I see. This is the level of understanding we’re dealing with.
I know all that. That’s why a said as a country, not a nation-state; to differentiate between national culture and government It was the nation-state that started in 1789. I’m not wasting any more time arguing with you. It’s clear we won’t understand each other.
I never said it was fate. Of course propaganda plays a role. All I’m saying is that hate isn’t a mental illness. People are morally responsible for their hate. Lumping people like that in with mentally ill people will make our lives harder, and they’re hard enough already. Associating us with them will make it easier, psychologically, for other people to involuntarily commit us or even kill us (check the stats on police shootings and severe mental illness). I’m not saying people are born to hate. I’m saying we have enough problems, please don’t advocate mixing them in with us. Call hate a “social illness” and treat them that way. We have enough problems.
Pretty sure I’ve never murdered anyone personally, but I’m actually pretty much constantly talking about my country’s murderous policies. Which ones? Chile? El Salvador? Laos? Iraq? I’m a leftist, I can talk about that shit all day. I think we’re dicks. I’m just also antiauthoritarian, so I think the Chinese government are dicks, too.
One-note support of a regime with talking points rather than actual arguments? Smells like a govbot to me…
For non-bots: No one I’ve seen here is arguing that America hasn’t done shitty things. If you want to have China be your imperial masters, you have every right to make that decision, but imperialism sucks no matter who’s running it (hint: it’s not just a yt people thing), and China’s international relations strategy isn’t being run for the good of poor countries, but the good of the Chinese state. I think things tend to go better for the poweless when power isn’t unipolar, so poorer countries can play competing interests off each other, but every sovereign nation gets to make that call for themselves.
Me, apologizing profusely to an underpaid, much abused intermediary on a call to the insurance company where I beg for the meds I need to live. God, those poor people are being used as human shields.
I prefer PI, or pseudointelligence, as in The Diamond Age.
That’s because people mean very different things by “political.” I use the definition of “a subject related to the (usually human) division of power”, because it makes it rhetorically harder for people to depoliticize their pet causes, so we can actually look at what’s happening.
And yet we drank more during actual Prohibition than before. I wonder if other things happened in that time period… /s
You don’t need to be violent if the electoral apparatus is rigged to favor you (the right in American politics—I’m not making this up), but they are anyway. But if the electoral apparatus is rigged against you, if your party can get the most votes consistently and still lose, while your opponents make policy that literally kills people, if you’d still argue that extraelectoral measures are extremist, you’re not advocating democracy, you’re advocating acquiescence. The people of Germany would have been right to rise up against the Nazis (who only got 38% of the vote, btw), yeah? So where’s the line? Which standing up for yourself makes you righteous, and which an extremist?
“Addictive” means so many different things to different people at this point, it’s become useless. If you can compare the erotic materials I share with my spouse to heroin with a straight face, I’m not the one with a problem.
The right will make pleas that sound equally dangerous to the average fool. It’d be easy enough for them to try to get the very sites that exist to support trans kids and say “we need to shut these down because they’re harming/multilating kids,” like they always say. And then a sympathetic judge shuts them down, I hope you’re happy with the kids you saved now, because there will be so many you can’t.