Get off your high horse, buddy.

[and i’m tired of pretending it’s not]

I’m inclined to think that these kinds of thought distortions are a product of the hyper commercialization and hyper commodification of our lives. People don’t meet other people unmediated by consumption or a screen, so the ideas of what it means to connect are distorted.

The places you talk about still have a public social life, 3rd spaces, etc. In advanced capitalist countries, there is no public space without some sort of consumption.

I dunno Barack Obama and Jimmy Carter, seem to have been personally good people. That’s two recent US presidents. Then I guess I would add some super low hanging fruit like Nelson Mandela, Frederick the Great, John II Komnenos, any of the Five Good Emperors, Cyrus the Great, Ashoka, and one could keep going.

EDIT: To all those pestering me about how US presidents presided over criminal imperialist policies, here is my answer from down below:

OP talked about “glaring character defects”.

These are policy failures and state crimes, arguably attributed to the American state as a whole, and the long term US imperialist policies, rather to the singular person of the president.

You might have noticed that I added Frederick the Great in the list, which tells you exactly what my understanding of the challenge was.

I’m not here to defend US imperialism, don’t @ me.

I get that. You can just as well focus your blame game on the Democratic party and demand reform on their end. My impression is that that’s a more productive way of going forward, because reforming the attitudes of the electorate is a much harder proposition.

Ps. I’m not downvoting you btw.

Did I mention the presidential election? I’m harping on the push back against calling your previous president “genocide Joe”. You had a terrible choice to make between a Maga radical fascist and an imperialist genocide enabler. You personally made that terrible choice in a way that I would probably also go if I were American. But for goodness sake, the fact that the alternative was… Trump doesn’t absolve in the least Biden from the genocide he enabled.

Why did it have to fucking happen regardless though?

I mean I’m fucking tired of democrat supporting Americans being so fucking fatalistic about Biden policies.

It did not have to fucking happen. Biden could have pulled the plug from Israel’s war before the us election cycle started. But he didn’t. Why are you so fucking fatalistic that oh there is no way this could not have happened? Or to rephrase that, if you are so fatalistic about that, well you’ve already given up on democracy, so why do you complain about Maga fascism anyway?

Lol, imagine if a high ranking PA official (not even Hamas) were to say something like this. The UN Security Council would be passing a resolution condemning him.