The number of people who will show up for free healthcare is greater than the number who will show up for complicated tax credits for PEL grant recipients who operate a business in an under-served neighborhood for 5 years and were born on a prime numbered date, and make between 20 and 40K/year and submit 12 pages of paperwork.

Hell when I was phone-banking for Biden in 2020, half the people I was contacted listed free healthcare and freeing the ICE camps as reasons they were going to vote.

They thought they were voting for progressive policy, the opposite of that happened. Further disengagement is expected result of not doing everything in your power to help your base.

there aren’t enough voters who support free healthcare, abolition of ICE, and zero weapons for Israel

Nah, that requires intentionally misleading polls. Ask someone on the street “Do you think healthcare should be free” or even “should every single american have healthcare” and you will get overwhelming agreement. To get people to disagree you have to do bullshit like “Do you want the government to take away your health insurance” or something. Same with abolition of ICE and weapons for Israel. The only people who want ICE coming to their neighborhood and dragging off their neighbors or Israel bombing brown people are never going to vote dem.

There are no voters who will vote for means-tested subsidies for insurance companies that you buy through 1 of 50 online marketplaces or through your employer, but won’t vote for free healthcare.

There is a shitton of voters who will vote for free healthcare, but will assume whatever compromised centrist solution the neolibs come up with will not help them.

Thats precisely what the DNC counts on when they ratfuck progressives. The only reason we got Biden to step down and Kamala to pick Walz was the DNC couldn’t delude themselves into thinking they could win. Once Kamala’s popularity spiked and they told themselves the left, black people, and/or women would do as they are told, they went back to business as usual.

We need to be screaming from now to 2028 that any candidate who does not support free healthcare, abolition of ICE, and zero weapons for Israel is unelectable.

They will gaslight themselves into believing they have the most progressive war criminal ever.

You’re not going to make genocide popular. What we might be able to do is make the DNC run a candidate that people will vote for.

But she never would say no, you know, because of the implication.

Is maintaining the status quo being a “sacrificial pawn” against China?

No, anything that would require China invade is being a sacrificial pawn, such as declaring independence, hosting a military base, anything that pulls Taiwan outside of China’s sphere essentially.

Why would the independence option inherently represent that?

Because China isn’t going to tolerate it’s own territory, right off its coast, being used as a forward operating base by a hostile country.

I don’t want to fight China. Most people here seem to support continuation of the status quo.

The people who are calling for Taiwan to do things that would result in immediate war, such as acquiring nukes or declaring independence are not supporting the continuation of the status quo.

China seems happy with status quo followed by reunification “eventually”, Taiwan is happy with status quo, it’s literally only bloodthirsty western libs and 4% of Taiwan who want Taiwan to leave China entirely.

do you also accept they don’t want to be part of the PRC?

This being an option is contingent on the US not using them as a sacrificial pawn against China, which is what the “independence” option represents. The choice isn’t China vs status quo vs “freedom and democracy”, its China vs status quo vs war, then China, and every warmongering lib here wants to fight China to the last drop of Taiwanese blood.

We have polling, it says the people of Taiwan overwhelmingly want staus quo. What they want doesn’t matter to you.

In this case? <enemy of the west> bad. They don’t feel any need to learn about Taiwan or Xinjiang or HK or Tibet beyond its utility in proving this, and certainly don’t care how it might affect the actual people living there.

You can observe the same phenomenon with Russia; no matter the data, somehow its indicative of Russia bad and justification to increase hostile action, even at the expense of Russia’s victims.

Coded language, but it appears to be in there.

Lets not do the pizza gate thing. The stuff they said in plain language tells us they felt no need to use coded language.

The US would lose its mind if China parked missiles off California

It’d be pretty funny if China gave Cuba missiles.

But they’re afraid to even give them oil to avert a US-imposed famine, so its unlikely we’re gonna see China do something cool.

Btw, mander.xyz isn’t blocked in mainland China like .ml

Libs don’t actually care about the matter, they simply want to justify pre-existing positions, so anything that doesn’t support this feels hostile to them. In another comment thread I have someone who’s never been to Hong Kong asking me to provide citations about what HK is like.

find people on wanted lists and how reward money collection actually works

How does it actually work?

I depict it as living in a colony of Britain, which it literally was.

And the coffin apartments, homelessness, and lack of fire safety are pretty well known. Have you been to Hong Kong? There’s massive inequality and some of the highest rent in the world because the government blocked the expansion of housing for decades.

What autonomy, they lived in a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie imposed by Britain.

What Social freedoms? The freedom to die under bridges or in coffin apartments or to live in literal tinder boxes?

What China did to Hong Kong?

You mean freed them from a council imposed by the British, elected by the crown and large businesses?

just as brutal

Theres a difference between brutality in response to millenia of oppression and brutality against anyone who might not want to continue that oppression.

Thats not to say the CPC was some perfectly just machine, but the two are qualitatively different. Would you say the French og revolutionaries were just as brutal as the bourbons?

Lets say America Maduros Xi and all 3000 members of congress for good measure, then holds free elections. Who do you think the chinese people vote for? Someone who will give up China’s labor and resources for pennies, the primary reason that China and the west have an antagonistic relationship, or you know, more communists?

North Korea has a million artillery pieces and like 20 million people ready to call back to service, and China would probably get involved if the alternative is a hostile puppet state on their border. The calculus of invading NK is quite different than Taiwan.