Objection
@Objection@lemmy.ml
- Comment on [Video] Australian attorney-general Michelle Rowland confirms it is now illegal in Australia to say Israel is committing genocide. 5 days ago:
Zionazis are not welcome here.
- Comment on Are you people all bots? 1 week ago:
I believe in Live Internet Theory. The vast majority of people I interact with are real humans, bots are often easily identifiable, and even then there’s usually a person behind the bot.
- Comment on It's just obvious 1 week ago:
I may be the dumbest man in Athens, but I still know a thing or two.
- Comment on Tankie 1 week ago:
What’s silly about it? Tankie is when you support using tanks, I don’t support using tanks in Ukraine so therefore I’m not a tankie. The people who want to send tanks to Ukraine are tankies.
Or we can recognize that that definition doesn’t reflect how it’s actually used. And the way it’s actually used is generally towards people who promote peaceful, diplomatic solutions over military ones.
- Comment on Tankie 2 weeks ago:
OK, next time someone calls me a tankie, I’ll just say, “Actually, I don’t support sending tanks to Ukraine” and I’m sure that’ll clear things up and convince them I’m not a tankie.
- Comment on Huh? 2 weeks ago:
WHAT?
YEAH, I LOVE BEING HERE WITH THE PEOPLE I’M WITH TOO
- Comment on Tankie 2 weeks ago:
Don’t judge what a tankie or Nazi is by insults on the internet, hyperbole and bullshit rule.
Words are defined by common use. If the common use of the word “tankie” is to throw it at people who oppose war, then that’s what it means now. You can say it’s defined as being pro- war, but I’ve never seen it used that way.
Back in the day when word originated they loved the T-34 tank and Russia in WW2 and so on.
Well sure, WWII is basically the go-to example of a necessary and justified war. There was a time in my life when I labelled myself as a pacifist and the counter-example that everyone always brought up was WWII.
At that time, my position was that that was one exception from like 70 years ago and we shouldn’t make a rule from the exception considering how many unjustified wars have been fought since then. Now, my position is a little bit more flexible to account for that and a handful of other cases: now I say, “no war but class war,” and WWII was a class war.
However, my position hasn’t actually changed much in practice since those days. The vast majority of wars and violence are systemic and fought for bourgeois interests, so I still oppose them. Only very rarely does violence happen in the opposite direction, for example if we compare the death tolls of Luigi Mangione to Brian Thompson.
And what do you think the “tank” in “tankie” comes from?
It comes from accusing people who oppose war of supporting the other side’s tanks, as I just explained to you in my previous comment.
- Comment on Tankie 2 weeks ago:
Name one piece of misinformation I posted. You’re just lobbing baseless insults again.
- Comment on Tankie 2 weeks ago:
Not my fault this is the only level of discourse y’all are capable of.
- Comment on Tankie 2 weeks ago:
Yes I do.
- Comment on Tankie 2 weeks ago:
You’re thinking of social democrats.
- Comment on Tankie 2 weeks ago:
Non sequitur.
- Comment on Tankie 2 weeks ago:
Case in point: Anyone who wants to stay out of conflicts automatically supports Russia. My actual reasons and motivations are totally irrelevant. Thank you for proving my point.
- Comment on Tankie 2 weeks ago:
You’re thinking of liberals.
- Comment on Tankie 2 weeks 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 2 weeks 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 2 weeks 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 2 weeks ago:
But tankies oppose nearly all wars.
- Comment on Tankie 2 weeks 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 2 weeks 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 2 weeks 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 2 weeks 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 3 weeks 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? 3 weeks 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? 3 weeks 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? 3 weeks 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!" 1 month ago:
- Comment on for a better future for ur children 1 month 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 1 month 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 1 month ago:
To quote Carlin, “The earth doesn’t share our prejudice against plastic… The planet is fine. The people are fucked.”
