It was organized over twitter, “big players” were not involved. Hell, Trump himself was only interested in showing up because he likes being on stage in front of people. There was no plan, no goal. It was the political equivalent of an angry sports riot.

isn’t political violence our main export?

Yeah, Trump himself has no policy commitments. He’ll say whatever he thinks is popular biased on the last thing he’s seen on television. In office, he delivers bog-standard republican policy because that’s who his cabinet gets filled with.

I don’t see Biden changing his stance on arming Israel. Trump could, but the question is whether would it last long enough to actually affect policy.

Season 5, Episode 13 For The Uniform

He does this to a Maquis settlement after they had similarly poisoned two Cardassian planets.

the special effects are really impressive, it’s worth checking out

You are looking for a Great Man of history to pin this on. You’d rather believe someone nefarious is in charge and pulling the strings from an ocean away, than to see this for what it is; an empire with no real conscious oversight. A pile of self-interested businessmen, politicians, and militarists doing whatever they can to line their pockets, profits above all else.

The US has, per capita, the largest prison population and, outright, the biggest military on the planet. If there’s a road to ‘unfreedom’, we traveled down it a long time ago.

You’d rather believe Trump is result of foreign interference, that our own institutions would never result in this without being sullied from outside. It’s fan fic, it’s Cold War nonsense.

Trump is the consequence of our political systems, of our spiteful culture, of our economics that promises success and leaves people sick, broken, and in debt. So what if the Russians had a few hundred Facebook posts? That “seed” would not have taken if the soil weren’t already fertile. Frankly, I don’t think it made a difference. We were barrelling toward Trump with or without the oh so spooky slavs typing on a keyboard.

All hardware becomes legacy hardware in time. Even if we assume they’re eventually able to deliver on all those great big shiny promises, I’d rather not have to schedule an outpatient surgery just to keep up on emails. Pocket touchscreens being practically mandatory is bad enough…

From further up the thread

A liberal is someone who:

• Upholds the modern nation state and is thus against monarchy (against whom the first liberals rebelled against)
• Upholds capitalism and market economies, and with it property rights
• Upholds electoral parliamentary systems of governance
• Usually believes in some version of the social contract or similar theory from which the legitimacy of the nation state and capitalism is derived.

This describes the bulk of the Democrat and Republican parties. US politics doesn’t have a left-wing as it is understood in the rest of the world, our center is between two right-wing ideologies.

now now, let’s be fair

it’s also so that evangelicals can ban recreational sex

And your metaphor was a fun oversimplification.

Desertification has increased

Local flora has decreased

Rabbit populations have octupled

Deer populations have doubled

Yeah yeah, you see the individual and not the historical pattern.

Isn’t it funny that the US keeps doing this? The presidents are incidental, flitting in and out of office with the whim of the public. But the conflicts? Those last. Nuclear rockets parked in Yugoslavia one century, flooding Ukraine with weapons the next. You know children in Vietnam are, to this day, born with napalm induced complications?

Doesn’t this all ring a little too familiar to you? Do you think maybe our grandparents had cute little nicknames for Khrushchev, comparing him to Hitler, when they were our age?

Amazing, a century latter the blame is still squarely placed on Russia. Those people must not be capable of self-determination, am I right my good Cold Warrior? Good thing we had this stockpile of depleted uranium, by jingo! So what if it leaches into the groundwater? Canadian mining firms have been poisoning Ukrainian groundwater for decades now! What’s a little rare-earth-elements between allies, amiright?

They outlawed starting a conversation in Russian. It was criminal for a business not first say something in Ukrainian. Like, imagine if Arizona tried to pass a law that criminalized conducting business in Spanish.

Induced demand – the production of weapons necessitates the use of weapons in order to keep shares from crashing. Like a shoe factory regularly changing the design and fashion to keep from flooding the market, blood is spilled to keep the 401Ks safe.

Welcome to the Second Cold War, you’ve been here along.

well now i wanna just cus i’m getting pushback

you’ve fallen for my trap card; the allure of forbidden fruit!