Cuba’s democracy is actually a 0-party state. Candidates stand on their own for election, and most politics are run through local orgs and workplaces. They recently concluded one of the most democratic exercises in the history of the Western Hemisphere, when through a series of local referendums they amended their constitution. No lobbyists, no special interests, no controlled media - an almost totally pure example of a government run by citizens, for citizens.

As for China, the Chinese people have something like 90%+ satisfaction with their central government, as measured by independent observers. The reason for this is their commitment to Full Process Democracy, which means that your democratic participation in the system doesn’t end with your vote for a representative - low and mid level officials are required to constantly be polling their constituencies, and they can be dismissed (either by a recall election or by higher ups) if they don’t act in accordance with the desires of the people they’re supposed to represent.

Furthermore, China’s ruling party may be one party on paper, but it is “one party” that is made up of over one hundred million members. It has internal factions that range from neoliberal to anarcho-communist, and it is very intentionally embedded into every single Chinese institution. Most of the service that the CPC provides to the people is provided at a local or even individual level - for example, a Chinese worker’s equivalent to a union leader is a coworker who’s with the party, where if you have problems with your boss you can get it resolved through them.

Meanwhile Brazil went back to their last progressive president after Bolsonaro’s failure, and Bolivia has foiled two attempted coups by reactionary forces. Venezuela and Cuba also remain strong, with the latter being possibly the most democratic country on this planet.

In Africa, the most notable “democracies” that have been overthrown in recent memory were all client states of western countries whose previous governments cannot in good faith be said to have been representative of the people.

The Middle East is pretty bad, what with Israel going full fash in the past year. It’s not like they haven’t been edging for decades, though.

But in Asia, the only country that might be more democratic than Cuba is China, and they’re as strong as they’ve ever been. Since that’s 1/5th of the population of this planet living under one of its premier democratic governments, I’d say the prognosis for global democracy is fine.

Ukraine can fight this with whatever they can get from around the world.

You ignored the entirety of my point, which is that Ukraine has signaled that they want the conflict to end, but their masters in Washington and the EU are pressing them forward regardless. Donbas has been functionally independent from Ukraine for almost ten years now, and only two of those with Russian troops supporting it. It’s not Ukrainian territory anymore in any way that matters.

It’s Ukraines fight

The US and its allies have sabotaged peace talks between Ukraine and Russia on multiple occasions. European politicians have been talking about putting EU troops on Ukrainian soil in support roles so that more Ukrainian men can charge directly into Russian artillery fire for the past few months. In the months leading up to the invasion, the western media apparatus was braying for Russian blood with a fervor that I hadn’t seen since the runup to the Iraq War - and for ten years now the US has been directly backing anti-Russian elements inside Ukraine, regardless of the fact that many of those elements were literally fascists, leading directly to the Maidan coup and the ethnic schism in Ukrainian society that resulted in the civil war.

It’s a proxy war, always has been.

All over the world

Showing your bias here, because really this is only happening in Europe and the Anglosphere.

I mean, for the majority of the country’s history, huge portions of its population had literally no democracy due to no right to vote. But I guess we’ll ignore that.

Don’t forget the millions of felons who still don’t. In Florida they passed a direct referendum to give them their franchise back, but the state government employed legal fuckery to prevent it from working as intended.

This is a law

The US also has laws against providing arms to military units that have been credibly accused of war crimes, but in Israel (also Ukraine) they simply don’t investigate allegations in order to keep the arms flowing. If Biden wants a legal casus belli to deny Israel arms, he has many to choose from, but he is actively choosing not to employ them.

one is a guy trying to stop the genocide that’s been negotiating behind the scenes for months

I don’t believe you. Or more accurately, I don’t believe the alleged “leaks” from the White House about how mad Joe Biden is but it’s behind closed doors just trust me bro. This guy has been hard in the pocket for Israel his entire career, why wouldn’t he be now?

Batman put Harley Quinn in charge of the bat cave.

Palestinians

Claudia De la Cruz it is.

I won’t deny that people can do multiple things at once, I just don’t agree with the premise that voting matters in the current paradigm.

If you had enough people to do the thing, then you would be able to protect members of the group at a local level while national orgs realign and/or get replaced.

But nobody has a large enough group of people to do the thing. In the absence of a large enough group of people to do the thing, voting is a purely personal decision that will not effect the outcome.

As I’ve said elsewhere, to fix it from within the system itself you would need a bloc of people willing to punish one of the parties for moving right by withholding their votes and their donations. To fix it from without the system is also possible, but would require some “authoritarianism” in the form of people with guns. Anything else is just people flailing around ineffectually and getting mad at others who aren’t flailing in the ineffectual way that they prefer.

Either way you’ve got the same problem: getting a large enough group of people together who are willing to do the thing. Socialists of all stripes have been trying to crack that egg for over a hundred years and the only ones who had any success were the ones that managed to get the peasants on their side because peasants have a certain amount of class consciousness that proles don’t.

If choosing red or blue doesn’t work, and choosing another option also doesn’t work, then what good does feeling self righteous about your decision to pick one over the other do? Unless you’re suggesting that the shitty reality of our situation is that we’re fucked and nothing will work at all no matter what - which is a level of defeatism that I don’t think is very helpful either.

Perhaps if both sides were not so awful, people wouldn’t feel compelled to meme about them.

Lemmitors: You don’t understand! I’m not voting for Slightly More Rotting Corpse, I’m voting for the Slightly More Rotting Corpse administration. Yes it’s true that both of them support nuclear warfare along the Mexican border, but Rotting Corpse would be dropping more nukes with higher frequency on the climate refugees so we have to vote for the lesser evil.

tell anon that we’re comparing pain between men and women

study is actually about which gender is more willing to lie for no good reason

crank the pain up to the maximum legally allowed

he’s sweating

he’s crying

he’s still saying zero

It’s an illustrative comment though. Our society teaches us not to view women as predatory, and to always view men as such - so that creates the difference between a woman talking about baby anatomy and a man talking about baby anatomy.

The Democrats will never change how their party runs or what their awful politics are as long as people keep voting for them no matter what. So basically we’re stuck with this genocide-supporting neoliberal bullshit until America finally collapses (inshallah).

The average age of Ukrainian soldiers fighting Russia is 43-45. Ukraine is almost certainly the worst developed country to live in right now.

Plus, North Korea may be poor by western standards, but they have a lot of comforts that many third world countries lack, so even if you discount my example they’re still not the worst by a wide margin.