Direct democracy would literally be a popularity contest.
Democracy is not a popularity contest - if that's what you've got, the people organizing the popularity contest have already neutralized democracy a long time ago.
The concept of democracy is compatible with any consensus-based decision-making process that happens from below - once it's dictated from above... well, you get the picture.
stuff is just worse blatantly reverse engineered copies
The reason they only had reverse-engineered copies is because the bigwigs at the CPSU decided that the workers didn't need personal computers, despite the fact that all the computer research facilities in the USSR (of which there were plenty) recommended that they do.
If the USSR had thrown it's weight behind personal computing we could have had some interesting shit.
I doubt that... Biden in up against more than just Trump. He's basically been painted into a realpolitik corner - and, to be fair to Biden, it isn't even really Biden's fault.
The thing that amuses me about a ‘secret’ society like this is that they are entirely made up of people whose political positions are worn on their red hats- and their cars- and their lawns- etc.
It's not so much secrecy as just plausible deniability - the same way we know nine out of every ten old white guys in the US political establishment are white supremacists but are given the benefit of the doubt by the media because they don't use the n-word in public.
A new analysis suggests that many Black Americans believe the racial bias in U.S. institutions is not merely a matter of passive negligence; it is the result of intentional design.
Believing that white supremacism could be anything other than *intentional design" is peak fucking white liberalism.
They don’t target population centers, they target military bases that always happen to be near a population center.
That's exactly the excuse they used to justify every aerially-delivered atrocity from Hamburg to Hanoi. Britain was routinely doing it in the middle-east nearly a decade before the Nazis did it at Guernica.
If you don't want to believe me, you can believe Curtiss Le May himself.
There are no innocent civilians. It is their government and you are fighting a people, you are not trying to fight an armed force anymore. So it doesn’t bother me so much to be killing the so-called innocent bystanders.
The mass-slaughter of civilians was the point then, it's the point now - the nuclear ballistic missile is simply the logical conclusion to this. It literally allows for mass-murder at the push of a button.
You need to stop confusing the propaganda with the actual reasons.
Didn't say you were... that's not the point. The point is that the US has always treated civilian populations as perfectly expendable - to be kind of honest, I'm not even sure they don't see the US population in the same way, either.
Our government’s grievances are of their government. Not the people.
Have you noticed how all those nukes the US government maintains don't target governments but population centres instead? The mass-slaughter of civilians have always been the US way - this time, they just did it with misinformation.
A Russian ship docked in Cape Town last year carrying armaments destined for the "War On Terror - Mozambique Edition." The US embassy pretended it didn't have access to that intelligence, and accused the SA government of (supposedly) supplying Putin with weaponry. The rapidity with which these accusations was championed by white supremacist political organisations (including the second largest political party) made it all even more suspicious. We literally had people here (you can imagine which kind) calling for the US to regime change us.
The incident raised more questions than anything - but the white liberal media here in South Africa didn't bother with those... it merely seemed interested in using the entire affair to attack the ANC. It was pretty clear to people here that there was something bigger going on than merely one measly little Russian ship - and, personally, I suspect that the ANC's "sudden" concern over what is going on in Gaza is a retaliation against the US for this. They sure as hell didn't have these concerns when they allowed Israel to buy up South African corporations left, right and centre...
Democracy is not a popularity contest - if that's what you've got, the people organizing the popularity contest have already neutralized democracy a long time ago.
The concept of democracy is compatible with any consensus-based decision-making process that happens from below - once it's dictated from above... well, you get the picture.