Agreed. This strategy works best in a two party system. Much easier to divide and conquer only 2 choices. Not so much with ranked choice voting and multiple parties. The US was a time bomb of corruption wating to be purchased from either political party. Putin just paid the most for GOP access and got it.

Agreed. And if it wasn’t clear, I think Trump is an idiot. He sees everyone but himself as an enemy, including a vast majority of the country he is President over. He’s not saving the economy in our country - he’s working exclusively for himself and dismantling it for his favor.

The defense money discussed in this meeting is very likely going to Trumps family or friends (like the literal 2 Billion his son recieved from Saudi Royalty) As our economy is very much on its way to another great depression, including the corruption and needless Tariffs that caused it last time.

Everyone that works with Trump gets ass fucked, because the only thing he wants is fealty and self enrichment. There is no benefit towards our country or citizens in his actions, just himself.

At the very least, the leaders of NATO understand this, and sucked his dick over this deal just to make sure the US didn’t leave NATO as Trump has made very clear he gives no fucks about. Without the US’s military backing, NATO is at immediate threat of hostilities, certainly by Russia who wouldn’t hesitate to push past Ukraine and into Europe as Putin has made clear is his goal. The leaders of NATO are simply making a deal with the devil to avoid literal hell.

It sucks you have to deal with those consequences, but at least you have a government that isn’t banning abortion to kill more of your people through sheer ignorance.

Yep. But the point is Donald doesn’t realize his dick is getting sucked by someone trying to get a favor out of him rather than just because he’s such a swell guy.

He’s a narcissist. All he sees is compliments, not the clear manipulation behind them.

Give Trump praise, he’ll do exactly what you say. Which is why he thinks Putin is his best friend. Putin is just using Trump as a convenient idiot that’ll do anything asked as long as Trump feels he’ll be complimented by it.

All he has to say is something like:

“Oh Donny, at this time your big hands and strong will are our only hope. Won’t you please bomb Iran to protect the world and become it’s hero?”

And that’s all it takes to start WW3. And Trump would post the message thinking it’s a compliment.

Nothing says MAGA like taking the highground over a kid dying of terminal cancer. Your prioties are just as fucking awful as the people you vote for.

Just FYI, you’re arguing with someone that agrees with you.

I agree with you too, but only about your main point. Not “all men.”

That assumption is the same logic as bigots and the very “men” you are trying to chastize. Let me just rephrase what you wrote to make my point:

It truly is ‘all women’ when it comes to a discussion about being involuntarily celibate. Using whataboutism to studiously ignore the issue at hand.

You literally are using the same arguments that incels do to justify their hatred and punishment of women.

Just changing the who and what in that argument does not make it a logically sound one.

Anecdotally, I’m a man, and one that has literally saved a woman from being arrested for assault because I recognized she was having an extreme bipolar manic episode, and not just “going crazy” like her female friends believed when they called the cops on her.

The belief our penis prevents us from acting humane is laughable bigotry.

If you want to make a scientific point, don’t follow it with unscientific insults.

I don’t disagree. But I have a unique take on the fall of empires and the evil inherent in humans.

Imo, evil is a byproduct of human selfishness. Taking without empathy towards where it’s coming from. Money, power, property, and even life itself.

There are people that do this because of their isolated environment. (Raised to think anyone that doesn’t look like them isn’t human, and therefore it’s alright to exploited them for gain.)

And there are those that do it because they are sociopaths.

While Sociopathic diagnoses isn’t an easy thing we can pin down. In a world where our social behaviors can be dramatically affected by our genetics (autism) it’s not hard to assume sociopathy is just another manifestation of something like autism. Just a more extreme one - where a person literally is incapable of understanding others as human with emotions like them.

These people are born incapable of understanding that other people have feelings at all. So they don’t contribute to communities, they don’t help others, they just lie and pretend to be like others to exploit for their own gain. They lie to appear social and kind (towards some), as that attracts others in that group they can easily take from.

You know the uncanny valley? The unsettling feeling we get when we see CG that looks human, but doesn’t quite move or act like a real human?

imo that’s an evolutionary response to our habit of breeding sociopaths. They pretend VERY hard to be human, but lack the natural primate communal instinct everyone else is born with. They look human, but don’t act like it compared to the rest of the community.

In smaller groups, like towns or families, these people can be kicked out and otherwise ostracized to protect the smaller community from being exploited.

But in larger communities, it’s an all you can exploit buffet. In larger communities, sociopaths thrive because there is an endless amount of trusting people they can exploit. If they fail, they just move on to the next group of suckers.

If they manage to extract enough power, then all they have to do is keep lying to maintain it. But always, and eventually, at the cost of the larger community itself. There is a finite limit of exploitation that once reached, no longer serves to preserve the larger community, just the power of the sociopaths in it. The community collapses, as it’s support mechanisms have been diverted to the sociopaths, and the sociopaths are then unable to lie any longer and usually blamed / killed / ostracized for their bullshit now that it’s obvious.

So while sociopaths are thankfully not the norm when it comes to humans, just a few in a group can take down our largest efforts to civilize.

This is why smaller human cultural groups tend to have much longer histories than massive empires. (Bushido and martial arts still exist, but the Shogunate does not). We are always going to breed sociopaths, and in turn they will make sure we never get too big for our own good.

Problems arise when the world itself is now fairly united, and sociopaths have no where left to run and hide.

If we want our biggest countries and empires to persist longer than 250 years, then we needs laws that prevent sociopaths from doing their thing.

I’m a big fan of wealth caps. Because it’s non intrusive on a person’s genetics, and the only people that complain about having 800 mil to spend instead of 1 billion, are sociopaths.

Anyway. That’s my way of saying:

• We are not all evil, mostly it’s sociopaths (and the wealthy brought up inhumane bubbles.)

• Sociopaths are the reason every human empire has fallen.

• There’s a lot of powerful sociopaths running the world because we spent decades collecting all our best resources together in large shiny empires that called the worst of us like a moth to flame for their exploitation.