Objection
@Objection@lemmy.ml
- Comment on Tankie 51 minutes ago:
Not everyone the term was or has been applied to supported them. But regardless, they still used whatever influence they had to push for fewer tanks.
If I’m an American and I’m out protesting the Vietnam War, and I say that we should end the war and stop building tanks, and that the Vietnamese communists were justified in rising up against the colonizers, does that make me pro-war? Does it make me pro-tank? Is the “peaceful” stance the one that says the Vietnamese were not justified so the US should stay in the war? That’s nonsense.
But that’s the exact same logic you’re applying here and everywhere else. If someone supported peace and deescalation with the USSR during the Cold War, then they’d be accused of supporting or not sufficiently condemning how they handled the Hungarian uprising. If someone opposes the war in Ukraine, they’re accused of supporting or not sufficiently condemning Russia. If someone opposed the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, they were accused of supporting or not sufficiently condemning 9/11 and Al Qaida. And so the peace advocates are always depicted as being violent, and it works the exact same way every single time. War is Peace.
At this point, I accept that it’s always going to happen that way and that I’ll always be “the bad guy” for opposing war. I used to be a “terrorist sympathizer,” now I’m a “tankie” in another ten or twenty years, I’m sure I’ll be some other horrible thing. Who cares.
- Comment on Tankie 1 hour ago:
Actually, I do. That’s completely consistent with my point.
The people who coined the term wanted to take a more aggressive approach to dealing with the USSR. They were particularly concerned that tensions might deescalate due to the change of leadership from Stalin to Khrushchev and the explicit foreign policy approach of “peaceful coexistence” with the West. Those in the West who supported deescalation and refused to take a hard line in support of the Cold War were labelled as “tankies” for their insufficient hawkishness.
The Western leftists and peace advocates the term was created to condemn obviously had no control over the policies over the USSR. To the extent that they could influence the policies of their home countries, they pushed for deescalation, for building fewer tanks. It was the “anti-tankies” who wanted more tanks, as they always do.
- Comment on Tankie 3 hours ago:
Yes, that’s why “tankies” are generally opposed to building and deploying tanks, moreso than just about any ideology short of pacifism. Certainly moreso than liberals are.
- Comment on Tankie 6 hours ago:
But tankies oppose nearly all wars.
- Comment on Tankie 6 hours ago:
The word “isolationist” doesn’t exist in the vocabularies of most people around here. It doesn’t really matter why I disagree with US military interventions, the fact that I do means that I will inevitably be labelled tankie or a Russian bot. So you might as well ignore it, or love the word instead, cause you ain’t done nothing if you ain’t be called a Red.
Besides, I’m not wholly an isolationist. I have no problem with trade or foreign aid, so long as it isn’t military aid. More accurately, I’m a dove. But “dove” doesn’t exactly work as an insult. Some liberals even like to imagine that they’re doves, unbelievably.
But again, liberals don’t recognize that perspectives like “doves” or “isolationists” exist. You either follow the narrative of the media and politicians, or you get thrown into this big lump of Bad People™ with zero distinctions regarding why you disagree with them.
- Comment on Tankie 7 hours ago:
Exactly.
There’s only one war worth fighting and that’s the class war. Everything else is just throwing lives away for nothing.
- Comment on Tankie 8 hours ago:
Really? Because I’m always calling for staying out of conflicts and dramatically reducing the military budget and people are constantly calling me a tankie because of those stances.
See, if you don’t want war, it means you support the other side, and however bad “our” side is, the other side is always worse and more aggressive (the media says so, after all) and that means that anyone who’s pro-peace is actually pro-war.
So it was when I said we shouldn’t invade Iraq and Afghanistan, it meant that I was “a terrorist sympathizer” and “pro-Al Qaida,” and when I say we should stay out of Palestine, people say I’m “pro-Hamas” and when I say we should stay out of Ukraine people say I’m “pro-Russia” and a “tankie.” Consistently advocating against the use of tanks is essentially the defining characteristic of a “tankie.”
- Comment on Tankie 10 hours ago:
They don’t care who “wins”, they profit off of the war itself (and the rebuild for that matter).
Then why would they love tankies, some of the only people who consistently oppose them building and using tanks?
- Comment on Give me some good ones 4 days ago:
Colbert at Bush’s correspondence dinner:
The greatest thing about about this man is that he’s steady, you know where he stands. He believes the same thing on Wednesday that he did on Monday… no matter what happened on Tuesday.
- Comment on What's it going to take to truly stop the US? 5 days ago:
The BRICS aren’t outside US sphere of influence.
But they aren’t wholly within it either.
India is squarely within it.
Is that so? Then why didn’t they cooperate with the US oil embargo on Russia?
Russia had been friendly under Bush and early Obama.
Yet more reason why US influence was greater during that period than it is now.
And China’s our number one trading partner -
It’s actually #3 after Canada and Mexico.
hardly an enemy, except in the fevered imagination of anti-China hawks.
Absent a serious geopolitical rival - the USSR
What made the USSR a more serious rival than the PRC? The USSR was generally committed to deescalation and denouement.
China’s trade policy serves several purposes:
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Providing Chinese people with access to foreign goods, to avoid repeating the dissatisfaction that contributed to the USSR’s collapse
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Expanding China’s geopolitical influence, and building up a competing market such that countries have another choice besides the West
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Making Western aggression costly through economic dependency.
In other words, they are building soft power, which is proving highly effective at swaying countries away from the US.
I can’t understand why you simply don’t recognize the utility of soft power. And yet you talk about corporations being “the seat of real material authority,” yes, that’s correct, but how do they wield and exercise that authority? Is it through hard power? Does Amazon have aircraft carriers and a standing army? No, obviously, if hard power was all that mattered, then it would make no sense to say that corporations are more powerful than the government. The government could, if it wanted to, seize every Amazon warehouse and throw Bezos in prison, while Bezos does not have that capability over the government. Even through your own hard power lens, your perspective makes no sense.
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- Comment on What's it going to take to truly stop the US? 6 days ago:
Countries in the BRI:
Countries in BRICS (red/orange):
I’m not sure that iron fist strategy is working out so well. The US is clearly in a state of decline and the soft power it’s able to wield today is considerably less than it held in the past, because the right is high on their own supply and doesn’t understand that you need soft power in order to rule the world.
While it’s true that the US was pretty brazen in invading Korea and Vietnam, it was also able to control the narrative better and did things either covertly or had some sort of pretense for it, and the postwar order also involved significant economic investment in places like Europe, Taiwan, South Korea, and Japan, all of which helped generate soft power.
The world has never been more beholden to the US than it is today.
I disagree. It was more beholden to the US during the 90’s and 00’s when it was the only real superpower. But it abused that status and that’s what allowed China to present itself as a more stable and reliable trading partner and thereby begin to challenge US hegemony. I don’t see how anyone can look at the world today and think that the US is more dominant than it was after the fall of the USSR or think that it won’t continue to lose ground to China in the foreseeable future.
For every Venezuela, there’s a Colombia.
- Comment on What's it going to take to truly stop the US? 6 days ago:
It’s a slow, ongoing process. The more the US tries to use force to make countries fall in line, the more people look to alternatives. Countries that used to be unaligned are looking at China and countries that used to be aligned with the US are looking at playing the field.
- Comment on "No eating for free allowed! You must only watch it rot on the beach!" 4 weeks ago:
- Comment on for a better future for ur children 4 weeks ago:
That’s actually a statistical error, Carbon Bezos is an outlier who should not have been counted.
- Comment on all the proof i need 4 weeks ago:
The fediverse’s favorite is proof by shaming: Asking for proof means you’re a bad person who doesn’t deserve proof.
- Comment on for a better future for ur children 4 weeks ago:
To quote Carlin, “The earth doesn’t share our prejudice against plastic… The planet is fine. The people are fucked.”
- Comment on for a better future for ur children 4 weeks ago:
Bombs are not environmentally friendly.
- Comment on "No eating for free allowed! You must only watch it rot on the beach!" 4 weeks ago:
The works of the roots of the vines, of the trees, must be destroyed to keep up the price, and this is the saddest, bitterest thing of all. Carloads of oranges dumped on the ground. The people came for miles to take the fruit, but this could not be. How would they buy oranges at twenty cents a dozen if they could drive out and pick them up? And men with hoses squirt kerosene on the oranges, and they are angry at the crime, angry at the people who have come to take the fruit. A million people hungry, needing the fruit- and kerosene sprayed over the golden mountains. And the smell of rot fills the country. Burn coffee for fuel in the ships. Burn corn to keep warm, it makes a hot fire. Dump potatoes in the rivers and place guards along the banks to keep the hungry people from fishing them out. Slaughter the pigs and bury them, and let the putrescence drip down into the earth.
There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success. The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit. And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. And coroners must fill in the certificate- died of malnutrition- because the food must rot, must be forced to rot. The people come with nets to fish for potatoes in the river, and the guards hold them back; they come in rattling cars to get the dumped oranges, but the kerosene is sprayed. And they stand still and watch the potatoes float by, listen to the screaming pigs being killed in a ditch and covered with quick-lime, watch the mountains of oranges slop down to a putrefying ooze; and in the eyes of the people there is the failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.
- Comment on If WW3 breaks out, who is going to be on which side? 4 weeks ago:
If WWIII breaks out we’re all gonna fucking die. Will there be any countries left after 24 hours?
- Comment on Why do .ml users get a bad rep? 4 weeks ago:
By that logic, you don’t even need to know my stance on Russia, because the fact that I opposed the war in Afghanistan “proves I’m not anti-imperialist.” The Taliban definitely isn’t socialist either, after all.
- Comment on Why do .ml users get a bad rep? 4 weeks ago:
I’m saying it’s wild you promote it as AES when it fucking isn’t.
And I’m saying no one considers Russia to be AES, it’s a strawman that libs tell each other about us until they forget they made it up.
- Comment on Why do .ml users get a bad rep? 4 weeks ago:
If someone says something happened on the fediverse without providing a link, they’re lying.
- Comment on Why do .ml users get a bad rep? 4 weeks ago:
It’s only baffling if you don’t listen to the actual reasons people believe things and just assume it’s because Russia used to be socialist, regardless of how many people say otherwise.
- Comment on Caption this. 4 weeks ago:
“This is just natural free market competition. The real problem is big government trying to impose restrictions on Hawk Inc.”
- Comment on Shout out to my engineering homies. 5 weeks ago:
“Look, I don’t like this any more than you do, but as long as billionaire perverts exist, there’s going to be demand for secret pedophile islands, and somebody’s gonna have to traffic kids to them. I’m just trying to get that bag.
I feel like you’re being very childish about this.”
- Comment on Shout out to my engineering homies. 5 weeks ago:
Yeah, this is why I became a hitman.
- Comment on Shout out to my engineering homies. 5 weeks ago:
Yes, that is more or less correct. My problem is primarily with US weapons manufacturing and military spending. If it could not be shut down entirely, then, all else being equal, it would be preferable for it to be offshored to Europe, or anywhere else, to keep as much as possible out of the hands of the increasingly fascist and beligerant US.
In most cases, the main enemy of a poor person of a given country is a rich person of the same country. I believe in following my class interest, not some “national interest” that’s typically completely divorced from my own, if not actively detrimental to it. I have no interest in upholding or protecting that “national interest,” that “national interest” is really bourgeois interest and the bourgeoisie are more than capable of looking after it themselves.
There are some exceptions, however. Franz Fanon, for example, argued that in developing countries, the gap between the domestic rich and poor is outweighed by the international gap, such that a class truce may be acceptable to resist foreign colonizers. Likewise, the CCP was willing to form a temporary alliance with the KMT in order to repel the fascist Japanese. The USSR opposed strikes in the US during WWII because those strikes would have impaired the war effort against the Nazis.
These exceptions to the general rule of class war only apply when there is a significant, genuine threat to the average person, when the foreign threat is intent on outright extermination. If it’s merely trading one set of capitalists for another, then it is not my fight and none of my concern.
Typically, anything that benefits the bourgeoisie, that benefits the so-called “national interest,” is bad for me, even if it doesn’t harm me directly. Because the more money and resources the bourgeoisie possess, the more power they will be able to wield against me, lowering my wages, making me work longer hours, taking away my healthcare and security. All of these things they are more capable of when they have money, weapons, and resources acquired through imperialist conquest.
- Comment on Shout out to my engineering homies. 5 weeks ago:
This is the most this clip thing I have ever read in my life.
- Comment on Shout out to my engineering homies. 5 weeks ago:
That’s complete nonsense.
You’re saying, “a just society would need engineers to build weapons, to be used for defense, therefore, it is right for engineers to build weapons in an unjust society where they will be used for offense.” That does not follow at all. That’s like seeing a car stalled out in the middle of an intersection and saying, “A functional intersection would need me to go when the light is green, therefore, I should keep driving forward. The problem is the car in the intersection, someone needs to fix that, and I don’t need to change my behavior even if it’s going to lead to people dying, because I’m acting in a way that would be appropriate in a functioning intersection.”
That’s not how morality, reason, or anything else works. You have to look at the world as it actually exists and look at the predictable consequences of your actions in the actually existing world.
Again, I will return to the unanswered point from before, about how far you’re willing to extend this line of logic, whether you think it was morally neutral to manfacture Panzers and Zyklon B for the Nazis.
Your position is completely indefensible and untenable. You called me childish, when you’re refusing to acknowledge and adapt to the real world.
- Comment on Shout out to my engineering homies. 5 weeks ago:
The fewer weapons that people make for them, the fewer weapons they will have that they can use to kill brown people with. Therefore there is a clear line of cause an effect between making weapons for them and brown people dying. Therefore, the people making those weapons have caused harm, and would deserve to go to Hell if it existed.
This is all very straightforward, I still have no idea what you’re confused aboout.
