-supreme court fash speedrun any% begins in earnest
-biden does his best cryptkeeper impression in the debate, the lyin’ lamestream media balks hard, swing state polls start leaking badly
-reads from post Trump calls for jailing and “televised military tribunals” of “Mr. Biden, Ms. Harris, Mr. Pence, Mr. Schumer, Mr. McConnell and Nancy Pelosi”
-xi presses the rare earth resources socialism button, presumably (or at least hopefully) in prep for pressing the ALL earth resources socialism button
-heritage foundation president does a public threat of violence at the left, increasing his chances of being roadkilled by a significant factor (fingers crossed)
-the west sez: zelensky your country is three embodied forms of corruption in a trenchcoat, yea we are gonna need you to take off that “i fought a losing war of attrition and all i got was a spot in NATO” tshirt you keep wearing on tv
-dr disrespect dropped by subway (this isn’t momentous it’s just hilarious LMAO)
-steam summer sale
-the pho place near me fixed their broth (less cinnamon 
)
The contradiction I’m failing to understand is why these elections in the West are flashpoints… like, the bourgeoisie have total domination, especially since there’s no real leftist opposition anywhere in the West™. Why on earth create tensions with people that agree with you on 99.99% how to rule?
I get it to some degree, there’s propaganda bubbles surrounding the type of liberalism you gravitate towards based on your life experience, but fundamentally those ideologies are 100% compatible with each other. It’s as if when the cold war ended, liberal “democracy” dropped all pretense of sanity.
For a very long time now, the presidential elections haven’t been flashpoints for exactly the reason you describe. But since the 2000 elections, the contradictions have progressively ramped up, probably because material conditions have deteriorated and the bourgeoise are not omnipotent.
Ideological infighting between bourgeoisie factions. The Civil War never ended, it simply entered a cold state after the assassination of Lincoln and with him the assassination of reconstruction. Andrew Johnson’s alliance with southern capital meant none of the financial stake holders we’re held accountable and land was never redistributed to the free slaves.
So the slaves of the south were emancipated into the open arms of the southern capitalist who replaced chattel slavery with wage slavery.
The emancipation process never ended, and the reimplementation of slavery also never ended. Over the decades new factions have risen and been incorporated into the struggle, mainly Evangelicals, since they represent such a large base for the conservative axis. Their incorporation has caused the development of the conservative solutions for the issue of labor reproduction, namely in the antiabortion movement.
With conservative victories over the last 20 years, they have positioned themselves ever closer to winning this cold war. This has been a war of ideology, attempting to solve the contradictions of capitalism from different positions. The problem progressives have however is that appropriating leftist positions doesn’t solve the issues of capitalism, it erodes capitalism. Their dabbling in populism has given the electorate a taste for it. When progressives fail to deliver on their populism however, it weakens their voting base, solves none of the issues of capitalism, and requires them to lean right for real solutions.
This fragmented position leaves the collective bourgeois unable to deal with external conflict. Their handling of Ukraine and Israel can be viewed as an extension of this internal conflict.
At some point one of these positions within the ruling class has to win out over the other. Resulting in either Christian Fascism, or a kind of “National Socialism” rooted in a more traditional form of Fascism.
I suppose because the contradictions are inevitable within such an economic system. Capitalists are loyal to nothing. They have no credo. They clearly have no restraint. If these economic relations are in place, humans will inevitably do terrible things to each other to exploit such a system.
They didn’t have morals before. They had competition (from a number of communist revolutionary states). That’s what kept them in line. That’s why they had a pretense.
No competition - no need to pretend you’re sane… I mean, I guess false consciousness is so prevalent now that these people all believe themselves to be sane. These sane people are created by rampant capitalism, and act in the way I described in my first paragraph.