It is though. Liberalism is the ideology of capitalism and capitalism is unsustainable. Both in the sense of environmental sustainability and in the sense of the tendency of the rate of profit to decline.

This whole line of “old ideas become stale” and “young people question orthodoxy” contradicts the thesis, because liberalism is the old idea, is the orthodoxy.

One election, of a handful of elections, doesn’t disprove the general trend, that people are fed up and looking at alternatives. Biden winning in 2020 did not mean the end of Trumpism, much less of “illiberalism” in general. This is a general trend, not some absolute prophesy.

More evidence of his mental decline.

Terrifying. Immigration courts need to be abolished altogether.

Same, but in reverse 🤝

Because:

When you say, “fucking stupid” is “stupidity” actually the problem? Like what, they can’t do math?

Raw brainpower is only a fraction of what’s involved in good judgement. Book knowledge is another fraction. But there’s a whole host of other factors that can influence decisions. Poor impulse control, psychological hangups, bad habits, greed, privilege, etc. That’s assuming that the education they received actually taught them how to think critically in the first place.

The vast majority of the time, when I have a problem with someone, it’s not just a matter of lacking brainpower or education. Condensing those problems down to “stupid” is, aside from any other concerns, simply inaccurate.

I picked China from skimming your comment history. Have you defended North Korea? jfc

Like I said, I’ll “defend” literally any country on earth. You have 195 to choose from! If I haven’t “defended” them yet, just spread misinformation and say we should start a war, and I will. I care about the truth, not some liberal purity test.

China did take Hong Kong

More like the UK returned Hong Kong to China after the lease agreement they had forced upon it through colonialism expired.

Same with Tibet.

You mean the slave-owning theocracy that was historically part of China, was never internationally recognized, which is also claimed by Taiwan?

Incredible that you have to go back 70 years and that’s the worst you can come up with.

They want Taiwan

What you personally speculate might happen in the future is not a mark against China.

They’ve “wanted Taiwan” for decades, just as Taiwan “wants” the mainland. And for decades, peace was maintained through the doctrine of strategic ambiguity, whereby Taiwan was not formally recognized as independent but was allowed to operate as such. US politicians, rather than maintain that peaceful compromise, have recklessly decided to start deviating from that status quo (because they’re psychotic warmongerers looking to manufacture threats).

If you actually care about Taiwanese independence, then what exactly is wrong with the status quo of de facto independence? Why are our politicians choosing to rock the boat?

But I highly doubt you even knew what strategic ambiguity was, much less that our politicians deviated from it. Because the media rarely really reports on that part or frames it as an escalation. They only report on China’s response to it. And that response is then used to frame China as being aggressive out of nowhere. They do the same thing with any country they don’t like. It’s kind of like how European countries will condemn Iran for retaliating but won’t condemn the US for starting the war.

The more extreme stuff against China may just be propaganda that China itself created to discredit the more reasonable claims

In that case, stop spreading Chinese propaganda, you tankie 😉

The truth is, China does pose a threat to the US. But that threat is economic and diplomatic. China has emerged as a reliable trading partner that stays out of conflicts, while the US burns itself out fighting in every corner of the world. Every year, neutral countries are becoming more aligned with China and formerly US-aligned countries become more neutral, and this trend did not start with Trump.

You want to counter China, you have to start playing the diplomatic game more seriously and stop trying to solve every problem through force. Whenever the US does something like attacking Iran, or invading Afghanistan, or even seizing Venezuela’s foreign reserves, there are countless little countries that see it happening and wonder if they’ll be next.

Trying to resolve the rivalry with China through military force would be absolutely insane. And yet, that seems to be the course of action our rulers are committed to. It’s terrifying to think that anyone would consider WWIII and nuclear armegeddon a viable solution.

This thread is full of the most absolutely bizarre takes imaginable.

The war in Afghanistan was a complete failure from start to finish and was only ever about making more money for arms manufacturers and oil companies. At literally any point in the decades long occupation, the best thing to do would be to immediately withdraw. The decision to withdraw was one of the best policy decisions any president has made in my lifetime (an admittedly low bar). I was hoping and praying for that decision for literally 20 years of my life. Personally, I’d tend to credit Biden with it since he was the one who actually followed through and accepted the political fallout from all the psychopathic hawks in the media.

And I come in here and the two sides are, “Biden good because [incredibly good and necessary decision] was actually Trump’s fault!” vs “Biden bad because [incredibly good and necessary decision] was Biden’s fault!”

How on earth has everyone in here come to this conclusion that if we prolonged the war even another 20 years, we could accomplish something we completely and utterly failed to do in that time? Even our own puppet government was telling us to leave. If you want to blame someone for losing the war, blame Bush, because the war was already lost within the first year at most. I literally cannot comprehend how anyone could look at that situation and want us to stay unless they were directly profiting from it.

Rationally, I know that liberals are bloodthirsty warmongerers who worship Khorne and want to build mountains of skulls and all, but like aren’t you supposed to keep up some kind of pretence of not just wanting to turn a country into a perpetual slaughterhouse?

I don’t want to go to war with any country. I am also willing to refute misinformation about any country. Those two things constitute 99% of what “defending” means in this context.

Why limit yourself to China? Just say, “In North Korea the government forces everyone to eat each other’s brains and we need to invade to get them to stop,” I’ll say that’s not true and we shouldn’t, and now you can attack me for “defending North Korea.” Surely there’s worse countries than China out there for you to pick from.

“We have to fight them over there or we’ll be fighting them over here.” I remember that line. They said about the wars in the Middle East, they said it about Vietnam, they said it about Korea. “If we don’t win, there’ll be a 9/11 every day.” But we lost, and somehow there hasn’t been another 9/11. “Vietnam is a domino, if we don’t stop them here, they’ll spread communism to more and more countries.” But we didn’t stop them there and they focused on rebuilding and self-defense.

Every major conflict the US has been involved in since WWII, top officials have evoke WWII and the Nazis. Many of those conflicts were wars of aggression, often seeking to prop up fascists.

If the US military was actually about defense, it could easily be cut in half. We’d still be spending more on it than any other country in the world. The US spends more than the next 9 countries combined and it is the fascist threat that other countries have to defend against.

Yes, sometimes the only way to solve a problem is through force. But it’s also true that when you have this massive hammer, everything looks like a nail. We have this whole industry built off that profits from war and needs a constant state of war (or at least threats) to justify its existence, and if there aren’t any threats, they’ll create them.

Once all the people involved in the previous unjustified wars is in prison, then if the people who threw them in prison want me to believe that there’s a genuine threat, I’ll consider it. But I will never support US military involvement in any conflict until that time, regardless of circumstances.

And I think the bans were right in retrospect because the timed (not typically perma) bans expired

Lol, no they weren’t/didn’t.

and those people still magically disappeared completely from Lemmy after the election.

Lol, no we didn’t.

There’s no faster way to get called a tankie than opposing the construction of more tanks.

Opposing the construction of more tanks necessarily means arguing that those tanks are unnecessary. Arguing that tanks are unnecessary means arguing that the supposed threats our rulers want us to be afraid of are not as significant as they’d have us believe. And if you’re arguing that an “enemy” country is not as much of a threat as our rulers claim, then it’s trivial for someone to accuse you of minimizing the threat because you actually support the enemy.

This is how it’s always been. I opposed the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan from the start. Back then, instead of “tankie” they called you “terrorist sympathizer.” People who opposed the wars in Vietnam and Korea were called “reds” or “pinkos.” Those who opposed WWI were accused of being “Bolsheviks.” Some dude once criticized Rome’s violence and was accused of plotting violent insurrection and got executed for it. Same shit, different day.

I have a brother who fought in Iraq and Afghanistan, and while he’s always been an absolute chud, it was a very radicalizing experience. He came back with PTSD and then started “self-medicating” with meth. He made our family’s lives a living hell, like we were 24/7 911 operators, always waiting for the day he was going to act on his paranoid delusions. He finally went out to some innocent family’s house with a gun and pulled on the cops who’d followed him and got shot in the arm. He’s recovered somewhat, but still has relapses.

These experiences are the most traumatic thing that has ever happened to me or any of my family. Still it pales in comparison to what he experienced, which in turn pales in comparison to what the people living in those countries experienced. My dumbass brother chose to go over there, but they didn’t choose to be born there, and the casualty rates were so much higher for them.

People look at casualty rates (if they bother to) and imagine that that’s the full price of war. But my brother isn’t on any of those casualty lists, because his wounds were “only” psychological. The true scale of harm is literally incomprehensible.

I remember one night that I had come to visit and I went out to eat with my parents, thinking, hoping, that for one night things could be peaceful. Then the texts started coming in. Another crisis, more schizophrenic accusations, veiled threats, reading into every little thing. I remember the tears streaming down my mother’s face as she tried not to make a scene at the restaurant.

Whenever I think about any of the people responsible for those wars, I take what I felt in that moment and multiply by a hundred, a thousand, a hundred thousand, by as much as I’m capable of, and it’s still not enough.

The government and media do such a good job sheltering the public from what war really means. So many people just treat it like a movie or a video game because they know that more than they know about reality. The media rarely covers the human cost, especially of the other side. And so when I come on to Lemmy and vent about how war is bad and we should build schools and hospitals instead of tanks and bombs, people call me a tankie and accuse me of having some secret agenda. Because real life action movies are so cool, who could possibly have a problem with them?

running from their wartime fighting obligations because they’re a family of cowards.

Dodging drafts is the only cool thing any Trump has ever done, actually.

It is difficult for me to imagine what “personal liberty” is enjoyed by an unemployed person, who goes about hungry, and cannot find employment.

Real liberty can exist only where exploitation has been abolished, where there is no oppression of some by others, where there is no unemployment and poverty, where a man is not haunted by the fear of being tomorrow deprived of work, of home and of bread. Only in such a society is real, and not paper, personal and every other liberty possible.

• Some guy

Yeah, but on the off chance aliens pick him up and he’s their first contact, they’d probably destroy the planet.

Me: Hey, stop that!

Guy who broke into my house: What a great sentiment, but it’s unbelievably unrealistic throws my stuff into a giant bag there will always be things people will want to steal.

When criticism is levied against the empire, it gets framed as “stopping all violence forever.” The same framing is not used when it comes to criticism of enemies of the empire. Nobody talks about Iran in terms of “We can’t do anything about them because violence will always exists.” Why? Because they framed as being somehow uniquely beligerant, while the empire is framed as being “the normal amount” of beligerant - even though the empire is much more violent, beligerant, and aggressive than Iran or any other country.

You can want the most murderous regime on the planet to stop attacking countries without the expectation that all violence will end forever.

Depending on where you split the clauses, there are as many as 18 commandments

And here I thought it was fifteen.

Lots of people treating the Torah as exclusively Christian in here.