Could have been someone else (not Trump) allowing an attempt on Trump’s life, figuring:
Possible, definitely not a sure thing.
Close. The internet was never leftist – as in opposing capitalism. It was at its best the ACLU wing of liberal, and at its worst the age of consent wing of libertarian.
When social media exploded, the internet condensed to just a few aggregator platforms. You now had all this traffic and attention that could be more easily monetized than a million small websites and forums, and that’s what happened. Your few companies that own these aggregator platforms now have an enormous financial interest in (1) keeping content palatable to advertisers and (2) keeping regulation and taxes at bay. They accomplish the second in part by cooperating with the U.S. intelligence community, to the point of becoming one of the many industries with a revolving door between their corporate governance and the parts of the actual government that deal with the industry.
Of course any significant leftist communities on these platforms get snuffed out: big business and the American government hate the left. Your ACLU-type liberals get pushed right or out as the impetus to make money drives every decision, with their free speech language selectively co-opted to protect the right. Then your most right-wing party starts to become openly fascist around the time a fascist buys one of the major platforms and removes even the nominal guardrails against the most egregious fascists.
Now we’re here: with a few small non-fascist corners of the internet populated by a mix of leftists and liberals.
I’d ask:
This has been a conversation for a few decades about Japan. They may have some issues with fewer young people having kids (and hard restrictions on immigration), but “depopulate” isn’t on the table, and I’m not even sure it’s at a crisis stage.
*The atomic unit of propaganda isn’t lies, but emphasis.
There is nothing Hamas could have done on October 7 that would justify committing genocide against Palestine.
Any reading you can recommend on this?
Who cares if the arguments resemble one another? The underlying situations are what determine if the argument makes any sense.
“I was afraid for my life” is a fine argument for firing back if someone pulls a gun and starts shooting at you. It’s ridiculous when it comes from a cop who opens fire on a kid with something in his hands.
if ukranians want to stay independent russia should respect that
The parts of Ukraine Russia controls right now were trying to break away from Ukraine before the war. And again, Russia is not trying to conquer Ukraine – the goal is to keep Ukraine out of NATO.
nobody can strip their right to resistance and the over 60k dead Palestinians responsibility lay exclusively on Israel
Palestinians and Ukranians both have a right to resist attackers. I’m saying it’s sensible for Palestinians to do so (because their attacker has stated their intent to exterminate them, so it’s either fight or die), but not sensible for Ukrainians to do so (because their attacker just wants them not to join NATO, and because there is no realistic hope of the war turning around).
As for who’s responsible for the deaths: Ukraine’s government almost immediately sold out their people when they (on the advice of Boris Johnson) backed out of ceasefire agreement they had tentatively agreed to in the opening weeks of the war. By choosing to use their people to fight a proxy war for NATO when there was an easy out on the table, they are partly responsible for the deaths of their people.
Israel say that there is no Palestinians and all the land is our , Russia say that Ukrainians are just Russians that Ukraine was simply part of Russia .
It cannot be overstated how completely different these situations are. Israel is trying to exterminate Palestinians. Russia does not want Ukraine to be part of a hostile, nuclear-armed military pact. Palestinians are fighting because otherwise Israel will kill them. Ukrainians are fighting because their coup government is having its strings pulled by NATO.
I think Russia could have with economic pressure alone stop Ukraine from joining NATO
They tried since 2014, and Ukraine still wouldn’t give it up (or keep their domestic fascist groups from attacking Russian speakers in Eastern Ukraine). It turns out Ukraine and NATO weren’t even negotiating in good faith, as Angela Merkel admitted about the Minsk II agreement.
There is the type who say palestinians should resist… They say if hamas never attacked
If anyone says this, they don’t mean it, because it’s completely contradictory. They’re lying to you.
I would like ukranians to stop dying but not by giving up part of their land
There’s no future resolution to this war that leaves Ukraine with more land than they have today. Continuing the war just means it will end with less Ukranian land and less Ukranians.
It’s unlike Palestine because Russia is not fighting a war of extermination and is not trying to drive residents from their homes. The people in the parts of pre-war Ukraine that Russia now controls aren’t being massacred or evicted; they are predominantly Russian speakers who had (to be charitable to Ukraine) legitimate grievances with the Ukranian government after the U.S.-backed coup in 2014.
From the Ukrainian perspective, there is actually a benefit to a peace on Russia’s terms: Ukraine keeps more of its land and its people stop dying. There’s nothing to be gained by continuing the war because it isn’t going to turn around. This is again unlike Palestine, where peace on Israeli terms would involve at minimum the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, and where western public support for Israel has collapsed.
They think Palestinians should be driven from their homes or exterminated. They don’t care how many Palestinians die, so why would they make that argument? I’ve never heard a zionist say that.
If you care how many Ukranians die, you’d want the war to end sooner rather than later. The peace terms aren’t getting any better, so all their government is doing is getting more of their people killed.
[Resources are] finite, as is our capacity to replenish them.
You think this is propaganda?
Arming Ukraine just prolongs a war that’s clearly lost. That costs more lives than it saves.
What’s more important than the nuances of appropriations is the fact that Biden could have stopped giving weapons to a state committing genocide, but didn’t.
Everything else he did or didn’t do with respect to the situation is comparatively minor.
Why wouldn’t they be low after supplying Ukraine and now Israel for so long? They’re finite, as is our capacity to replenish them. There’s been plenty of reporting on the limits of our ability to do so.
Skepticism is warranted, but it could easily be true.
This is a good counterpoint – there’s a real career risk here, which is part of what makes it such a meaningful statement – but Kaepernick was in a very different employment situation. For him, taking substandard offers (whatever non-NFL pro league was active at the time) wasn’t worth it because of injury risk. So he had only 32 possible employers (realistically, fewer had QB needs) and they actively collude all the time. Extremely easy to get blackballed in that environment.
Bob Vylan will lose money off this, but they can find smaller venues to play and doing so can’t jeopardize their career the same way a knee injury in the USFL could for Kaepernick. It’s not a career ender.
Western marxists feel personally attacked for this position and end up rejecting it and discrediting it.
This is certainly part of it, but there are at least three other reasons western marxists hold some reservations:
There hasn’t really been a labor aristocracy since the 1970s
I think the primacy of the labor aristocracy (in the U.S., at least) has only really started to degrade much more recently. There was a fairly strong (though changing) economy in the 90s, the first dotcom boom, then the early tech boom, then the consolidation of the tech companies into 4-5 giants in the 2010s (after the Great Recession).
Now that even those jobs are drying up, and now that multiple generations are seeing the twin crunch of that + the cost of living explosion (in education especially), you’re finally seeing widespread, lasting pessimism about the economic future.
That’s exactly correct. This part:
As an example of one of his viral videos, he says legal systems for expropriating exist in NY, but that doesn’t matter much because he will either be blocked from his usage or the results will be reversed by the state.
Is just that. You have to try those avenues for change and prove they don’t work, otherwise liberals will point to them and say you’re too radical. It’s harder to convince people you’re too radical when you tried to play by the rules and it got you nowhere. You have to exhaust every other option before a critical mass of people will get on board for revolutionary change.
Democrats: Damn, someone responsible really should have put some serious measures in place to handle this situation. Why are you looking at me like that?