Sometimes a game being a little unbalanced can make it more fun.

Growing plants to eat kills fewer plants than growing plants to feed to livestock which you then eat. The “plants’ rights activist” argument is invalid.

I used to have a job processing used laptops from offices and you would not believe how many people put Apple stickers on Thinkpads and other non-Apple products. I guess for a lot of them it’s like saying, “I’d rather be using a Mac,” or it was just to be silly, I have no idea.

16 hours ago

So uhh any thoughts on those Powerball numbers?

The situation in Ukraine is complex, while the situation in Taiwan is purely hypothetical and can be dismissed without further comment.

In Ukraine, revolutionaries overthrew the government and banned opposition parties. Then, other revolutionaries decided they didn’t like that so they overthrew their regional governments and tried to break away. The pro-Western side pretends that the revolutionaries they backed were completely organic and represented the popular will, while the pro-Russia revolutionaries were purely Russian proxies - and the pro-Russia side pretends the exact same thing but in reverse. The reality is that both sides have some degree of genuine popular support.

In any case, a civil war broke out between them, and after numerous ceasefire attempts fell apart, with cities in eastern Ukraine being shelled by artillery, the pro-Russia side requested Russian assistance.

Now, I don’t think either side is fighting for anything meaningful, it’s just about who gets to put their flag where. The Ukrainian people will suffer more or less equally under either government, but they are suffering much more in this pointless destructive war.

The only reason it’s any of my business is because my government supported the overthrow of the previous government and helped bring in a new government that was unwilling to have free and fair elections, and is now providing military aid to said government. If we had simply stayed out of there from the start, I don’t believe any of this would be happening.

As for Russia, while I’m not fond of their response to the situation by any means, to really condemn them I would need to suggest an alternative course of action. If they had stayed out of the war, then the people of eastern Ukraine would, at the very least, be shut out of any democratic process. Perhaps the best approach would have been to simply spend the money they’ve spent on war on a mass relocation effort allowing ethnic Russians in Ukraine to relocate within Russia, although I don’t know that that’s realistic or that anyone would agree to that. Or perhaps Russia should have simply rolled over and accepted this expansionism. I don’t really know, it’s not really my business.

Of course this whole mess goes back to Lenin giving Russian territory to Ukraine in the hopes that the ethnic Russians would be a stabilizing force on Ukrainian politics and would help build a bridge between Russians and Ukrainians. We are now living in the miserable future where that failed and backfired tremendously. Ideally, the USSR wouldn’t have collapsed and we wouldn’t be here in the first place. But no use crying over spilt milk.

All I know is that I don’t want to be involved in it. If the Ukrainians want to fight Russia they can knock themselves out, more power to 'em. But if nothing else I can’t see how it’s possibly worth the cost when we have people here losing their food stamps.

Blackshirts and Reds by Michael Parenti will go a long way towards understanding my politics.

China seems to aspire to this same modus operandi. They seem to want to invade Taiwan in the near future.

“Seems to aspire to” “seem to want to” those are just other ways of saying that they aren’t doing it, that there’s nothing that you can point to that’s in any way comparable to what the US has been doing for decades, if not since it’s conception. You’re just speculating about what you think might happen and saying that that hypothetical possibility makes them as bad as a country that’s actually done that and worse.

It’s not that long ago that Michael Bloomberg and Rudy Giuliani were Republican mayors of NYC, but I think the last non-communist leader of China was decades ago. Before the PRC was established I would guess.

Sure. But those communists have often had vastly different approaches. China saw extensive changes both economically and politically in the 80’s and different leaders have differed on their approaches since then.

So the leadership of a single party is in their constitution. I don’t think that’s true in the US, or other western democracies.

You’re right, it isn’t. In fact, the US constitution doesn’t say anything about political parties at all. That doesn’t stop our political system from being dominated by two parties, because of the way things are set up.

The Chinese system operates off a different set of assumptions than the US system does. But the assumptions that the US system makes are fundamentally incorrect. So I don’t see a reason to just broadly dismiss the entire Chinese system based off of it being described as a “one-party state.” I for one, would prefer to live in a system where only the Democratic party existed and the Republican party did not. But moreover, I don’t think you could accurately answer basic question about how the Chinese system works. Like, walk me through your picture of how someone becomes a mayor in China. Do you even have a picture?

Look, my politics are pretty simple. I see my government doing all this fucked up shit and I hate the people doing it, I want to get rid of them, ideally have them face justice, and then bring in new people who hopefully we won’t have to do the same thing to. But apparently I’m not allowed to want that? Apparently I suddenly have to answer for every alleged bad thing anyone around the world has ever done. And I’ve been entertaining that crazy idea quite a bit more than it really deserves. Without getting into details, I can tell you that my own family was very negatively impacted by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Nobody I know has been negatively impacted (certainly not to the same extent) by China not having sufficiently democratic mayoral elections, or anything else China has done.

And again, I have absolutely no idea what purpose condemning the Chinese government is supposed to serve. I’m trying to solve problems that affect my own community. And if you think I have a moral responsibility to help liberate the Chinese people from their government, I mean, that’s insane. Again, there’s nothing I can do to bring down the Chinese government from the outside and even if I could I can not imagine any scenario where that would help the Chinese people.

I mean, if anything, shouldn’t I prioritize, say, Saudi Arabia over China? How about before we go around taking aggressive actions against a government that the people overwhelmingly approve of, we just stop giving weapons to a literal monarchy? Like, I’m not even saying we overthrow them, just stop aiding them. If you want me to ignore my own people for the sake of people all around the world, I’m down, it’s just that even if “Liberate Chinese people from the government they support” would be way, way down my list even if I put it on it. Why shouldn’t it be?

Genuinely, why shouldn’t it be? At a certain point, shouldn’t I be questioning your motivations for constantly trying to redirect my justified anger and my own government towards my government’s enemies?

“chinese hacking”

Christ, have you heard a single word I’ve said this conversation? Yes, China does hacking, Russia does hacking, the US does hacking, everybody does that kind of stuff. The difference is that China is generally limited to the kinds of bad things that every government is guilty of, whereas the US literally dominates the world by force, assassinating if not full-scale invading anybody they don’t like. You keep coming up with this tiny trivial stuff to compare to things like the occupation of Afghanistan, which makes me think that you simply don’t comprehend the scale of suffering that that entailed.

Sources like CNN and Wikipedia refer to China as a one-party state. I guess I’ll accept that this description is probably accurate, until I see news of China having national elections involving at least two competitive parties.

Actually, China has nine political parties.

It’s kinda funny to say that in comparison to New York City, because you brought up Mamdani as if he had already been elected. In fact, he only won the Democratic primary. It’s just that the Democratic party is popular enough in NYC that it’s been more or less assumed that he would win. Of course, the incumbent Cuomo was also from the Democratic party, and yet there’s significant ideological differences between them.

You might say that NYC is, functionally, a one-party city. Of course, meaningful ideological differences can exist within that party, with competitive races between them. But I suppose the fact that the Republican party technically also exists there is the thing that determines whether NYC has democratic elections or not. Is that how that works? Should I be thanking the Republicans for making the US a democracy instead of “one party state?”

It’s very clear that you haven’t actually investigated or thought about how the Chinese system works and are just repeating lines you’ve heard. A one-party system doesn’t mean that the leaders of the party pick out who they want in each position and they run unopposed.

In my experience it seemed like uniforms were kinda another grift. You gotta buy everything just so from this specific place and you might never wear any of it again afterwards. I also got in trouble fairly frequently for accidentally having some part of my uniform out of order, which had more to do with forgetfulness or neurodivergence than anything.

At the same time, I didn’t really feel like it interfered with my ability to think critically or independently, but that might just be me. I was always weird enough that anyone who would have bullied me over clothes would’ve bullied me over other stuff, and my head was in the clouds anyway so I hardly noticed what I was wearing.

If anything, perhaps things like that biased my thinking in a libertarian direction, out of rebellion. It’s very easy to think that way when you’re young, and tired of parents and teachers telling you what to do.

My mind works differently from most people’s and my experiences may be atypical. But when I googled for studies I found mixed results, it doesn’t appear that there are conclusive results showing a correlation between uniforms and academic performance.

In any case, I think it’s that big of a deal. It is messed up, generally speaking, how little control kids have over their lives in the US and how people’s intrensic motivation is often killed off and they’re pushed around by extrensic motivators, rather than cooperating with what they actually want. I would say that uniforms can potentially contribute to that larger problem.

That’s one person in a mayoral position. The overall direction of the country is something that we don’t have a choice in. Mamdani can make buses free or whatever because that doesn’t really threaten the elites, at best, it inconveniences them.

We also haven’t seen what he’ll actually do in office. Obama promised to reign in the overreaches of mass surveillance and did no such thing, for example. AOC recently voted in favor of sending military aid to Israel.

Do you pay attention to mayoral races in China? Or do you just assume that they must be undemocratic and that all the candidates are bad without a second thought? I’ll admit, I don’t, because I have little reason to. But if there were a Mamdani-like figure in China’s politics, do you really think you’d hear about them?

It seems to me like you keep trying to make a rule from the exception. Zohran is notable precisely because he’s an exception. Taiwan, likewise, is an exception to China’s general approach to foreign relations. The general trend is that the rich exert a ton of influence over the US government, which pushes it in the direction of trying to dominate every corner of the globe, usually through force. Of course, I’ve mentioned some of the most recent and blatant examples, but spin a globe, put your finger on a random country you’ve never heard of, and look into that country’s history. You’ll almost always find the US doing something nefarious. You simply can’t say that about China.

Fair point. Here in Europe though, Russia is probably a bit more worrying. E.g. I’m not surprised that Poland wants to take a firm stance of supporting Ukraine, because Poles are probably worrying that their land might be invaded if Ukraine is taken over by Russia.

My perspective on that is that I’m not really convinced that Poland’s government is really that much better than Russia’s to the point to be worth fighting for. They’re both right-wing capitalist governments that don’t seem to do a lot for their people. If I were a Pole, or a Russian or Ukrainian, and the government tried to draft me to fight, I’d probably just flee. Is the average person’s life really going to be that different? A government is only worth fighting for if it actually does things for the people (or if the enemy is genocidal like the Nazis).

As for China, maybe we would disagree, but I think they really want to expand their power, even if that means stamping on people’s rights…

Of course. Every country, or at least every superpower, gets there because they’re willing to play the game, because they have their eye on the ball. That’s just the way the world works, realistically.

But China’s approach is mostly about winning the peace. China expands through economic investment and the production of goods. Every year, more and more small countries that used to be neutral are turning towards China and countries that used to be oriented towards the US are becoming neutral and dealing with both. Colombia, for example. Because the US is at best neglectful of these countries, at worst, it’s outright hostile, it maintains and expands control through outright invasions, bombing campaigns, funding insurgencies, covert regime change, and freezing assets. Every time it does this for the sake of controlling one country, a hundred countries see it and wonder if they’re next. In the past, they had little choice but to tolerate it, but now that China is a viable challenger, they have options.

Multipolarity restricts the abuse any country can commit, because of the option of turning to an alternative. Likely, part of why China offers more generous and less restrictive deals is simply because they’re trying to break into the market.

China is not my ideal system. Tbh, my ideals might be incompatible with achieving superpower status. But China makes it more likely that something closer to my ideals could be implemented in smaller countries around the globe, and, having been tested and proven in that context, those policies could spread further.

But ultimately my point is, you don’t make it to the top without stepping on people’s toes sometimes. You might say, “Well then maybe you shouldn’t try to make it to the top,” and that’s a valid point, but someone’s going to be on top, and the further up that person is from everyone else, the more ruthless they probably had to be to get there - and the more they are able to act with impunity. If you’re trying to bring the top down to a lower level, that is not achieved by primarily focusing on the top’s main rivals or competitors.

for one thing it might be good if China had political freedom and democracy

It might be good if the US had political freedom and democracy too.

I don’t really know how to evaluate how democratic a system is, from the outside. China has elections, and the government has a high degree of support (according to Western polls). It’s true that the system is dominated by one party but there were also reforms made to allow more ideological diversity to exist within the party than previously. Not having lived there, I find it difficult to evaluate.

But I can tell you that the American system is certainly not democratic. We have tons of untraceable dark money going into campaigns, our system is designed to only allow two parties, both of which are corrupt and serve the interests of the rich, polls consistently show overwhelming dissatisfaction with congress regardless of who’s in charge, people are being abducted off the streets without due process, taken to secret prisons (such as the one at Guantanamo, which has existed for decades under both parties), etc.

How am I supposed to worry about what’s going on in China? I have bigger fish to fry, don’t you think?

wanting to take over Taiwan

It’s just saber-rattling.

trying to expand their global power

Through diplomacy and voluntary trade deals? I don’t see a problem with that. If that was how the US went about things, I’d feel pretty differently about the US than I do.

making friends with other world leaders who want to expand their power

I don’t really see “making friends” as being imperialist. China’s foreign policy is, generally speaking, to stay out of political questions and trade with everyone. This isn’t a perfect position, but it’s at least a degree of separation from imperialism.

In some situations that might be true but I think it depends. In some cases, the ruling class of your own country might be investing in a military which protects you, while a foreign government might want to invade your country and oppress you.

Yes, in some situations, I agree. This is a perspective argued by other theorists like Franz Fanon, who’s position was that developing countries escaping colonialism have more to worry about from foreign colonizers than from their domestic “bourgeoisie,” who are still relatively poor.

This is also why the CCP formed coalitions with the KMT in order to repell the Japanese fascists (and previously, to put down the warlords that emerged following the fall of the Qing). Likewise, the USSR condemned strikes that took place in the US during WWII, because defeating the Nazis was more important.

But these are exceptional cases, where either the class dynamics are different from developed countries, or where a truly existential threat exists, such as Germany and Japan in WWII. Of course, since WWII, US politicians have attempted to compare every conflict to it and to argue that there’s an existential threat, even when it’s completely absurd, including Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq.

We can argue about the merits and flaws of China and Russia, but neither of them represent an existential threat to me as an American. Pretty much the only thing that does present an existential threat, imo, is the rise of fascism domestically. And that threat is caused by declining economic conditions, perpetuated by maintaining status quo policies. And the only options we are offered in the existing political system are to maintain those policies and sink further into decline, or to move closer to fascism directly. This makes the rise of fascism inevitable, unless victories are won by the working class to, at minimum, extract the necessary policy concessions to restore stability and stave off decline. Therefore, in my position, class conflict should come before anything else.

Thanks. I stand somewhat corrected in that there is some basis for saying he’s regretful.

Some people (myself included) have extremely negative feelings about the US military, and the people who serve in it. For us, soldiers are worse than cops, and the bar for accepting a former soldier into a leadership position is high, even impossible for some. I see things like “I loved the infantry,” next to “Nothing disgusts me more than my participation in imperial adventures,” and it seems like there’s a bit of ambiguity in that which people might read in different ways.

Not living in Maine, I’ll just maintain a position of detached skepticism. That way, everyone can be mad at me.

I mean, they’re still basically calling them that with “tankie.”

I can’t even keep track of who’s supposed to be writing our checks anymore. I’m working for the Putin-Xi-Soros-Hamas-RNC-DNC conglomerate. That’s clearly the simplest explanation of why I hold my views, it couldn’t possibly be the reasons I actually say.

They’re allowed to dislike and criticize him, that doesn’t make them an “establishment democrat tankie.”

Have you considered the possibility that two people could make a subjective judgement about someone’s character and come to different results? Or that, having come to those results, they consider it important to share them and convince others of their position?

I looked at their post history, and the last post they made about Platner had you right under it with the same copy-pasted response. Now, should I assume that you posting frequent defenses of him means you’re being paid by his campaign? Or, is it perhaps possible that you came to a conclusion that you’re passionate about? And if so, is it perhaps possible that they came to a different conclusion that they’re also passionate about?

It doesn’t even make any sense. I guess the DNC is also paying them to criticize Israel to, what, make their cover as a tankie more convincing? What’s even the game here?

It’s just nonsense. Frankly, I don’t have a strong opinion about this person because I don’t live there, but when you default to these accusations in response to any criticism, it doesn’t inspire a lot of confidence in your position.

I live over a thousand miles away from Maine, so no, I have not seen him in person. And I haven’t watched his town halls, no.

If you have a clip where he expresses regret about his time as a mercenary, I’d be happy to watch it.

Geneva_Convenience is part of an Establishment Democrat smear campaign

this tankie’s cherry picked items

Lmao going with both of those at once. Tankies, famously connected to establishment democrats.

I remember a time, long ago, when people were allowed to just, not like a particular politician without being accused of all this conspiracy nonsense. Internet echo chambers have poisoned people’s brains to the point that they can’t imagine anyone thinking differently from them or having different values or priorities without them being secretly manipulated by sinister forces. It’s ridiculous.

In a personal letter? In years of therapy to repair his mind of the PTSD? In a video apology?

Yes? That would at least be something. Right now this whole, “actually, he regrets what he did” thing is just typical liberal fanfiction of projecting what you want to be true onto politicians who don’t deserve it. It’s the same shit with “Kamala is secretly pro-Palestine (despite consistently denying it)” line.

Wanting something to be true doesn’t make it true.

Probably the best sign of him being progressive is that he didn’t spend longer in Blackwater* after seeing the private military overcharge the govt for services.

…What? Is that the problem you have with Blackwater?

would you condemn seemingly imperialist behaviour from countries like Russia and China as much as you would condemn imperialist behaviour from western countries

The only example you produced of China’s “imperialism” was settling some uninhabited islands in the Pacific. Compare that to the unprovoked invasion and decades long occupation of Afghanistan, and the comparison is obviously spurious and if that’s really your position then you’re obviously trolling and can be dismissed without further comment.

Surely we should hold every country to consistent standards.

I don’t actually agree with that, for a number of reasons, some of which I’ve already expressed: you should of course hold your own country to a higher standard than any other country, because you have a greater responsibility for how it behaves.

On top of that, I’m also partial to Lenin’s arguments for “revolutionary defeatism”. Let me explain.

Before the first world war, a bunch of socialists and social democrats got together in the Second International, and they issued a statement called the Basel Manifesto. The Basel Manifesto warned of the looming conflict, and expressed that, should socialists fail to prevent it, they should use the opportunity to launch a global revolution - ideally, the threat of revolution would be a deterrent that would prevent the war in the first place.

But the war happened anyway, and the revolution did not materialize, at least not I’m Britain, France, or Germany. In fact, the social democrats of each country, who had previously agreed in principle to that course of action, all suddenly found reasons to rally around their respective flags and support the war effort. The British social democrats pointed to Germany’s more autocratic system, while the German social democrats pointed to Russia’s serfdom, and so on. Or they said, all sides are bad, and we’re not trying to win or conquer anybody, we’re just fighting “against defeat.” And so they all kept killing each other, and countless lives were lost for no good reason.

Lenin, however, argued that, in that situation, the proper response is for the socialists of each country to be primarily opposed to their own respective countries, to advocate for their own country’s defeat. I cite him here because he expresses it much better that I could:

On closer examination, this slogan [“neither victory nor defeat”] will be found to mean a “class truce”, the renunciation of the class struggle by the oppressed classes in all belligerent countries, since the class struggle is impossible without dealing blows at one’s “own” bourgeoisie, one’s “own” government, whereas dealing a blow at one’s own government in wartime is (for Bukvoyed’s information) high treason, means contributing to the defeat of one’s own country. Those who accept the “neither victory-nor-defeat” slogan can only be hypocritically in favour of the class struggle, of “disrupting the class truce”; in practice, such people are renouncing an independent proletarian policy because they subordinate the proletariat of all belligerent countries to the absolutely bourgeois task of safeguarding the imperialist governments against defeat. The only policy of actual, not verbal disruption of the “class truce”, of acceptance of the class struggle, is for the proletariat to take advantage of the difficulties experienced by its government and its bourgeoisie in order to overthrow them. This, however, cannot be achieved or striven for, without desiring the defeat of one’s own government and without contributing to that defeat.

When, before the war, the Italian Social-Democrats raised the question of a mass strike, the bourgeoisie replied, no doubt correctly from their own point of view, that this would be high treason, and that Social-Democrats would be dealt with as traitors. That is true, just as it is true that fraternisation in the trenches is high treason. Those who write against “high treason”, as Bukvoyed does, or against the “disintegration of Russia”, as Semkovsky does, are adopting the bourgeois, not the proletarian point of view. A proletarian cannot deal a class blow at his government or hold out (in fact) a hand to his brother, the proletarian of the “foreign” country which is at war with “our side”, without committing “high treason”, without contributing to the defeat, to the disintegration of his “own”, imperialist “Great” Power.

Whoever is in favour of the slogan of “neither victory nor defeat” is consciously or unconsciously a chauvinist; at best he is a conciliatory petty bourgeois but in any case he is an enemy to proletarian policy, a partisan of the existing governments, of the present-day ruling classes.

To put it another way, the most important conflict is class conflict, and my most immediate enemy is the ruling class of my own country. Even if the ruling class of another country is just as bad, or even marginally worse, that’s a bridge to be crossed later.

Once our own rulers have been justly tried but a revolutionary tribunal and received whatever punishment is deemed appropriate for hundreds of thousands of counts of murder, then after that we can deal with Putin next. Not before.

…is what Lenin would probably say, anyway.

I can accept that the documents are real, and I can accept that China’s handling of the situation was problematic. As I said, I don’t know what I’m supposed to do with that information. The only means I see of myself influencing China’s actions is through my government, and I should probably focus on trying to influence my government to stop abducting people to secret prisons themselves before I worry about influencing them to pressure China about it’s problems.

My thoughts and prayers go out to the Uighur people. Happy? I can waggle my finger at China, if you like, perhaps I can even write a letter to Xi Jinping about it. That all seems rather meaningless to me.

I’m more of a solution-oriented person. Genuinely, not just here, but in my personal life, I don’t really see the point in playing the blame game. Tell me how anything I do or don’t do is supposed to improve the treatment of Uighurs, and I’ll consider it. But I’m not really interested in playing St. Peter and saying which countries are good or bad and who deserves to go to heaven or hell. When I criticize the US, it’s because I’m trying to change the US. Unless you can either provide a mechanism for me to influence China without the US government, or are willing to argue that I should support the US against China, then I don’t see why I should care, or why you should care whether I care.

There are also the allegations of rape

What is your opinion of Tara Reade?

Two of the examples I listed involved the NYT and the BBC cynically exploiting their readers’ willingness to believe claims of sexual assault to advance their own agendas. If you give the imperialist propagandists any way to circumvent the normal process of skepticism and critical evaluation of evidence, they will use it.