I’m not trying defend those deployments, I hate the military as much as anyone. But the fascist I’m arguing with is trying to use those deployments as a justification for a hostile, century long occupation with the goal of forcibly erasing their culture through force. All I’m saying is, those are not the same thing.

If that were true, you’d have a lot in common with them. How many women were murdered by the occupation? I wonder, how long your country would have to occupied to stop people from thinking and acting like you? Because I think we should leave Afghanistan alone and start there.

I hope that you find yourself on the receiving end of what you support.

People didn’t criticize the withdrawal itself (at least non-monsters didn’t).

I mean, I’m not going to disagree with characterizing these .worlders for example as monsters, but it’s not as if it was a fringe position.

The only language you imperialist bastards will ever understand is force, thankfully, Afghans know how to speak it. May the message spread around the world.

Sounds about one bad day away from this

Come back to me in 80 years

On the one hand, props for putting a number to it, on the other, Jesus Fucking Christ.

You realize that all the countries’ governments you listed have at least consented to us being there, whereas Afghanistan specifically said they wanted us gone?

Just going full Genghis Khan over here. As if the brazen conquest wasn’t bad enough, you want to condemn our grandkids to the continued subjugation of their grandkids. Absolutely insane.

So many people are “anti-war,” except for the current one.

And yet, I’ve seen people on here criticize the withdrawal. Like, how much longer did you wanna stay, dawg? Another 20 years so the proxy we set up would last another week?

You’re absolutely valid and not overreacting. Unfortunately, depending on where you live, you might not have many other options - but if you can look into other modes of transportation you should.

Driving is dangerous, and not everyone is cut out for it. The great thing about public transit is that it’s much safer and less stressful, it doesn’t demand focus and attention - and that benefits drivers too, because it means fewer bad drivers will feel like they have to drive and it reduces traffic in general.

It all comes down to what the alternative is. If your alternative to driving is relying on others to drive you places, it’ll reduce your independence or be expensive (if you use rideshares). But if the alternative is biking or taking a train, then by all means go for it. There’s lots of reasons cars suck, danger, stress, insurance, gas, traffic, pollution, lots of reasons to look into other options.

And WMDs were my generation’s Gulf of Tonkin incident, and another generation’s USS Maine.

There was no corner of the known world where some interest was not alleged to be in danger or under actual attack. If the interests were not Roman, they were those of Rome’s allies; and if Rome had no allies, then allies would be invented. When it was utterly impossible to contrive such an interest—why, then it was the national honor that had been insulted. The fight was always invested with an aura of legality. Rome was always being attacked by evil-minded neighbors, always fighting for a breathing space. The whole world was pervaded by a host of enemies, and it was manifestly Rome’s duty to guard against their indubitably aggressive designs. They were enemies who only waited to fall on the Roman people.

• Joseph Schumpeter

But a growing faction of the right is drunk on power, using its current dominance to wage a culture war against its own citizens as retribution for the last number of years. “Owning the libs” is their preferred method of revenge. Instead of tackling inflation or healthcare, they are targeting millions like me who want nothing more than to live our lives freely and equally.

She says, immediately after doing exactly that. The key words are “like me,” she’s perfectly fine with waging a culture war against people just trying to live their lives as long as she’s not in the outgroup.

I wonder if Ernst Röhm would have written a version of this if he’d survived.

It does not. Where?

Tbf, the article should probably mention the fact that machine learning programs designed to play chess blow everything else out of the water.

Thank you, brainfart on my part.

tl;dr Because that’s communism.

Let’s look at the history of labor movements in the US.

At first, yeah, you started with a pretty broad cross section of society (the Knights of Labor, for example), as well as some more radical elements. Then you had the Haymarket Affair, where people were protesting for an 8-hour work day, and the cops started killing protesters, and someone (possibly a provocateur) threw a bomb at the cops. The press went wild with it and it kicked off a red scare where many labor organizations kicked out and distanced themselves from Anarchists and Marxists.

Fast forward to the Great Depression, and you’ve got a new wave of radicalization because people are seeing the failures of capitalism, and that led to the New Deal. There was another red scare as the US and USSR became rivals, and that served as “the stick,” while the New Deal policies served as “the carrot.” The labor movement once again distanced itself from the more radical elements on the promise of a cooperative government. All the communists, who were more concerned with a broad movement of solidarity, got kicked out of groups like the AFL-CIO, and the unions were considered acceptable because they were (at least to a degree) narrowly self-interested.

These unions flourished in the 50’s, 60’s, and early 70’s, during this post-New Deal, Great Society era. They weren’t necessarily the most inclusive, but they worked well for their members. However, in the 70’s an economic phenomenon emerged that was termed, “Shrink Stagflation” - a period of high inflation and high unemployment at the same time. The Keynesian economic model (which had had a broad consensus up until that point) said that you deal with unemployment by having the government spend more money, and then when unemployment drops, you reduce spending to avoid inflation. It didn’t have a clear answer for what to do when both were high at once, that wasn’t really supposed to happen.

The Carter administration made the decision to focus on inflation instead of unemployment, which screwed over the labor unions. But this was a broad bipartisan consensus among the Washington elites, and when Carter was replaced by Reagan, he did the same and pushed it further. Under this new paradigm of “supply side economics,” people’s identities as consumers was emphasized over their identity as workers. Even having purged radical elements and having become relatively toothless, unions were vilified and blamed for making goods expensive, and they didn’t really have the power to do much about it.

Question of economics were increasingly moved outside of the realm of public accountability and influence, being left to “experts” and both parties having broad agreement about things, but we still had to vote over something, and so we had the emergence of the culture war. Around the 90’s you had some rather boring presidents and debates, because it was the height of “the end of history,” where there was this idea that all the big questions and conflicts had been resolved and it was just a question of little tweaks here and there.

However, in the 2000’s, as it became clear that conditions were declining and the wealth gap was growing, there has been a new wave of radicalization, on both the right and the left, which started to really manifest in 2016. But it is very much in its infancy, without a lot of experience or strength. It’s been over 40 years since we had strong unions (and even those ones were defanged). Now, we’re fighting against entrenched anti-union and anti-worker policies, practices, and beliefs. And progress is being made, but it’s a long, uphill battle, and a lot of it is young people figuring things out from scratch.

Hey, I agree with you, a two state solution isn’t viable (albeit for the opposite reason, that Isreal is a beligerant, expansionist, genocidal state that should not exist). Now, as a “leftist,” I’m sure that you’d agree that, if everyone’s going to be part of the same state, then of course everyone should have equal rights, including voting rights, correct? You want every Palestinian to have the same voice in government that Israeli citizens do, right?

Or is it that when you call for a one state solution, what you mean is that you want to continue denying them rights within your own state while also preventing them from having their own state? To seize their territory and then have them remain as second class citizens who are denied fundamental human rights? For your race to reign dominant over others?

You don’t need to answer, I think we all know the answer to that question, fascist.

And I’m not a fan of Zionazis trying to pass themselves off as “leftists” while supporting genocide and apartheid, but here we are.

Yeah, I see where you’re coming from. I mean, I’m also 100% a leftist, I’m extremely left on most issues, but I also just don’t get why so many people are opposed to this one particular state.

I mean, people always talk about the whole conflict with Germany starting in 1939, but you really have to consider that those wars happened because they were reclaiming territory like the Danzig Corridor that belonged to them historically. They even tried giving territory back to France by setting up the Vichy Republic. And it was the communists and partisans going around trying to stir up a class war who really started things, we had to put them in camps for the sake of security. And I feel bad for any innocent people caught up in it, but it just feels like nobody extends the same concerns to the German civilians the government is trying to protect. At the end of the day, if the Reichstag Fire hadn’t happened, none of this would be happening.

Oh! My mistake, it seems I mixed up the names of some countries and events there. You’re totally right though, if those people didn’t want to get massacred and starved, they shouldn’t have tried to resist your political project and/or had homes in places you wanted to forcibly seize. You know, this is just like what I’m always saying, “It’s your own fault you got slapped, because you shouldn’t have resisted.” I mean, that’s what leftism is all about, amirite?

He did not start the movement by excluding certain groups, gangs, movements, organizations, or political leanings.

Pretty sure he never had any intention of working with the KKK. Pretty sure that if the KKK came up to him and told him they wanted to join his movement, he’d tell them to fuck off, the same way virtually anyone would.

Fucking brainworms, stg.

I was not able to find when the Black Panther Party worked with groups associated with the KKK

You weren’t, huh? Wow, who woulda guessed?

but they did try to bring white organizations into their working-class movement.

They were willing to work with them, but they did not change their positions to accommodate them. They did not sell out their own members or members of other minority groups in order to appeal to them.

Chris Smalls was able to achieve a great stepping stone when he was able to make the Amazon Labor Union (ALU) in Staten Island by bringing people from all walks of life and not cherry-picking certain groups and excluding them from the working-class movement.

Sorry, I wasn’t aware that one of the “walks of life” Chris Small brought people in from was the fucking KKK. For that matter, I don’t recall the Black Panthers befriending the KKK either! Huh, how about that!

Fucking brainworms.