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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • Xi Streisand-ed it hell and back

    This doesn’t make any sense.

    The same way calling Bibi a murderer isn’t antisemitic

    I’ve heard from quite a few ranking Democrats that calling Bibi a murder is antisemitic.

    Government leaders are not a protected class/race, sorry.

    Why do westerners insist in finding excuses to inject racist caricatures into a discussion about civil rights? I simply don’t understand why shouting “Look at Netanyahu, the greedy hook-nosed jew holding a bag of gold!” benefits anyone in any way. It just seems like 4chan levels of racism-for-racism’s-sake.

    Are all liberals this desperate to spew slurs or is it just the terminally online ones?





  • How the fuck are you going to build an equal and fair society when learning how to boil beans is too much sacrifice? Clowns.

    I don’t see people opposed to beans nearly so much as I see them desiring of ground beef. Go into any vanilla Mexican Restaurant worth its salt and you can find both.

    I wouldn’t call “giving up meat” a minor life change so much as I’d call it giving up a simple and abundant luxury. The fact that it comes through the suffering of an animal whose fate is totally obscured to you matters about as much as the cheap plastic bobble head lining your desk bothers you for being produced in a sweatshop.

    A lot of this is simply structural. Tastes developed through childhood. Supply chains built out over generations. Advertising and cultural norms baked into the adult human consciousness over a lifetime. They won’t change optionally. They’ll have to shift as a matter of necessity.

    Only after you have generations of people who are adapted and accustomed to a near-to-total vegan diet (as we’ve got for the billions living throughout Southeast Asia, Africa, and Latin America) are you going to see a serious shift in human behavior. This isn’t just going to be a nation’s worth of individuals making personal lifestyle changes.


  • You can have two people agree on 90% of things but because they have 10% of a disagreement

    I believe the views of the DC leadership are heavily divorced from the median voter. Whether you’re talking about Medicare expansion, civil rights, student debts, or our current spat of overseas occupations, conflicts, and genocides, the gulf is far larger than 10%.

    We fixate on a few key issues as a litmus test for ideological sympathy. But the idea that Pelosi, Schumer, and Harris genuinely share the views and understandings of your median Pennsylvania or Arizona voter… hell, even your Vermont or California voter, hasn’t born out.

    The class divide is wide and even the most progressive-seeming liberals don’t seriously want to bridge the gap.





  • I think this is less a question of Canada being afraid of America and more a question of the US/Canadian working class being terrified of a bunch of hotheads feeding the rest of us into a military meatgrinder to assuage their bloated egos.

    To paraphrase the legendary boxer Mohammad Ali when he refused enlistment to the Vietnam War, “I Ain’t Got No Quarrel With Them Canadian Mounted Police”.


  • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.worldtoMemes@lemmy.mlI'm a leftist
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    9 days ago

    FDR was a leftist because of the policies he implemented.

    Its hard to argue a politician is something other than his policies.

    you are missing is why he implemented those policies

    The why hardly matters. Only the consequences. You can definitely argue that FDR failed to cement the more progressive programs (fully employment through public agencies, public control of finance and agriculture, a long term peaceful coexistence with the Soviet states). And for that reason, he was a kind-of failure. But I would argue putting the weight of the world on one man’s shoulders is deeply unfair. FDR took US policy as far as he could. Then it was Truman and Eisenhower and their lackeys who fumbled the bag (or capitulated to corporate interests deliberately).

    His strategy to contain the CP was to neuter the party by bringing it into the Democratic party fold, alienating their most militant members, and slowly squashing their agenda.

    The Democratic Party, as a whole, has a vested interest in neutralizing rival movements and harvesting their members. That’s not a strategy FDR invented or pioneered. Neither was the DemSoc liberalism of FDR incompatible with a more Reform Oriented American Communist Movement. The strategy worked in large part because American Communists saw FDR’s outreach to Stalin’s Russia and Mao’s China as a positive turn foreshadowing a real global movement.

    I might argue that Stalin’s “Communism in One Country” and Mao’s failure to open China up until Nixon, thirty years later, that did more damage than FDR’s liberal-washing of Communist organizing efforts. I could easily argue that the Truman/Eisenhower Cold War was what ultimately did in the American Communists. Socialists couldn’t uproot Hoover from the FBI or unseat McCarthy from a strong union state like Wisconsin or keep guys like Nixon or Kennedy from worming their way into the upper echelons of the US government on a wave of mafia money.

    At some point, you have to acknowledge the failures within the leftist organizing movements that happened in the US. Deng and Khrushchev and Ho Chi Mein and Kim Il Sung didn’t collapse in the face of these problems in their home states and they all had it much worse.





  • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.worldtoPolitical Memes@lemmy.caMeanwhile at DeepSeek
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    9 days ago

    All of the censorship is bad.

    Censorship is often necessary, and even beneficial, when the alternative is the mass distribution of misinformation or spam. If you had to parse every email your account received, rather than dedicating a big chunk of it to the “junk mail” folder, the service would lose much of its utility.

    the amount of effort the CCP puts into hiding its own history

    I would be curious to know the number of Chinese citizens who know about the Tienanmen protests relative to the number of Americans who know about the US sponsorship of Contra Rebels in Nicaragua or our CIA’s admitted role in international cocaine trafficking.

    Hell, consider that most Americans can’t find Iran (or North Korea) on a map. This, despite Americans having an overwhelmingly negative view of our designated Foreign Enemies.

    Americans fixate on Tienanmen precisely because its one of the only things they do learn about in public school. US/Chinese relations practically begin and end with Tienanmen Square. What Americans don’t realize and won’t accept is that this subject is discussed ad nauseum within the Chinese historical community, but traditionally from the basis of accounts provided by the Deng government.

    This is in the same way that, say, US education on the Pearl Harbor bombing or the JFK Assassination or the 9/11 attacks are taught from the perspective of US state scholars and politicians.




  • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.worldtoPolitical Memes@lemmy.caMeanwhile at DeepSeek
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    9 days ago

    its just a focal point distraction from the real shit they bury

    Is there anything more American than taking a moment to think and realizing, “Damn, fixation on Tienanmen Square seems like its designed to derail any kind of serious conversation about our respective countries” and then falling directly into the “Because the nefarious Chinese have tricked us!” mental trap.

    “During the cold war, the anticommunist ideological framework could transform any data about existing communist societies into hostile evidence. If the Soviets refused to negotiate a point, they were intransigent and belligerent; if they appeared willing to make concessions, this was but a skillful ploy to put us off our guard. By opposing arms limitations, they would have demonstrated their aggressive intent; but when in fact they supported most armament treaties, it was because they were mendacious and manipulative. If the churches in the USSR were empty, this demonstrated that religion was suppressed; but if the churches were full, this meant the people were rejecting the regime’s atheistic ideology. If the workers went on strike (as happened on infrequent occasions), this was evidence of their alienation from the collectivist system; if they didn’t go on strike, this was because they were intimidated and lacked freedom. A scarcity of consumer goods demonstrated the failure of the economic system; an improvement in consumer supplies meant only that the leaders were attempting to placate a restive population and so maintain a firmer hold over them. If communists in the United States played an important role struggling for the rights of workers, the poor, African-Americans, women, and others, this was only their guileful way of gathering support among disfranchised groups and gaining power for themselves. How one gained power by fighting for the rights of powerless groups was never explained. What we are dealing with is a nonfalsifiable orthodoxy, so assiduously marketed by the ruling interests that it affected people across the entire political spectrum.”

    -Michael Parenti Blackshirts and the reds

    Meanwhile…

    Every time China visits we get a hospital, every time Britain visits we get a lecture.

    ~ Dr Lubinda Haabazoka, Director of the University of Zambia Graduate School of Business and former President of the Economics Association of Zambia


  • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.worldtoMemes@lemmy.mlI'm a leftist
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    9 days ago

    He did a lot more than “save capitalism”. Social Security, the Citizens Conservation Corpse, and the full blown WW2-era command economy (complete with ration cards and production quotas and public housing for all the rapidly mobilized industrial workers) had far more in common with Stalinism than Coolidge’s laisse-faire market economy. Hell, FDR even had his share of gulags, when you consider how Japanese Internment Camps were created and administered.

    There is no future for humanity with oligarchs like him and his family

    There’s a sharp line between an oversized land baron clutching a fist full of stock certificates and a popular elected bureaucrat charged with administering the public labor force.

    Oligarchy can’t just be “guy with rich parents” or it quickly descends into austerity fetishism. Oligarchy is fundamentally anti-populist. It requires a strong centralized police force to compel a broad, disorganized public into acting against their own material interests. FDR’s New Deal was a meaningful shift away from oligarchy precisely because he adopted policies from his left-leaning proletarian base in defiance of the Depression-Era economic elites. And he implemented them with the enthusiastic support of the body public. Nobody was getting held up at gunpoint to take a salary from the Parks’ Department or to pile into Keynesian school house construction programs or to patch up wounded soldiers at the VA.

    FDR’s personal wealth gave him a platform upon which to propagandize left-liberal policies on a national stage. But his messages resonated because they had a popular basis not because he simply hammered people with Madison Avenue propaganda.