the supreme Court does not interpret the constitution, they apply the constitution to laws.

That’s a pedantic dispute, they interpret the constitution when applying their understanding of the constitution to laws.

They are not some God-like Watchtower society, and when they stray, they Must be impeached.

Theoretically that would be nice, but getting two thirds of the Senate to agree on anything is unrealistic.

We, the people, elect our representation in Congress and are at fault for all of this.

Eh… We don’t exactly have a direct democracy, and the bicameral nature of our representative government was created to empower conservatives. This was made even worse by the Great Compromise.

No, it is not. The people have failed.

That’s a contradictory statement. The constitution is null and void if “the people” have failed to uphold it. The constitution isn’t self evident, nor is it enforceable or interpretable by any single individual. It’s a social contract defined by the courts and enforced by its martial arm.

When you swear an oath to uphold the Constitution you aren’t swearing to uphold your personal interpretation of the Constitution. You are swearing to uphold the legal definition of the Constitution, inpreted by the supreme court. A court which has made it pretty clear that prior interpretations no longer really matter.

used to think that “left” and “right” were diametrically opposed terms, but i don’t see it that way anymore:

I mean… It depends on the definition you are utilizing. The term originated from the seating arrangement from the French National Assembly prior/during the french revolution. With advocates for a republic on the left, and monarchist on the right.

The most common modern geopolitical definition is now the left supporting socialism and the right supporting capitalism. Two economic systems which are fairly diametrically opposed in an economic sense.

imperialism: Imperialism means to conquer other countries for the sake of imposing your own norms and values on them.

Again, it depends on your definition. But imperialism is generally a policy of a powerful nation who extends it’s rule over another country through direct or indirect means. This can be for economic, strategic, or even political gain, most usually to exploit the resources or labour of another nation.

That’s actually what the northern states of the US did to the southern states of the US before they became the US.

No…just no. You can really do an imperialism on yourself, that’s just definitionally incorrect.

isn’t it just to do something illegal to get what you want? isn’t every change in human history illegal, before it becomes the new norm? wasn’t it illegal for gay people to stand for their rights in the 20th century?

What?

Fascism is purposely hard to define as it’s a reactionary response to the democratic process and thus depends on vagueness to grow within a democracy.

However, fascism can be recognized by its extremely hierarchical structure of governance, its goals as a political body, and how it organizes capitalism to serve its own goals.

liberals from the coastline will loudly proclaim that the conservative “child marriage” (starting at age 14) laws are a monstrosity (because that’s, idk, child abuse or sth), but at the same time, you will find in many schools in the coastside a subject called “sex education” where people learn to use condoms and such. such classes are typically held at about age 13 or sth (well, it was for me). guess why they do it? because they recognize that teenagers do in fact have desires to experiment with sexuality, and offering the courses is simply recognizing that and making the best out of it.

Child marriage laws are bad because it gives a legal avenue for adults to prey upon children… Not because people want to prevent teens from sexual exploration. What is wrong with you?

It’s not just weird, it’s materially impossible.

I was mainly talking about the people being weirdos. Every monarchist I’ve ever run into have been extreme oddballs.

Technically you can be an anticapitalist and still not a leftist. You could be one of those weirdo turbo conservative monarchists.

The only smart person was the guy with the other bear who at first ran back to help, but then realized he would just bringing another bear into the mix. The other bear seemed a little too eager to go back as well.

Is this copium? Maybe, maybe not.

In a place like Texas… More than likely.

In a state that’s closer to a swing state it’s easier to over do it with gerrymandering and spread out your support too thin. In a state where there’s a lot more support to spread out… Accidentally fucking up is a little more challenging to do.

Plus, I would find it difficult to believe that political operatives wouldn’t be able to grasp the idea that things like the Latino vote from the last election might not be as dependable this year and react accordingly.

I hate that people don’t understand that shitty video can’t be analyzed to get an accurate event reconstruction based on small details. Not saying that this is or isn’t Luigi, I’m saying that trying to utilize what little facial features are available on this bad video shouldn’t be used as evidence against or for his case without other supporting data.

Poor quality video is not an accurate reconstruction of reality. Compression issues can create visual artifacts like blurring, pixelation, obscuration, or banding. Hell, even different lens types can distort someone’s looks to a huge degree.

No worries, my main criticism was mostly cuisine based. But seriously, if you ever want to impress someone with a home cooked meal, risotto is a really easy but flashy meal. I honestly think it’s one of the easiest ways to cook rice.

Lol, risotto takes like 30 min to make. The hardest part about putting a PC together isn’t the assembly, it’s picking out what parts you want and then buying them all.

For me it’s dealing with my indecision of balancing cost and performance and then the obsessive need to find the best deal for every part I picked.

But yeah my main point was I think you’re overestimating how long risotto takes to cook.

Yeah, unfortunately in my area gas range is actually more efficient than induction because the electricity is mainly by natural gas anyways.

How does it work with the wok? Wouldn’t it just be the bottom getting the heat?

Right… But one could say the same about the proletariat pre-revolution.

we don’t like corn syrup right?

Yeah, we need corn syrup…please do not be insensitive to our addiction.

There is no stopping the impulsive need to add corn into everything. Corn for the fuel, corn for sugar, corn for the livestock, corn for the hole. If you can cram corn in it, we’ve done it.

However, without confirming in reality, some took it to mean that the peasantry would oppose socialism if they weren’t already proletarianized. It isn’t quite as stupid as it sounds.

I can see how someone unfamiliar with the countryside could make the assumption. However, as a person who’s lived and worked on a farm it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. Farming communities are extremely interdependent on the local community to get just about anything done. No one person or family can work the land by themselves, it really does take a community if you’re not a wealthy land holder.

Trots take it to mean that all socialist countries are generally highly flawed to outright bad

Yeah… He was a messy removed about a lot of things. Really a mixed bag of conflicting ideas in that little dude.

Well… The problem is that the Catholic Church does not act as a unified body, especially in America.

Trad Catholics in America have been hating the pope since basically Vatican II. That doesn’t mean that “they are at war with the church”, just that organizations like Opus Dei are actively trying to pull the church further to the right.

So while some of the church maybe doing good, the other part of the church is ending abortion rights and partaking in other crazy shit on the supreme court.

but prevalent idea that the peasantry would be counter-revolutionary, as they would have more of a petite-bourgeois ideology based on their largely self-driven living conditions.

I guess hindsight 20/20, but I had always figured they were referring to the landed peasants like kulaks or sub-kulaks. Seems incongruous that peasants in poverty would be counterrevolutionary.

Trotsky also rejected that a country itself could be socialist, as he believed internationally the system being capitalist would cause a reversion to capitalism eventually.

Kinda agree with this to an extent.

When the Russian revolution failed to inspire successful revolution in the west, they reached a dillema. Trotsky feared the Russian peasantry would attack, and so wanted to go on the offensive first

What time frame are we referring too here, and what peasantry? Im guessing well before the implementation of the five year plan? Also, in his references to the peasantry I always kinda figured he was speaking about the kulaks.

Chinese Trotskyists were wrong, wanting to attack both the KMT and Japan before kicking out Japan. Mao and the CPC formed a temporary alliance against Japan, then kicked out the KMT, which ended up being correct.

I mean… Like most things in this time period, it kinda depends on when you are talking about. In the beginning most communist did not like the decision to form a united front with the kmt, but acknowledged it as necessary. There wasn’t really much of a delineation between trotskyists and stalinist until when it came to the kmt until the Shanghai massacre. And tbf it’s kinda understandable that people like chen duxiu would want to break/attack with the kmt afterwards.

Why? The government has better purchasing power than any private corporation and most things, but especially infrastructure become more economic at a greater scale.

Another point is that utilities are natural monopolies, and that the government building and controlling the infrastructure would cut out the profit motive that is currently driving up the cost.

Trotsky’s plan of Permanent Revolution rested on the idea that the peasantry would erode socialism, because he thought they could not be truly aligned with the proletariat.

Isn’t that just in the case of later developing capitalist countries? My understanding was that he believed later developed capitalist countries would be unable to build the industrialized economy that creates a large proletariat class. So in these countries the existing proletariat would have to seize control and then later form an alliance with the peasantry down the road.

However, I don’t think that means he only wanted to develop socialism with western nations. I mean Stalin and him had a major rift develop over Trotsky wanting to support the Chinese communist and Stalin siding with the kmt. One of the things I kinda agree with when it comes to Trotsky was his opposition to the socialism in one country policy.

This is kinda dependent on what year it is of course, Trotsky was kinda all over the place once he fell from grace.