Those are some good points/better ways to say it.

Then asserting that these Other People are trying to Take Over.

Yeah that’s a more accurate analysis I think. When most people reject socialism out of hand, I don’t think they’re really engaging with any of it’s actual ideas, they’re just associating it with scary foreigners.

For a lot of these core ideas, the very pitch-line for them is corrupted. Even removing the question of rich people having an edge, you have these core messages that only justify the status quo.

Yeah. I do get that. There are plenty of these aspects of society that I would want to change to be more fair, compassionate, etc. But when it comes to discussing these ideas with regular people, you need some kind of starting point and using the system’s own premises against it I think is a reasonably effective tool to do that. Once we have a political and economic system free from the control of a handful of greedy people, I think it’ll be a lot easier to take the next steps.

I haven’t done enough research to know how well it does in every category, but I was recently thinking of moving to Vietnam for similar reasons. I’ve learned a decent amount about it and while it’s definitely still a developing country, it seems like it’s oriented in the direction I want. It’s been making huge strides towards poverty reduction and while it’s not entirely there, it’s getting close. Similar to modern China, while it has markets, the government does a lot to make sure important things are adequately addressed including stuff like infrastructure and apparently they’re getting close to implementing universal healthcare. They have an unaligned foreign policy. From what I’ve seen, the government seems reasonably responsive to the people. And lastly it sounds like they’re reasonably friendly towards foreigners. I’m kind of shocked they’re not more pissed at Americans, but apparently there are US expats living there who have said they have good experiences with the people.

The problem with me moving anywhere right now though is I’m super depressed, so doing all the things I’d need to do to move, including learning a foreign language, would be really difficult for me and I’m not sure I’m ready to live without my current support network. It’s kind of stressful though because it really does feel like it might be urgent to leave now. Even before Trump I hated it here, but now it looks like the fascism train is rapidly accelerating and I’m an autistic Jewish communist. I might not be immediately in the crosshairs thanks to me being white, but I doubt I’m that far down the list.

This is what’s frustrating about trying to talk to people about socialism. It’s everything that liberal capitalist democracy claims to be but isn’t. They’ve just been brainwashed into thinking it just means authoritarianism.

• Democracy: You want a government by the people, of the people, for the people? Well a system that lets the rich and powerful pour their vast resources into corrupting it doesn’t allow for that. And that’s before we even get into the explicit ways in which US “democracy” was set up to be resistant to popular influences. Also, in a less direct way, the more of society that is privatized, the less in under the preview of whatever semblance of democratic control we do have.

• Freedom: Under capitalism, your freedom is directly proportional to your wealth. Rich people and corporations can do whatever the hell they want and can often do things that infringe on the freedoms of others, but if you’re poor, or even just not super rich, your ability to make choices in life is heavily constrained by what the market offers and what you can afford. If you can’t afford to lose your job, you have to follow what your boss tells you. But hey, that’s not a government, so it doesn’t count right?

• Meritocracy: People want to be rewarded for their hard work and keep that reward? Well capitalism doesn’t reward hard work. It rewards having enough money and power to siphon the value of other people’s hard work. It doesn’t matter what people did to get to the top, they could have inherited it, they could have done crimes, etc. They could be completely undeserving of it and still be put in charge and still take your money.

• Innovation: Capitalism doesn’t promote innovation as anything more than a byproduct of a different force. ANYTHING that makes profit is incentivized, regardless of how productive it is for society. Sometimes that’s new tech, but things that are equally valid under capitalism include: Weapons, cheap plastic crap, getting people addicted to things, finding ways to offer less and charge more, suing others to try to stop them from using anything vaguely similar to what you own IP for (regardless of if you were even the ones to originally make the thing instead of just acquiring the IP) etc. Under this framework, you can even consider lobbying the government as profit generating activity. You spend some money to get the government to do things that will allow you to make more money in the future.

I could go on, but you get the idea. It’s just really hard to make the jump from having people agree with these things to realizing that the system itself is to blame and that in order to do better we need to change it.

Thanks. I never thought of that. /s

Depression. Lots of depression. And anxiety. And probably some other stuff.

Tried tons of different treatments and nothing has really worked. Going to try therapy again on recommendation of my psychiatrist, but I’ve only had negative experiences with therapy and I still really don’t see how it’s going to fix anything.

Thanks, but I’m currently too depressed and anxious to be a professional anything at the moment unfortunately.

Unfortunately this is the movie. So it’s longer and we have to pay for it.

So this is necessarily going to oversimplify things because it’s a comment on a website. I invite anyone who wants to add more insights or clarifications to do so:

So lets start with the issue of how this would happen: The only ways to remove US president from are political, not legal. We can either vote them out, or impeach them. Impeachment is not a legal proceeding held in courts, it’s a process that is kicked off by a vote in the House of Representatives and finished with a vote in the Senate. So whether or not a president can be impeached almost entirely depends on the political makeup of the legislature. Right now the Republicans have a majority, so unless they all have a stroke tomorrow and wake up with a conscience, such a vote will not pass any time soon.

So now we move on to the question of why our politics is this way. On a very fundamental level, the US isn’t a real democracy. I’ll try to highlight the factors I think are most relevant:

1. We have a very powerful capitalist class that is able to use its immense wealth to deeply influence politics. While this has always been the case to some degree or another, (fluctuating with some significant historical events) the Citizens United https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._FEC Supreme Court decision essentially codified the right of these capitalists to spend unlimited amounts of money to influence politics. The result of this is that the vast majority of our politicians in significant positions support capitalists, as they likely wouldn’t be there without their assistance. This unites them in various matters having to do with benefiting the capitalist class, either directly through low taxes, lax regulations, etc, or indirectly through supporting the capacity for the state to engage in violence, as this violence is necessary to both maintain their power against the working class as well as go around the world stealing shit from everyone else. Even if Democrats and Republicans disagree on a broad range of issues, they will generally be united in matters that secure their power and the power of their donors. So even if they dislike some of what Trump does, or at least the optics of how he’s doing it, they’re not going to push back too hard because some of the stuff he is doing is stuff they value anyway.

2. US elections are structurally designed in a way that limits people’s choices and overall influence on the outcomes. First Past the Post voting, a voting system in which the winner is merely the person who got the most votes, even if they aren’t the one which a majority of people want. In a race between 3 candidates, a, b, and c, a gets 34%, b gets 33%, and c gets 33%, a wins even though he not only barely has more votes than the other candidates individually, but also that the other candidates are collectively more popular than him. More people DIDN’T want him than did, but he still wins. This means that lets say candidates b and c are politically closer to each other than they are to a, even if they disagree on some stuff, then the result of both of them running and allowing a to win is that now neither of them get a candidate who is even close to what they want. This means that in a system like this, a 3rd party ALWAYS acts as a spoiler. This effectively pushes 3rd parties out of serious competition for the race. Fewer parties = fewer choices = less likely that there is a candidate who you will like to vote for = less representation in government. And because people are unlikely to vote 3rd party for the above reason, this makes those voters essentially captive to the other party, because if they don’t vote for them, they will get the worse option. Meaning that party has even less incentive to try to attract these voters by listening to their interests.

3. The other structural issue is gerrymandering. Elections are based on districts and those district boundaries are decided by politicians. So the same people who can benefit from how the districts are set up are the same people who get to actually do the drawing. There are all sorts of ways to gerrymander https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerrymandering to get a favorable result for your party. So not only does this allow parties to cheat, it effectively allows politicians to pick their constituents, further freeing them of the competitive need to be responsive to their needs.

4. Through the use of the aforementioned state power and tons of propaganda, any semblance of a labor movement has been crushed. The US does not have a class which is politically united by common material interests. Without this uniting force and without the solidarity that comes from directly working with others, the US has effectively been able to divide the working class along other lines. Racial, cultural, etc. It’s also pretty easy to make them irrationally fear each other because if you never actually meet with someone, you’re more likely to believe what others tell you about them. Between the war on drugs and war on terror, the government spent over a decade making people afraid of foreigners and various other minority groups.

The result of all of this is that the US does not have any real left flank. It has no significant political force that’s primary concern is the welfare of everyone. Instead we have the stupid loud Nazis and the college educated closet Nazis who wear nice suits and talk good. In the past decade or so as the illusion of shared prosperity deteriorated, it’s become more clear to more people how broken things are and they are disappointed in the politicians who made it that way and/or fail to adequately and honestly commit to addressing these issues in the future. Neither party will address these issues for the aforementioned reasons, so now we are seeing essentially a marketing battle. Republicans are really charismatic towards people who align with them culturally and know how to rile them up to engage in politics. Democrats are… boring. They are empty suits. They look like your image of the stereotypical politician. Perhaps with the exception of Obama, who was a uniquely charismatic figure in politics in this period of history even if he wasn’t much less corporate than any other politician. So 2016 rolls around, people are discontent after a disappointing 8 years of Obama letting them down, and the election was between a TV personality who knew how to get people riled up and an ancient politician who was so out of touch with regular people that she barely seemed human. Nobody was getting excited to go vote for more of the same and she certainly wasn’t going to score any voters off charm. Fast forward to 2020, we end up with Biden after the DNC did everything they could do block out a more likable candidate and I’m reasonably sure that the ONLY reason he won was in reaction to just how terrible Trump’s term was. Then we get 4 more years of empty suit, people get disappointed, and now we’re at 2024. Remember how They put up yet another boring politician nobody trusts or likes. Meanwhile, remember how we spent over a decade making people afraid of foreigners? Well even though both parties are responsible for some combination of those policies and messaging, who is going to be better at capitalizing on that fear and hatred? The boring closet Nazis? Or the really loud, dumb Nazis who play into people’s fear and hatred? So surprise! They pick the loud Nazi over the next empty suit the Democrats ran. But hey, to the politicians and the capitalists they represent, this is still preferable to an actual left wing candidate winning. Keeping people divided and distracted is currently the best way for them to maintain power.

So now that we have the fascist in power, the people who need to do their job to stand up to him either can’t or won’t. Ask yourself how you can expect a politician to resist one fascist when they are actively supporting another fascist committing a genocide? Are these people who have the political principles or will to be genuinely against state violence, overreach, or violations of human rights? And even if they did, they don’t have the majority needed to do anything about it.

So yeah, I wouldn’t expect Trump to get impeached any time soon. The soonest it could possibly happen would be after the mid-term elections in 2026, but that’s assuming the Republicans don’t do anything to get in the way of that election. (Also, I don’t actually know, is the Senate up for grabs in the next election? Only about 1/3rd of the seats are in contest each election, so I don’t know if the current makeup is such that the Senate could change hands next election.) I’m not optimistic about this, but who knows?

During high school I did a summer study program in France and also briefly went to Amsterdam for a weekend.

In college I took a vacation with some college friends in Japan, going to several cities across the country. It’s kind of funny, we’re all weebs, but one of my friends learned Japanese in college and he’s pretty much fluent. He actually speaks better Japanese than Chinese despite being from a family that immigrated over here from China this generation lol.

It was definitely nice seeing the different kind of things they had in those countries as well as a lot of the similarities. That said, I don’t know that I know enough about them to talk intelligently about their modern politics.

Thanks. Do only some of the instances have an old version? I see one for lemmy.zip but it doesn’t show up for ml or lemmygrad.

So I just pick one of them and I’m good? Any suggestion which one to pick? Just the biggest?

EDIT: Also, am I able to just be logged into both so I can see both sides at the same time or do I have to swap back and forth if I want to check out world or the commy instances?

How does that work? I assumed one Lemmy account covered everything. Where do I go for each of these?

Probably? At least in the sense that I’ve managed to gather from the very confused online arguments about the term. I’m a communist. While I’d love it if we could all peacefully vote our way into a better society, I recognize that it’s probably not going to happen and whatever nastiness we’d have to do to actually make the change is worth moving past the endless awfulness that is capitalism. And for the existing countries, while they’re not magical Christmas lands, I’ve learned they’re not quite as bad as the capitalists have fear- mongered.

And I get Anarchists thinking it’s states all the way down but…………. I don’t know what to tell you. What’s the alternative? Even if I want to get where you’re going, how do we get there? Where is the bus/train? I don’t see any running to get there.

Man now I can’t watch Seinfeld anymore? Why people got to do this?

I took AI courses in college and it was fun to learn about then when it was a bunch of toy examples that showed the potential of these systems, but it was clear enough to anyone in those classes or doing that research how not ready they were for real applications because of all the known flaws with how model training worked. And then some ceos just ignored all that and started blowing up the bubble.

So my answer is the research models that could play video games kinda good. Everything after that was getting ahead of ourselves.

have you been to a psychiatrist, ideally more than one? Done any research yourself beyond just the depression?

Yes. Quite a few at this point. A few that just diagnosed and managed medications, but then there was also a clinic that did a brain scan to try to help figure things out, this is where I learned I was also autistic, but that didn’t really lead to anything useful. I also went to try TMS and Ketamine. Lately I thought that I might have ADHD, so I went to go get tested for that, but they decided that wasn’t it even if I did have some attention problems, they were just more related to the depression symptoms. After that, I’ve started doing ECT. I’m still in the early stages, but I’m starting to get to the number of treatments where people supposedly start feeling it helping and they of course ask me every time I go and I just never know what to say. I can’t really tell if I feel any different. At some point if it’s not helping I’m gonna have to stop because this is easily the most painful, disruptive treatment I’ve had so far. At least with the Ketamine I was basically just zonked out listening to music for like an hour. The ECT involves going to a hospital that’s like a half an hour away, not eating for 8 hours, not drinking for 2 hours, getting a needle stuck in my arm for anesthesia, then getting my brain zapped. I feel like shit the rest of the day. So if it’s not working, more than any other medication or treatment I’ve had, I need to end it. But I don’t want to miss my chance at what feels like the last thing that might help.

I think the interesting thing about the US is that its propaganda sews the seeds for eventual dissent. It runs on ideals about freedom, democracy, equality, individualism, progress, prosperity, etc. The national mythology isn’t “fuck all the poor people.” The trouble is, the US isn’t any of these things. It just makes it hard to recognize that or what the alternatives are. So I wouldn’t say I moved along the political spectrum as much as I slowly started to notice that I wasn’t where I thought I was. You grow up seeing Obama go from “Hope and Change” to continuing to do all the wars, torture, and spying… it makes you realize “hey I don’t think these people were being honest about sharing my values.” And it’s just a long, slow trip from there to figuring out what movements actually represent your politics.

We can all lie and give some cultural sites that you should totally go see but… food. All my real suggestions are food related. If you’re not from the immediate surrounding area, you absolutely have to get at least one slice of cheap pizza. Not from a fancy tourist place. Just literally find some random thing on a corner selling it for like a dollar or two and you will have the best pizza you will have had in your life (again if you live outside of the NY metro area).

After that, look to see if there are any street food festivals happening. Might be some interesting stuff.

There are quite a few touristy restaurants in the middle of the city that are going to be expensive and crowded, but they can still be fun to go to once if you don’t mind the cost and can get a reservation.

For actual activity suggestions… highly dependent on what you like. Museums? Parks? Shows? They’re all there, it just depends on what you want. I guess one recommendation in that regard is that if you want to see a broadway show and are willing to be flexible, there is a ticket counter in Time Square that you can go to day of to get discounted tickets for a show that day.

Not Christian, so take it with a grain of salt, these are just my observations:

These are people who thought that public schools not actively supporting their religion was the same thing as religious persecution. If “woke” stuff represents their shrinking influence over public life, then a government being “anti-woke” lets them go back to asserting themselves over others, or at least not having their views challenged. So even if the leading guy isn’t a moral paragon of their religion, the fact that he’s giving them permission to go back to their old ways is probably good enough.

Also, not really relevant, but the last bit about the Pope is funny to me. Most American Christians are Protestant. Evangelicals specifically are Protestants. While it probably isn’t a big deal anymore, tensions between WASPs and the more recent Catholic immigrants from Italy and Ireland were a feature of early to mid 20th century politics. It was actually a pretty big deal when JFK was elected because he was Catholic. So I really doubt Evangelicals care much about the Pope other than when he happens to agree with them.

Some good answers already here, but I can only answer for myself: I used to be that kind of leftist that was “Well I want socialism, but not like those scary foreign authoritarian countries. They’re doing it wrong! Or that’s not really socialism!” At some point after learning more history and talking with others online, I’ve softened my view on these places. Some of that is learning that some of what I knew about them was straight up misinformation, but some of it comes from a shift in perspective: These aren’t abstract ideals of countries. They’re real countries. With real people, real histories, real material conditions, real geopolitical relationships to deal with, etc. They’re doing something really difficult and it’s really easy to be an armchair quarterback while sitting cozy in the US where I don’t have to deal with any of their tough decisions or the consequences of them. Am I happy with them doing some authoritarian policies? No. But maybe they’re necessary to deal with the interference of the US? I don’t know for sure if that’s the best approach, but I don’t have to imagine the counterexample of what it looks like if you don’t take defensive measures, the US has helpfully provided a bunch in the form of all of the countries they’ve backed coups in for the crime of electing even a slightly leftist government. We could squabble about better ways to deal with this, but neither of us has the full context to have an educated discussion on the matter. Also for the genuinely bad stuff, I wouldn’t go as far as specifically supporting those things, but it’s worth putting them in perspective. You can’t talk about China online without someone bringing up Tienanmen Square, meanwhile the US has been a never-ending avalanche of evil in it’s short history, but you can talk about any number of things not related to politics in the US without a random leftist wandering into the discussion about the latest hollywood movie shouting the entire lyrics to “We Didn’t Start the Fire.” I mean we’re happy to bring all that stuff up if it’s in the right context, but people are so deranged about communist countries that the ONLY thing they can think to bring up in relation to them is their less savory moments that may or may not even be true/exaggerated.

It’s really hard to sort good information from bad about these places because there’s so much propaganda. I get that those other countries have an incentive to put out their own propaganda, but it’s hard for me to know what their reach is or what their motivations are or how much they are lying vs countering US misinfo. Meanwhile I KNOW the US has a fairly sophisticated system of propaganda spanning government agencies, media companies, NGOs, etc. I KNOW the US is motivated to prop up the interests of capitalists and try to stop other countries from pushing back against them. A lot of the bad shit and lies the US has done is just straight up declassified history. So I’m sorry if I’m a little skeptical about what the empire that’s made it it’s business to deny self-determination to countries around the world has to say about those countries.

As for Russia, I’m not specifically a supporter. Ever since the USSR collapsed they’ve been another capitalist, imperialist country. But in terms of scale they’re just not even remotely comparable to the US. They are at worst a regional power and outside of nukes can’t really threaten the US on the global stage. So when the US war machine starts saber rattling about them, I know what it’s for because I’ve seen it a million times before. We always need an external enemy to justify the massive amount of money we spend on the military and all of the capitalists who profit from it. Even if I think it would be good if someone in the region pushed back against Russian aggression, I think feeding the beast that is the US military industrial complex is a net negative for the world. Not that I really have any say in it. I can’t remember the last time my congressperson or senator asked if I wanted to give another couple billion dollars to their friends in the “defense” industry. And then of course there was all the hysteria about Russian interference in our elections from the Democrats. I don’t even care if they’re right or wrong. That’s besides the point. The function of the claims is what is more valuable to look at: The implication of “Russia is subverting our democracy by interfering in our elections.” is “We had a previously uncorrupted democracy before the Russians got involved. Please ignore how our own billionaires have bought out all of our elections.” It’s a way to shore up support for a failing system by externalizing it’s problems.

I just want to live in a world where we can all live dignified lives. US capitalists are the current greatest obstacle to that dream. I’d rather have imperfect allies against that than throw my lot in with the “Endless war, exploitation, and ecological collapse” team.