cecinestpasunbot

Okay but Bush actually stole a presidential election.

Bush sued to stop a recount in Florida that would have likely led to Gore winning the 2000 presidential election. A conservative Supreme Court majority sided with Bush and stopped the recount. It makes Trump’s whole “STOP THE COUNT!” look amateurish in comparison. Bush actually was able to stop the count and got away with it.

Gore didn’t want Americans to start questioning the legitimacy of our democracy so he conceded. The rally around the flag effect after 9/11 helped quash any further criticisms of how Bush came to office.

It’s for all of the journalists, aid workers, and their families.

They have a much higher false negative rate now than they used to. Thats probably due to changes in the virus itself and lower viral load as people have higher levels of immunity now. However if you test positive you can still be pretty certain you have covid.

This is a wild take. The Chiang Kai-shek’s KMT did not have any more legitimacy than the CPC. He was a straight up fascist and after fleeing to Taiwan he politically repressed native Taiwanese people by having them massacred. You can oppose Xi and the CPC without having to pretend the KMT was at all legitimate.

Bush is objectively worse on every level. They’re both terrible and the people in their administrations were both soulless gouls. However, Bush’s administration was far more effective in carrying out their repugnant agenda.

People will say Trump tried to steal an election. That’s true. But Bush ACTUALLY stole the election in 2000. Bush also gave us 2 wars which killed in total over a million people and led to the rise of ISIS. Trump’s admin tried it’s best to get the US into a war with Iran but couldn’t make it happen. Bush’s administration also helped get the US into the Great Recession from which the American working class has never truly recovered. Trump doesn’t hold a candle to the kind of damage Bush inflicted on the US and world.

The die was cast long before that when the US decided to fund the mujahideen to fight the Soviets. That destroyed the possibility of a secular Afghani state. The US later found that the easiest way to pacify the country was to simply bribe Taliban aligned warlords. Once the money spigot was turned off, a Taliban resurgence was inevitable. Every administration from Reagan to Biden shares some blame in what is happening today.

There’s no evidence Hamas beheaded children. IIRC that was a rumor originating from the IDF which remains unsubstantiated.

Companies are competing with each other to maximize profit. If there aren’t new markets for them to grow into, companies can only grow by reducing cost and bringing in more revenue. As such they make shittier products while also pushing prices as high as they can go. This is an unfortunate consequence of how capitalism works.

Sure but that’s not saying much.

Israel bombed an Iranian embassy which is considered sovereign Iranian territory. That’s an act of war. They’re trying to provoke Iran into a broader conflict. If this is Iran’s response then the world can breathe a sigh of relief. A regional war would be devastating to the lives of millions and should be avoided.

What you’re saying just isn’t true though. China isn’t overbuilding by any meaningful metric. Their urbanization rate is really low compared to developed nations like the US. They have a huge population so their total rate of construction while urbanizing is unique. However the actual process of urbanization isn’t unique at all.

If you look at historical data the US followed a very similar trend with rapid urbanization ramping up until around the 1960s. That rapid development included a mix of shoddy and quality construction. Additional urbanization was more difficult to achieve and growth slowed. That’s basically what you’re seeing in China now too.

So maintaining global dominance is so important the US just has to enable war crimes and ethnic cleansing? That’s the logic of fascism.

I imagine that’s the likely reason the IDF was attacking and occupying hospitals in Gaza. If there is nobody to count the bodies then Israel can keep the reported death count low as they continue their genocide.

I don’t think anyone who supported say Bernie or Warren thought that Biden was a progressive. However, there were attempts made by the Biden campaign to appeal to progressives. After Bernie lost, Biden and Bernie staffers actually collaborated to release a joint list of policy proposals. I think that gave a lot of progressives false hopes for what a Biden presidency could be.

Yes just like Al Qaeda and the Taliban…

I just clicked through to a guardian link that talked about why she was initially convicted. It’s harder to pin down exactly what misinformation she was accused of spreading though since most western outlets are causally dismissive of the claims.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/nov/16/citizen-journalist-facing-jail-in-china-for-wuhan-covid-reporting-zhang-zhan

That said, this guardian article references interviews she did with VoA, an American government outlet, and The Epoch Times, a far right wing outlet run by the Falun Gong cult. The Epoch Times I know in particular has promoted antivax or anti lockdown conspiracies in the US, as well as other stuff like with Qanon and the idea that Trump actually won in 2020. It wouldn’t surprise me to know she was promoting similar anti lockdown conspiracies but just in China.

A lot of people voted for Biden in the primaries because they were being told he had the best chance of beating Trump. Plenty of those people actually favored the policy proposals of other candidates.

I suspect China believes it can outpace the economic growth of Taiwan in the long run. If Taiwan’s business elites start to think they’re missing out on that growth by opposing reunification, then you’ll see a political shift in Taiwan.

You should know that most Marxists believe capitalism is an economic engine unlike anything that came before it. That doesn’t mean we can’t build a more rational system. If we wanted to approach the problem scientifically we would study capitalism, understand how it works and came to be, form hypotheses for how to build something better, and then experiment.

I’d also add that the formation of the modern government, ie liberal democratic states, and the development of capitalism are one and the same. Our totalizing market economy can not exist without governments ensuring conditions are right for market exchange to operate smoothly. As such, I don’t think it’s possible to say a failure of governments are not a failure of capitalism. It’s a package deal so to speak.

I think their administrations likely had equally bad intentions. The incompetence of Trump’s administration just means they acted more erratically. They were also much worse at getting press on their side and worse at covering up their actions.

Biden gave material support to Israel’s genocidal campaign which has killed over 30,000 people. You’re delusional if you think paying lip service to a ceasefire while still actively supporting the genocide is going to satisfy anyone.

Hong Kong was never a vision for what China could be though. British rule was also very authoritarian. Much of the repression of free speech today is being done using laws the British enacted. Even when the British decided to introduce democratic reforms to HK, they explicitly gave outsized control of the city to corporations.

That’s not really true if you account for the purchasing power of the dollar within the US. While Americans might benefit from cheap imported consumer goods, their housing, food, and healthcare costs are incredibly high when compared to other countries.

The thing is, you can’t really separate the Chinese people from the CCP. Something like 7% of the population are members and the party has very high approval ratings. That’s not just because the CCP are good propagandists either. Rather the living conditions for the average Chinese person have improved dramatically over the course of only a few decades thanks to policy decisions made by the CCP. As such, opposing the CCP and wanting the Chinese people to thrive may be seen as a highly contradictory perspective to people living in mainland China.

It’s not that corporate news in the western world has to be well organized to put out the same perspective. Rather, they operate under the same kinds of selective pressures and as such they develop similar biases.

A good example is all the reporting on WMDs in Iraq that went unquestioned by much of the western press until well after it mattered. Unfortunately nothing has really changed since the invasion of Iraq.

Hamas has no power in the West Bank. Yet Israeli settlers are free to harass Palestinians and force them from their homes without consequence. If you think that’s a successful resolution to the conflict then you’re just willfully ignorant.

I’m not sure what’s confusing about this. Republicans don’t stand for anything. Why would you believe them when in comes to Ukraine? They’re just lying in order to score political points and differentiate themselves from democrats.

The left on the other hand is principled regardless of whether or not you agree with their rationale. It’s not like any leftists wants more death and destruction. They just think that ending weapons shipments is more likely to reduce the chaos and suffering.

I mean the Taliban literally offered up Bin Laden but Bush rejected the offer and instead chose to invade. 20 years later and hundreds of thousands there’s nothing to show for it. It’s not like there weren’t people critical of the invasion at the time.

It doesn’t require federal legislation actually. Biden could simply order the AG to deschedule marijuana which would effectively legalize it nationally.

Okay and as far as the Taiwanese people are concerned they apparently see that choice as a lose lose situation. Why then does it matter if they prefer the ambiguity of the status quo? Why is it so urgent that they make a choice they clearly don’t want to make?

Willful ignorance, as I said.

For others reading this, UN reports on the issue are easily accessible.

https://www.unocha.org/publications/report/occupied-palestinian-territory/other-mass-displacement-while-eyes-are-gaza-settlers-advance-west-bank-herders-enhe

Even Haaretz reports on settler violence.

https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2023-07-01/ty-article/.premium/settler-violence-in-the-west-bank-isnt-an-oversight-its-a-long-standing-policy/00000189-0abc-d572-af9b-0afffdd50000

You have to go out of your way to ignore the mass amount of evidence that show the Israeli government endorses and supports the forced eviction of Palestinians in the West Bank.

I don’t think the article is actually all that critical. It might have been worth providing more context for why China is using that much concrete. However, even without that I think it’s fine.

The real problem I think is the headline. It frames China’s concrete use as an irrational mental illness which is just absurd. I’m betting that was the work of one of the BBC’s editors and not the actual author.

Let’s be fair, the ROC under the KMT and Chiang Kai-shek was far from democratic despite their claim to Sun Yat-sen’s legacy.

You’re not wrong. The CPC see Taiwanese independence as a threat because the US prevented them from taking it during the Chinese civil war. The US knows this and clearly intends to use Taiwan as a pressure point to gain diplomatic leverage against China. That makes it a high stakes game with the Taiwanese people caught in the middle and no resolution in sight.

Given that context, it’s not surprising most people in Taiwan want to maintain the status quo and prevent any escalation. However, as tensions rise between the US and China the political tensions in Taiwan rise with them.

The intention and systematic oppression and discrimination of Palestinians amounts to the internationally recognized crime of apartheid.

Palestinians have no say in what happens to them. Israel restricts their freedom of movement in Gaza and the West Bank. Israel intentionally limits their access to clean drinking water, food, and other resources. Palestinians were forced from their homes en masse in 1948. To this day Palestinians continue to be kicked out of their homes and segregated from encroaching Israeli settlements. The Israeli state enforces this system of oppression through criminal and illegal violence. I could go on but you get the point.

This isn’t just my opinion. It’s the international consensus and the opinion of Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and experts at the UN.

China doesn’t claim to have a communist economic system though. They understand perfectly well that they have a market economy. Their rationale for this apparent contradiction is that they believed they couldn’t grow quickly enough in isolation. They thought that by building a market economy they could trade with the western world and therefore rapidly develop. I think that gambit has clearly paid off. It’ll be interesting to see what decisions China makes once their economy is strong enough that the US cannot legitimately threaten it.

You seem to be confused. Explaining to you the root cause of the conflict is not the same thing as justifying ongoing violence. The simple truth is that this conflict will only end when Israel decides to end the apartheid.

Thank you! I totally forgot that easily verifiable facts are actually just propaganda when Adm_Drummer says so. I’ll be more careful next time.

Some of the governments of various regional powers may not care. However the Palestinian cause has massive popular support.

In Yemen I think it’s both. The Yemeni people were starved and bombed by the Saudis with lots of US support. It shouldn’t be surprising to anyone that they feel a deep sympathy for what Palestinians are going through.