GarbageShoot [he/him]

The one is not the other

Arendt is one of the more overrated authors in America short of the founders, but she has a point about how, when you are removed from the brutal nature of the violence, you can just sort of shuffle it into your day-to-day activities. Sure, you can certify the paperwork, it’s just letters on a screen. Hell, you can even administer the needle, as it’s not your job to concern yourself with his innocence or guilt, it’s your job to use this specific set of injections to kill him in a visually benign way. Separating arbiters from brutalizing and brutalizers from arbitration makes the flagrant injustice much more palatable to both parties.

Frequently they blame ““communist”” politicians for letting the immigrants in

Biden said of the bill, “It would give me, as President, a new emergency authority to shut down the border when it becomes overwhelmed. And if given that authority, I would use it the day I sign the bill into law.”

Jeeesus, what a fucking scoundrel. Literally just a Republican at this point.

They absolutely are, and many people would be excited to answer questions you have (including me, depending on the question). You just need to be careful not to come across as combative, because they’ll meet you in kind and it’ll be a dogpile.

c/askchapo , depending on the question

Don’t you know that Stalin owned the whole Soviet Union?!?

I wish you wouldn’t believe what those very plutocrats you disavow tell you about Cuba.

Literally just read the list. It’s not ahistorical because it gets history wrong, it’s ahistorical because it has nothing to do with history. It has no ability to explain how and why fascism emerged when it did rather than sooner or later and thereby has very little understanding of what it actually is. It’s like defining a disease by a very loose checklist of symptoms, the fundamental causality is completely absent, so there is very little you can even do with it besides make a shaky diagnosis.

Incidentally, Trump isn’t a fascist. He flirts with being a fascist and in many ways has lit the way [something something tiki torches] for future fascists, but fundamentally, he’s just doing fascist-like rhetoric as a way to sell people on relatively normal neoliberal policy. Probably the most strange thing he did was bomb Qasem Soleimani, something that Democrats didn’t even really oppose on any grounds other than it being rash, despite Soleimani being a leader in the fight against ISIS. If I had to pick a second thing, it was probably lowering military funding to South Korea, which was just him being stupid and accidentally a clearly good thing to do. He’s not harder on immigrants than Democrats, he’s not harder on China or Russia, he’s just a normal rightist wrt to queers, he likes giving tax cuts to rich people, and he’s fussy in diplomatic meetings. He had very few policies that Biden didn’t immediately perpetuate. If you want to call the whole neoliberal edifice fascist, fine, whatever, but he’s not special in anything but aesthetics.

Eco is not a definitive authority and his little checklist is extremely ahistorical.

https://citationsneeded.libsyn.com/episode-83-the-unchecked-conservative-ideology-of-us-medias-fact-check-verticals

I can do it too. MBFC is a hack website that equivocates between centrism and lack of bias. See this arbitrarily picked page for an example. See that graphic, the very first thing beneath the title? It’s giving the game away right there, with a left-right spectrum where the center is “least biased”. What about a centrist bias? Doesn’t exist, and the closer you get to centrist, the less “biased” you are.

Trump doesn’t have even a double-digit number of loyalists in the Senate and proportionately probably about the same in the House. This is a relevant detail because his enablers in Congress are overwhelmingly party loyalists who will drop him like a sack of potatoes the moment it becomes more expedient to. The reason that matters is that it was mainly the Republican Party that got all those Congresspeople elected, not Trump, even in the races where Trump endorsed them, so the relative locus of power is the Republican Party (and really it’s the donor class, but we don’t need to get into that).

All this to say that AP’s simplistic and unsubstantiated flattening of Venezuelan politics to “There’s one guy in charge of everything, his lockstep minions, and the brave rightists fighting them” is below you to believe.

He has shat the bed for his country

US sanctions fucked over the country, so unless you think “being disliked by the US” is a grave sin, this isn’t an accurate framing

I believe this is the “whataboutism” that liberals love to cry about so much (more properly, you’re deflecting to a completely different topic)

Maduro isn’t a socialist, Chavists aren’t socialists and he’s openly a Chavist (i.e. a follower in the tradition of Hugo Chavez, who was a great progressive but not really a socialist).

I don’t give a shit what the Carter Center has to say about any of America’s enemies, and they provide no means to evaluate the substance of the claim by “experts from the UN” (which is different from a report by the UN or an official committee of the UN).

And, again, Maduro did not appoint the judges; he doesn’t even have the power to.

Maybe most pertinently: Do you not remember last election cycle, when all the neoliberal news outlets were joined together in their outrage over the NED and friends saying Maduro stole the election, only for that claim to “just turn out” to be pulled from thin air? Do we need to do this every six years when a US-backed reactionary loses?

Quoting something that AP says without substantiation is not actually a good citation. It’s not like Maduro appointed the judges.

None of its supposed assets make up for the corporate overlords who run it and promote or permit all sorts of terrible things

Granted

There would be an immense toll, but it would mean the destruction of the US, Israel, NATO, and neoliberalism generally, which I think means there is also room for optimism. If I may gesture towards Mark Twain, there are two Reigns of Terror here, and though we have reason to fear the latter one, it will not last as long or kill as many as the former one that it puts an end to. If there is not a nuclear holocaust, anyway

Adam Johnson and Nima Shirazi