Just curious of other opinions. Do we think the fact that Americans being heavily armed acts as a deterrent of foreign invaders, or is it more that geographically we are protected and it doesn’t make much of a difference?

https://x.com/SenAdamSchiff/status/2111105476628816119

>A teenager used a gun to murder innocent children.An educator died in a job that should not be life threatening.And yet the GOP majority will again resist any meaningful effort to stop the next school shooting.This is the reality of the current Congress. And it’s heartbreaking.

Likè fucking clockwork. It hasn’t even been 24 hours and you guys are already blaming Republicans who have 0 power in Oregon. Your Gun Control Laws did nothing to stop a Criminal. Locked doors did nothing to stop him. You know what did stop him? A armed citizen with a gun. But of course Democrats wont acknowledge that in their headlines. Because it defeats the narrative you want to paint.

Politicians seem to understand the answer. After all they give themselves armed security. For Congress they get Capital Police. For the President they get the Secret Service. All people with guns. But for some reason Democrats refuse to acknowledge that having Gun Free Signs doesn’t stop evil people with evil intent.

Your immediate reaction is just to ban everything and punish good LAW abiding citizens likè the armed citizen who has a CC permit. Can’t imagine how annoying that was to go get in leftist Oregon.

A armed citizen stopped the School Shooter. Your locked doors didn’t shit. We need to stop trying to take away our 2nd Amendment rights because we have criminals in our society.

The police didn’t stop him a ARMED citizen did.

We need to stop making Schools soft targets.

Politicians give themselves armed security but not our fucking kids.

We give Banks armed security but not our fucking kids.

We give Airports armed security but not our fucking kids.

Every major institution has armed security but not our fucking kids.

Make it make sense.

In my opinion the answer is an obvious yes- the majority of drug deaths are not due to the drugs themselves, but rather the fact that they are criminalized in the first place. Drug overdose deaths (and overdoses in general) are overwhelmingly caused by the adulteration of drugs with substances such as fentanyl. Decriminalizing drugs and allowing the distribution of safe supply drugs (that is, drugs that have been tested and confirmed to be pure) would drastically reduce (and possibly even eliminate) overdose deaths. For an example of the kind of effect legalizing safe supply could have, the Drug Users Liberation Front in Vancouver distributed over 3000 boxes of tested drugs to users, and not only did those drugs not lead to any deaths, they did not cause a single overdose.

I am mainly saying in the case that in the next 5-10 years we get a ai agent that takes over a significant amount of jobs. There is no way that capitalism in its current form such as what the United States has can exist.

L

Why should a passport or id have something as vague as "gender" rather than sex? Categorizing people around sex makes sense, it's as simple as that.

Speaking as a teenager in highschool, why do we have grown ups speaking for us. In my very honest opinion I don't even think we even need them

I get it adults think we aren't "developed" enough or "don't understand" but we very much do and adults would be very surprised at how much we actually know life wise.

we don't need adults speaking for us. If I could I would protest about this too. We don't need lawyers for "lawsuits" for kids, for some apps yes I agree, but some are kinda utterly stupid and parents lying to lawyers just to get the money from the lawsuit. Can we kids get a chance to have a voice instead of an adult who will only spill lies just to get what they want And silence us teenagers and kids?.

I honestly think the government should put up a system where the judge asks the kids what the app does or how it affects them in life instead of a lawyer because please we do not need one we have our own voice for a reason it's called freedom of flipping speech and adults are not allowing us kids to have that.

If someone could protest or even kids themselves and like me could protest about this please do, we all have a voice we just never use it and we are ALLOWED to use our voice as well no matter how young we are.

This is a simple but very important principle. If we don't understand it, we can't understand democracy.

To rule is to exercise authority or control. The only way we have authority or control, over our lives is to use our rights. Without our rights we have no agency and legally have to obey the government. Legally using our rights, allows the people to rule themselves and tell government to "kick rocks".

If we don't understand that, authoritarians can limit or minimize the rights we can use. They'll tell us juries can't nullify bad law or we can't demand grand jury investigations or make citizens arrests of ICE agents or participate in Article V conventions... or however you want to legally use your rights to influence the due process of the country. They'll say that's not democracy.

This allows authority (in this case the 1% and politicians) to limit US to just voting rights. They've conditioned US into thinking just voting is democracy AND they've figured ways to manipulate our voting rights.

Exercising and growing our rights is critical to strong democracy

It should be obvious by now that the Republicans don't have a plan for the Iran war except to bomb, bomb, and bomb some more. And since gas prices are tied to Trump's War, prices won't be coming down as long as the Republicans control the government.

Who's going to end this war?

We’ve had enough discussions about American politics, let’s shift the focus and check-in on the affairs of Europe for a second.

The vibe I get is that there is a tacit acknowledgment of the increase in right-wing activity across Europe (Vox, NR, Fdl, AfD), but also an optimistic denial that Europe is anywhere as bad as the US.

My questions to Europeans:

- Do you think your government is adequately responding to economic issues, immigration, and/or national/cultural identity?
- Is there resentment towards the status quo and perceived government inefficiency?
- Does criticism against centrist/liberal politics also often criticize Ukraine?
- Do you think the centrist/liberal factions of your government are trying to be proactive, or are they more interested in maintaining the status quo?
- Do young adults (18-25) have good job prospects? In particular, how are the prospects for fresh university graduates?

Thanks.

I'm looking for a range of perspectives on the debate over whether Ukraine should hold elections.

Zelensky's presidential term expired in May 2024. Ukraine hasn't held elections since, citing martial law. Trump has publicly called for elections, saying Zelensky "could have ended the conflict many times" and "should hold elections." ( https://www.afp.com/pt/node/3846598 )

Zelensky has refused. After it he went to the UK asking Burnham for more weapons. He told Piers Morgan "no, of course" when asked if he'd resign, calling it his responsibility and criticizing Trump. ( https://www.kyivpost.com/post/87150 )

Street protests broke out in July after Zelensky fired Defense Minister Fedorov, a popular reformer. Protesters demanded accountability, power checks, and elections. Fedorov himself called for wartime elections and accused the government of corruption ( https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cdew8n9erlwo )

How much should corruption allegations against Zelensky's inner circle matter, given he hasn't been charged personally?
Does an expired term change the legitimacy of a wartime leader? Zelensky's supporters say elections can't happen under martial law; critics say that's convenient. Where do you land?

Non-Market Coordination of Labour, Production, Distribution, and Exchange Necessarily Precedes, and is Continuously Required, to Sustain the Modern Market Economy:

The foundational premise is that, before you can have a modern market economy - the kind of impersonal, price-clearing trade at scale that Adam Smith described in The Wealth of Nations (and which is virtually synonymous with the modern nation-state) - you require the formal institutions that enforce contracts, protect property rights, and underwrite a stable medium of exchange. [1, 2]

However, to have such formal institutions, you first require people who will perform those roles and conduct that work - alongside a means of directing and coordinating both the people and their labour.

And this is what establishes the logical necessity of pre-market logic to coordinate and direct labour and production before the market can ever attempt to do so. For anyone to have time spare (from the necessity of subsistence farming) to be able to dedicate any of it towards staffing those institutions, society must already be producing an agricultural and material surplus - which in turn requires an existing division and specialisation of labour. Because society needs a division of labour just to build the institutional foundations that make a market possible in the first place, the market itself cannot be what coordinates that initial division of labour.  [3, 4]

Throughout history, human societies have solved this pre-market coordination problem in different ways. Within small tribal units, labour was coordinated through personal, kinship-based reciprocity; across early agricultural empires, it was coordinated through overt physical bondage in the forms of slavery, tribute, and feudalism. Yet while these non-market logics could organise production, none of them could birth a modern market economy. Kinship reciprocity collapses beyond small networks of personal trust, while slavery and feudalism immobilise workers through direct domination - stripping people of the autonomy required to become free consumers and flexible market participants. 

To generate a modern market economy, society required a different mechanism capable of scaling the reciprocal cooperation of the village across millions of strangers, without resorting to the physical bondage of feudalism or slavery.

And that mechanism was taxation - a form of legal coercion exercised by a sovereign authority who can mobilise labour, command resources, and ultimately create the demand for the very currency on which a modern market will run. 

And this requires the issuance of tax credits (otherwise known as money). The sovereign authority and currency issuer first began by imposing a tax obligation (of n taxes) on their citizens, and then created specific jobs that people could perform to acquire the tax credits necessary to satisfy their outstanding tax obligations. [5, 6, 7]

Of course, taxation did not begin as an enlightened or benevolent force. For centuries of early statecraft, taxation operated as a violently coercive instrument of extraction - not far removed from the slavery, imperial tribute, and feudalism it existed alongside - used primarily by monarchs and warlords to provision armies and enrich ruling elites. Yet unlike direct physical bondage, taxation contained a crucial structural difference: by demanding payment in _currency_ rather than owning the worker's body outright, it preserved a space for human autonomy. And as societies progressed and became more civilised, this fiscal mechanism began to be utilised in far more **amicably coercive** ways - directing resources not merely toward the crown's barracks, but toward the foundational institutions of civil society.

By issuing currency toward public provisioning and reclaiming it through taxation, the sovereign manufactures the **diffused, impersonal trust** required for large-scale specialisation to begin. It is through this fiscal architecture that a widespread societal web of mutual expectation is woven amongst strangers: the farmer can focus on his crops because he trusts that the soldier will protect his land; the soldier protects the land because can expect that he will be fed and sheltered at night; and the soldier can also trust that there are practicing nurses who will be there to tend to his wounds if he is to get injured. 

Rather than replacing the cooperative reciprocity of the village, sovereign taxation is the very mechanism that allows civil society to scale it to the level of a nation-state; because each has a tax obligation that they must fulfil to appease a superior physical power, and yet they are welcoming and amicable to such an arrangement because they can observe the results compared to the alternatives where no such tax obligation exists. 

In the modern day, this is not a particularly relatable story, because the causal chain has mostly become invisible, especially since we do not exactly have tax obligations levied against us _before_ we find work. Yet, to the best of our historical and empirical knowledge, this market-preceding logic of compulsory taxation and public provisioning remains a permanent prerequisite for price-clearing markets to emerge and endure. 

This is because, without the state continuously issuing currency, enforcing tax liabilities in that unit of account, and directing real resources toward non-market foundations (courts, schools, healthcare, and infrastructure), the private market would lose both the stable money it trades with and the social system of capable people it trades within - two foundations that market logic can never provide for itself.

Firstly, it would lose its money, because a price-signalling market cannot bootstrap its own universal unit of account. Left purely to market logic, any private commodity-money fluctuates in value like a speculative asset, and its acceptance in trade remains fragile. It is only through the non-market compulsion of taxation that a currency acquires a permanent, universal baseline of demand - allowing it to transcend its primary role as a tax credit and become a stable unit of account and medium of exchange for private trade.

Secondly, it would lose its people - because, ultimately, the market cannot build its own foundations because it cannot create its own participants. Unlike commodities, human beings are not produced in factories in response to price signals for profit. Price-clearing markets only respond to _effective demand_ - desires backed by existing purchasing power - in pursuit of short-term, capturable returns. Yet human beings enter the world with zero purchasing power, and require nearly two decades of continuous care and investment before they can ever enter the market to work or trade. Because meeting these existential, non-discretionary needs across an entire population is inherently unprofitable, citizens must first be raised, educated, kept healthy, protected, and socialised outside of market logic - by a web of families, communities, and public institutions.

The market uses productive, healthy, literate, and law-abiding citizens, but it does not manufacture them - ensuring that non-market coordination remains the permanent prerequisite for private trade.

And embracing these facts is the most productive thing that capitalism could ever do. Because, when a market economy forgets its own origin story, it begins to treat the social sphere as a parasitic burden - rather than a structural foundation.

Dissolving the Public–Private Dichotomy and the False Conflict Between the State and the Market:

Under the illusion that private wealth is entirely self-generating, it seeks to minimise taxation, starve public institutions, and subject healthcare, education, and justice to the short-term logic of profit. In doing so, the market begins to saw off the very branch it is sitting on - slowly eroding the health, literacy, and institutional trust of the workforce and consumers that it relies upon to function.

Conversely, when a society recognises that social coordination precedes the market, the false war between the public and private sectors dissolves. Funding teachers, nurses, courts, and infrastructure is no longer mischaracterised as a "drag" on the economy, or an act of charity paid for after the market has done its work. Instead, it is understood for what it truly is: the primary investment that makes private enterprise possible in the first place.

A business cannot innovate if its workforce is chronically ill or poorly educated; entrepreneurs cannot take risks if contracts are unenforceable or infrastructure is crumbling. And thus a flourishing market economy does not require a retreating state; it requires a competent sovereign that continuously replenishes the human, social, and institutional capital which private enterprise then has the privilege to utilise and draw upon.

So, once we understand that a sovereign currency issuer does not need to "extract" money from the private market in order to build society's foundations (because state provisioning and taxation are what create and anchor the currency in the first place), our entire economic outlook changes.

The central question of politics is no longer "How much public education, healthcare, and infrastructure can the private market afford to fund?" Instead, the question becomes: "How do we mobilise our real resources and labour to build the strongest possible human and institutional foundation for our market economy?"

The True Macroeconomic Circuit, and Reconceptualising the True State–Market Boundaries:

Once we ask the right question, the true macroeconomic circuit comes into view: first, the sovereign authority issues currency to fund the workers and enterprises that enable fruitful social reproduction. Next, a portion of each individual's newly earned currency is reclaimed to settle the tax obligation levied against them (which helps to anchor the demand for the currency, and thus its value). Finally, the surplus financial wealth that remains in the hands of households and firms becomes the very purchasing power that funds the private market economy.

This reveals that the sovereign’s net spending is the private sector’s net financial surplus. So, when a government obsessively pursues austerity - slashing public provisioning while maintaining high tax extraction - it does not merely starve schools, hospitals, and courts of the financial resources necessary for adequate operation; it actively drains the private market of the net financial assets required to buy goods and services too. Deprived of state-issued purchasing power, households and businesses are forced to turn to commercial banks where they must take on ever-increasing loads of private debt just to keep the market turning. Starving the social foundation does not make the private market leaner or stronger - it instead renders it fragile, indebted, and prone to crisis.

Does this mean a sovereign state can simply issue limitless currency without consequence? Not at all - and this is where taxation asserts its secondary modern role. While a currency-issuing state never faces a financial constraint, society always faces real resource constraints - as there are only so many trained nurses, skilled builders, megawatts of energy, and tonnes of steel available at any given moment - just as a nation's capacity to produce and sell exports will affect its capability to import critical resources without also importing inflation.

If combined public and private spending exceeds what our workers and enterprises can physically produce, the result is inflation. Modern taxation, across income, corporate profits, unearned asset appreciation, and consumption, is what drains excess purchasing power when competing demands outstrip finite real resources and ensuring those resources can be prioritised for more systemically vital non-discretionary and foundational needs, instead of being used to bid up prices to satisfy discretionary desires.

Understanding this sequence gives us a clear blueprint for where the boundary between state and market belongs. We should never subject either the prerequisites of market participation or finite, non-reproducible bottlenecks to the logic of for-profit ownership. Healthcare, education, basic security, and justice are not ordinary commodities to be rationed by price; nor can spatial land, natural resources, and natural monopoly infrastructure (like water, energy, and transport grids) be privately monopolised. Because these are the foundational inputs that allow citizens to enter the market as equals, allowing private gatekeepers to own them only breeds predatory market power pricing - making social reproduction unaffordable and productive enterprise artificially costly.

Conversely, when society guarantees its social foundations publicly and holds its physical bottlenecks in common trust, the private market is finally freed to do what it actually does best: generating useful price signals where competition is possible, demonstrating financial discipline, improving reproducible production, rewarding genuine innovation, and discovering operational efficiencies.

This is why the public and private sectors can work so well together when coordinated competently - provided the boundary between them respects the limits of contractibility. 

Whilst non-reproducible bottlenecks and foundational goods cannot legitimately be owned for profit, private enterprise can still operate under public charter where the profit motive genuinely aligns with the public interest. Crucially, this mechanism must be restricted to commodified, physically verifiable deliverables - such as laying fiber networks, constructing transit lines, or installing renewable energy grids. For these discrete technical assets, the state can deploy reverse auctions, inviting private firms to compete within strict engineering and access mandates. In these domains, market discipline excels: profit is derived from engineering ingenuity, logistical innovation, and material efficiency - allowing the public to reap cost savings on outputs whose quality can be objectively measured before payment is cleared.

Conversely, we must strictly exclude high-touch, relational commons, such as healthcare, elder care, child welfare, primary education, and custodial justice, from competitive tendering. Because human care, compassion, and dignity cannot be fully codified in a procurement contract, subjecting these services to the lowest bidder predictably incentivizes "quality shading": cutting corners on unmeasurable human labor, suppressing front-line wages, and gaming administrative metrics to extract a margin. By deploying market competition solely where outcomes are physically deterministic and keeping our high-touch social reproduction under direct public administration, society harnesses private technical efficiency without compromising the human foundations that make the market possible in the first place.

The Real Failures Are Thus Political:

Of course, recognising the indispensable role of the sovereign brings us face-to-face with an uncomfortable reality: it reveals the state as an extraordinarily powerful institution, or at least, an institution capable of extraordinary utility - if only it makes the right decisions. Too often at present, it does not. The reason our foundations feel neglected is rarely a lack of sovereign capacity, but a failure of political direction, because modern electoral dynamics (driven by short-term campaign cycles, sectarian partisanship, regulatory and oligarchic capture, cronyism, and the pursuit of popular support over long-term outcomes) systemically misalign the incentives of (often corrupt and/or incompetent) governments with the genuine interests of their citizens.

It is obvious though that we cannot simply abolish the need for social coordination - so we have no other choice but to perfect it. The next great frontier of political economy is not privatising the state, but pioneering democratic innovations; redesigning our political and administrative institutions so that the government becomes genuinely aligned, competent, effective, efficient, accountable, and autonomous.

So, Here's What I Believe That We Must Do About It: Constitutional Reform to Democratise the Sovereign and Finance:

In this section, I will attempt to separate between the broad diagnosis of ‘what’ I believe needs to change, and my more personal opinions and conjectures on the alternative mechanisms which could underpin more specifically ‘how’ we might practically engineer those outcomes. 

Even if one disagrees with the exact suggestions below, I hope to bring awareness and spark debate around the existence of alternative frameworks, concepts, ideas, systems, and mechanisms which could be adopted. 

Firstly, at a structural level, we must cure electoral short-termism, partisan gridlock, and the polarising incentives that make even broadly popular, long-term investments so difficult to implement - transforming the roles of our elected officials from ideological combatants into executive administrators and diplomatic representatives of the state.

My favoured mechanism to achieve this, would be to transfer much of the core agenda-setting and policymaking authority to permanently institutionalised, sortition-based bodies of citizens, who would be equipped with genuine sovereign power. By entrusting democratic deliberation to a stratified, representative sample of the public itself, elected politicians are no longer tasked with warring over ideology, but are instead employed to administer the citizenry's instructions at home and represent the state on the world stage.

However, because ordinary citizens drawn by lottery are not domain specialists, a sortition assembly is vulnerable to manipulation by self-interested and/or biased civil servants and facilitators who draft briefing papers and select the expert witnesses in ways that quietly steer the outcome towards their desires. And so, to ensure the assembly remains genuinely sovereign, its epistemic architecture must be built on three constitutional safeguards: adversarial briefing models (where competing analytical teams cross-examine each other’s assumptions in plain language - rather than relying on a single "consensus" narrative); autonomous investigative power (equipping citizens with an independent budget to commission outside research, alongside legal subpoena powers to compel raw departmental data and summon frontline workers or whistleblowers); and staggered, overlapping tenures paired with a dedicated citizen oversight chamber - ensuring that institutional memory is passed directly between cohorts so a permanent bureaucracy can never simply outwait and outmanoeuvre a rotating public. 

Secondly, I believe it is important to realign electoral incentives, so that elections select unifying, competent administrators - rather than divisive and popularist politicians who encourage the electorate to turn against each other. 

This goes hand-in-hand with the first recommendation of implementing sovereign sortition-based bodies of citizens, because such bodies would already inherently guarantee true proportional representation of the electorate within government, which would allow us to shift the focus of elections towards the competence and broadest cross-societal appeal of a single coherent party, to encourage politics to be about consensus-building and constructivism rather than the polarising partisanism that often results from plurality voting (such as FPTP) and the incoherent, fragmented and tribal sectarianism that often results from the ‘proportional representation’ promised by ordinal methods (like STV or IRV). 

My preferred voting method would be a simple cardinal method, like STAR voting.

Thirdly, we must sever the link between private wealth and political power so that these administrative and diplomatic offices remain completely free from oligarchic capture.

Practically, this can be achieved by banning all corporate, trade association, and foreign political donations entirely, capping individual private donations at a modest egalitarian ceiling, and publicly funding elections through egalitarian mechanisms such as "democracy vouchers".

Fourthly, we must permanently police the boundary between the commons and the market, ensuring that neither the human prerequisites of market participation nor finite, non-reproducible bottlenecks are enclosed for private rent extraction.

To make this operational, our economic governance must look beyond narrow antitrust enforcement toward a comprehensive constitutional settlement: legally ring-fencing foundational public goods from privatisation, enforcing strict public-utility and common-carrier mandates on natural monopolies, and using land-value and resource taxes to reclaim the unearned economic rent extracted from finite land and natural assets.

And finally, at a structural level, we must end the state’s institutionally self-imposed financial capture - stopping commercial banks from pumping credit into unproductive asset speculation, while preventing private bond markets and offshore currency speculators from holding public provisioning hostage.

As a practical overhaul of our banking, fiscal, and monetary architecture, a competent sovereign should use targeted credit guidance to steer domestic bank lending away from land and monopoly bottlenecks toward real innovation and productive enterprise; directly coordinate its central bank and treasury (so that funding our social foundations is never subjected to the veto of financial markets); and deploy well-targeted capital flow management whenever necessary in the public interest - insulating the nation's currency from predatory speculation and destabilising capital flight to safeguard its foreign exchange health and domestic purchasing power.

In the end, a thriving market economy depends on a thriving social foundation - and that foundation depends on a democracy worthy of the power it wields. We should not demand for a smaller and weaker state; what we should demand is a smarter constitution to democratically steer an adequately and proportionately sized one. 

I take a centrist political stance.

Needless to mention, against those who prepare with the intent to cause harm, one inevitably, unavoidably, and must also prepare; if countermeasures are omitted, it will eventually become impossible to resist, which in reality results in giving the opponent the power over our life and death. In other words, ignoring or making light of this is equivalent to choosing enslavement.
Some media reports state that Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark, currently visiting Japan, also stated the following in a TV interview:
"We recognize that hackers are also using AI (SI) which is available to everyone, and we strive to prevent them from using these tools through new security methods and the like."
Of course, the speed of SI is something that leaves no room to stand against manually; therefore, phrased differently, refusing server facilities would mean handing over the power of life and death, which implies that this is an option leading to the enslavement of the citizenry and thus results in the conclusion that it is illogical.
https://news.yahoo.co.jp/pickup/6598729
https://newsdig.tbs.co.jp/articles/-/3010032

On the other hand, while maintaining beneficial SI requires a massive number of data centers, I can also understand the feeling of wanting to reject attracting data centers because their benefits are hard to perceive.
The fact that foolish selectors themselves tempt more strongly, like the sweet talk of the devil, is probably something almost everyone can intuitively understand.

Therefore, for operators planning to operate data centers involving a power consumption of a certain scale or more, how about determining their scale based on a rate (α) established in proportion to the amount of power used, and imposing the following as obligations?
- Based on the aforementioned rate (α), to employ and engage a large number of personnel for socially contributing occupational duties from the districts neighboring the data center operation.
- Based on the same aforementioned rate (α), to mandate assistance toward welfare or educational facilities in the areas surrounding the installation region.
- Based on the same aforementioned rate (α), to construct and operate multiple facilities that serve as the cornerstone of regional promotion.
- To mandate the maintenance and provision of transportation and information-communication infrastructure around the data center construction and operation area.
- Based on the same aforementioned rate (α), to lay out business and industrial parks in the surrounding districts and continue attracting them so that the facilities continue to be filled above a certain level.
- Without being based on the same aforementioned rate (α), to bear the obligation to constantly monitor environmental pollution and deterioration over a wide range—including the energy environment and living environment—and report changes.
- In the event that environmental pollution is confirmed, regardless of the polluter, to impose an obligation on the data center operator to take some sort of measure, including approaching the actual polluter, to achieve complete improvement.

What kind of opinion will you show regarding the above? Can I expect a reply?

Let me know what you guys think? What are 3-5 shifts, or more that have really lead to those problems.

Would love additional thoughts in comments below.

I am generally pretty left-wing progressive (those are NOT the same thing!), but with a notable libertarian streak. Universal healthcare, free college, government investment in mass transit and nuclear power, support for co-ops and labor unions; I support all of this.

Unfortunately, the proponents of those policies bring with them other policies, many of which are specifically aimed against my own best interest. Absurd gun laws, DEI, social programs that only benefit minorities or women, censorship of speech and press they dislike, "Green" policies which are actually worse for the environment, etc.

Not that I have any issue with minorities or women, but most of the people I know are poor, rural whites; why are we being asked to pay more and accept oppression on the justification that those groups had little money and were oppressed in the past? What kind of sense does that make? "Two wrongs make a right?"

Moreover, how do you expect these people to actively vote against their own best interests? Forget ethics for a minute and look at sheer pragmatism: The white working class consists of 100 million Americans, the single largest voting bloc there is, whom it is simply impossible to form a majority position in government without.

That means that the policies they are proposing will never happen... and they know it.

Do you want to help minorities and women? Start by helping everyone.

I want to get perspectives from across the political spectrum on a foreign policy trade-off happening right now.

The context: The Strait of Hormuz disruption has caused the largest oil supply shock in history. Global oil supply crashed by 10 million barrels per day in March 2026, and Brent prices surged about 65% in a single month.

OFAC issued a general license on October 9 authorizing Russian diesel imports until April 2027. Russia committed to supplying 300,000 tons immediately, 500,000 tons in November, and 1 million tons afterward (source - https://ofac.treasury.gov/recent-actions/20261009_33 )

Trump told Zelensky to stop attacking Russian refineries, arguing they were disrupting global diesel supply and hurting American consumers. He also suggested Ukraine might need a new leader. (source - https://www.wsj.com/world/trump-calls-on-ukraine-to-stop-hitting-russian-refineriesand-replace-zelensky-cc9bada8?eafs_enabled=false )

How do you see this situation?
And does the answer change depending on where you sit politically?

Both major parties warn about a rise in extremism in the US, but when you look at institutional power, it’s very one sided.

What does the socialist or communist left actually control? DSA is the largest socialist org and while they have 250 members in public office, almost none serve statewide or in federal office and it's almost all blue city councils.

CPUSA holds zero elected seats. There is no socialist or communist equivalent of a Federalist Society, Heritage, or ALEC.

Now let’s look at the right wing libertarian network control? This is a 50-year infrastructure built by the Koch network and others. ALEC drafts legislation, with about 1,000 bills introduced annually, 20% becoming law. It’s funded by corporations like ExxonMobil and Koch Industries.

The Federalist Society built a judicial pipeline, placing conservative judges including Roberts, Alito, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett.

Heritage Foundation wrote the Project 2025 blueprint. That same network of billionaire families has put more than $120 million into the groups behind Project 2025 alone.

The elite elements include the Cato Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the Federalist Society, Americans for Prosperity, the State Policy Network and many others. That's writing bills in all 50 statehouses, a Supreme Court majority, entire university economics departments and dark money groups like DonorsTrust that can vastly outspend any socialist org.

So why is communism and socialism treated as an existential threat to the US when it controls zero federal branches, while right wing libertarianism… deregulation, privatization of public services, gutting the administrative state, repealing labor and environmental protections, all while currently living in what’s arguably an oligarchy already, has already captured state legislatures, courts, and executive branch staffing?

Is the fear of socialism mostly symbolic Cold War legacy, while the libertarian project is the actual governing agenda? Or do you think the libertarian influence is overstated and socialist ideas are more dangerous long term?

I'm from the United States, and from what I can tell the US is on the worse side of this. However, from my research it seems like we're not the only ones.

So first off is "prison" really a good option? When someone does something wrong, we lock them in a cell and control every aspect of their lives for a set time, often multiple years, sometimes even decades or life. Now what do they do in prison? According to Federal Bureau of Prisons, the have some educational options there. However, some other source (The Marshall Project and Prison Policy Initiative) show that these and work experience in prison do not amount to many useful skills outside of prison. There's also a good chance that depending on the case, it could have gone to civil court as well and a large monetary punishment was given. This means that a lot of people will be in debt with no useful skills, if and when they are released. And if they had the skill set needed, there is a massive issue with the idea of hiring "criminals", regardless of whether they have become better people or not.

There's also an idea that a lot of people seem to have that "if a criminal has done it once, they will certainly do it again". I feel that this is the definition of a self-fulfilling prophecy. As I see it, of course they'll do it again because if they've spent years in prison with no useful skills and no one willing to hire them, how are they supposed to live? So they'll take up criminal activities again, and again, and again until they die, either in prison or out of it. According to CSG Justice Center, Alaska has recidivism rates going up to 57%. This particular source only follows three years where possible though.

Then there's the sentences, which are a complete mess. We all know the meme "Diddy only got four years". Then there's the case of Ryan Holle, a man who lent a car to a roomate (William Allen Jr) who committed an armed robbery that killed a woman. Holle had no clue they had any plan of robbing someone, and still got life in prison without parole thanks to the felony murder rule (it did later get changed to 25 years, but in my opinion that's still too long for lending a car to a roomate). Another example, Lockyer v. Andrade in which California's three-strikes law allowed two consecutive terms of 25 years to life for stealing $150 worth of videotapes. Then there's Brock Turner. He only got 6 months for rape.

Next thing up is what seems utterly insane to me, the idea of trying a minor in adult court. For anyone interested, you can find the age of criminal responsibility in various countries here, but in the US depending on the jurisdiction children as young as 10 can go to adult court (and that can lead to a life sentence in some cases). I personally think 10 is way too young to be giving out a life sentence. In fact, I had an argument with someone earlier who said a six year old who shot a teacher should be charged as an adult, which I do not agree with at all. In fact, the user told me that the kid made a concious choice to pick up the gun and shoot, and that it is wrong to think that such people can be rehabilitated. I think they could if we actually tried.

This is a lot of stuff, and while I have much more to say I will try to keep it relatively short. So I'll finish off with what I think we should do instead. First off, invest in actual rehabilitation. Teach people how to become better people. Next, stop assuming people are set in stone. They aren't, and they can change. Finally, reserve prison only for those who truly show that they will not change. Because the sentence shouldn't be based on the actual crime, but based on the person. Because a 50-year old child predator definitely deserves prison time. But a kid who picks up a gun not completely understanding the complete implications of taking a life does not deserve a life sentence.

So what all do you guys think? Do you agree? Do you not agree? Am I missing important information?

I have been reading something and there I found something. It was about an empirical or behavioural approach to understand a political theory. It was about a behavioural turn. Basically, if you want to understand the state of democracy in a country, you need to understand how the citizens actually vote, how elites behave, how political participation occurs and how decisions are made. And this is where I would like to add something. I think every single one of them is equally responsible. Yes, many will push off that responsibility may not be equal, including the one who dissents and the manner of dissent. But hear me out. It is a cycle, a vicious one, similarly like the vicious cycle of poverty we used to study in school. What do you think, what better measures the state of democracy in a country. No AI usage will be appreciated.