Now if we can convince that side to then use the victory to change the rules, then so be it.
What if Democrats not only don't change the rules to improve the democratic process, but they also fail to even talk about significantly improving their constituents' lives? What if they also can't be bothered to take climate change seriously? And what if -- after all that -- they do genocide?
I used to think like you do, but at some point in the last decade or two Democrats stopped being a worthwhile option. The party will have to be either radically changed or smashed in order for any major progress to happen anytime soon.
There was also a ceasefire and prisoner exchange, and Trump immediately forcing Israel to accept it torpedoed the "we don't actually have any influence over them" excuses.
"Well we could immediately escalate any conflict to end human civilization" is not the boast you think it is.
Look at the current war in Ukraine -- the closest we've come to direct conflict between two nuclear superpowers. Nukes are useful only to the extent they make the other side think twice about a large, conventional invasion. If you actually use them against someone who can retaliate, you lose.
I can believe that a lot of what we call laziness is really something else, but I'm not in the maximalist "lazy does not exist" camp. Whatever your goals are in life, you need at least some ability to buckle down and do those necessary things you'd rather not do. All else being equal, some people are better at that than others.
This is exactly the hell we’ve been trying to prevent for fifty years, and failed.
The whole project of liberalism -- the idea that we could slowly reform American institutions instead of upend them -- has failed. On anything close to the current path we will see no meaningful action on climate change, no significant redistribution of ill-gotten gains, and no lasting checks on the ability of the state to carry out the type of arbitrary brutality that's the focus of this article.
It's time to think about which radical changes need to be made most urgently, and demanding those changes as a prerequisite to supporting whatever political leaders or movements emerge.
It's also helpful to highlight the relationship between imperialism and fascism. Fascism can be described as turning the tactics and violence of imperialism (that are initially reserved for the periphery) inwards, on "undesirable" parts of the imperial core. Usually this follows on the heels of closing imperial horizons.
Also, enormous monopolistic companies are centrally planned themselves. Companies like Walmart and Amazon have internal economies the size of some national economies, and their employees, teams, and departments aren't buying and selling resources amongst themselves -- the allocation of these resources is planned.
Attempting to run the internal operations of a large company like the free market was actually what killed Sears:
Lampert intended to use Sears as a grand free market experiment to show that the invisible hand would outperform the central planning typical of any firm.
He radically restructured operations, splitting the company into thirty, and later forty, different units that were to compete against each other. Instead of cooperating, as in a normal firm, divisions such as apparel, tools, appliances, human resources, IT and branding were now in essence to operate as autonomous businesses, each with their own president, board of directors, chief marketing officer and statement of profit or loss. An eye-popping 2013 series of interviews by Bloomberg Businessweek investigative journalist Mina Kimes with some forty former executives described Lampert’s Randian calculus: “If the company’s leaders were told to act selfishly, he argued, they would run their divisions in a rational manner, boosting overall performance.”
Anyone who's worked at a large company could tell you that the plans they make aren't flawless, but central planning at scale is not some scary untested idea, or a disproven relic of the past. It's happening right now in large swaths of major industries.
A huge plot point is the exploitation of a new underclass that turn into irreverent terrorists who commit the worst crime imaginable.
I think this is pretty harsh.
The Free Navy is portrayed as a radical subset of belters who have gone rogue from the legitimized, Fred Johnson-led OPA government. Our POV character from the Free Navy is Filip Inaros, whose whole arc is becoming disillusioned with the group and walking away. Their motivation does not justify the genocidal attack on Earth, but is certainly a legitimate grievance -- there are millions of belters who will not be able to adapt to the gravity of the new worlds, and so they may well be left to die out or be re-subjugated. They think "the universe will just move on without them."
And the cruel conditions they're subjected to are resolved: belters become the dominant power in the 30 years between where the show ends and where the books pick back up. The ones who are willing and able have essentially unlimited real estate to settle on in the new worlds, too.
"no u"