I can do it too. MBFC is a hack website that equivocates between centrism and lack of bias. See this arbitrarily picked page for an example. See that graphic, the very first thing beneath the title? It’s giving the game away right there, with a left-right spectrum where the center is “least biased”. What about a centrist bias? Doesn’t exist, and the closer you get to centrist, the less “biased” you are.
Trump doesn’t have even a double-digit number of loyalists in the Senate and proportionately probably about the same in the House. This is a relevant detail because his enablers in Congress are overwhelmingly party loyalists who will drop him like a sack of potatoes the moment it becomes more expedient to. The reason that matters is that it was mainly the Republican Party that got all those Congresspeople elected, not Trump, even in the races where Trump endorsed them, so the relative locus of power is the Republican Party (and really it’s the donor class, but we don’t need to get into that).
All this to say that AP’s simplistic and unsubstantiated flattening of Venezuelan politics to “There’s one guy in charge of everything, his lockstep minions, and the brave rightists fighting them” is below you to believe.
He has shat the bed for his country
US sanctions fucked over the country, so unless you think “being disliked by the US” is a grave sin, this isn’t an accurate framing
I believe this is the “whataboutism” that liberals love to cry about so much (more properly, you’re deflecting to a completely different topic)
Maduro isn’t a socialist, Chavists aren’t socialists and he’s openly a Chavist (i.e. a follower in the tradition of Hugo Chavez, who was a great progressive but not really a socialist).
I don’t give a shit what the Carter Center has to say about any of America’s enemies, and they provide no means to evaluate the substance of the claim by “experts from the UN” (which is different from a report by the UN or an official committee of the UN).
And, again, Maduro did not appoint the judges; he doesn’t even have the power to.
Maybe most pertinently: Do you not remember last election cycle, when all the neoliberal news outlets were joined together in their outrage over the NED and friends saying Maduro stole the election, only for that claim to “just turn out” to be pulled from thin air? Do we need to do this every six years when a US-backed reactionary loses?
Quoting something that AP says without substantiation is not actually a good citation. It’s not like Maduro appointed the judges.
There would be an immense toll, but it would mean the destruction of the US, Israel, NATO, and neoliberalism generally, which I think means there is also room for optimism. If I may gesture towards Mark Twain, there are two Reigns of Terror here, and though we have reason to fear the latter one, it will not last as long or kill as many as the former one that it puts an end to. If there is not a nuclear holocaust, anyway
This is the sort of thing where the only thing you can possibly be getting from it is a sense of moral superiority, since you aren’t actually making things better even if you were more persuasive (because you’d still be acting apart from any sort of organized boycott), and you are not even being persuasive.
Consumer ethics is a diversion from systemic critique of the platforms enabling this shit
It’s so annoying. I already had a liberal proactively bring the election up as though it wasn’t an open and shut case, as though it’s not just the even-more farcical version of what happened just like 5 years ago. There was a flurry of unsubstantiated accusations, because those are easy to make, and then reactionary media treats those accusations as though they were credible, and eventually proper investigations find that the accusations are so much hot air, but that can’t happen quickly enough to prevent the manufactured crisis of the accusations.
Taking “selling out your country” to new levels
Look Jack, if you don’t like it, you can vote for the other rapist
The US military throughout East Asia is notorious for doing sex crimes
One is a country, one is an individual, to say that any individual is more important to the war than the United States is the literal definition of Great Man Theory (i.e. childish nonsense).
This is without getting into other considerations like how Netanyahu is a scapegoat for faux-progressives who want to deflect away from how this genocide has enthusiastic support from many powerful institutions within Israel. It is an Israeli project much more than Netanyahu’s personal project.
P.S. Assassinating Putin wouldn’t end the war in Ukraine either (nor would assassinating Zelensky or Biden)
The NED is notorious for basically being a CIA cut-out
Tibet was de facto independent for a while, but it re-joined China voluntarily circa 1950. About 10 years later, with some help from western agitation and assets, the theocratic ruling class felt too threatened by development empowering their serf population and sought to secede in order to maintain their fiefdom. Mao sent in the PLA and crushed the secessionist revolt.
You really can’t “no u” this one because of Imperial China, the PRC’s claim to Tibet is completely valid. You’d probably have more luck trying with Xinjiang, though evidently that is viewed as slightly played-out now.
Turns out most people despise rentiers
Such a pathetic thing to say. Even if what they were saying was true, why does the show need to be about the election? Isn’t it, like, a political comedy show? Aren’t there other political issues to talk about? idk, I hate South Park anyway, but it seems like a remarkably stupid thing to say.