But can't defend against soldiers with no helmets and no armor?

And yet Ukraine can't seem to defend against them? Russian territory gains have been accelerating over the last 4 weeks. Pretty bad situation if Ukraine can't defend against unarmored and unarmed soldiers

Ok, idolize/glorify is different than praise. Go ahead and argue that point. I am interested in understanding the position.

They said they didn't praise Stalin, you said that saying good things about Stalin is praising him. He disagrees with your definition. I don't. I think you're right. That's praising Stalin. But I don't see anything wrong with praising people for the good things that they did.

Further you didn't say they should admit that they idealize Stalin, you said they should admit that they praise Stalin. There's definitely a difference in those two words. You're moving the goal posts again.

You think I am projecting that I have a problem with cognitive disaonance based on what evidence? I am not trying to get you cross some moral line like "admit to everyone here you're just a dirty liberal who thinks Obama was a good guy". I am engaging you and critiquing you. If you can't tell the difference, I can't help you yet.

And if you can read the thread, the thread you are replying to invokes Rule 6 which is what caused the commenter you are debating against to start this conversation about praise/deification/etc

Read

I am claiming that you pretend malaria and bad humors are both bad. One exists. The other doesn't. You don't seem to have the willingness to acknowledge that. The social credit score in China that effects individuals does not exist. Sure. You can say both the US credit scoring system and the nonexistent Chinese personal social credit score are bad, but that would be foolish.

You could be saying that the US credit score system and the Chinese social credit score that is used to manage negative externalities of businesses are both bad, but I would disagree with you.

But I am pretty sure you don't know that the social credit score for individuals does not exist.

Rule 6 says "idealizing/glorifying". A poster in this thread. Dogbert said the word "deifying" in this thread. Maybe you don't think those are interchangeable. I could be convinced either way.

As for what I am talking about, the fact that Dogbert praises Stalin is apparently a problem for you. It is possible to praise people for the positive things they have done. Some people argue against that praise because they think the negative things the person has done are more important. Some people go so far as to believe it's not possible a person has done anything praise worthy ever because of the bad things they have done and that therefore anyone praising them is clearly morally derelict and that their opinions no longer matter.

The fact that you are trying to paint Dogbert's praising of Stalin as something he should "admit" is a way of drawing a boundary between acceptable and unacceptable beliefs, a form of thought policing, and also a way to create an echo chamber where you can't be confronted with positions that challenge your own position and threaten some of the beliefs that you hold tied into your identity.

So what I am talking about is you, choosing to interpret Rule 6 as applying to a positive analysis of Stalin's actions in office because you can't really handle discourse that runs counter to an orthodoxy that you adhere to.

You said "you don't know how much I considerer both systems" in another comment.

That's pretty much all the back up one needs.

The social credit system in China does not apply to individuals. It was originally designed for businesses. A limited pilot in certain locales was applied to individuals. That pilot program was shutdown in 2019.

So sure, go ahead and consider both systems that actually really exist. Go ahead and claim that both things can be bad. Keep on pretending!

The Chinese government ended the pilot programs for social credit scores for individuals in 2019 because the Chinese people didn't want it, so Xu Xiaodong is likely one of those examples where a local government running their implementation of the pilot overreached and the central government, responding to the will of the people, ended it.

No because France, Portugal, Spain, The Netherlands, and Germany are all problematic in the same ways, as are their colonies, former colonies, contributions to the body of work (like racism), and collaboration with the problems of today (Third Reich, NATO, etc). We could even include more European nations in the list for these same reasons.

Sorry, that's just now how politics works anywhere. Do you consider with political party "ruled" which states or cities or islands in the US? When the Confederacy seceded from the Union did that suddenly mean they were no longer legitimately part of the US?

Taiwan was part of China, there was a civil war. The losers of the war retreated to Taiwan, and then the US and UK sent warships to block the victors from bringing the losers to justice. Taiwan at that point was still part of China, the country, but now had its own fascist government prosecuting the White Terror and killing hundreds of thousands of people while the US and UK protected them, and then integrated them into the global economy. At no point did Taiwan secede, at no point did the concept of the nation of China have its borders redrawn, nor did the nation of China declare a separation between the island the mainland.

Hell, even the fascist mass murderers on Taiwan said it - there is only one China and Taiwan is an island province of that country. And world leaders agree that's the case.

Wow. Fully on victim blaming? Stop letting billionaires influence me? Stop them from influencing my family and friends? That's your strategy? And you call me delusional?

Perhaps you haven't seen the Princeton study that demonstrated, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that popular opinion has absolutely no influence on legislation in America. That popular and unpopular legislation passes at the exact same rate, meaning that popularity is not a factor in legislation. They went further to explore what DID have an effect on legislation. Do you know what they found? Legislation passing was directly correlated to the popularity of a law with the ultra minority (>1%) of wealthy individuals in the country.

That's a very direct tell. The people are not clamoring for things the billionaires want. The party is acting in the billionaires' interests. The research has been done. This is fact. I know blue MAGA can't handle facts, but you really need to get this fact into your worldview if you're going to be effective.

In the general [election] vote for whoever isn't a fascist

The Democrats are the moderate wing of the fascist movement because America is a fascist project. Everything the Nazis did they learned from the Western imperial powers. The Nazis studied American apartheid. They modeled their plans for the Slavs after the USA's treatment of Indians (which is still happening right now). They modeled their propaganda on our propaganda.

Our cities and towns, our water, our suburban sprawl, our uranium mines, our prisons are all reminders of what fascism does when it wins. It builds on stolen land, it structuralizes the violent oppression, and it creates genteel social aesthetics to cover it over. The Democrats are the genteel social aesthetics.

Ruth Bader Ginsberg showed us this when she rules against a tribe and as precedent she relied on the Doctrine of Discovery, a papal bull that the Europeans used to kill and enslave 10s of millions of indigenous people. It's very difficult to imagine something more clearly damning than SCOTUS affirming that Indians didn't have the right to do something TODAY on the basis of the Doctrine of Discovery. She even said that the reason it was important to affirm is because the entire country relied on this for its legal basis to continue existing.

Democrats and Republicans alike were into ice pick lobotomies for women. Democrats and Republicans alike were into eugenics. Democrats and Republicans alike have a long dark history, because it's not about both parties being the same, it's about both parties being adminstrators of the same empire.

It's the empire that's fascist. Not just one party. And the fact that you think you can solve this by getting off Twitter and getting your family off Twitter and voting really hard for the less obvious of two facist parties in a violent virulent fascist country is proof that the PR strategy of the Democrats is working exactly as it's intended.

The country these two parties administer integrated fascists directly into the country's administration. It supported fascists, and still supports fascists abroad. It depends fascism's right to organize, to recruit in public, to participate in elections, to participate in governments.

Responsible countries purge fascists. The US does not purge fascists. It purges communists. Anti-communism being a core tenet of fascism, the connection is clear.

But of course. I can't convince blue MAGA any more than I can convince MAGA. Both groups are completely impervious to facts, history, and reality.

That's not how the Republican party went further right. They went further right because their previous right rhetoric and aesthetic laster long enough for the economy to continue to collapse and for their constituents to feel real economic pain. So, they had to go further right in order to rationalize the situation in the mind of their voters by blaming the erosion of traditional values even more. It's a death spiral driven by economic realities, not voter ideology.

In the same way, the Democrats are losing because the voters want a solution to the economic problems but the only solution threatens their true constituency - the owning class. So the Democrats can't be pulled further left because that would accelerate the erosion of the power of the elite. And the Republicans are forced to go further right to explain why their previous policies didn't create the change that was needed. Thus, the entire elite, both Ds and Rs are dragged right, back into the original rationalizations for founding a nation in indigenous genocide and chattel slavery.

Voting D will never fix that. The proof is all throughout history. The Ds and the Rs collaborated to purge every leftist they could find in the country - twice. And they may very soon be doing it again, because this is what happens when unions get stronger, when resistance movements get stronger, and when solidarity movements get stronger.

China has been eliminating poverty for quite some time. In fact, over the last 70 years, China accounts for 80% or more of the entire global poverty alleviation gains. The US has created more poverty in that same time.

But also, the US has been racist, violent, colonialist, jingoistic, misogynistic, and white supremacist since it's founding. You know those propaganda images DHS posts on Twitter? Those are from the US's time of westward expansion. This isn't new. What's new is that we have given up on trying to hide it, which is something we did for for the last 70 years. But even in the 40s we had concretation camps, we had open racism in all of politics, we had the second largest Nazi group in the world.

And after WW2? Operation Paperclip? Operation Gladio? The US openly staffed NATO with Nazi officers. The US openly advocated for Nazi politicians to lead West Germany. There were literal Nazis running West German after the war.

And then of course the Korean War. The Vietnam War. The Irag wars. The Afghanistan war. The embargo against Cuba. The coup in Iran.

This is what the US is. Nixon banned heroin explicitly to imprison black people. We have slave labor producing billions of dollars in value annually. And we punish our prison slaves who don't work by giving them solitary. All of that is massive gross human rights violations, things we've pretended to invade other countries for.

This is who we are. It's not new.