[Radii]

Good post. I'm surprised you didn't mention a national mask mandate. Do you not expect that to be tried?

I feel like as polarized as we are right now that the best we're going to be able to do is to try to calm things down a bit and appeal towards reasonableness via a calm, consistent message. A national mandate I would expect gets people in AR-15's in the streets in many states.

I'm actually kind of surprised by this. Ignore this if you wish, but from my perspective you can't address climate change without the global piece - it doesn't matter what the US does all that much if you don't get other countries on board as well.

Hm when I was thinking globalization and the like I was thinking global economics more than anything, which I feel is a very weak subject of mine. If nothing else I feel like the US should lead by example when it comes to the environment. You're definitely right in that we need global buy-in, but up to this point we have been at our best participants and at our worst antagonistic on climate change. I'm sure many things could happen simultaneously but I would make my major focus of climate change to do our part in a very visible and aggressive way, and definitely as we do that to work with the international community in any capacity that we can to be world leaders and to get others to come along with us. Thus far though this has only been a weakness of the US, so until we're doing it ourselves, I'd expect global conversations on climate change to be mocked.

It also seems to me that issues of what you term equality are in a somewhat similar boat; there is much greater suffering around the world than there is in America and therefore drastically ramping up foreign aid for example, global enforcement on human rights, basic infrastructure and medical care in various places around the world, etc. is where the front line is on those issues.

What I term equality is very heavily biased towards the treatment of blacks in the united states going back to 1619 (and many of those things work to harm women and other minorities and LGBTQ+ folks and of course indigenous americans). But that systemic oppression is really based on power. Our system of government is designed to keep those in power, in power. Solving issues of oppression would help you and me - straight white males who are not in power, in many ways as well. There is, in my view, an unbelievable and overwhelming effort to make at home to take care of our own people. Those issues can be addressed internally - obviously, without extra layers of international diplomacy and potential military conflicts to address inequality and suffering around the world.

But it's not an either/or situation. But I have spent a significant time learning about oppression within the United States, and I have concrete ideas about what's happening here. So my focus when it comes to my own activism is entirely built around this. I've just made it my issue and my focus.

We should absolutely work to address world hunger and genocide around the world. But I believe that we should dramatically shrink our military budget and remove ourselves from many places that we exist today. That's where we find a lot of the money to clean our own house. But at this point we're talking far beyond what Biden could do (or would want to do, remember I consider him to be on the side of the oppressors, when it comes to systemic rascism). We're also far out of my wheelhouse. I see the issues, hunger, medical care and violence throughout the world, but we know that in war torn regions getting food to the people that need it is problematic, and we know we have a weird way of deciding when to intervene militarily and when not to, and we tend to cause a shitton of problems when we do, and those are problems I don't really know how to address. So yeah, I'm in favor of spending a ton more on humanitarian aid, but the reality of how that would work I'm not smart enough to speak on. And I would argue that cleaning our own house should be a top priority.