I remember debating with my buddy (he’s pro-Russia) about the Ruso-Ukrainian war when it broke out, and my saying how Russia invading Ukraine because of Nazi gangs is a pretty flim flam excuse for a land grab. “It would be like the US invading Mexico and seizing territory because of the drug cartels”, I said. Why is my country this way.
I guess. He’s an Anarchocapitalist on every other day of the week. I just enjoy arguing amicably with people, and he does too, so our friendship works.
100% agreed. I’m more on the anarcho-commie/left libertarian side of things myself, so I recognize money and markets as being forces that are just as coercive and abusive as any government.
Tell me about it. Anyway, he’s not under any illusions about how fucking backwards both the US and Russia’s governments are, but he really believes that Russia’s in the right on the matter of the war because there really are capital N Nazis that really are up to Nazi shit in Ukraine. As fucked as that genuinely is, imo I think that’s just the flimsy pretense being used to justify a land grab, which is why I used the analogy of the US invading Mexico under the flimsy pretense of stopping the cartels. Well, here we fucking go, I guess.
I can’t speak for him, but I think everyone does some handwaving for their team. Unfortunately, the Ruso-Ukrainian war is practically a meme of Slavic conflict with all the shitty stuff happening, and it’s got everyone’s arms about broken with hand waving.
He’s gay, and he’s always been there in a pinch. He’s not a bigot, he’s big on the Anarcho side, just wants people to not be interfered with and thinks a lot about how the government interferes with people a lot.
For context, I lived in the south when for a few years around the time Obama ran for president and met actual KKK members without their hoods. I’m white, so I did have the privilege of getting to immunize myself against their bullshit right from the source. Someone else I know came out as both trans male and an actual Nazi in almost the same blow. They claim to be an ironic Nazi, but that experience taught me that there’s no such thing. I’m grateful for the encounter, as it gave me time to learn to recognize the enemy, but I don’t speak with them anymore. I don’t break bread with that type as a matter of policy, life is too short for that. I just learn enough to spot their shit and move on.
Wars are traditionally pitched as “defensive” from their native soil. Vietnam was justified by the Gulf of Tonkin incident. WW2 was justified by Pearl Harbor. Iraq and Afghanistan were justified by 9/11. Or Benghazi was for Libya. Etc, etc. Now Trump is arguing that cartel violence on the border justifies invading Mexico. Only a matter of time before they can point to a Missing White Woman or a drug bust or shoot out that can be used to justify moving troops over the border.
Russia isn’t any less immune to this logic, and the War in the Donbas was as hot an issue to capitalize on as anything Americans experienced with Panama in the 80s or Cuba in the 60s.
Same with China and Taiwan. Or the civil wars in Sudan and Ethiopia. This isn’t in any way a uniquely American problem.
I just want to leave a couple excerpts from they thought they were free by Milton Mayer
It’s a short read, and I highly recommend it if you’ve never had the chance to read it.
…”Most of us did not want to think about fundamental things and never had. There was no need to. Nazism gave us some dreadful, fundamental things to think about—we were decent people—and kept us so busy with continuous changes and ‘crises’ and so fascinated, yes, fascinated, by the machinations of the ‘national enemies,’ without and within, that we had no time to think about these dreadful things that were growing, little by little, all around us. Unconsciously, I suppose, we were grateful. Who wants to think?
"To live in this process is absolutely not to be able to notice it—please try to believe me—unless one has a much greater degree of political awareness, acuity, than most of us had ever had occasion to develop. Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion, ‘regretted,’ that, unless one were detached from the whole process from the beginning, unless one understood what the whole thing was in principle, what all these ‘little measures’ that no ‘patriotic German’ could resent must some day lead to, one no more saw it developing from day to day than a farmer in his field sees the corn growing. One day it is over his head.”…
…”Each act, each occasion, is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next. You wait for one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join with you in resisting somehow. You don’t want to act, or even talk, alone; you don’t want to ‘go out of your way to make trouble.’ Why not?—Well, you are not in the habit of doing it. And it is not just fear, fear of standing alone, that restrains you; it is also genuine uncertainty.”…
…””But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes. That’s the difficulty. If the last and worst act of the whole regime had come immediately after the first and smallest, thousands, yes, millions would have been sufficiently shocked—if, let us say, the gassing of the Jews in ’43 had come immediately after the ‘German Firm’ stickers on the windows of non-Jewish shops in ’33. But of course this isn’t the way it happens. In between come all the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D.”…
This is how fascism works. It’s an unrelenting deluge of controversies, changes, and bullshit. This deluge is what empowers the fascist. One step leads to the next, but people say it’s all just talk. The people are kept busy with things meant to look like they’re important, while the real important changes are carried out away from prying eyes. And most importantly, it’s a steady march to hell. No one thinks the dictator is actually going to do those things, until he does one. But then it was only the one thing after all.
If trump says he’s going to invade Mexico, I fully expect him to attempt it. But it’s not going to be on day one. No, it’s going to be after a year or 2 of mass deportations and ICE raids. And most people won’t say a damn thing about those. And then if news keeps saying that we tried deporting and it’s not working, well then we have to invade, I’d bet a decent amount of people will support it, probably a vocal group of Latino republicans who “did it right”.
We’re so very close to a dictatorship, all of the groundwork is already laid out, the plan is out for anyone read. I just hope people will actually resist when the changes start coming.
One of the biggest complaints about Democrat presidents is that they don’t follow through on their promises. It says a lot when your biggest defense of Trump is that he won’t either.
The difference between making Mexico pay for his wall and bombing Mexico is that, as Commander-in-Chief of the U.S. Armed Forces, he would have the ability to bomb Mexico.
He said before his first term that he was going to build a wall and make Mexico pay for it and has done neither.
He’s spent billions on a bigger DHS, a bunch of blockades of inconsistent quality built by shady Trump-aligned contractors, and transfer of military hardware to border town police forces.
The idea that Trump hasn’t militarized the border is flatly false.
They both “happened” in so far as you can point to events that justify what came next.
Trump can easily point to border violence that he can use to justify an invasion in the same way Putin used the civil war in the Donbas to justify invading Ukraine.
These aren’t True/False statements, they’re events used as justification for invasion. Claiming there’s no violence on the border of Texas and Mexico is maybe a step shy of claiming 9/11 or Pearl Harbor were inside jobs. What’s at issue isn’t “Did this happen?” but “Is launching a twenty year long bloodbath a prudent response?”
I remember debating with my buddy (he’s pro-Russia) about the Ruso-Ukrainian war when it broke out, and my saying how Russia invading Ukraine because of Nazi gangs is a pretty flim flam excuse for a land grab. “It would be like the US invading Mexico and seizing territory because of the drug cartels”, I said. Why is my country this way.
Pretty cringe that you know someone who parrots Russian govt talking points though
Every ML and hexbear
I guess. He’s an Anarchocapitalist on every other day of the week. I just enjoy arguing amicably with people, and he does too, so our friendship works.
Ancap and staunch defender of authoritarian regimes?
Sound about right to me. Ancap is about capitalism with no limits, so it’s an authoritarianism of money.
100% agreed. I’m more on the anarcho-commie/left libertarian side of things myself, so I recognize money and markets as being forces that are just as coercive and abusive as any government.
Tell me about it. Anyway, he’s not under any illusions about how fucking backwards both the US and Russia’s governments are, but he really believes that Russia’s in the right on the matter of the war because there really are capital N Nazis that really are up to Nazi shit in Ukraine. As fucked as that genuinely is, imo I think that’s just the flimsy pretense being used to justify a land grab, which is why I used the analogy of the US invading Mexico under the flimsy pretense of stopping the cartels. Well, here we fucking go, I guess.
He does know about the Wagner Group, right? And why it’s named that?
Yeah, he actually runs a social group that managed to get a video response from Prigozhin shortly before Prigozhin’s dollar store rebellion.
So he just doesn’t get it at all, or doesn’t think it’s a big deal when Russia does it?
I can’t speak for him, but I think everyone does some handwaving for their team. Unfortunately, the Ruso-Ukrainian war is practically a meme of Slavic conflict with all the shitty stuff happening, and it’s got everyone’s arms about broken with hand waving.
I used to have friends like that.
Don’t count them as “friends” these people are friends until you become, gay, disabled etc. then they spit in your face.
It’s definitely a priviledge to be able to be friends with bigots.
He’s gay, and he’s always been there in a pinch. He’s not a bigot, he’s big on the Anarcho side, just wants people to not be interfered with and thinks a lot about how the government interferes with people a lot.
For context, I lived in the south when for a few years around the time Obama ran for president and met actual KKK members without their hoods. I’m white, so I did have the privilege of getting to immunize myself against their bullshit right from the source. Someone else I know came out as both trans male and an actual Nazi in almost the same blow. They claim to be an ironic Nazi, but that experience taught me that there’s no such thing. I’m grateful for the encounter, as it gave me time to learn to recognize the enemy, but I don’t speak with them anymore. I don’t break bread with that type as a matter of policy, life is too short for that. I just learn enough to spot their shit and move on.
Wars are traditionally pitched as “defensive” from their native soil. Vietnam was justified by the Gulf of Tonkin incident. WW2 was justified by Pearl Harbor. Iraq and Afghanistan were justified by 9/11. Or Benghazi was for Libya. Etc, etc. Now Trump is arguing that cartel violence on the border justifies invading Mexico. Only a matter of time before they can point to a Missing White Woman or a drug bust or shoot out that can be used to justify moving troops over the border.
Russia isn’t any less immune to this logic, and the War in the Donbas was as hot an issue to capitalize on as anything Americans experienced with Panama in the 80s or Cuba in the 60s.
Same with China and Taiwan. Or the civil wars in Sudan and Ethiopia. This isn’t in any way a uniquely American problem.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Association_of_German_National_Jews
I just want to leave a couple excerpts from they thought they were free by Milton Mayer
It’s a short read, and I highly recommend it if you’ve never had the chance to read it.
…”Most of us did not want to think about fundamental things and never had. There was no need to. Nazism gave us some dreadful, fundamental things to think about—we were decent people—and kept us so busy with continuous changes and ‘crises’ and so fascinated, yes, fascinated, by the machinations of the ‘national enemies,’ without and within, that we had no time to think about these dreadful things that were growing, little by little, all around us. Unconsciously, I suppose, we were grateful. Who wants to think?
"To live in this process is absolutely not to be able to notice it—please try to believe me—unless one has a much greater degree of political awareness, acuity, than most of us had ever had occasion to develop. Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion, ‘regretted,’ that, unless one were detached from the whole process from the beginning, unless one understood what the whole thing was in principle, what all these ‘little measures’ that no ‘patriotic German’ could resent must some day lead to, one no more saw it developing from day to day than a farmer in his field sees the corn growing. One day it is over his head.”…
…”Each act, each occasion, is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next. You wait for one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join with you in resisting somehow. You don’t want to act, or even talk, alone; you don’t want to ‘go out of your way to make trouble.’ Why not?—Well, you are not in the habit of doing it. And it is not just fear, fear of standing alone, that restrains you; it is also genuine uncertainty.”…
…””But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes. That’s the difficulty. If the last and worst act of the whole regime had come immediately after the first and smallest, thousands, yes, millions would have been sufficiently shocked—if, let us say, the gassing of the Jews in ’43 had come immediately after the ‘German Firm’ stickers on the windows of non-Jewish shops in ’33. But of course this isn’t the way it happens. In between come all the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D.”…
This is how fascism works. It’s an unrelenting deluge of controversies, changes, and bullshit. This deluge is what empowers the fascist. One step leads to the next, but people say it’s all just talk. The people are kept busy with things meant to look like they’re important, while the real important changes are carried out away from prying eyes. And most importantly, it’s a steady march to hell. No one thinks the dictator is actually going to do those things, until he does one. But then it was only the one thing after all.
If trump says he’s going to invade Mexico, I fully expect him to attempt it. But it’s not going to be on day one. No, it’s going to be after a year or 2 of mass deportations and ICE raids. And most people won’t say a damn thing about those. And then if news keeps saying that we tried deporting and it’s not working, well then we have to invade, I’d bet a decent amount of people will support it, probably a vocal group of Latino republicans who “did it right”.
We’re so very close to a dictatorship, all of the groundwork is already laid out, the plan is out for anyone read. I just hope people will actually resist when the changes start coming.
One of the biggest complaints about Democrat presidents is that they don’t follow through on their promises. It says a lot when your biggest defense of Trump is that he won’t either.
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The difference between making Mexico pay for his wall and bombing Mexico is that, as Commander-in-Chief of the U.S. Armed Forces, he would have the ability to bomb Mexico.
I have no idea why you don’t understand that.
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I’m glad you’re sure. I think many of us would rather not risk you being sure.
deleted by creator
He’s spent billions on a bigger DHS, a bunch of blockades of inconsistent quality built by shady Trump-aligned contractors, and transfer of military hardware to border town police forces.
The idea that Trump hasn’t militarized the border is flatly false.
Pandering? Yes. Actually going to do it if allowed? Also yes.
Sweet Summer child alert!
They both “happened” in so far as you can point to events that justify what came next.
Trump can easily point to border violence that he can use to justify an invasion in the same way Putin used the civil war in the Donbas to justify invading Ukraine.
These aren’t True/False statements, they’re events used as justification for invasion. Claiming there’s no violence on the border of Texas and Mexico is maybe a step shy of claiming 9/11 or Pearl Harbor were inside jobs. What’s at issue isn’t “Did this happen?” but “Is launching a twenty year long bloodbath a prudent response?”