I hate how charities are run by rich assholes who pay themselves or their family and friends 6 to 7 figures while doing very little to actually help people

I wouldn’t go that far. Some traditions can be a positive that help give people a sense of shared community: christmas trees, presents and gluhwein for christmas, turkey for thanksgiving, etc

Workers for capitalism

Trump and his fascists deserve most of the blame, but I fear that liberals won’t learn from this. Realpolitik is bullshit. When you promise to help people but then sell us out to lobbyists and the donor class decade after decade after decade, then people lose all faith in institutions. Facts don’t matter because those facts were used to gaslight time and time again.

If you are rich you can rape and do whatever you want.

This is why I hate capitalism so much. Extreme power disparity is the heart of tyranny and the extreme disparities in wealth that capitalism creates only leads to extreme disparities in political power.

I fear that the US went past a breaking point and that the US will fully be an oligarchy after Trump is done

How so? My dad voted for Trump’s fascism, but my mom did not. I am not going to avoid my mom just to punish my dad.

Advertising is absolutely morally reprehensible. It is propaganda that exists only to manipulate people into buying shit they didn’t want or need. And it turns out that mindless consumerism is destroying society and our planet.

Next you’ll tell us Putin’s Russia is as strong as ever

China didn’t have to steal anything, the west handed them all of our trade and engineering secrets on a silver platter just to boost their profit margins.

You’re not completely wrong. There are many aspects of our system that are deeplh undemocratic: the way that the donor class gatekeeps who is able to run, the way politicians serve lobbyists and donors over the public will, and the way that oligarchs own 95% of our news media all create an environment where the interests of the people are not represented by our government

The supreme court and congress has put the executive branch in its place before.

The SC betrayed democracy with Citizens United and again when they gave Trump immunity for his countless crimes while in office. Don’t forget that the SC openly take bribes from billionaires.

I mean, Russia has been a fascist country for 30 years now and they haven’t collapsed

80% of Nazi casualties happened on the eastern front by the Communists. But yeah, the Soviet Union no longer exists, Russia has fallen to fascism, and now the US has too. The world is fucked.

Old appliances broke, but they were made to be easy to fix so our grandparents could just swap out the broken parts. I helped my dad replace the compressor on an older fridge as a kid and the heating elements on my grandma’s toaster. I remember my dad taking me to some locally owned mom and pop hardware store where we could buy replacement parts for old appliances off the shelf. My parents still have the toaster, but that store closed down and new stuff isn’t made to be fixable anymore (most likely due to planned obsolescence thanks to late-stage-capitalism).

On a tangent, when you think about it, throwing an entire toaster away because one heating coil burned out or throwing awag an entire fridge just because the compressor gave out is not rational. But if you tell people we should have the freedom to buy repairable appliances then they look at you like you are crazy. To me, it is the other way around. Sustainability isn’t political or a luxury, it is an inevitabe, unstoppable force of equilibrium.

Real leftists would advocate for socialism.

True, but there are there differing approaches to socialism: MLs want authoritarian socialism (government runs everything), while Democratic Socialists usually want a hybrid of market socialism (co-ops) and government run socialism for needs that free market co-ops cannot address. And then there are libertarian socialists who want only worker owned co-ops and syndicates. Finally, we have SocDems that want indirect socialism where strong regulations and labor protections try to achieve socialist goals through capitalism.

But then most of them would die from suffocation