Hitler had been an isolationist.

What the president elect fails to understand is mainly how the world works if your daddy isn’t able to give you a small loan of a million bucks.

Yeah NATO is a force for American power. It gives us undue influence in the world. And also I can’t imagine wanting a powerful United States and not wanting a powerful nato. It’s a threat of overwhelming force so we can only spend money instead of American lives on stabilizing our interests and critical allies. It’s also a way to have MAD countries without nuclear proliferation, or allowing allies we don’t want to have nukes (Germany) to have them.

IDK if we can throw out USA in case they work against us, maybe we will form a new alliance without them?
But maybe I should have written NATO as we used to know it will be dead.

After how we treated the Kurds, I cannot believe anyone still trusts us. We have a lot of shit in our house that needs cleaning, and we sure do seem to be shooting all the maids…

yeah honest at least from the people i’ve spoken to in my country (australia, so take the opinion of the voting populace with a grain of salt - we’re entirely dependant on the US for defence against china, and even more so now that we’re buying US nuclear subs which we have no capacity to maintain ourselves since we literally have to even make laws to deal with nuclear to deal with them)

… sorry rambletangent

… last time people were like “okay well we know that the 4 years are up soon and stability will return”… this round, the world really can’t trust the stability of the US: from now on, who the fuck knows what’s going to happen? we just have to make backup plans, and that severely curtails US influence because there are suddenly alternatives - and nobody wanted alternatives - we all wanted to give the US power (well, kinda)… but you just can’t rely on US politics any more when it’s existentially important

You’re infantilizating the russian population. Political satirical TV shows in the 90s (remember this was before the internet) easily rivaled what you would see even on current US TV. Yet most russians were happy to accept a clampdown on independent TV and reelected putin in 2004 (generally considered a free and fair election). And they were OK with the comical medvedev seat warming exercise in 2008, not to mention putin’s formal return in 2012.

This whole paragraph does not contradict what I said, but your tone seems to suggest it does.

Also those satirical TV shows were all basically crying wildly that bad things are coming. Said bad things came. So?

Anyway, this doesn’t make the Russian population any more or less infantile than the Ukrainian population.

The russians would never back any political force that would reject imperialism or even acknowledge russian crimes. Even the alleged “opposition” in the form of Navalniy’s gang is deeply committed to imperialism.

That political force was dissolved after its key figures were murdered or ridiculed on TV 24/7 in the late 90s and early 00s. It definitely existed.

Also Navalny’s ideas have changed a lot over time. If you are referring to his “Crimea is not a sandwich” statement, it’s just correct - international law has such a thing as right of self-determination, regardless of what Ukrainian laws say. The fact of military aggression doesn’t negate that right.

This is a non-sequitur. The ultimate responsibility for the state of russian politics lies on the russians themselves.

My cousins’ father is from Artsakh, Ukrainian politicians congratulated Azeris with their crimes. I couldn’t care less what Ukrainians have to say on responsibility after that. Try following your own declared principles first. Otherwise it’s not even funny.

It’s about the choices they make. There is nothing inherent to russian society/culture that would justify such a state of affairs.

People are responsible to the degree the structure of power is affected by their choices. Said structure right now is affected negligibly by most of the Russian population.