Dystopian fiction: The regime alters photos to make people look happy and smiling, to hide their cruelty.

Dystopian reality: The regime alters photos to make people look sad and pained, to brag about their cruelty.

Oh it was awful. I was about your age back then, and I had been raised religious which I rebelled against by trying to be completely rational, to the point of trying to suppress all my emotions like a robot, which made me miserable. I had no self confidence, crippling social anxiety, and all sorts of bad ideas steering me in completely wrong directions.

I don’t think I had met any openly queer people at that point and the first time I did I was like, “I don’t get it, I would never express myself that way, because what would people think?” while of course completely sidestepping the question of how I actually felt or wanted to identify because again, suppressing my emotions. Spoiler alert: probably should’ve examined that!

The best decision I ever made in my life came a few years later when I studied abroad in Japan. It exposed me to a lot of different perspectives in the international house and also gave me interesting experiences to talk about which helped with my social anxiety (actively identifying and working on it with therapy techniques later on probably did more).

Politically, I had no real awareness of leftism and was into Ron Paul and libertarianism, because he was the loudest antiwar voice at the time. It’s also a great ideology for if you’ve never had a boss or a landlord. I was mostly just glad to be rid of Bush, and I had some hope that Obama would end the war, prosecute people in the Bush administration for war crimes, and stop mass surveillance. I was very naive at that time.

I feel like this was a time before a bunch of movements or cultural tendencies became associated with the right. The problems were still there, but there were also some non-shitty people included in them:

• It was before Gamergate, but there was a lot of sexism in video game communities.

• I remember being into “transhumanist” ideas that would these days be associated with Elon Musk and his sycophantic techbro fanboys.

• Many prominent “New Atheists” either had or would break right and support the wars in the Middle East, with logic like, “We’ve already fixed sexism completely here in the West (and the feminists who don’t agree with that are just a bunch of dumb broads), the big problem is Islam,” ignoring the threat of Christofascism at home.

• Even stuff like 4chan, I had friends who were on /b/ back in the day who turned out normal and chill. There was an element of rebelling against the Pat Robertson, stick-in-the-mud, “D&D is witchcraft” types, and part of that was reveling in rule-breaking, and so they delighted in shock images and made fun of anyone who cared too much about things in response to that.

I guess the positives were that people were less divided and it was easier to have hope for the future. But like there were reasons why those things changed, either movements/groups showed their true colors, or valid criticisms of those groups became more widely accepted. I much prefer the division and conflict that we have now compared to the “post-9/11 world” where virtually everybody was in agreement about slaughtering Muslims. And yeah I had more hope for the future but it was because I though technology would fix everything for everybody and didn’t understand how it could hurt workers and benefit capitalists, it was based on ignorance.

The implication is that the Iraqis were not forced into anything against their will, that the invasion and occupation was in their interests and for their benefit, and so this is dissimilar and the Greenlanders would resist harder than the Iraqis.

The reality is that the Iraq War was similar because they were both imperialistic wars of aggression for the purpose of seizing resources.

I have no idea what you’re talking about.

No, I just don’t like unprovoked wars of aggression and decades long occupations. Including when someone not named Trump is doing it, including when it happens to countries outside of the imperial core.

This would not be the occupation of Iraq, which was difficult enough. U.S. troops would need to force Greenlanders, citizens of a treaty ally, to become American against their will.

The Atlantic always manages to squeeze shitlib bullshit into every article, like this ridiculous Iraq War apologia. I see the source and I immediately know it’s coming, every single time.

Right, because that’s possible.

Does original sin exist?

Everyone believes their cause is just. Every conflict ever can be framed as defensive. The US has compared every major conflict since WWII to stopping Hitler, even cases like Vietnam. My mother once quoted, “All that’s necessary for evil to triumph is for good people to do nothing” in the context of supporting the invasion of Iraq.

If You investigate and deconstruct the concept of “defensive” wars (as You are so wont to deconstruct concepts) then You will find that they are entirely dependent on socially constructed ideas about “legitimacy.” If Switzerland does not have “legitimate ownership” of Zurich, then to station troops there or to fight against Zurich being occupied by foreign powers would make Switzerland the aggressor. It could be argued that, when the US invaded Vietnam, it was merely “coming to the aid” of the Republic of Vietnam, which had requested our aid (nevermind that they were our puppet). Likewise, in Ukraine everything about how you view the conflict is dependent on who you think is legitimate - the “consensus” interpretation in the West is that the central government is legitimate and the separatists are just Russian puppets, while the pro-Russia view says that the separatists are legitimate and the central government just Western puppets.

So V.I. Lenin observes:

…the bourgeoisie [of all the imperialist nations] are always ready to say—and do say to the people—that they are “only” fighting “against defeat”.

Funny enough, this observation was shared by Leo Tolstoy, the Christian Anarchist/Anarcho-Pacifist, who writes:

For ever since the beginning of the world, the use of violence of every kind, from the Inquisition to the Schlüsselburg fortress, has rested and still rests on the opposite principle of the necessity of resisting evil by force.

World War I is a prime example of how things can go wrong. There had been a major socialist movement at the time across every major country in Europe, and there had been a significant fear that, should the imperialist powers start a major war like that, it would lead to a coordinated revolution across all of Europe. But instead, when war broke out, the social democrats all found reasons to rally around the flags of their respective countries. They were committed to keeping their positions within the realm of acceptability, and the war narrowed that realm of acceptibility to the point that coordination with ordinary people of other countries (or genuine opposition to the war) was considered treasonous. So, all the social democrats of Europe rallied around their flags and drafted proles to go out and kill each other for no good reason.

If Your “anarcho-antirealist” stuff is supposed to have any merit at all, then it ought to allow You to recognize that the concept of “defense” is largely arbitrary - or are You seriously of the belief that national borders have some inherent natural truth when even the law of gravity does not?

The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On.

I mean, the people did vote for her…

No they didn’t.

Or she’s just selling out and kissing ass in hopes that the invaders will install her as a puppet and grant her money and power.

Quisling

There’s 195 countries in the world and we’re engaged in like 7 different wars so that’s 188 wars that Trump has prevented by not randomly deciding to attack them /s

“Holier-than-thou leftist” reporting in.

The story of the emperor with no clothes has a very optimistic view of society because in real life the boy who shouted out that he had no clothes would be beaten with a stick.

So they’re going to go to somebody like MTG instead.

I had a part time job at a UPS warehouse in Tennessee when covid hit. We got a new manager, and so they gathered everyone in the warehouse together into a small break area, everyone was right next to each other and nobody was wearing a mask, and the manager gave us all a speech about how much he cared about our safety. There were TV screens in the break areas that had been set to display information about covid safety guidelines that were being blatantly violated.

The same day, my supervisor informed me of a new policy: they’d had too many people “faking” being sick and calling out, so from now on you have to come into work even if you’re sick, and they’ll decide if you’re sick enough to go home. I with I had gotten it in writing because what she told me was definitely illegal, I actually called OSHA afterwards but it was my word against theirs. This was the only time I’ve quit a job with no notice, I remember it clear as day, I told her, “People are dying” and she replied, “I have a business to run,” and I said, “I don’t care.”

I wanted to set the damn building on fire. I was fortunate to have saved enough to take time off work because I lost all confidence that there was anywhere around me that would be a safe place to work.

“Democrats in the House and Senate [are] focusing on lowering your costs, dealing with affordability. Republicans, led by Donald Trump, are focused on spending treasure and, God forbid, lives on military adventurism overseas,” Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer told reporters this week, just before the chamber voted to advance a resolution halting further attacks on Venezuela without congressional permission.

Lmao Chuck Schumer is trying to play this card? Hey, how did you feel about throwing away countless lives and money in Iraq and Afghanistan? How about all the money we’re spending to help Israel commit genocide? Maybe if some of that had been spent on making things more affordable, we wouldn’t be in this situation.

If Chuck Schumer actually believed that for a second, we’d be hearing about his resignation and suicide. It’s just a soulless ghoul saying whatever voters want to hear, just so long as it doesn’t involve bashing ICE.

315 grants were terminated in October, ending support for 223 projects worth approximately $7.5 billion,

Deciding that the government had violated grantees’ rights to equal protection, Mehta only ordered a return to the status quo, reinstating seven grants totaling $27.6 million.

Let’s be clear, that’s $27.6 million out of $7,500 million. 99.6% of the cuts still go through.