I hope that we’ll find a way to block that bs, like the Kremlin troll farms etc.

Yeah, for sure. The Russians have been busy in all countries. The reason things got out of hand in the states is because you have a two party system. You only need to control a few people to control enough to take over the country.

That being said, Americans need to take a page out of the French play book at this point. If you try to make a Frenchman work an extra half hour a week, Paris will burn. That’s the level of outrage you need here. Nothing short of that will be effective. Don’t protest, riot! A few people hanging about with plakards isn’t going to cut it when the government is deciding which TV shows they’ll allow, threatening politicians, protecting pedophiles, killing witnesses in federal custody, detaining people without cause, deporting/imprisoning people without trial, and deploying combat troops against peaceful protesters.

I’d like to point out that all this shit is not normal and Americans need to understand how deeply fucked up the situation is. From where I’m standing I’m not sure most of them do. Yeah it’s regrettable that fascism took hold in the states despite the rest of the world screaming at them to stop, but what’s really alarming is that they’re just kinda going along with it.

I find that the the same authoritarian, isolationist, and anti-intellectual mind-viruses that permeate through society in the United States (especially in rural communities) have a beachhead here in Western Europe

America’s worst export.

😢

And how’s Europe and such doing on gay rights, women’s rights, diversity, privacy rights, health science, climate science, wealth equality, economic policy, territorial threats…

One comparable out of many doesn’t make a glass house.

For the record, we average citizens don’t want to be the “world police”. This is what President Eisenhower was referring to as the “Military Industrial Complex”.

Starting in  the  1980s,  the  United  States,  which  insisted  on  strict  terms  for  the  re-payment of  Third  World  debt,  itself  accrued  debts  that  easily  dwarfed those  of  the  entire  Third  World  combined — mainly  fueled  by  military spending.  The  U.S.  foreign  debt,  though,  takes  the  form  of  treasury bonds  held  by  institutional  investors  in  countries  (Germany,  Japan, South  Korea,  Taiwan,  Thailand,  the  Gulf  States)  that  are  in  most  cases, effectively,  U.S.  military  protectorates,  most  covered  in  U.S.  bases  full of  arms  and  equipment  paid  for  with  that  very  deficit  spending.

This has  changed  a  little  now  that  China  has  gotten  in  on  the  game  (China is  a  special  case,  for  reasons  that  will  be  explained  later),  but  not  very much — even  China  finds  that  the  fact  it  holds  so  many  U.S.  treasury bonds  makes  it  to  some  degree  beholden  to  U.S.  interests,  rather  than the  other  way  around.

So  what  is  the  status  of  all  this  money  continually  being  funneled into  the  U.S.  treasury?  Are  these  loans?  Or is it tribute? In the past, military  powers  that  maintained  hundreds  of  military  bases  outside their  own  home  territory  were  ordinarily  referred  to  as  “empires,”  and empires  regularly  demanded  tribute  from  subject  peoples. The  U.S. government,  of  course,  insists  that  it  is  not  an  empire — but  one  could easily  make  a  case  that  the  only  reason  it  insists  on  treating  these  payments as  “loans”  and  not  as  “tribute”  is  precisely  to  deny  the  reality of  what’s  going  on.

• Except from the Beginning of David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years