The scene was embarrassing enough for the prick already. The fact that it was organized and planned, and he still had no plan whatsoever for what to do if El-Sayed simply said “Yes, I do condemn the Muslim Brotherhood” really goes to show how fucking weird and disconnected from reality these people are.

This is the same reason why they’re so obsessed with Hasan. The right has benefited from a perception that men, or at least “real” men, don’t have a place on the left. It’s been a highly effective strategy that shifts things away from the actual issues and onto meaningless aesthetics, and which is partially responsible for the political gender gap, particularly among young men who are more impressionable in that way. Having at least a handful of men who can challenge that perception (provided it doesn’t fall into actual toxicity) is, from a purely pragmatic perspective, strategically invaluable.

The right understands the potential impact of such aesthetics better than many on the left do, and so they’re desperate to discredit such figures, and especially, to try to get liberals and leftists to denounce them, because the goal is to reinforce this narrative that men have no place on the left. Of course we shouldn’t let their narratives dictate our actions, but we should at least be aware of them and try to avoid playing into them. Know the enemy.

Yeah but none of that happens if the corporations that make the cars are the ones writing the laws that regulate them.

If what I’ve heard about two things being true at once is accurate, then it’s possible for both The Atlantic and Trump to suck balls at once.

Why do you need to be “more motivated” if you care about climate change so much, when the options couldn’t be more clear?

I don’t know how I can possibly make this more simple. These people haven’t been motivated enough to vote for your party before. You want them to be motivated to vote for your party in the future. Therefore, you need to find a way to make them more motivated to vote for you. That’s why. This is not complicated.

You are just making excuses for apathy.

No, I’m simply shifting the focus to where it belongs.

There’s a mismatch between what the party does and what the people want, and your solution involves trying to change what the millions of people want instead of changing the handful of people who determine party policy. Not only is that completely undemocratic, it’s also completely impractical. Unless you have a magic wand you can wave that will turn millions of people into Lesser Evilists before you’ll need their votes, you’re gonna have to meet them where they’re at and give them things they want. Which is exactly how any democratic system is supposed to work.

It’s kind of amazing how entitled y’all are with your party. They’re supposed to be “public servants.” If a servant’s employer tells them to clean something, does the servant say, “It’s already clean enough, you need to learn to live with a little dust,” or do they do the thing they’re being fucking paid to do and clean it again, even if they think the request is stupid? The level of backtalk y’all give to the public is frankly unbelievable. You don’t act like public servants, you act like public masters, like you’re feudal lords who get to tell us what’s going to happen and we’re uppity rabble who needs to fall in line. You’ve got things completely upside down.

What an article.

Consider what the American president just told the entire world: Please don’t interfere in my relationship with a murderous dictator, or he might help the country that America’s men and women in uniform are fighting at this very moment. The leader of the most powerful nation on the planet—yes, that’s still the United States right now—is trying to get everyone else, including the American Congress, to avoid antagonizing Putin, instead of warning Putin not to even think about aiding Iran.

As always, The Atlantic’s solution to every situation is to be more aggressive and militaristic. A more sane version of this article would be criticizing Trump for starting the war in Iran to begin with. But The Atlantic jizzes their pants over the war because they’d been dreaming about it for ages.

The author seems to be struggling here with the concept that Superman does not exist. The US, like any country, has a limited ability to throw it’s weight around. This is exactly why sanctions on Russia didn’t work and were never going to work, because they just sold their oil through India and China, and China was never going to cooperate on sanctions while we were antagonizing them in a pointless trade war. “Full aggression on every front,” the dream of every Atlantic writer, only has the effect of spreading the US thin and weakening its ability to apply real pressure anywhere.

The irony here is that Trump is overextending the US and trying to be in too many places at once, by starting the Iran War. Most ordinary people, including many on the right, oppose the war for that reason. But The Atlantic is so committed to full aggression everywhere that they somehow find a way to argue Trump isn’t overextending enough. And, naturally, their objection seems to primarily be that it’s undignified to acknowledge these limitations, rather than framing things around any actual human cost.

A world in which the White House is allied to the Kremlin was, until now, the stuff of paranoid fiction. Manchurian candidates and red presidents were fantasies, dark tales that Americans told themselves, like ghost stories around a campfire. But this alliance now exists. If Stalin and his Cold War successors could see what Trump and Putin have created, and how the mighty United States has been humbled and humiliated, they might think that their evil hopes were not wrong, but only that they dreamed them too early.

This whole framing of it being an “alliance” because the US stopped sanctioning them is patently absurd. Is the US “allied” with every country it’s not currently sanctioning? Words mean things.

But what’s especially ironic about this part is that the USSR, under Stalin, was literally part of “The Allies,” during WWII. The US traded with the Soviets, fought on the same side against a common enemy, sent them military aid, coordinated on military strategy, etc. Why would Stalin consider it particularly remarkable, even if the US had entered an actual alliance with the Russian Federation? That’s also completely dismissing the whole history of the collapse of the USSR and the US involvement in establishing the Russian Federation in the first place. It’s just stupid.

By the way, why did the US ally with Stalin? Was it because FDR secretly agreed with him, ideologically? Or was it because the US was aware of it’s material limitations and made the correct decision to focus on one problem at a time, instead of maximum aggression towards everyone at once? If this guy had been in charge back then, we’d all be speaking German.

Even after WWII, throughout the Cold War, the US traded with the USSR. The US also signed treaties and agreements such as SALT. And whenever it did, there were plenty of these insane, warmongering reactionaries, like the author, who pushed the exact same kinds of exaggerated rhetoric about how the politicians responsible were being controlled or manipulated by the Kremlin. These extremist nutjobs want the same thing they always have, a future where when the dust settles there’s two Americans left and one Russian, so they can call it a “victory.”

he may well believe that some janky diesel deal with Russia will alleviate high fuel prices in the United States. (It will not, although it will certainly help some Russian companies.)

Honestly I just love this line, the cherry on top of the whole piece. “It will not,” zero elaboration whatsoever. Reminds me of this classic Onion article. Why would making oil more directly accessible, instead of shipping it to China or India first, not lower fuel prices? Even if there’s some reason why it wouldn’t, why isn’t it included in the article? It’s just unprofessional.

It seems that the author included that line because he’s concerned that people will care more about fuel prices than the rest of his arguments, and he’s concerned such people might agree with Trump. But how on earth do you paint yourself into such a corner, in your own article, that you’re left baselessly asserting, “it won’t,” regarding Trump and fuel prices? Donald Trump is solely, directly responsible for prices soaring, on account of his pointless, failed war of aggression against Iran.

But again, no one at The Atlantic wants to frame things in those terms, because they just love war so damn much.

No, you’re supposed to understand that people will be more motivated to vote if you appeal to them based on the policies they care about and follow through, instead of offering nothing beyond, “not the other guy.”

I fully understand that the racist caricature of a Chinese person presented in this meme is a scammer, that’s one of the stereotypes that makes it a racist caricature.

If someone posted a meme with a Jewish “happy merchant” scamming people, would you read that as being ok because it’s about “scammers?” Or would you recognize that invoking the stereotype of Jews being scammers is racist? Especially when presented in the context of other racial stereotypes. Would you treat me calling it out as “intentionally misunderstanding to claim the moral high ground?” Or is it that depicting Chinese people as scammers is more acceptable than doing the same with other races?

The joke is obviously painted this way, but you are intentionally misunderstanding so you can attack/dismiss the poster as a racist/fascist/Nazi, a very common leftist playbook technique to claim moral high ground.

I didn’t misunderstand shit. Calling out racism is also a very common leftist playbook technique to… call out racism. Do you recognize that racism is a thing that exists and should be called out?

But let’s not pretend that Tibet was liberated from a cruel economy and then given a path to self determination and control over immigration. If the remnants of all former empires laid claim to their former conquests the world would burn.

Do the former Confederate states have control over immigration, or is that handled at the federal level? Do those states have “a path to self-determination,” including a path towards secession, or towards reinstituting slavery? No, they are, quite correctly, bound by federal laws and follow the same rules as everyone else. Should we treat the Union reestablishing control over the Confederacy as, “an empire laying claim to its former conquests?” They had been a part of the Union for a much shorter time than Tibet had been part of China.

Most nation-states have slavery-by-another-name running inside their prison systems, including China… Slavers liberating slaves, pfft.

Yes, and the Union had prisons too. This doesn’t change the fact that ending the formal institution of slavery was a major, important step that materially improved the lives of the freed slaves. You’re dismissing all progress unless it instantly creates a perfect utopia overnight. This was a big one I heard, “The Northerners were hypocrites because their factories had harsh conditions.”

So far, I have yet to hear an argument that passes the, “Can this be used to justify the CSA” test, and as the CSA was unjustified those arguments must be wrong. You say that the systems were different, and yes, that’s true. The question is whether they were different in any relevant way. They were both cruel systems of involuntary servitude.

All of your arguments are just justifying cruel, inhumane, oppressive, authoritarian systems, and twisting words around to present it as “anti-authoritarian.” My upbringing has innoculated me against that sort of thing.

Ok so you lose then.

Yeah, and growing up I heard the exact same talking points about the Confederacy. How states should have the right to decide whether they want to be in a union or not, how ending slavery was the real slavery, how it was authoritarian for a central body to tell us who we couldn’t enslave, how Southern culture was lost by the North imposing it’s ways on us. Just another nation-state trying to control the little guy. I’ve heard it all before.

If there is some rationale that can actually justify bemoaning the lost cause of the Tibetan slaver theocrats, it’s probably for the best that I’m not clever enough to see it, because I’d have used it to justify the beliefs I was raised with and might not have ever become a leftist in the first place.

It’s completely absurd to speak of “self-determination,” especially “socioeconomic self-determination” regarding a literal slave theocracy. What, you mean the “self determination” of the theocrats? Because the serfs didn’t have self-determination to lose in the first place. Again, there’s no shortage of people in the South who would bemoan the “carpetbaggers” and the loss of Southern “socioeconomic self-determination” (though they might use different terms), completely glossing over the fact that slaves had zero socioeconomic self-determination under their system.

You are the one who’s adopting a statist perspective by treating the serfs and their lords as one entity with unified interests, when if you look at if from a class perspective, they had diametrically opposed interests, with the interests of the serfs being in line with the interests of the Chinese people and the revolutionaries. Which is why so many of them supported them (in spite of the slaver theocrats’ attempts at religious indoctrination).

Of course, another reason is their shared history. Tibet had been part of China for hundreds of years, which is why it’s still claimed as part of China by the ROC. During the brief period of chaos following the collapse of the Qing, it emerged alongside countless other warlord states that were opposed by both the nationalists and communists, as well as anyone with half a brain who could see that the division is exactly what allowed them to be invaded by the Japanese despite them being a much smaller foe. In fact, during WWII, the US military produced a film that states that point explicitly.

China would have been wrong to have not freed the Tibetan serfs. Perhaps that liberation was imperfect or incomplete, just as the liberation of slaves in the US was, but it was still a step in the right direction that massively improved the quality of life for the vast majority of Tibetans.

Point being, national sovereignty doesn’t outweigh wanton cruelty. It’s the same argument with the Confederacy, “States’ rights? States’ rights to what?” No state that employs that kind of system has the right to exist. The Union defeating the Confederacy and freeing the slaves, even if it wasn’t total liberation, was completely justified and made a marked improvement in countless people’s lives. Yes, there is still more to be done, but the world is a better place because slavery, as an institution, was ended by force.

Disbanding NATO doesn’t help anyone but Russia and somewhere in that brain of yours you know that.

Pretty sure it would’ve helped the Libyans if the “defensive” alliance that waged an offensive war on them didn’t exist.

NATO is a tool of neocolonialism and there are countless neocolonies around the world that it harms. Even if it were “defensive” (which it absolutely isn’t) it maintains an oppressive status quo over the global majority and gives member states the ability to attack wantonly, without fear of retaliation.

People who don’t eat at restaurants at all are obviously not the same as people who don’t eat at a restaurant that doesn’t exist.

Legitimately don’t understand this word salad.

You said you understood that concept but then spent the rest of your comment describing people who want to eat at restaurants.

Someone who doesn’t currently eat at restaurants might start eating at them if the restaurants find a way to appeal to them. That’s not a complicated concept.

If I’m vegan, and no restaurants in my area offer vegan options, then I am someone who doesn’t eat at restaurants at all. If a restaurant opens up that does offer vegan options, or if an existing restaurant adds a vegan option, then I might start eating at restaurants. Do you not understand this concept?

Likewise, someone who doesn’t vote might start voting if they’re appealed to. This is equally uncomplicated.

No one is going to open a restaurant where the target market is “people who don’t go to restaurants”.

???

When you open a restaurant, the only target market is people who don’t go to your restaurant. Looking into how to expand your business to people who don’t already go to restaurants is absolutely a valid line of inquiry that companies persue all the time. Maybe the reason they don’t eat out because it’s too expensive, and you can appeal to them with lower prices. Maybe the reason they don’t eat out is because they don’t know how good your food is, and you can address that with free samples. Maybe they have dietary restrictions and you can appeal to them by adding vegan or gluten free options. Restaurants, like any business, are constantly looking for ways to break into new sections of the market. So your analogy falls completely flat.

Look at, for example, Little Caesars which at least back when I was in school had cheap ass $5 pizzas, they tasted like shit but they were $5 so being a broke ass college student I ate there all the time when I might otherwise have not eaten out at all. And that’s why they focused on keeping the price low instead of making it actually good. Because at $5, even groceries wouldn’t be much cheaper.

Likewise, if a political party is uninterested in appealing to people who don’t already vote for them, it must mean that they’re satisfied with their current level of support. Which, considering the Dems lost the last election, doesn’t exactly seem to be working. And what, do you think you’ll have better luck trying, again, to appeal to “moderate” Republicans? Let me know how that goes, lol.

It’s kind of shocking that it has so many upvotes. I guess I’m saving this one and adding it to my pile of, “Reasons why I don’t give a shit what the majority of people on here think.”

Twenty years of listening to you fuckers say this about Afghanistan, but we lost, and where are all the 9/11s?

Uno reverse card

If so many people who care about the climate don’t vote, then why don’t politicians take a stronger line on the issue to appeal to them?

What population of slaves in history has not welcomed their liberators? What population of slaves in history has been permitted to petition someone to come free them?

(you could argue things like “wage slavery,” but that’s still significantly different from chattel slavery or serfdom)

Human trafficking is illegal everywhere. It still happens, but does so in the shadows. If a nation can just accuse another of not doing enough to combat human trafficking, that’s subjective by how much is “enough,” and the scope of it is hard to prove in an objective and indisputable way. Any nation could accuse any other nation and it would be a free pass whenever anyone wanted to go to war.

I’m talking about having an official stance of legalized chattel slavery or serfdom.