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Edited by Mrph1 on Nov 30th 2023 at 11:03:59 AM
It's definitely right to criticize in saying, "I wonder if you would say that if you had relatives who directly suffered from his hands" but it's taking it too far to say that anybody who gives a contrary opinion is not any better than the Far Right. That is Black-and-White Insanity, and not truly appreciative of the Gray-and-Grey Morality of the world. Assuredly if I had relatives who suffered from communist violence I would feel the way you do, but the world shouldn't be governed on feelings alone.
By that logic, Jesse Jackson is in the same boat as Steve Bannon. As he wrote in this article on Castro's death
with a mixed and nuanced assessment. Nelson Mandela is in the same boat as the Far Right
.
Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn have never whitewashed Communist dictators or the violence of Al Qaeda and ISIS. This is what I am talking about, in terms of this shibboleth of "anti-imperialist Left" where everyone decides that this is Chomsky and Zinn's views and don't actually read the articles they wrote. I have my own disagreements with Chomsky on a lot of issues (that guy is too much a fan of Orwell for my liking). And neither Chomsky or Zinn (who actually I don't like too much as a historian or political commentator) view anyone in the Middle East as freedom fighters. They merely see them as products of America's insane foreign policy and that's pretty irrefutable. ISIS would not exist if America had not invaded Iraq...and Iraq after all was America's ally during the iran-iraq war when Rumsfeld sold the gas that Saddam used against Kurds. In the case of Cuba, America has looted and robbed the place for 60 years before Castro came on the scene...if they wanted to make the argument that they would have been better for Cuba, they could have settled Guantamo Bay and developed it, and make some of the refugees live there and bring prosperity there...instead they make it into a Gulag.
Fact is for most people in the world, America's foreign policy is their only policy. They don't live in America after all, they do know a lot about it because American imperialism ensures its products go everywhere and anywhere.
edited 13th Dec '16 11:32:26 AM by JulianLapostat
Again, no one was saying that talking about the bad stuff should stop. What we were urging was an end to the "nothing will ever get better" which Crimson said explicitly and which you also said. There's a fucking balance here, and you've weighted it towards the side that says "things will never get better".
You are deliberately ignoring that. And it makes conversation with you nearly impossible.
edited 13th Dec '16 11:28:01 AM by AceofSpades
Saying "Castro did a lot of good things" is something I am and have always been willing to concede. The world is indeed Gray-and-Grey Morality. Hell in the early days the CCP did bring a lot of gender equality for women and push China into industrialization as did the Kims with North Korea when South Korea under capitalism was struggling to modernize. I appreciate that of them, China was utterly dreadful to women before the Communists (and still is in a lot of places). But that's not the same as saying "it's unfair to call Castro a monster because he also did good things as if it cancels out and excuses literal tyranny and mass murder and imprisonment of dissidents".
For a case of the converse as much as I respect MLK I also find it ridiculous when people apotheosize him and outright deny that he also plagiarized or at least was sloppy in how he cited part of his PhD thesis dissertation and engaged in some extramarital affairs, as if it being true and known to the mainstream somehow negates the good he also did. Or that Gandhi was racist towards Africans and that his views may have helped in the persistence of the caste system, despite all the work he did to help the Dalits.
edited 13th Dec '16 11:40:03 AM by AlleyOop
@Julian In regards to NATO expansion, after the fall of the USSR, Eastern European countries literally lined up to join. Nobody forced them into it at gunpoint, unlike the USSR forcing communism on them. They wanted security against any future Russian aggression, and I'd say the last couple of years have proven them right.
"What do we say to the God of Death? Sean Bean is over there."You guys are right...I was overreacting, I am sorry. Fact is that anti-racism and anti-imperialism is a pet-peeve of mine. And for me seeing the words "toxic" and anti-imperialist together is an automatic Berserk Button. As I said I was going to respond last night feel asleep, and let it stew and come over.
Having said all that, I do think that this is connected to the general political discourse. The fact that the mainstream American Left, Sanders and others, don't have any concrete views on tackling the American Empire. Sanders himself was in favor of "drone strikes" because it meant no ground troops and that was Obama's attitude, yet he's against TPP even when it's essentially a means to help and enrich democratic Taiwan and other workers in that region in Vietnam and other places.
American Left is quite myopic on that issue, because it's still connected to the Cold War and the idea that America "won" it, or rather Reagan and the Conservatives won it, rather than the Keynesian-Detentists won it. So that narrative has to be tackled and attacked.
I'm incredibly proud of this thread, and to participate in it, really.
At the very least, we'll have this, if nothing else.
Assuming SOPA's misbegotten children don't come back on Trump's coin...
aw shit
Say to the others who did not follow through You're still our brothers, and we will fight for youObama: If you were fine with big government until it served black people rethink your biases
LAWD. If this is a preview of Post-Presidency Obama...
Gives me life!
New Survey coming this weekend!Article by a gay man about why he broke off a friendship over the election.
It's definitely a sentiment I can understand and agree with — there are a bunch of people I've known for years who voted for Trump, and I discovered that I probably never really knew them at all.
Conversely, my oldest friend, who was once a Rich in Dollars, Poor in Sense Republican, who I spent years trying to bring over to the Democrats, left the party for good and voted D across the board. I had hoped his first election as a Democrat would have been one worth celebrating. He lives in Indiana these days — experiencing Mike Pence up close did more to make him a liberal than twenty years being my friend ever could.
Man, that shit gives me life.
edited 13th Dec '16 12:07:41 PM by CrimsonZephyr
"For all those whose cares have been our concern, the work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream shall never die."Other things that Big Government did...
ARPA and NASA.
You know what Arpa gave us, Arpanet, now known as the Internet...without that you would have no Google, no Microsoft, and no Steve Jobs, no Facebook and Twitter. Peter Thiel is a scumbag and fifth-columnist for helping Trump, after leeching of the government.
All Ayn Randians, like Thiel, like Paul Ryan and their ilk, like Ayn Rand herself are looters of the first order, very much of the kind they despise.
edited 13th Dec '16 12:11:55 PM by JulianLapostat
I was always under the impression that the US had "won" due to a long succession of poor Soviet leadership then anything the US actually did.
Either you are correct that it should be underestimated how lucky Reagan was and how much of his success was built on people who weren't even associated with him.
I was referring more to the fact that how the end of the Cold War gave many Americans, among liberals and conservatives, a kind of retroactive justification that all of America's actions during the Cold War was right in the end. Reagan's attitude of belligerence, of nearly triggering nuclear war with the Able Archer Crisis was washed away and forgiven rather than detente or rapprochement. So that meant that America's actions was justified and correct. Interfering in Italy's elections in 1945 was correct and so on and so forth.
During the 90s, you had people trying to reconstruct Joseph Mc Carthy because apparently there were Communist spies, and that led to many even saying the Blacklist was okay, and that it was the fault of the people who got blacklisted for not "naming names". Many liberals started adopting that attitude. and the end result is that American Communists got written out of American history despite the amazing work they did in the 30s where they more or less codified the modern Left platform. But in order for that platform to work, modern liberals have to ignore that fact. Like many say that after Pinochet fell and Chile became a Democracy again that toppling Allende was the right thing after all.
Never mind that Mccarthy didn't actually get any communist spies. That in most cases, they weren't CPUSA members, they were hired hands because you get more information from people who can blend in then from open card-carrying commies...this tradecraft goes without saying but the idea was that anybody who supported communism in America during the 30s was a collaborator of Stalin's purges (which was more or less Orwell's argument) and that overshadowed all the other actions and activities they did in the union movement, in African-American enfranchisement.
Now in the 2000, we see the fruits of those short-sighted foreign policy but American Liberals still don't take it all the way to a total re-examination of the Cold War itself. Because if the one thing that Regan did perniciously was that he allowed Americans to see themselves as "good" even when they do evil. So Americans still assume categorically that we did good and behaved morally during the Cold War when in fact the opposite happened.
@AlleyOop: It's worth noting, as far as leftists like Chomsky go, there's a (largely correct) assumption that how free and open a society is has very little correlation with how much of a threat it is to the rest of the world. Cuba for example, despite being an authoritarian dictatorship, poses no threat to anyone outside of their own borders, whereas the United States is regarded in global popular opinion the number one threat to world peace
, despite being one of the most open societies in the world.
Many people here would probably have agreed with that opinion during the worst parts of the Bush era, and I can't imagine anyone would disagree that's going to be the case under a Trump administration. Before Bush II you had HW and Reagan, and before that you had Nixon. If every other Presidency the United States goes around terrorizing the world, regardless of what the intervening years look like, we still look Not So Different from any other imperial power in history.
edited 13th Dec '16 12:29:17 PM by CaptainCapsase
PEEP
The Podesta email hack could have been avoided if it weren't for one small and crucial typo
Spoiler: When asked to double check a phishing email, another Clinton staffer wrote "legitimate" when he meant "ilegitimate"
Ow.
Unrestrained Obama is one thing we'll need going forward. Without being weighed down by the presidency and the endless bullshit of the Republicans, he can be a figure that can help rally us from the despair of the coming dark era and, hopefully, get the media to stop being distracted by Trump's latest stunts for a minute or so.
The next few years will require fighting back on a level none of us have seen in our lifetimes. If we are to have any hope of protecting our nation from the forces destroying us from within, it's going to take everything we have.
Once more we see that Putin and Trump are the luckiest evil bastards around. One more reason to fight hard and smart.
edited 13th Dec '16 1:10:27 PM by Geostomp
"When you do things right, people won't be sure you've done anything at all" Futurama, GodfellasI believe luck is an empirical reality, and Trump has lots of it. Putin on the other hand...well he'd say if he were lucky he wouldn't have to annex Crimea and do something as mad as hack the US elections.
Getting back to TNC's interview. The full one is here and I love that epigraph
:
“They’re a rotten crowd,” I shouted across the lawn. “You’re worth the whole damn bunch put together.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
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For Want Of A Nail, or in this case, an I, the battle was lost...
x4 A small part of me's still wondering if things could get bad enough that it'll turn into an actual fight. With bullets.
(Of course, I doubt things will ever get that far, but you never know...)

So I haven't heard a PEEP about Hillary's emails in the last month or so.
It's almost as if it was a non-story that honestly didn't matter.
>.<
New Survey coming this weekend!