frisbird
@frisbird@lemmy.ml
- Comment on If if the subtext of america has always been government as 'Donald Trump' imposes, where did liberals go wrong? 4 hours ago:
That’s not a real thing. Liberalism is a political philosophy. It has a meaning. What Americans call liberals are just liberals. And what Americans call conservatives are also liberals.$
- Comment on If if the subtext of america has always been government as 'Donald Trump' imposes, where did liberals go wrong? 7 hours ago:
Liberalism is internally contradictory. Liberals didn’t so much “go wrong” as much as Liberalism successfully solved a contradiction (feudal society facing rapid economic growth) with another contradiction (universal human rights constrained by private property).
Liberalism was doomed to this fate from the beginning. Honestly the failure of liberals is that they didn’t abandon liberalism and adopt communism sooner.
- Comment on Is anyone else having a hard time sympathizing with Americans? 5 days ago:
Start claiming it.
- Comment on Is anyone else having a hard time sympathizing with Americans? 5 days ago:
LOL.
I always side with the oppressed. I am on the side of anyone who fights evil, but the US needs to be humbled. I bet the Russians caused this.
Fucking gold, mate.
- Comment on Is anyone else having a hard time sympathizing with Americans? 5 days ago:
Oh no, it was originally intended this way too. This is what James Madison was talking about when he said that the government ought to secure the interests of the opulent minority against the will of the majority.
- Comment on Is anyone else having a hard time sympathizing with Americans? 5 days ago:
Only the last 20?
- Comment on Iran’s Protest Crackdown Followed a China Playbook. There’s a Reason for That. 1 week ago:
www.jpost.com/middle-east/…/article-881733
wsj.com/…/american-spies-confront-a-new-formidabl…
Propagandists gonna propagandize.
China has successfully disrupted US spy networks in China to the point where the US is struggling to get any recon or operational foothold there.
Iran is absolutely going to look to China, as would any country, for help with breaking up US intelligence operations.
And since Mossad is literally on the ground in Iran, and Mossad and US intelligence are inextricably linked, this collaboration makes total sense and is probably the optimal path.
But keep spinning it like Iran needs help from China to learn how to kill 25% of all protestors in 3 weeks with small arms when Israel couldn’t kill that many Palestinians in 3 months with fighter jets, tanks, and a full court military press.
Eat it up piggies.
- Comment on Instead of everyone leaving NATO, could everyone else just kick the US out? 2 weeks ago:
So then America isn’t a democracy because it persecuted Assange, Snowden, Manning, and many many others over its long history, right?
Because it outlawed the communist party and persecuted every single person in every industry that was associated with the communists, black listing them and ending entire careers let alone lives, right?
Oh wait, you blocked me. Nevermind
- Comment on Instead of everyone leaving NATO, could everyone else just kick the US out? 2 weeks ago:
LOL, how silly.
Russia and China are democracies - they have systems of voting, candidates, politicians fall in and out of favor with the public, etc. In fact, China is innovating on how to get MORE participatory systems into their Republic that aren’t limited to gerrymandered popularity tests.
But human rights? You’re joking, right? Guantanamo Bay. Extraordinary rendition. Abu Ghraib. Vietnam. Cambodia. Laos. Guam. School of the Americas. Iran-Contra. Overthrowing the Shah. Operation Paperclip. Operation Gladio. CIA black sites. Drone striking weddings. Drone striking funerals for people who died at those weddings. Zero Units. Napalm. Agent Orange. Land mines. Somalia. Libya. Iraq. Afghanistan. Kidnapping a head of state. Double tapping fishermen. Spying on all communications of their own citizens. The Five Eyes spying on each other’s citizens and trading the intel back to each other.
You think respect for human rights is required for NATO membership? Do you know what NATO has even done?
- Comment on Trump says US needs to own Greenland to deter Russia, China 3 weeks ago:
I thought Trump was a Russian puppet
- Comment on What is the difference between an American liberal and a liberal outside the USA? 4 weeks ago:
Wait until you find out who developed the transatlantic slave trade…
It was the liberals.
You are using the word liberal to mean “moral”.
That’s not how it works.
Liberal can’t be the opposite of monarchic, fascist, communist, authoritarian, and protectionist all at the same time.
Protectionism is universal. Liberalism has nothing to say on it.
Use of authority is liberal. Have these gentlemen ever seen a liberal revolution?
You want liberal mean sugar and spice and all things nice. It doesn’t
- Comment on What is the difference between an American liberal and a liberal outside the USA? 4 weeks ago:
Musk funded
With profits gained from private property
a illiberal president
Who built his whole wealth on private property and is actively attacking Venezuela for the crime of nationalizing (deliberalizing) their natural resources.
that uses the power of the government to terrorize people with draconian anti-immigration policies and pushes highly destructive import tariffs
None of which are illiberal
How much does Musk receive every year from government subsidies and government contracts?
A lot. Because he owns the companies that receives them. Because the system is a liberal system of private ownership and everything else is illegitimate in their eyes.
- Comment on What is the difference between an American liberal and a liberal outside the USA? 4 weeks ago:
They don’t believe in hereditary monarchy, they don’t believe that private property should be abolished and that the crown should dole out land based on politics. They’re liberals who want a strong executive that can champion the private property foundations of liberalism against the democratic foundations of liberalism. Remember, liberalism didn’t start because people wanted the common peasants to control the county, it started because the merchants wanted their ill gotten wealth from their rapacious adventures to translate into political power and the crown was not willing to allow lowly merchants to usurp multiple generations of aristocratic family ties.
Musk is a liberal, not because he loves democracy but because he justifies his actions on the basis of free speech, freedom to profit, private property claims, free movement of capital, and the rights the employer. None of these things are compatible with monarchy.
Yes, there is actually a monarchist movement in the USA still, but it is very very small and very fringe and they hold that position in a way that seeks to take the current owning class, turn them into a formal aristocracy, and eliminate not merely democracy but also the liberal foundations of capitalism. It’s anachronistic and impossible, but there are some who think that way
Most conservatives just want to go back to the liberalism of our forefathers that genocides and enslaved millions, when the poor and the women and the brown couldn’t vote because they weren’t considered fully human, and where conquest was a valid legal foundation for a state.
- Comment on China Is Banning Tesla-Style Retractable Door Handles Over Safety Concerns 4 weeks ago:
You do realize that the US uses prisoners as slave labor to the tune of $11B annually, right?
- Comment on China Is Banning Tesla-Style Retractable Door Handles Over Safety Concerns 4 weeks ago:
Would you say that a government is functional if a highly biased university research project spanning 15 years determined that over 95% of people approved of their government, even accounting for the possible ways these numbers could be skewed?
- Comment on China Is Banning Tesla-Style Retractable Door Handles Over Safety Concerns 4 weeks ago:
Nor does China suffer the same recidivism rates, carceral rates, or parole rates that the US has. Nor does China accrue debt for prisoners tonthe tune of hundreds of dollars a day that they owe when they get out.
- Comment on China Is Banning Tesla-Style Retractable Door Handles Over Safety Concerns 4 weeks ago:
Uh. Friend. I hate to tell you this, but the US imprisons more people per capital than the Soviet GULAG system at its height. China has never imprisoned people at the rate the USA has. Even in the last 18 months, where the USA dropped out of the top slot in the world, it lost to Cuba who recently had a huge uptick in incarceration due to the US’s most recent attempts at recruiting dissidents. And the USA is only slightly better than Cuba on this number. And Cuban prisons are like, fully integrated into communities and don’t rely on torture and don’t have gang violence and don’t charge prisoners hundreds of dollars a day and don’t use them as slave labor the way the US does.
No. On this particular issue of locking up whomever they want for whatever reason and abusing them and letting them die and massive recidivism and a parole population that is under 24/7 surveillance that is something like 2x larger than the prison population - on this topic, the US is not somehow sliding towards being problematic. It has been this way for a century. The US is a brutal brutal regime to its own people.
- Comment on What is the difference between an American liberal and a liberal outside the USA? 4 weeks ago:
It’s because the default, globally, is now liberal. Liberalism was the movement away from monarchism. Conservatism was the movement to preserve monarchism in the face of liberalism. American liberals are liberal. American conservatives are also liberal. The alternatives are monarchist/conservative (generally only exist in countries with royalty still), communist/socialist, and anarchist (which has both right and left flavors, and even liberal flavors)
- Comment on What is the difference between an American liberal and a liberal outside the USA? 4 weeks ago:
American conservatives are liberals by definition, and liberals are right wing globally speaking
- Comment on I feel like half the neighbourhood is on fire and everyone is carrying on like everything is normal 4 weeks ago:
It would certainly be cathartic
- Comment on I feel like half the neighbourhood is on fire and everyone is carrying on like everything is normal 4 weeks ago:
Murdoch’s empire is the tip of the iceberg, my fine feathered friend. The US government has been producing propaganda for its entire existence. It continues the propaganda that was produced by the English, Dutch, French and Spanish before it. The US military is a propaganda machine. US military intelligence is a propaganda machine. The US State department is a propaganda machine. Nearly everything said by electeds and appointeds are part of the narrative, knowingly or not. Our education system is fundamentally built on propaganda. Our advertising landscape. Our video games. Our literature. Not just the rags, but the real thoughtful stuff too.
It’s in the universities at every level, it’s in all the curriculum, it’s in the court system, in common law, in the jurisprudence. It’s in SCOTUS opinions. It’s in children’s rhymes and songs and school yard games. It’s in parenting. It’s in the churches and synagogues.
It’s quite literally the narrative equivalent to the air we breathe. No. Getting rid of Murdoch’s empire would do nothing. MSNBC is propaganda. WaPo, NYT, NPR, CNN… It’s all completely integrated into a long running white supremacist narrative.
Don’t believe me? Do you know about AIM? The American Indian Movement? When they were brought to court to face the state accusers the ultimate authority for the court’s decisions was none other than the fucking Doctrine of Discovery - literally a bulletin sent out by the Pope 600 years ago saying “Christianity must be spread. Save the heathens of the world. If they won’t be saved, enslave them, take their way of life from them and educate them, and if they fight back, kill them all”. Yeah. That’s what the court’s decided.
But that was like 50 years. Surely it’s not the same? A, that’s not how law works and B, nope. In the 2000s the SCOTUS heard a case involving Indian territory and RBG, liberal bastion, wrote the majority opinion and the decision rested on the Doctrine of Discovery, with RBG stating that the US would not have a legal basis for its territorial claims without it.
We are all living on land stolen under the decree of a fucking religious leader who said that genocide is OK because they weren’t going to be saved anyway. The Spanish were disgusting in a totally different way, choosing to interpret the decree as a license to rape as much as possible, steal children, and mix white blood with savage blood in an effort to bring the offspring of the savages closer to God.
But you’ll never learn that in grade K - 12. You’ll never learn that a Thanksgiving was a victory prayer that the white settlers held after successfully destroying a village of natives, killing everyone there or running them off. They were giving thanks to God for their victory. Again, not something we’re gonna teach kids.
Everything from the holidays we celebrate and don’t celebrate to the speeches given on those dates to the statues, paintings, poems, museum displays, historical markers on the highway.
It’s all a fucking narrative to cover for the absolutely brutal country we live in and have always lived in. The fascism didn’t start with the Nazis and we’re not just emulating them for some abberation in time.
This is who we are as settlers. This is our inheritance. This is what was done in our names, when our forefathers said “we need to make a better life for our grandchildren and their grandchildren and their grandchildren”. This is America. This is Canada. This what Europe unleashed on the world.
And this is what we have to clean up, arrest, and heal.
- Comment on I feel like half the neighbourhood is on fire and everyone is carrying on like everything is normal 4 weeks ago:
What helps is to recontextualize what you’re seeing. It makes you feel less crazy and helps to give you a sense of your place.
The reality is that the US is not becoming like Nazi Germany, but rather that Germany became like the United States through the Nazi movement, and then that Nazi movement was integrated into the United States, and now the United States is advancing the thing we know of as “fascism” or maybe more specifically “EuroFascism” or “North Atlantic Fascism”.
Racism as we know it today, is found all over the world. That’s NOT because racism as we know it coemerges naturally everywhere but rather because racism as we know it was invented by the European civilization and then imposed on 80% of the world’s population through imperial domination. This is important because it helps to understand what I mean when I say that Germany became like the United States.
Germany, like most Continental European countries, was not multicultural. The European nation states were generally monocultural and their techniques for survival involved the dominance of their one culture over another, often through the process of complete extermination or displacement. This expanded the boundaries of those states, but maintained them as a monoculture.
Settler colonialism started off this way - bring your culture and your people to a new land and begin the process of extermination and displacement until you have secured an outpost of your nation state in new territory. But this was incredibly inefficient, it turned out, and the Americas really showed that by being so goddamned big. A new way of colonial domination was invented in America and it drew on racial hierarchies articulated by European scientists to rationalize it. Did you know every single original medical university in the US had a huge role in the research and development of race science?
The integration of chattel slavery, reservation systems, child separation, cultural erasure, the creation of slave hierarchies where some slaves were masters over other slaves, the creation of inter-racial conflict between kidnapped and enslaved Africans and the indigenous… All of these advances were done here, in the Americas. The first gas chambers were invented by the French generals in Haiti, the same French generals that we look to as liberators and leftists in the US, because the Haitian slave revolt was so massive that the French needed efficient ways of killing large groups of them.
When you study the rise of the Third Reich and it’s leaders and philosophers, you find that they studied the US to learn how the Germans could achieve what the US had achieved. The Germans wanted to stop with this idea of just Germans owning and dominating nearby lands - there weren’t enough Germans! They needed to construct a cross-cultural race, the Aryan race, that could bind a disparate group of people together and build a greater violent force. Their intent was to invade the Slavic nations, invade Russia, and control all of the territory and resources there. To do this, though, they would need more than just extermination and displacement. They would need slave camps, reservations, they would need the Slavs to work and labor and toil but not revolt, they would need different groups to fight with each other, to fight for proximity to the Aryans for their own safety, they would need to advance the American system.
And they did. They made huge strides in developing what the Americans had made huge strides in developing from what the Americans had inherited from the British, French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Dutch. But, the Soviets won. The Soviets rallied every single ounce of self-preservation they could muster and they defeated the most powerful military ever fielded in Europe and marched all the way through Berlin.
And what happened. The Holy Roman Emperor - the Pope in the Vatican - to which we can trace the Doctrine of Discovery, the literal Pope started saving Nazis by getting them into monasteries and then relocating them to monasteries all around the world.
And the Americans helped. Truman oversaw the creation and execution of Operation Paperclip, which brought Nazis from all levels into the US and all over Americas. They were given money, property, jobs, security details, false identities, etc. And they were integrated into the US. The US put top Nazi officers in charge of NATO. The Allies put top Nazi politicians in charge of West Germany. It never ended.
The US isn’t becoming like the Nazis. The US inherits the fascistic empires of Europe, it advances that fascism to its highest known height, and then the Nazis emerge and extend the US’s program back into Europe, and then the Nazis are absorbed back into the US, and the US continues to develop the program, unhindered by any opponents, with a completely pacified and propagandized population.
When you realize this, you realize it’s no longer as crazy making. You have always been surrounded by Nazis or latent Nazis. The signs have always been here. You have been raised in text books worshipping genociders, slavers, rapists, human traffickers, drug dealers, and yes, fascists. The entirety of your upbringing, education, and social structures all conspire to integrate and obscure these things, because they are complicit in it. And up until such time as you realize what’s going on, you also are complicit in it
Now that you realize what’s going on, now the job is to figure out what to do about it. How to be less complicit, how to stop it, or how to build the momentum that will eventually stop it.
- Comment on China says US broke international law by seizing oil tankers off Venezuela 5 weeks ago:
…lse.ac.uk/…/ahmed-al-sharaa-at-the-un-a-path-fro…
www.nytimes.com/…/syria-isis-islamic-state.html
The Syrian leader has been discreetly cooperating with the U.S.-led coalition against ISIS and Al Qaeda since he took control of a slice of rebel-held territory in northwestern Syria in 2016, according to Syrian officials and Western diplomats who spoke on condition of anonymity in keeping with diplomatic protocol.
Literally someone the US claimed was a terrorist up until 2024 has been actually working with US military intelligence for 8ish years.
- Comment on China says US broke international law by seizing oil tankers off Venezuela 5 weeks ago:
www.bbc.com/news/articles/cj69j8l918do
US launches ‘powerful strikes’ against Islamic State in Nigeria, says Trump 9 minutes ago
- Comment on Random idea: a federated alternative to Amazon Prime built from independent shops? 5 weeks ago:
Yoooo, fediverse ecom?! I love that idea.
And it’s totally doable. Ecom has been going through a “headless” revolution for a while now, meaning way better APIs and metadata.
There’s A LOT of problems in the ecom world around product images, availavle inventory, and metadata accuracy, but it’s definitely worth exploring.
- Comment on China says US broke international law by seizing oil tankers off Venezuela 5 weeks ago:
At least you realize you don’t have any reasonable response except vibes. Maybe you’ll ask me for a source to back up one of the claims you think is imaginary.
- Comment on China says US broke international law by seizing oil tankers off Venezuela 5 weeks ago:
That’s a very weird take. China absolutely has free will and it is using it to advance its national interests. One of those national interests is national defense. Defense against whom, we might ask? Defense against Zimbabwe? No. Defense against Denmark? No. Defense against Uruguay? No. China’s national defense posture is specifically shaped based on the threats it faces from the Western empire and its vassals.
Is that a lack of free will or is it an acknowledgement of the reality of the power structure of the world. It is absolutely true that the US truncates the national self direction of other nations. Every nation on earth would rather spend its efforts and wealth on making life better for itself. But instead, the US went and dropped two nukes in civilian cities and then carpet bombed and napalmed a handful of Asian nations and killed millions of people and made them suffer for generations from the after effects of nuclear and chemical warfare. So now everyone that the US treats as an adversary essentially has no choice but to establish sufficient military deterrence and defensive capabilities to prevent the US from flattening their country, killing their people, and stealing all of their resources.
If you were a relationship counselor and told China to just not worry about the USA, you’d have to deal with the guilt when the USA murdered your client. You don’t tell the victim of abuse to just not respond to threats of violence. Victims of abuse and facing threats of violence must act to protect themselves or they have a very high likelihood to end up dead. This is not an abdication of self determination but an assertion of it.
The fact that you can’t see that is very bizarre. It’s almost as if you cannot acknowledge that China has legitimate national security concerns and therefore it should follow all international laws like a good little world citizen and not worry so much about the fact that the US has spent 20+ years planning attacks and putting capabilities into positions specifically to counter Chinese defenses.
From an external perspective in the US, I agree with you - US residents are the most propagandized people in the world and they can’t imagine that China would ever do any of what it’s doing because of the real legitimate threat of violence from the US. But outside the US and the white supremacists here and in the EU, most people would see this conversation and think “wow. Archangel really does not understand what’s going in the world”
- Comment on China says US broke international law by seizing oil tankers off Venezuela 5 weeks ago:
Mission failed
- Comment on China says US broke international law by seizing oil tankers off Venezuela 5 weeks ago:
Sorry you feel that way. The reality of the situation is that the US is a violent threat to every single nation on Earth and every administration since Obama has publicly declared a military focus on Asia. If you think China has no need to defend the geographical features most critical to its national defense, you can just say that. It’s not gaslighting. As you said, you already don’t support the US, so you don’t have to defend it. You just have to acknowledge that you’re in the wrong when you say that simply because the US has not done any overt piracy or committed war crimes in the SCS this is not sufficient to conclude that China has no legitimate security interests in controlling it.
- Comment on China says US broke international law by seizing oil tankers off Venezuela 5 weeks ago:
I forget just how propagandized we Anglos are, and how propagandized I was for at least 30 years. It’s entirely possible that if Archangel keeps engaging I might be able to teach them one thing and if I can do that, it’s worth it