The US has a freebie wildcard to bomb anyone anyway.

The wordplay is clever. Somebody’s big mad that people are blaming the British for something they did

Might want to examine why people making fun of one of the most blatantly evil empires of all time offends you.

Do you not understand that it’s a joke?

Obviously we all know the paper is talking about the microorganism, but since the real cause of the famine wasn’t the microorganism but the British, it’s funny to act like the paper is insulting the British rather than talking about the microorganism.

That’s the only way I can interpret your comment in any coherent way, that the joke just went completely over your head.

The British were responsible for those deaths while the Chinese were not.

I’ll just leave this here

We can’t condemn the Nazis because if we condemn the Nazis people will think we’re Nazis. When people see that we won’t condemn the Nazis, that’s how they’ll know we aren’t Nazis.

It’s very frustrating and the thread I linked made me feel like I was losing my mind. I try to seek out perspectives I disagree with but a lot of times I just end up concluding, “Damn, these people are even worse than I thought.”

What gets me is how wildly people in the thread blew it out of proportion. You had someone quoting “first they came for” as if lifting sanctions on a leader we installed is comparable to the Holocaust.

It’s like everyone needs everyone to agree that every time Trump sneezes, it’s the literal worst thing that has ever happened, and if you push back on anything ever you’re the enemy. These same people fantasize that they can win elections by appealing to moderates.

But the thing that really grinds my gears is how they all default to hostile intervention in foreign countries despite knowing absolutely nothing about their situation. The “null” position should be leaving everyone alone, but instead, it’s whatever the government or media tell them. Or in this case, whatever a random tweet from a crypto grifter tells them. And they will try to bring down the hammer of social condemnation and use things like this as a way to equate communists to fascists and kick us out of spaces, even when they aren’t actually at all invested in the issue.

Buncha clowns.

My apologies. I tried to control-F and apparently that doesn’t work on usernames.

In any case, my take is essentially just, “Hands off Syria.” I didn’t think we should arm him, I don’t think we should sanction him, etc. I don’t really think that’s a shit take, but it’s certainly drawn some criticism over the years.

Cool, so then, why did 1500 people just upvote a picture of a tweet calling him a terrorist, and criticizing the lifting of sanctions against him? Why did only like 40 people downvote it? That’s what I’m calling out.

Where were you when in that thread, by the way? Why are you criticizing my take and not that one? Don’t tell me you only saw the thread sitting at 7 upvotes and missed the one with 1500. My bad.

Imo classical economists were generally more clear-sighted and honest than modern ones. Of course they had their biases and perspective based on their class (and their audience), but at that point economics was so poorly understood that theorists were legitimately trying to figure stuff out, moreso than trying to produce propaganda. Of course, the industrial proletariat and threat of socialism wasn’t really present yet either, so the class conflict was more about new money bourgeois vs old money aristocrats and landlords.

Marx and Smith are a lot more similar than most people think, because Marx was writing in the context of various economic assumptions that come from Smith, such as the labor theory of value, which is usually attributed to Marx but actually comes from Smith.

The thing about Smith though is that his writing style was very dry and repetitive so nobody actually reads him, at best, they might read abridged versions which cut out any inconvenient parts like that. So he just kinda became known as the capitalism guy and is thrown in the same category as Ayn Rand.

I have a BS in physics that I never used, I chose it because I had no idea what I was doing and discovered afterward that most jobs involving physics are less “figuring out how stars work, for the joy of discovery” and more, “figuring out new and exciting ways to kill brown people, for profit,” which I did not sign up for. So, I’ve wound up doing grunt work at warehouses instead. “Learn to wash your own vegetables and you won’t have to pay court to kings,” as the story goes.

A lot of people go into STEM because they just want to solve problems and the issue with that is that if you just solve any problem that’s put in front of you without regard for who’s problem it is and whether solving it will actually make the world a better place, then you belong in the same category as the guy who developed the Blitzkrieg doctrine, who claimed afterwards that he didn’t really care about “politics” and was just doing his job as best as he could. Just because you’re capable of solving a problem and someone’s asking you to doesn’t mean that you actually should.

The more you tighten your grip, the more star systems countries will slip through your fingers. Every year, more and more middle income countries that were unaligned are buddying up with China and the ones that were buddying up with the US are playing the field. China is keenly attentive to this global battle over hearts and minds while Americans are too preoccupied to even notice, and don’t care when they do.

It’s becoming more and more clear that all these conflicting announcements are to allow Trump and his cronies to profit off insider trading. Kind of insane how blatant it is, short the market, announce tariffs, sell the short, pause the tariffs (except for China), buy tech stock, announce tech will be exempt, they gotta be making crazy bank.

If you’re not in danger, “pacifism” is just a way to flaunt the privilege that you never have to get your own hands dirty. It’s very easy to be a “pacifist” in a gated community protected by cops, in the same way that Jeff Bezos would never find himself in a situation where he’d have to throw a punch.

What’s even worse is when libs call themselves “pacifists,” but make exceptions for nations fighting “defensive” wars, as if virtually ever side in every conflict ever does not justify the war by claiming the other side is the aggressor. If you can travel a thousand miles away to kill people and call yourself a “pacifist,” the term is completely meaningless.

Actual pacifists are fucking crazy, and I respect them for that. It takes either a lot of guts or a death wish to not defend yourself in the face of danger.

The American brain drain is gonna suck for people living here but is also very justified and deserved at this point.

The Americans have gotten so complacent about being on top of the world that lots of people don’t think there are any real consequences to anything and just wanna fuck around. We used to be at the forefront of research but now nobody with half a brain would want to come here. We’re heading full speed into a century of humiliation and people are just gonna keep doubling down on ignorance and bigotry as things get worse

When you try to use only sticks and no carrots, people don’t do what you want, they just avoid the crazy guy waving a stick around at everybody.

The thing to understand about Christianity is that it was originally a reaction against the Roman empire and then got co-opted and integrated into it. As a result, ever since like the 4th century Christianity has been about basically the opposite of what Jesus talked about. It turns out all that stuff about turning the other cheek stops being relevant if the emperor has his soldiers paint crosses on their shields while they’re out conquering and enslaving the Gauls. Of course, you can keep all the mythological stuff, who cares, but anything relevant to politics or the material world mysteriously seemed to reverse once they entered the halls of power.

The carrot of being accepted into the empire was matched with the stick that if you didn’t go along with the imperial-approved form of Christianity you’d be burned at the stake as a heretic. Any sects still clinging to anti-imperial sentiment get hunted down and exterminated just like when they were being fed to lions, but it’s the Christians doing it to each other now, so you don’t even have to get your own hands dirty. This approach worked way better at suppressing dissent than just trying to ban Christianity altogether.

Of course, a lot has changed over the centuries. And originally it wasn’t perfect or anything either. But imo, it was when Rome Christianized that Christianity Romanized, and ever since its real values have had more to do with Rome than with Jesus. The meme’s, “moneyless, classless, stateless” ideal of heaven is a relic of the original teachings that gets shunted off to the purely mythological side, where it not only doesn’t matter, but also occupies a place in their brain that could have otherwise been sympathetic to making good things happen in the material world. That’s already resolved, there’s no need to worry about it, there’ll be pie in sky when you die.