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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • She literally said they only invaded because they had a gun to their head and the response was relatively moderate. You said she is talking about western foreign policy. I built no straw man. You both just said that shit. No one pointed shit at Russia. Russia didn’t like the new government in Ukraine. Took over crimea. Trump was in office so the response was meh. So then Putin went for round 2. And she said it was in response to being threatened. And was a moderate response.

    Why don’t you take your tankie ass to Ukraine and see the moderate response first hand.






  • There is a fucking chasm wider than the grand canyon between being left on the political spectrum and being a stalin apologist. And pretending that third parties in the US elections format don’t act as spoilers and that is a liberal myth is either (a) just being really fucking stupid or (b) some tankie bullshit made by a person living in lala land.

    See, I’m complex enough to acknowledge that the democrats kind of suck overall, having multiple parties would be better, but also accepting that given how the current system functions things can absolutely be worse if Trump wins again. Let us not forget that last time Stein implicitly supported Trump saying she like he won’t be able to get anything done but Hillary is efficient and will likely make things worse. Stein is fully capable of pulling just enough votes that Trump could win. And last time that ended Roe v Wade. This time, say buh bye to assistance for Ukraine. He wanted to fuck up NATO before. I’m sure that’d be real high priority now.

    The perfect is the enemy of the good. This is not how I’d like the world to be. But there is no magic wand and you can’t just pretend things are totally different and think that has an effect.







  • But these groups and people weren’t the same people as the ones that walked across the land bridge. The cultures had long since diverged and were different. Wars had been fought. Whole groups died or merged. And if you go back a little further, they are all closely related. I don’t think the point is that the slaughtering and pillaging was OK. It is that you cannot have a good faith argument on fixing current problems by trying to focus only on arbitrary time periods to claim certain privileges. I am very much in favor of doing more to make the lives of the native americans better, but I also will not make the argument that descendants of Europeans or Africans have no claim to the land there either. Because to do so is not in good faith and just ignores reality. Any time period you pick to decide who has a claim to a place is arbitrary. We cannot change the past. We can only change the future (but we are limited by the confines of the present).


  • Nah. Don’t let the current situation fool you. You’ve seen that I’m very pro-Israel in my other comments. But there are many of us that are lefties through and through. I mean most Jews in the US lean slightly left of the democrats. I lean further. And David ben Gurion was super leftist. Hardcore socialist commie pinko, that one. If I had been around for the founding of Israel, I’d probably have been kicking back on a kibbutz somewhere.

    But the right is definitely not our friend. Most of them support Israel for christo-fascist dreams of the apocalypse. They want to use us. And we should be careful to think that we are the ones using them.

    I do not know where you are from, but especially concerning the US and Europe, I do think it’s important to understand where this support comes from – even if they don’t actually know it either. It’s the underdog problem. Israel is much stronger than in the past. We have won many wars against people who wished to murder us all. We became a force to be reckoned with. And the Palestinian territories are the underdog. And the left has normalized seeing the underdog as the marginalized victim. They are not used to seeing an underdog victimizer. From South Africa to Ireland to PoCs and the LGBT+ communities, they are used to things going one way. And things are not one way. There is a whole 3d plane of possibilities in this world. And that’s why I argue more about Israel than anything else on here. To try to help people see that things are not black and white. This isn’t a left or right issue. This isn’t a David vs Goliath issue. This is something that cannot be boiled down to simple concepts or comparisons. And the more you know, the harder it really is to if not agree with what Israel is doing, to at least understand why they might make the choices they do. And it is not for the sole purpose of ethnic cleansing or genocide. At least not for the majority.


  • This is a lie. Hamas won the vote. The EU, UN, and the Carter Center all called those elections free and fair. If anything, Hamas was an underdog given that Israel, in collaboration with Fatah, kept arresting the politicians in Hamas as they defined Hamas a terrorist organization. Fatah and Israel wanted to delay the elections, but with the encouragement of the US (GWB in particular who felt Hamas would definitely not win), they decided to keep them as they were. Stop making things up to fit your narrative. Hamas still typically wins the popular vote in polling done since then. You have a fucking computer. Just google it. It’s all there in black and white.

    I mean they did have conflicts with Fatah. But the biggest fights weren’t until after they won the election.


  • That article has such a stupid take. It takes tiny pieces of quotes from a couple of ex-Israeli officials and with one of them is clearly omitting context. Did Israel permit Islamist groups to do stuff like build mosques and have charities? Yes. Did he also say, but it is not mentioned in the article, that they were completely peaceful at the time and that Israel didn’t want to be viewed as attacking Islam? Also yes.

    See, what you are saying is that Israel created Hamas by not using more oppression to stop these groups at a time when they were not attacking Israel, but the PLO was. And that is just such a simple naive take that it is ridiculous. Yeah if Israel could redo things, they might have decided that was a good idea. But then again, what if it just caused more attacks from the surrounding countries after they were claimed to be “attacking Islam.” Then would we also blame Israel for those attacks due to them repressing the Islamist movements?

    It even does the same by using cherry picked foresight about Afghanistan. It entirely ignores the situation in Afghanistan and just implies that the US caused Al Qaeda. Things just aren’t that simple. It’s entirely possible that had the US and other countries not interfered in Afghanistan that the soviet union would’ve lasted longer and Afghanistan might’ve been another Chechnya.

    At the time, Israel was having to fight against the PLO. They were not fighting against the religious Islamic groups. And knowing the history of the time period and the politics in the region, the very religious groups were not nearly the force that they are now. So they made choices for reasons that absolutely made sense at the time. And we have no way of knowing how things would be different if they made different choices.

    We can say that places that aren’t Israel still have issues with the Muslim brotherhood or are friendly with them all over the middle east. And Israel certainly didn’t create the Muslim Brotherhood. And if Israel didn’t exist and it was all a Palestinian state with a secular government, it isn’t a stretch to say that they would be in that area too, calling for an Islamist government. As they have done in Jordan, Syria, Egypt, Iraq, and more.