I think disappointment in people is a very reasonable attitude. In fact I think cynicism towards people in general is one of the core defining attitudes of our time, and it transcends political boundaries.

But as a filthy leftoid, I believe that there are socio-economic forces which are responsible for how people are in a given era. The spread of misinformation on the internet, social alienation, poor education with no media literacy, logic or critical thinking - these are not innate flaws in human kind, they are failures of society that can be fixed.

So you can see we have a real problem, because leftism and even liberalism is built upon respect for and faith in humanity - but very few act like it.

In other words, the rich are eating the middle class. They will buy up all property and normal people will be permanently priced out of the market. They have no reason to sell.

Complicated subjects like this have dozens of citations which often contradict eachother. The great thing about wikipedia is that it shows multiple sources and where they came from. This is a far higher standard of evidence than just cherry-picking one source that agrees with me and pretending that it’s definitive. Meanwhile the only thing you’ve cited is your imagination.

The data for Ukraine is so contested that it’s hard to put a number on it, but it’s probably higher than the Israel Palestine conflict, and at least comparable.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli–Palestinian_conflict

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_invasion_of_Ukraine#Casualties

I’d say that Russia is the biggest source of suffering caused by imperialism in the world right now ( just going by the death toll of the Ukraine war ) . Is saying that a ‘distraction’ from American imperialism?

The person you’re talking to is unlikely to be pursuaded but there’s usually silent, invisible lurkers who can be.

I know I’ve changed my mind on things because of arguments I’ve read on the internet.

It is proven that people do double down on their views when confronted with opposing evidence, but IMO this is more about the psychology of trust and confrontation between individuals, rather than proof of the futility of argument as a concept. Hell, Vsauce made a video called ‘The Future of Reasoning’, where he makes the case that argument might have been selected for as an essential part of human psychology and necessary for our survivial.

The trick is to argue with the voices in your own head and simply project them on to other people’s comments.

Actually History isn’t always written by the victors. After WW2 a load of german officers fled to south America and began writing books about how great they were and could have won if only they had finished developing all their wonder weapons in time. This is the origin of a lot of persistent and false memes about how advanced and brilliant the nazis supposedly were. It’s history written by losers.

I think the Tankies have already made their minds up. The real people who won’t be voting Biden are some % people who saw the debate.

Youtube has always claimed that it doesn’t turn a profit but I don’t believe them. My reasoning is that if the server costs are more than the revenue today, then they’re going to be worse tomorrow. A gorillian gigabytes of data are uploaded to that thing every nanosecond. A company can’t get exponentially less profitable every second and still survive. And what else is there to prop it up? Google ad results? No way is Youtube not profitable. They’re saying that to avoid tax.