This fucks, way better use of 22 billion dollars than usual

Just to add to the convversation about western symbols, I was nauseated to learn that in Iraq, the Beretta M9 pistol carried by Americans has become a symbol of summary execution, visual shorthand for being taken into an alley and canoed.

During the time of the US occupation of Afghanistan, opium from the region comprised a full 90% of the world's heroin supply. So I would say "the same thing they've been doing since at least the days of the Vietnam War and the Golden Triangle."

Taiwan

Did their democracy start before or after their native genocide, dissident concentration camps and forty years of martial law?

Okay, now carry this logic further. By this standard, the US is currently in the midst of a much larger and longer-running genocide of refugees on it's southern border, including forced hysterectomies and untreated outbreaks of disease.

So why should anyone believe such a genocidal government's claims about it's enemies?

"real world" labor movement and activism

very little drama

Levels of cap off the charts

The indigenous inhabitants and the 10,000 or so dissidents that they put in camps at the beginning of their incredibly democratic four decades of martial law.

When I am exposed to multiple people who disagree with me, that's brigading

Like 6ish years ago we all, liberals and leftists together, were creeped out by the right's sudden proliferation of "NPC" memes, correctly pointing out how dehumanizing it is and conjecturing darkly about what exactly this kind of rhetoric was priming these people for. Now, the overton window's so fucked that the we've normalized deploying the exact same invective against anyone who speaks up on behalf of humanity and against a US-dominated world. I've driven past the ruins of the Japanese concentration camps out in the miserable desert, and to know that so many people around me who act self-righteous but stand for nothing would rebuild those camps at the snap of a finger, or the running of an op-ed, or a scary news story....well, these people may haughtily object to being called blue MAGA, but that sure doesn't stop them from doing absolutely fucking everything they can to earn the label.

You are obviously pro-China (...). That makes you a Chinese bot.

At long last, we've reached the molten core of psychotic liberal solipsism

Nah, the real danger is the result of repeated cumulative reinfection damage from a still-poorly-understood virus that causes more and more damage to the vascular system and every organ connected to it. Long Covid is only beginning to be recognized for the mass disabling event it is, and the response of governments from the municpal all the way to the federal levels have been to let it rip, stop testing, shut down tracking sites, repeal mask mandates, and declare victory. Literally doing the thing they rightly mocked Trump for suggesting.

Now over a million people have died in the US alone, and our government has decided to force everyone back to work to sustain commercial real estate profits, and in the process condemned us all to a lifetime of body-destroying reinfections by a virus who's key traits are infectiousness and rapid evolution.

None of this had to happen. We could have had a real quarantine, just a month or two back in 2019, but that would require making slightly less money for a brief period of time, so instead we get to live in eternal plague world. The hobbling of any effective covid response by our ruling class in favor of more lucrative half-measures and non-measures is beyond a humanitarian disaster, it's a crime of unprecedented scale.

Idk what people are so worried about, I've been assured that the pandemic is over and we beat covid in ~~2020~~ ~~2021~~ ~~2022~~ ~~2023~~