I disagree that the situation is that simple.
I have no cognitive dissonance on this issue.
How naive of you to think it's that simple.
So now you're concerned with "looking cool". Your priorities are very strange.
The hubris and hypocrisy of this statement is confounding.
This is not "extremely well understood". That is flat out misinformation. Your level of confidence on this is far beyond what any scientist or philosopher would admit.
That's the physicalist perspective, but there are other perspectives, and the philosophical debate on physicalism vs dualism is far from settled.
Plus, our scientific understanding of consciousness is far from comprehensive. We still have no idea how our experience actually emerges from neurological activity.
I mean.... that description quite accurately describes me. I'm a broken person who has become convinced capitalism is a major source of strife in today's world, and have come to believe in socialism as the answer.
However... that hasn't led me to champion authoritarian states that repress people. There must be a little something extra thrown in there. My guess would be an unacknowledged desire to replace their oppressors.
This reminds me, I wrote something on the subject once:
When you're privileged, and never had to fight for anything in life, you probably won't even recognise it when you see it happen right in front of you. In fact, you might even write it off as baseless antagonism, a thoughtless disruption of peace, and side with the oppressors.
"What do you mean he didn't pay you? He's an honourable man! He pays me, every friday, on the dot! You must be lying."
Even more insidiously, though, is the fact that, even if you do suffer and fight your whole life, you still may not see it as oppression. You may even begin to think it the natural order of things, even begin to value and love the suffering, as a trial that proves your worth in life, internalising the values of your oppressors, until even the thought of a better life becomes not only fantasy, but dangerous sacrilege.
"He didn't pay you? Of course he didn't pay you. Welcome to life. Pay? You want a blowjob with that, too? Get real."
And with this internalisation of your oppressors' values, this adoption of their mindset, and the unquestioning acceptance of the status quo in its current form, once enough does eventually become enough, and you finally get it into your head that things can change, the inevitable form of that change becomes a mirror image: yourself in the throne of oppressor, cracking the whip not only upon your former master, but also upon your former comrades (now, as ever, seen only as competition) for the simple reason that the throne exists, and must be filled, for why else should it exist, other than to seat a whipcracker?
"There's no law telling him to pay you, why are you even surprised? You expect him to do it out of the goodness of his heart? Of course not. And when I'm on top, I won't pay you either."
sImPLY OPErATiNg A MeAT GRInDER
A meat grinder needs meat, you dunce. Activating the grinder in this metaphor is invading Ukraine. "Throwing people in the grinder" is sending people to stop the grinder.
If a coup needed to happen to stop surrender...
Sounds like they were planning on surrendering, no?
You're doing absolutely nothing to back up your argument.
"Shooting this dog will save the world. Take this gun. Will you shoot it?" Is also a yes or no question, but answering it entertains the notion that shooting the dog will save the world. The correct answer is "put the gun down, you're acting silly. Killing the dog won't save the world."
I fucking agree that both candidates are disasters for Palestine. But if you're really gonna try to challenge that beast, start organising for a grassroots movement to overthrow the entire corrupt bourgeois state to place the means of production in the hands of the proletariat.
But you won't. I know you won't. So in the meantime, you have to choose your best realistic option: vote. And you also have to be realistic when you vote. A third party candidate would need a genuine miracle to win at this stage, because they need serious momentum early on in the election season to have even a modicum of a chance at winning. And the FPTP system guarantees that only one of the two major parties will win.
So you're left with an imperialist who also wants to shit on their own country, and an imperialist who sort of paternalisticslly wants to "help" their country. Neither are great. Neither are even "good". But one stinks a little less.