IQ only means something within a small subset of the establishment. It’s a made up thing that is highly biased towards white European men. Yes, the system will hold you back if they determine you to have a low IQ, but for thousands of years people of all intelligences successfully lived in societies with others.

You have to give up the belief that the system is the sum total of reality. It’s the reason you wonder if your life is over at 23 - because the system is narrow and myopic and only has a little space in it and everyone else is pushed out. But the system isn’t even half of real life, and when you find the rest of life by giving up on the system you’ll find your life is just beginning.

Carl Jung even said that life doesn’t start until 40 - everything before that is just research.

Thank you for stating Occam’s Razor correctly. I am so sick of these “performative rationalists”

It turns out that courting a war criminal like Cheney didn’t have any impact on Republicans and demotivated over 10M Democrat voters who didn’t want to support a party that would support Cheney. Who could have predicted that?

Her campaign was further right than Reagan!

The Harris campaign was further to the right than Ronald Reagan was. She brought the Neoconservative movement into her campaign. She literally said the only difference between her and Biden would be that she would have a Republican in her cabinet. She’s a prosecutor focused on “law and order” and huge supporter of cops. She said there were no conditions she would ever put on Israel. Her campaign mocked Trump for not building enough of a wall, and that she would be tough on immigration, without saying anything about child separation, solitary confinement for toddlers at the border, and violence against the most downtrodden at the hands of border patrol.

She absolutely ran a campaign that was nearly indistinguishable from a Republican campaign from 20 years ago.

Trump got the same votes as last time. He convinced no more people. Meanwhile Harris got 10M less votes than Biden. She lost because she couldn’t convince those 10M to vote her. When she courted Dick Cheney, it becomes obvious why. The people who would have voted for the Ds saw them correctly as now right of Reagan.

Wow. The two party system has you so fucked that you imagine if the Ds disintegrate that the only replacement would be the Republicans. Read history, I beg you. The Ds will disintegrate over the next decade and they will be replaced by a better stronger party that takes their place.

Good question. If you have two parties ostensibly desiring office, and both will commit genocide, you punish the one that is ostensibly relying on you as their base until they stop the genocide. It’s a game of chicken with that party. And the Democrats lost that game. They thought “we will still get what we want even though we are genociders” and they didn’t.

So now. They will have to stop being genociders if they want to win next time. It would have been 4 years of genocide either way, but now the people have shown that if you want to win next time, you need to not be genociders.

That’s a white puritan definition of perfection, and perfection itself is a white supremacist Christian concept. You may think you’re an atheist but you have a lot of Christendom to shed.

Emotions are super potent. You will not be whole until you feel all of them and work with them on a regular basis. Eliminating anger from your life is a totalitarian strategy based on a Christian ideology that is fundamentally anti-human. Anger is amazing.

Yes, the standards you are holding for yourself are absolutely toxic and you will suffer from them long-term.

Your questions cannot be answered because they assume things about the world that are simply unreal and/or are not even logically consistent enough to be real.

For example, the most corrupt people on the planet are USA politicians. They are immune to insider trading, they have legally structured bribery, they receive bribes totalling in the billions annually, the parties literally contribute to their opponents’ campaigns, they control the entire debate system and establish a quid pro quo to require compliance from candidates in exchange for air time, they literally create and maintain prohibition laws to increase profits for private operators of their prison services…

As for dictators, the USA imprisons more of its population than any country in the world. It imprisons more people than the USSR GULAG did at its height, and they were holding Nazi soldiers. The USA prison system produces $11bn of goods and services for private companies using slave labor. Prisoners in the USA are usually charged anywhere from $100 to $350 every day they are in prison and they leave prison with that debt. That debt becomes the pretense for probation, where ex-prisoners who have served their sentences are directly surveilled and are required to work to pay their debt off. Failure to behave can result in a court summons and failure to attend that court summons for any reason can result in further jail time.

And that’s just the prison system. There are political prisoners in the USA held for years. There are secret military prisons. Children at the border of Mexico are held in solitary confinement causing permanent brain damage. White refugees are welcomed with open arms. Haitian refugees are met with cops on horseback and bullwhips. The secret military bases are on foreign soil so that the USA can break it’s own laws without oversight or consequence. The USA is spending a trillion dollars expanding and upgrading its nuclear weapons. All the while there are a million homeless people and budgets to address homeless are all given to the police to break up encampments and displace homeless people, the citizens pay the most in the world for health care and gets the worst outcomes, the political leaders take citizen money and give it directly to corporations in ways that are completely unnecessary to achieve their outcomes, and citizens who protest are beaten, kidnappped, blacklisted, monitored and surveilled, while citizens who kill protestors are protected and rewarded.

And you don’t think the USA is a corrupt dictatorship of the land owners over the masses?

Meanwhile, former President Carter has been at the forefront of election monitoring around the globe. Out of not quite 300 countries his group monitors 90+, so about a third. He has stated, the former USA president has stated, that Venezuela had the absolute best fairest most democratic elections they had seen. And Venezuela got sanctioned for dictatorship, corruption, and unfair elections.

There is no answer to your questions because your questions assume a fantasy world that does not exist. Come back to Earth, dig into what you’re observing, learn about what’s really happening.

This is the work we have to do as individuals, to struggle with our understandings against the real world we live in and challenge our own positions and understanding to more thoroughly champion those values we hold dear. Keep going, you’re on the right path. Keep struggling, it only gets harder for a while. If it starts getting easier, you’re going the wrong way.

Keep going! I think you still need more precision. Your racialized students are all victims of racism at nearly all times. What you’re talking about is when racialized students are victims of harm (which comes in many forms) where that harm is the intimate form of structural racism.

So when someone uses a racial slur, racialized people experience harm if they are exposed to it. A) what is that harm if the slur was used at them versus if that slur was used near them but not at them? B) is there harm if no racialized people are exposed to that event?

Being able to articulate these sorts of nuances in a way that is internally consistent will be the result of struggling with these concepts and coming to deeper understandings and the path forward will be clearer.

To put a finer point on it, if a white child, in a room of 5 white children and a white teacher, uses a racial slur, how would you describe that, how would you understand the consequences of that, how would you make the decision on whether and how to intervene, and how would you communicate your decision in context?

I will challenge for the sake of you refining your argument: bigotry is equivalent with rude behavior and aggressive confrontation. Bigotry is not limited to the structures of racism. You can be a bigot against people without hair, bigot against people based on height, a bigot against people based on body fat, a bigot against people based on body shape and proportions, etc.

Racism, on the other hand, is a structure that exists even without bigotry. Bigotry is a symptom or an outgrowth of structural racism. The earliest racists didn’t spend their time being rude and getting into fights with people, they spent their timing writing academic essays, giving lectures, and generally being perfectly calm, reasonable high society people who just believed things like race is inherent in the person and values are inherent in the race.

I challenge you to get more precise about why you think bigotry is different than other forms of conflict, connect it to the structural so that you’re not only dealing with the individual, and proceed from there with a refined analysis and set of proposals.

It’s a social democratic country run by an early stage neofascist party. Social democracy is the form of a state adjacent to fascism - fascism emerges from social democracy and fascism returns to social democracy.

So Italy is in an early stage of fascist potential.

The idea that any of our presidents ever actually “ran the country” should actually be completely unacceptable. You think farmers can run an entire country? How about actors? Failsons? Sex pests? None of these people should be “running the country”. The country has a massive bureaucracy running it and the president is filling a specific role of making judgement calls and tweaking the roster of bureaucrats

Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Iraq, Afghanistan, The Philippines, Nicaragua, Chile, Guam, Hawaii, Marianas, Cuba, Iran, Yemen, Syria, Haiti, Yugoslavia, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, economic shock therapy in Russia

And that’s just the basics. Millions dead, nukes on civilians, chemical weapons on civilians, mass deforestation, poisoning land and water, generations of cancer and birth defects, some individual US targets had more bombs dropped on them than all countries combined dropped in WW2, napalm and white phosphorous to bind chemical fire to human flesh, land mines fucking everywhere, depleted uranium dropped in population centers, coups, death squads, resource extraction and annexation, torture, kidnapping, direct terror and training and arming thousands of terror cells.

Not to mention the USA was built on land where 80% of the indigenous population was killed and the USA maintained and continues to maintain the policies of genocide, enslavement, mass murder, lynch mobs, systematic rape, eugenics, child torture and trafficking, etc.

Sooooo, no. The USA is not on its third invasion of a sovereign nation, it’s 200 years into it’s prosecution of the genocidal annexation campaign that it deliberately took control over from Western Europe.

Downvoters be crying

As Marxists, I think we need to be very careful about how we talk about taxes.

1. All value is produced by labor
2. All value produced by labor is stolen by owners through private property law
3. Of the value stolen by owners through private property law, some of it is provided back to labor to reproduce that labor
4. Of the portion of the value provided back to labor for reproduction, a portion is stolen by the owners through tax law
5. Of the portion stolen from labor by tax law, a portion is provided to both labor and lumpen.

It’s a ridiculous system of exploitation. Owners should be paying all of the taxes, but they control the tax law.

You literally just described a settler state, complete with using reproduction as an occupying tactic.

Israel, the state, is illegitimate and needs to be dissolved. The Israeli people can integrate and co-createba society with the Palestinians or they can GTFO. Any that stay to explicitly disrupt this and form reactionary movements can get rekt.

However, as you say, this reality won’t stop the genocide. So a two-state solution is the most likely interim step.

Pure copium