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wildcat09

Certifiably Surly
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Everything posted by wildcat09

  1. Freshman-intellect level atheism is boring and stupid and I think there can be good found in religious faith, but I do think it's wrong to say that right-wing evangelical Christians aren't "real" Christians. They are real Christians. So are Methodists, so are Episcopalians, so are black southern Baptists. And pretending otherwise causes real harm. Here's a good piece on how and why: Another piece from the same person: More moderate Christians need to stop pretending that these freaks aren't true Christians. They are, in fact, part of a branch of Christianity that has been hugely influential and powerful in this country for its entire existence.
  2. If we were a decent people there’d be an angry mob dragging Paxton out of his house right now and giving him the ol’ Gaddafi.
  3. Few people on earth truly deserve to burn in hell for eternity, but Ken Paxton is one of them.
  4. I don't think anything I said could be reasonably read as trying to wipe away that spectrum. The point of my comments wasn't on where Hamas falls on that spectrum, but on the disregard for the humanity of Palestinian people based on acts carried out by Hamas. I do think it's wrong to say that US leadership during Vietnam did not direct or sanction atrocities. Kissinger himself micromanaged bombings in Cambodia and Laos himself and often picked civilian villages with no enemy combatants as targets, pretty much for shits and giggles. He really fucking loved being the one making those decisions. We, and the IDF, have often not clearly been morally better than our enemies. Those instances when we've failed to be result from exactly the reactive, emotional mindset I cautioned against in my prior post. When we are better, it's not because of some innate goodness that others simply lack the capacity for, but because we listen to that caution (and have built protocols and institutions that require us to do so) and don't give in to our emotional need for revenge.
  5. Somewhere someone online is typing up an incredibly similar post about all of the dead children Israel has bombed and ranting about how peace with Israel is not possible because they're inhuman monsters. This is not to defend Hamas or downplay the horrors of what they did on 10/7 or the horrors they've inflicted upon the Palestinian people for whom they're supposedly responsible. It's a fact of war. Humans have and will always inflict what seems like unimaginable cruelty on others during war. Hamas isn't unique in that regard and they're certainly not worse than the nazis were (saying that they are arguably gets pretty close to a form of holocaust denial). You can read similar stories about atrocities committed by Israeli soldiers against Palestinans, by Japanese soldiers against Koreans and Chinese in WW2, by American soldiers against Vietnamese people, hell by American police against American children. Every person on this planet from every ethnic and religious background is capable of doing great good and of committing horrible acts. That's the human condition. Every person on this planet has the urge you're demonstrating here: to excuse cruelty against innocent people because of the perceived inhumanity of the enemy. That only results in more cruelty in response. There's an unfortunate calculus involved when determining the "collateral damage" that is morally "acceptable" to inflict when going after a group like Hamas or ISIS who needs to be destroyed by military force. It's not possible to do that without killing innocent people too. But when you start thinking "fuck it, it doesn't matter how many innocent people I kill because they started it so it's entirely their fault" you take a big fucking step down the road to becoming as bad as them. How do you think they got to thinking the same about Israeli civilians?
  6. Incredible. The Knowledge Fight episodes will be must listens.
  7. Don't worry, your impression of the morality of the people associated with the new fake scam school is still 100% accurate.
  8. Can't argue with you there.
  9. You really do not, under any circumstances, gotta hand it to the Nazis.
  10. I have never hit the neg button faster.
  11. They harassed at least one of the moms that made them look bad by going in after her kid while they waited outside for weeks at least. You can bet your ass they'd beat the shit out of (at the very least) anyone who called them a coward.
  12. Same here, but it will happen to some, because there's a lot of stupid people in this country. Many people who ended up joining the alt-right really entered their political lives as supporters of the occupy Wall Street movement, then became disillusioned when that fizzled out. Most people's politics, but especially young people's, are more incoherent and therefore more malleable than I think we really understand. There is some number of people who lean left right now who will get frustrated with what they feel are social pressures against them voicing a reasonable opinion (e.g. "it's pretty fucked up how many children Israel is killing right now and I wish they wouldn't") and end up falling for the far-right explanation for why that is (a Jewish conspiracy). You can see a similar spiral from many older feminists (especially in the UK) who objected to growing social acceptance of trans people and have ended up organizing with "mens rights" activists and actual nazis.
  13. About that: She certainly could've framed her answer better, but saying anything other than some variation of "it depends" would probably not have been true.
  14. When you express your "anti-Israel" view by harassing and vandalizing Jewish delis, etc., that's being anti-Semitic. There has been some of that, though I certainly don't think it's most of the people protesting Israel. But conflating Jews with the State of Israel is absolutely anti-Semitic and easy for leftists to lapse into. Of course, it doesn't fucking help when the House is passing resolutions saying anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism and so much of American culture generally pushes that idea. I mentioned in this thread when the war started, but it's really kind of shocking how much more frank discussion there is in Israeli media right now than in American media. They're the ones that were just brutally attacked and they're the ones in the midst of a war, so one would think they'd be the ones more under the wartime fervor, and many certainly are. But there's plenty of opposition to how Israel is conducting the war and to the expansion of Jewish settlements in Israeli media, while expressing those views here has and would cost many Americans (including many Jews) their jobs. What really sucks is that I think this climate is likely going to push many people who currently identify as leftists to the far right, because there's no accepted "legitimate" way right now to express those views.
  15. There is absolutely a problem with anti-Semitism on the left, but it's not remotely similar to right-wing anti-Semitism. Anti-Semitic leftists are unknown college students, not congressional representatives and senators and other influential political activists with actual influence and often real power. Anti-Semitism doesn't fundamentally undergird modern progressive ideology the same way it does modern conservative ideology. The biggest danger leftist anti-Semitism poses to Jews is its ability to push people from the left to the right, because it can help the right gain more political power. The biggest danger right anti-Semitism poses to Jews is another Holocaust.
  16. In Nixon's defense, he was extremely drunk pretty much his entire presidency.
  17. Nixon would've never known about them if Kissinger hadn't told him. He told him knowing Nixon would try to sabotage the talks, because he didn't want the war to end any more than Nixon did.
  18. I guess it's not really commonly known outside the left because centrists don't really like to acknowledge our own monsters, but under Nixon's administration the operation of much of the Vietnam war, and its expansions in Cambodia and Laos, were centralized under the National Security Advisor's office and Kissinger personally oversaw and micromanaged much of the bombing campaigns that slaughtered countless civilians: He also promoted tacit American support for the Khmer Rouge, after enabling their rise to power in the first place: These are just a couple of examples of why he was so horrible. The number of different atrocities he was personally involved in is shocking, but it is well documented. Oh, and he committed treason, as Fastbreak notes, when he helped Nixon sabotage the 1968 peace talks in hope of landing a job in Nixon's administration. What is really wild is that he was at the same time serving as an advisor to Humphrey's campaign and Humphrey was going to give him the same fucking job Nixon gave him. I guess you can infer that he helped Nixon because he thought Nixon was more likely to win with or without his help, but I think it's pretty reasonable to infer that he supported Nixon because he knew he'd have freer reign to do whatever he wanted under Nixon than Humphrey. A lot of people who don't even love his foreign policy have this view (probably because it's what they grew up hearing) that he may have done or condoned some bad shit, but did so because he thought it served a greater purpose. But that's a myth. He never really had any concrete foreign policy views that he was trying to advance, he just thought he should have power. He was an all time, duplicitous piece of shit who was more than happy to say whatever he needed to say to obtain more power and betrayed tons of his own friends to protect his own ass. He just liked playing the game and over a million people are dead as a result, not to mention the physical harm to tens of thousands of American veterans who survived Vietnam and the enormous psychological effects that the Vietnam War had and still has to this day on the American people (especially the American right).
  19. Um, y’all should try reading a book or two on Kissinger.
  20. The free speech crowd suddenly doesn’t like free speech so much. I wonder what changed.
  21. This is the type of thing people who are about to commit genocide often say about their targets and if you really believe it you’d be giving Israel moral permission to slaughter millions of people.
  22. They're just throwing shit at the wall, hoping something will stick.
  23. https://www.texastribune.org/2023/12/05/uvalde-officer-student-trainings-mass-shootings/ Too long to quote entirely, but jesus christ. Seriously, why do we have cops if this is what we get? I'm somewhat in disbelief at this point that none of the police who abandoned their duty to protect those children that day have killed themselves. Are most of them even ashamed?
  24. I think that's probably because it's a magazine by Jewish liberals speaking to a Jewish audience that already knows Hamas are monsters.
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