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Rent-to-own

I wasn’t trying to equate the degree of their misdeeds. I was trying to illustrate that political change takes time and a lot of willpower and was pointing to recent examples of other long-term efforts.

If you do want to play that game, which is kind of pointless, let me ask about when Europeans are going stop just letting migrants drown in the Mediterranean?

But I don’t blame all Europeans. I don’t blame all the French, Italians, Maltese, and Greeks. That’s counterproductive and not how we fix these problems. I know there’s a lot of people in those countries trying hard to help save the lives of migrants. Shouting “cope” at people isn’t going to accomplish anything.

Well said about tariffs. Von der Leyen should just use her “trade bazooka.” letting him set the rules of the game is exactly how he used the media to gain power in the first place: by breaking “norms” they went all Surprised Pikachu and couldn’t stop covering him and look where that got us.

I and many people I know have spent our whole lives trying to change the rigged system of FPTP/single-member constituency voting with the further distortion of state-based apportionment.

The issue, as with any rigged system, is that it’s really hard to un-rig unless either the people benefitting from the rigging let it change (lol) or there’s a major upheaval—usually a war. It took WWI for the German voting system to be un-rigged in favor of the Junkers and Belgium to end their rigged system, and it took a civil war in America to end the 3/5 Compromise which was a start in the right direction and then a decade plus of sustained sctivism for the civil rights movement to see a real impact in voting rights.

Many of us Americans are working on it. Meanwhile, it took the EU 14 years to begin to punish Hungary for Orban. The Serbs have been protesting for more than a year and still have yet to lead to lasting change. I could go on.

I know this is going to sound like a lazy American trying to do whataboutism, but I’m really just trying to say political change takes time and part of the danger of all of these leaders is how unresponsive they are and difficult they make it to change—especially the more powerful the state aparatus for violence they wield is.

Additionally, the US has regularly scheduled elections which makes just marginally harder to change governments unlike a ministerial system where snap elections can be called.