I propose a system that puts a percentage of plumbers into the halls of government equal to their percentage in the population. same with scientists, and psychologists, and doctors, and electricians, and mechanics, and fry cooks, and teachers, and cashiers, etc.

How do elections work in Vietnam?

What you describe of people from every profession being involved in government is essentially how the Vietnam Fatherland Front works. It’s composed of 44 member organizations, primarily unions, a broad cross section of society that anyone can easily be a part of, and they conduct oversight over Vietnam’s elections. The actual administration of the government is done by elected officials, who do not have to be members of the Communist Party, or the Fatherland Front. It’s similar to what you proposed, except more democratic, since the cross section of society that makes up the Fatherland Front only oversees the elections, while policy is decided through the elections themselves. Even if you claim that the Fatherland Front secretly manipulates the outcomes, the system you’re proposing seems to be one where something like the Fatherland Front would rule outright. The only thing missing is the element of randomness, which only makes the people making decisions less accountable and leaves the possibility of someone who’s views don’t represent what the people want getting into power.

My chud brother accused me of being indoctrinated before, and I’m like, my brother in christ actuality, we were raised by the same conservative parents, in the same conservative area, in many of the same conservative schools. I know what you believe backwards and forwards. You can’t tell the difference between my beliefs and Joe Biden’s. One of us thinks critically about our own beliefs and tries to understand other perspectives, and it sure as hell ain’t you.

It’s just really funny on some level when they’re so set on reading the same talking points from their script and try to go off about privileged out-of-touch coastal elites who only believe things because they’re never exposed to outside ideas, with someone they literally grew up with.

The US geopolitical strategy of trying to sanction Russia while starting a trade war with China and saber-rattling over Taiwan and then being shocked when China doesn’t participate in the sanctions is genuinely bizarre. It really leads me to believe that the powers that be just have absolutely no idea what they’re doing.

I mean, I guess if you want to understand the mentality, you can just talk to the average lib, they’d absolutely do the same because they aren’t capable of thinking beyond, “country bad.” And saying it might be a bad strategy to push rivals towards each other by giving them a common enemy is surely enough to brand me a “tankie” and dismiss everything I say. When I put it that way, it’s not really surprising that the people in the halls of power are on the same brainrot.

A majority of the Israeli public, at 78%, expresses high trust in the IDF, showing no significant change compared to the last three months (75%–77%), since peaking at 83% during the war against Iran (Operation Rising Lion) in June 2025. Among the Jewish public, trust in the IDF remains very high at 90% in this survey, compared to 86% previously, while among the Arab public it remains very low at 32%.

https://www.inss.org.il/publication/survey-october-2025/

The 90% number seems to be Jewish Israelis as opposed to Israelis in general.

long standing contracts

That graph he just posted kinda pokes some holes in this narrative that it’s just “long standing contracts” when there’s a massive increase in aid during his term.

There’s also the reality that you lot tend to ignore/deny which is that Biden bypassed congress to send additional weapons.

And you describe the US as “the biggest weapon manufacturer in the world” as though that somehow makes it better instead of worse. We’re already producing ridiculous numbers of bombs, and then we’re sending even more bombs to arm a genocide, and that’s somehow OK?

It’s so ridiculous. All the US is doing is having Israel do it’s dirty work so it has plausible deniability that rubes and partisan hacks can hide behind.

I’m afraid my brain is just too wrinkly to allow facts and evidence to just slide off it and just imagine that reality is whatever I feel like based on absolutely nothing, like you can.

China is just bribing people to continue living by providing material improvements to their quality of life. That’s cheating 😤

Jesus Christ do y’all come out of the woodwork for this. Blathering on about “great replacement” type shit, literally indistinguishable from the type of stuff you’d see on Fox News.

In fact, if you educated your racist ass about actual facts and history, there have been plenty of progressive Islamic societies, they just tended to get overthrown by the CIA. The more fundamentalist tendencies were promoted as more reliably anti-communist.

The notion that Western societies are in any danger whatsoever of turning to Islamic extremism is completely, laughably absurd, a racist, far-right conspiracy theory. The idea that women dressing a certain way would cause that is on par with people who say that gay people cause hurricanes.

Go back to Reddit with that shit, you are not welcome here.

If you mean it how I think you do, then you very much deserve it.

Four bars is already too many, adding a big red line down the middle is not helping, and tbh if you took away the star it’d at least be symmetrical.

If your flag is gonna be busy, at least be creative and put like a dragon or something on it.

Sorry CAR.

There was a tendency in this era to adopt extremist positions in reaction to the USSR and Kruschev and the fear of something similar happening in China. Even in China itself, this led to the excesses of the Cultural Revolution, with student-led militias killing each other, committing atrocities, performing show trials, etc. There was overcompensation that, afaik, went beyond anything that happened during the actual revolution, and some of it was just maximalist rhetoric thrown around to performatively demonstrate how unlike the revisionist Soviets they were, sometimes without really meaning it.

The Khmer Rouge was kinda like a kid getting relationship advice from someone going through a messy breakup. They took the most extreme rhetoric going around in China and internalized it. The Chinese communists didn’t really educate the Cambodian movement on basic tenets like “don’t be racist,” that the fledgling Cambodian movement actually needed but which the Chinese likely took for granted, and instead just emphasized, “don’t be revisionist.” For the same reason, the PRC wasn’t really watching out for the possibility of them becoming too violent/genocidal.

I can only lead a horse to water, I can’t make you think.

Don’t try to explain things you neither understand nor care about then.

But you’re explaining it with such a bad example that it undermines the whole point, it’s like if you said, “Some things are just objective facts, like which poems are good.” That to me indicates that it’s not really a simple concept at all, you just don’t see the depth because you haven’t examined it. Being unwilling to examine it, framing that examination as “the bottomless argument of philosophical truth,” only reinforces that. If you’re not willing to examine the question, then don’t assert that you know the answer in the first place.

Yes.

Not trying to say that everything is subjective, but that in particular is kind of a bad example.

I just think you’re being dismissive, while setting your own ideas as being apart from philosophy.

Apparently? You keep making philosophical assertions.

You don’t get to assert your philosophical views and then say, “I’m not interested is discussing philosophy” to avoid examination and criticism of those views.

I see, so you’re only interested in asserting your own philosophical positions, not examining or defending them in any way.

people created the ideas of countries, then made a list of them. USA is on that list.

People? Which people? If I get a bunch of people and declare a micronation within what the US considers it’s borders, is that objectively a country or not? Or suppose I convince a bunch of Americans that Germany isn’t really a country, does it then cease to be a country despite what the Germans themselves believe?

In any case, I would think that if something falls under the standard of, “This is true because a bunch of people say it is, even though there’s nothing physical you can point to to prove it” then it seems somewhat absurd to call that an “objective fact” What do “objective” and “subjective” even mean, then?

truth=facts. facts are objective. it’s a fact that the USA is a country in north America. there is no disputing that.

Not trying to say that everything is subjective, but that in particular is kind of a bad example.

Countries are socially constructed. The US is something that only exists so long as people agree that it does. There is no objective, material way of determining where one country ends and another begins.

In fact, there was quite a bit of disputing that historically. Prior to the American Civil War, lots of people said that the US was not a country but a union between countries, they were called “states” after all, and it was common to say “The United States are” rather than “The United States is.” There are still successionists today who argue for that interpretation. To say that the US is objectively a country means that there must be something in material reality that we can point to to prove that one interpretation is correct and the other is incorrect. What is that thing?

Whatever that thing is would have significant implications for how we see the world and look at other disputes, whether we’re talking about Spain and Barcelona, the UK and Scotland, China and Tibet, or Israel and Palestine. For example, if you say that historically, most US secessionists supported slavery and therefore they lacked moral character and the position is illegitimate, then it follows that what states exist is a function of the moral character of their supporters, and that seems to be adding lots of assumptions and moving away from any sense of objectivity.

“The US exists” is much more subjective than something like “This chair exists.” With the latter, you could argue that grouping a collection of atoms into the category of “chair” is arbitrary and there’s no way of determining when an atom stops being a part of “chair,” but that’s much more pedantic than socially constructed concepts that don’t really have a physical essence.