Objection
@Objection@lemmy.ml
- Comment on Tankie 2 minutes ago:
Name one piece of misinformation I posted. You’re just lobbing baseless insults again.
- Comment on Tankie 14 minutes ago:
Not my fault this is the only level of discourse y’all are capable of.
- Comment on Tankie 21 minutes ago:
Yes I do.
- Comment on Tankie 21 minutes ago:
You’re thinking of social democrats.
- Comment on Tankie 23 minutes ago:
Non sequitur.
- Comment on Tankie 29 minutes ago:
Case in point: Anyone who wants to stay out of conflicts automatically supports Russia. My actual reasons and motivations are totally irrelevant. Thank you for proving my point.
- Comment on Tankie 36 minutes ago:
You’re thinking of liberals.
- Comment on Tankie 1 hour ago:
Not everyone the term was or has been applied to supported them. But regardless, they still used whatever influence they had to push for fewer tanks.
If I’m an American and I’m out protesting the Vietnam War, and I say that we should end the war and stop building tanks, and that the Vietnamese communists were justified in rising up against the colonizers, does that make me pro-war? Does it make me pro-tank? Is the “peaceful” stance the one that says the Vietnamese were not justified so the US should stay in the war? That’s nonsense.
But that’s the exact same logic you’re applying here and everywhere else. If someone supported peace and deescalation with the USSR during the Cold War, then they’d be accused of supporting or not sufficiently condemning how they handled the Hungarian uprising. If someone opposes the war in Ukraine, they’re accused of supporting or not sufficiently condemning Russia. If someone opposed the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, they were accused of supporting or not sufficiently condemning 9/11 and Al Qaida. And so the peace advocates are always depicted as being violent, and it works the exact same way every single time. War is Peace.
At this point, I accept that it’s always going to happen that way and that I’ll always be “the bad guy” for opposing war. I used to be a “terrorist sympathizer,” now I’m a “tankie” in another ten or twenty years, I’m sure I’ll be some other horrible thing. Who cares.
- Comment on Tankie 2 hours ago:
Actually, I do. That’s completely consistent with my point.
The people who coined the term wanted to take a more aggressive approach to dealing with the USSR. They were particularly concerned that tensions might deescalate due to the change of leadership from Stalin to Khrushchev and the explicit foreign policy approach of “peaceful coexistence” with the West. Those in the West who supported deescalation and refused to take a hard line in support of the Cold War were labelled as “tankies” for their insufficient hawkishness.
The Western leftists and peace advocates the term was created to condemn obviously had no control over the policies over the USSR. To the extent that they could influence the policies of their home countries, they pushed for deescalation, for building fewer tanks. It was the “anti-tankies” who wanted more tanks, as they always do.
- Comment on Tankie 4 hours ago:
Yes, that’s why “tankies” are generally opposed to building and deploying tanks, moreso than just about any ideology short of pacifism. Certainly moreso than liberals are.
- Comment on Tankie 7 hours ago:
But tankies oppose nearly all wars.
- Comment on Tankie 7 hours ago:
The word “isolationist” doesn’t exist in the vocabularies of most people around here. It doesn’t really matter why I disagree with US military interventions, the fact that I do means that I will inevitably be labelled tankie or a Russian bot. So you might as well ignore it, or love the word instead, cause you ain’t done nothing if you ain’t be called a Red.
Besides, I’m not wholly an isolationist. I have no problem with trade or foreign aid, so long as it isn’t military aid. More accurately, I’m a dove. But “dove” doesn’t exactly work as an insult. Some liberals even like to imagine that they’re doves, unbelievably.
But again, liberals don’t recognize that perspectives like “doves” or “isolationists” exist. You either follow the narrative of the media and politicians, or you get thrown into this big lump of Bad People™ with zero distinctions regarding why you disagree with them.
- Comment on Tankie 8 hours ago:
Exactly.
There’s only one war worth fighting and that’s the class war. Everything else is just throwing lives away for nothing.
- Comment on Tankie 9 hours ago:
Really? Because I’m always calling for staying out of conflicts and dramatically reducing the military budget and people are constantly calling me a tankie because of those stances.
See, if you don’t want war, it means you support the other side, and however bad “our” side is, the other side is always worse and more aggressive (the media says so, after all) and that means that anyone who’s pro-peace is actually pro-war.
So it was when I said we shouldn’t invade Iraq and Afghanistan, it meant that I was “a terrorist sympathizer” and “pro-Al Qaida,” and when I say we should stay out of Palestine, people say I’m “pro-Hamas” and when I say we should stay out of Ukraine people say I’m “pro-Russia” and a “tankie.” Consistently advocating against the use of tanks is essentially the defining characteristic of a “tankie.”
- Comment on Tankie 11 hours ago:
They don’t care who “wins”, they profit off of the war itself (and the rebuild for that matter).
Then why would they love tankies, some of the only people who consistently oppose them building and using tanks?
- Comment on Give me some good ones 4 days ago:
Colbert at Bush’s correspondence dinner:
The greatest thing about about this man is that he’s steady, you know where he stands. He believes the same thing on Wednesday that he did on Monday… no matter what happened on Tuesday.
- Comment on What's it going to take to truly stop the US? 5 days ago:
The BRICS aren’t outside US sphere of influence.
But they aren’t wholly within it either.
India is squarely within it.
Is that so? Then why didn’t they cooperate with the US oil embargo on Russia?
Russia had been friendly under Bush and early Obama.
Yet more reason why US influence was greater during that period than it is now.
And China’s our number one trading partner -
It’s actually #3 after Canada and Mexico.
hardly an enemy, except in the fevered imagination of anti-China hawks.
Absent a serious geopolitical rival - the USSR
What made the USSR a more serious rival than the PRC? The USSR was generally committed to deescalation and denouement.
China’s trade policy serves several purposes:
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Providing Chinese people with access to foreign goods, to avoid repeating the dissatisfaction that contributed to the USSR’s collapse
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Expanding China’s geopolitical influence, and building up a competing market such that countries have another choice besides the West
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Making Western aggression costly through economic dependency.
In other words, they are building soft power, which is proving highly effective at swaying countries away from the US.
I can’t understand why you simply don’t recognize the utility of soft power. And yet you talk about corporations being “the seat of real material authority,” yes, that’s correct, but how do they wield and exercise that authority? Is it through hard power? Does Amazon have aircraft carriers and a standing army? No, obviously, if hard power was all that mattered, then it would make no sense to say that corporations are more powerful than the government. The government could, if it wanted to, seize every Amazon warehouse and throw Bezos in prison, while Bezos does not have that capability over the government. Even through your own hard power lens, your perspective makes no sense.
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- Comment on What's it going to take to truly stop the US? 6 days ago:
Countries in the BRI:
Countries in BRICS (red/orange):
I’m not sure that iron fist strategy is working out so well. The US is clearly in a state of decline and the soft power it’s able to wield today is considerably less than it held in the past, because the right is high on their own supply and doesn’t understand that you need soft power in order to rule the world.
While it’s true that the US was pretty brazen in invading Korea and Vietnam, it was also able to control the narrative better and did things either covertly or had some sort of pretense for it, and the postwar order also involved significant economic investment in places like Europe, Taiwan, South Korea, and Japan, all of which helped generate soft power.
The world has never been more beholden to the US than it is today.
I disagree. It was more beholden to the US during the 90’s and 00’s when it was the only real superpower. But it abused that status and that’s what allowed China to present itself as a more stable and reliable trading partner and thereby begin to challenge US hegemony. I don’t see how anyone can look at the world today and think that the US is more dominant than it was after the fall of the USSR or think that it won’t continue to lose ground to China in the foreseeable future.
For every Venezuela, there’s a Colombia.
- Comment on What's it going to take to truly stop the US? 6 days ago:
It’s a slow, ongoing process. The more the US tries to use force to make countries fall in line, the more people look to alternatives. Countries that used to be unaligned are looking at China and countries that used to be aligned with the US are looking at playing the field.
- Comment on Room temperature IQ is a far bigger insult in Europe than America. 1 week ago:
In that case room temperature IQ means you’re by far the smartest person who’s ever lived.
- Comment on for a better future for ur children 4 weeks ago:
That’s actually a statistical error, Carbon Bezos is an outlier who should not have been counted.
- Comment on for a better future for ur children 4 weeks ago:
To quote Carlin, “The earth doesn’t share our prejudice against plastic… The planet is fine. The people are fucked.”
- Comment on for a better future for ur children 4 weeks ago:
Bombs are not environmentally friendly.
- Comment on If WW3 breaks out, what countries are going to be on which side? 4 weeks ago:
If WWIII breaks out we’re all gonna fucking die. Will there be any countries left after 24 hours?
- Comment on Why do .ml users get a bad rep? 4 weeks ago:
By that logic, you don’t even need to know my stance on Russia, because the fact that I opposed the war in Afghanistan “proves I’m not anti-imperialist.” The Taliban definitely isn’t socialist either, after all.
- Comment on Why do .ml users get a bad rep? 4 weeks ago:
I’m saying it’s wild you promote it as AES when it fucking isn’t.
And I’m saying no one considers Russia to be AES, it’s a strawman that libs tell each other about us until they forget they made it up.
- Comment on Why do .ml users get a bad rep? 4 weeks ago:
If someone says something happened on the fediverse without providing a link, they’re lying.
- Comment on Why do .ml users get a bad rep? 4 weeks ago:
It’s only baffling if you don’t listen to the actual reasons people believe things and just assume it’s because Russia used to be socialist, regardless of how many people say otherwise.
- Comment on Scientists Are Increasingly Worried AI Will Sway Elections 5 weeks ago:
Of course, material conditions have nothing to do with what beliefs people arrive at or what movements spring up, no, it’s entirely 1) AI, before it existed, or 2) magic.
- Comment on YSK about Project 100,000, when the US conscripted people with mental disabilities to be used as cannon fodder in Vietnam, suffering triple the casualties of other soldiers 5 weeks ago:
I knew about MK ULTRA from that time but hadn’t heard about this one. I know about so much fucked up shit the US has done, but it seems like there’s always more out there.
