barrbaric [he/him]

Sure, there’s a two-way relationship, but the US is the global hegemon (or at least was until very recently), while Israel is a regional power. They may both influence each other, but the US has more say in the relationship.

Most honest US politician says unlimited force to protect his elevated position is fine, but the tiniest amount of force protesting that position is illegal terrorism.

For Interstellar, at least, I’d say it’s incredibly low-brow. The resolution is just “the power of wuv saves humanity!”, which is extremely simplistic and easily understood by the masses.

Reading the wikipedia article on Pakistan’s nuclear doctrine and thinking it looks good until I get to this:

One could argue that anyone paying taxes to the US (or any US-allied states) are “part of the problem” in that they’re partly paying for a state that is dead set on exterminating all life on the planet by accelerating climate change and embracing fascism (or, at the bare minimum, doing nothing major to oppose it). But the people paying those taxes are only doing so under threat of violence, imprisonment, or death. I think anyone who opposes this state of affairs is not part of the problem. They might not be part of the solution, which imo would require engaging in activism to attempt to overthrow the current state of affairs, but they’re neutral at worst. I’d like to think I do enough to fall under the former umbrella, and so would not think of myself as “part of the problem”.

The people who are “part of the problem” in my mind are three groups:

1. Those who willingly go along with the fascist project but do not meaningfully contribute to it. In america, these are your typical Trump voters who happily go along with everything he says but aren’t doing anything beyond that. It also includes many liberals who still believe in american exceptionalism and, for example, don’t see anything wrong with committing genocide so long as the person doing it is polite and pretends to be trying to stop it.
2. Those who contribute to the fascist project but are following orders. These are the kind of people who will go to Jan 6th, or scream about woke teachers at a schoolboard meeting. They might even run for small-time local office.
3. Those who are orchestrating the fascist project. These are the billionaires, high-level politicians, media personalities, and right-wing think tanks who have been actively pushing and/or masterminding the fascist movement for decades.

Clearly it’s one point three-twenty em-bee.

“Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.” ― Jean-Paul Sartre

You can just replace “anti-Semites” in the quote with “right-wingers”. They don’t care, they’re just trying to waste your time.

Perhaps if he wore a bomb vest to the next senate meeting I would consider forgiving him.

In your mind, what are acceptable ways to pressure a political party that is actively carrying out genocide?

Did you reply to the wrong person? Not sure how that relates to what I said.

Anyway, I’ll believe it when I see an actual source, not just “Well this rich dipshit famous for lying said it”. AFAIK all the actual serious science points to it being a natural evolution.

It might be simplistic, but I’m always going to go with Occam’s Razor on this: Trump and Elon are just that stupid.

Posting this is a war crime.

Hey wait that’s me

Well it got rid of the ability of people to downvote and potentially silence (by pushing them off the front page) any posts made by trans users, so I’d say yeah.

FWIW Hexbear disabled downvotes entirely (after a scandal where an audit revealed that certain users were exclusively downvoting posts of trans users) and it doesn’t seem to have resulted in any problems.

We also have a very strict moderation policy though, so this may not be universally applicable.

Lol owned

You forgot Women’s Beach Volleyball.

Taiwan only exists because it served, and continues to serve, US interests as a staging point for military operations against China. A war over Taiwan would absolutely see the US using Taiwan as a proxy, much as they are currently using Ukraine against Russia.

We’ve had one, yes, but what about second proxy war?

Well, BRICS isn’t really a formal alliance but if it were? Yeah, joining a hostile alliance while sharing a border with the US is asking for trouble, and the US has committed all matter of atrocities in latin america. I do think an outright invasion would be less likely than their usual method of military coups and death squads.