I just catalogue tankies as another flavor of right-wing. Any kind of authoritarianism is far-right as far as I’m concerned, whether it’s supposedly in service of communism or anything else.
Being left is about finding actual working solutions that help people and make society more free, just and safe for everyone and it’s about being willing to abandon solutions that have been tried and don’t work towards that goal (or require massive amounts of blood to achieve).
A tankie insisting that you need to just purge the political undesirables to make a utopia is just as irrational and right-wing as MAGA chud thinking theocracy or an ethnostate will work.
“Centrists” in the US think you’re meant to cut the difference between those two, which is why they end up conservative themselves. They’re stuck in a conception of the political landscape that limits them to thinking of things as a spectrum of extremes, rather than a binary between stuff that works to produce material good and stuff that doesnt.
It’s definitely a low point for our congress, which is saying something. Netantahu’s visit and reception is the perfect illustration of just how far to the right the political frame has moved in this country.
They don’t need our help shelling the region, what are you talking about? Israel doesn’t need a signature to continue indiscriminate dronestrikes, they are doing that right now. They’ve cut off foid and water, they’ve destroyed all the hospitals and schools, they’re bombing the save zones, bulldozing cemetaries, literally shooting people indiscriminately.
I really get the impression you don’t actually understand what’s going on in Gaza. There is no “moderating hand” from Biden, and he’s given them everything they want already.
Right, but they literally already have billions in weapons and bombs from Biden. If you pour more water into an already overflowing bucket the bucket doesn’t become more full. People need to actually look at what’s happening in Gaza, not just what they hear on NPR or MSNBC.
I think people are just unwilling to admit that the moral pressure against Biden was the right play from the start, and that it worked. Biden’s not even going to be in office but people still need to try to justify to themselves how just a few weeks ago they were doing everything they could to try and shut down criticisms of Biden’s genocide complicity.
People don’t want to admit they were wrong on this because they know what it means morally – that their place in history would be the same as the german citizens who stood by and made excuses for themselves during WWII.
Right, I’m not saying Trump is pro-palestine, I’m saying Biden placed exactly 0 limits on Israel, so they’re doing exactly as they wish (same as they’d do under Trump).
I think what’s revealing about you zionist guys is that you’re not making the same “not as bad on Israel” when it comes to Biden and Harris. If Biden is left of Trump on Israel (he’s not, but assuming your claim is true) then Harris is even further left of Biden.
You would think that having someone who polls better, who is to the left of Biden on Israel, would be good. Instead you’re still trying to do damage control for a guy who is no longer going to be in power and who has literally done nothing but give them more bombs and aid, same as Trump would.
There’s no indication Trump could be worse on Gaza. That’s something said by people who haven’t faced the reality of what’s actually happening there.
I’m willing to vote for and encourage others to vote for Harris. Biden is still Genocide Joe to me, there’s just no better nickname that reflects the true horror of what he helped enable.
I think zionist bots are in damage control right now same as the Rusdian/Chinese bots. Trying to make it seem like the pressure that led to Biden stepping down wasn’t a referendum on Biden’s out of control zionism.
And then there are people trying to square the reality that they have been dogmatically and aggressively defending a genocide enabler when they should’ve been calling for him to step down with everyone else. People are uncomfortable confronting what that means about them as people.
I’m the opposite, as I got out of my teens I really started to get less and less out of single-player games. They just felt like an empty theme park for the most part. I found myself more drawn to games like DayZ where it’s not just PVP, but it’s entirely open for you and others to choose how you play and approach eachother.
That anarchy of play styles has produced some of the greatest experiences I’ve had in a game because the “characters” you meet are real people and you have to use real reasoning and human social skills to navigate situations, whether it’s determining how suspicious someone is, making a hard call when you are uncertain, or forming alliances and building trust. I actually am the main character of my own story and what I bring to the table determines what sort of story I have.
Single-player games simply can’t offer that. In a single-player you’re just inhabiting a fictional character as their story progresses along rails like a train ride. I’d rather just watch a film or series for that kind of story.
And a game like Elden Ring where you just rotely try over and over until you find the scripted limits of the AI just doesn’t do much for me, I never feel fully engaged or accomplished. But when I engage with a human stranger and either negotiate or outwit them (or get outwitted) that is really mentally stimulating for me because there’s this overlap with reality where the human interactions are unsimulated.
He also called Trump America’s Hitler but then went back on that to get the nomination, which reveals that he really has no moral principles and will go whichever way he thinks the political wind is blowing.
Shay’s Rebellion and the Whiskey Rebellion were both carried out by veterans who had fought in the Revolutionary War, only to immediately have their rights curtailed and be taxed to pay the debt that was held by the elite revolutionary class. Massachusetts (where Shay’s rebellion was focused) had basically paid off all these wealthy elites who had funded the revolution and then taxed the normal citizens of the state.
Hamilton was pretty explicitly trying to create an oligarchy in the US, and the rebellions were a response to that effort to essentially cut the general population out of the democracy they had fought for while also getting them to pay down the debts incurred by the ultrawealthy landowners.
These rebellions were led by revolutionary veterans who had been fighting under the assumption that they were fighting for their own democratic rights, yet even after the war without a certain amount of property you couldn’t vote or run for office, leaving most people out in the cold.
So yeah, Washington (one of the biggest landowners) was eager to put down the rebellions, but it was out of a hypocritical and anti-democratic impulse, ironically. So, does it matter what the founders intended with 2A? If they were against what we now understand as democracy, how much weight should we really be lending their opinions now, in our context and understanding of what democracy should be? You start to see how “Constitutional Originalism” came to be a thing – it’s a relic of that early struggle between oligarch’s and the common people.
If people are interested in more on that topic there was a great podcast featuring William Hogeland that outlines a lot of really interesting context about post-revolution US that is not widely understood, but makes a lot of what we still struggle with to this day make a lot more sense. I’d say it’s critical history for progressive inclined people to understand.
OceanSoap being loaded into the train car: “Ok guys, any minute now will be the prime opportunity to stop these fascist guys. Just remember to consider both sides, they might have a really good reason for taking us out to this isolated camp.”
The fact that bystanders were killed/injured kind of makes me doubt it was staged, as much as Trump would stage something like that, I am doubtful they did in this case.
Supposedly they literally caught the bullet that struck him on camera:
Which is wild, but not outside the realm of possibility. This photo was being reported on by NPR this morning, they had an interview with the photographer.
People on the left talk about “sending in Seal Team 6” as a way of pointing out the hypocrisy and short-sightedness of the right’s power grab. Not because anyone actually thinks the president should assassinate people.
Meanwhile Trump has literally said he wants to execute his political opponents and the right-wing supreme court gave their blessing.
Sure, yet none of them are able to do what Trump does. That’s why it’s taken 40+ years for them to get to this point. The Mitch McConnells and such might be politically saavy, but they don’t have the “charisma” of Donald Trump to actually pull off the end game. That’s why they all protect him so much, he’s a cult figure, which can be difficult to fabricate.
6·6 months ago
I just catalogue tankies as another flavor of right-wing. Any kind of authoritarianism is far-right as far as I’m concerned, whether it’s supposedly in service of communism or anything else.
Being left is about finding actual working solutions that help people and make society more free, just and safe for everyone and it’s about being willing to abandon solutions that have been tried and don’t work towards that goal (or require massive amounts of blood to achieve).
A tankie insisting that you need to just purge the political undesirables to make a utopia is just as irrational and right-wing as MAGA chud thinking theocracy or an ethnostate will work.
“Centrists” in the US think you’re meant to cut the difference between those two, which is why they end up conservative themselves. They’re stuck in a conception of the political landscape that limits them to thinking of things as a spectrum of extremes, rather than a binary between stuff that works to produce material good and stuff that doesnt.