refenestrator

You ever see that photo of the bund in Shanghai in 1990 and then in 2010?

Why is it so hard to believe people are happy with this?

Go talk to some Chinese people, then, do your own research.

Just don't call them brainwashed while uncritically swallowing a story about how we're all free and they're all oppressed, no matter what they say about it.

There's polling numbers on all this. You can check popular approval of imperial wars in the US (it is low), or you can check Chinese approval of their government (it is high).

What do you call a nation that spends 800B on the military while their infrastructure rots, routinely sponsors coups all over their hemisphere and maintains an aggressive forward military posture all over the planet?

A democracy.

He just barely lost, after getting covid right before the election and looking like a huge fool, while democrats lost seats in the house, underperformed in the senate... no covid, he wins, easily.

If I were a Republican, I'd be congratulating you and handing you as much rope as I had right now. Say defund the police again, please, here's a megaphone, we'll record it for Fox News.

The people canceled by antiracists are mostly cultural moderates in liberal spaces, and that will always be true, because that's who they can get. They can't cancel conservatives, they can only make them stronger, so it's cancel well-meaning center-left people, or cancel nobody.

Most of the people who lost jobs and such from cancelations were center-left, politically.

You specifically used the word 'ruthlessness', approvingly, and cited the paradox of tolerance as justification.

People are really out there being ruthless, trying to hurt people, and justifying it using your logic. It's not a strawman if it's literally happening.

I'm absolutely trying to reduce the scope from what it has become.

It has become, "person I don't like is intolerant, according to me, and hey paradox of tolerance, therefore I will persecute them with no quarter and no decency". Did you see some of the crazy cancellation stories last summer? One guy was ruined for saying "please don't burn down buildings, especially right next to my house": https://reason.com/2021/06/15/daniel-elder-cancel-culture-ch...

If you think you've found a loophole that enables you to be a McCarthyist rooting out evil, you're the bad guy.

The article covers this, the ideology was forged inside elite academic departments with names ending in 'studies'.

They weren't some persecuted underground, they were cushy academics who got given sinecures in the aftermath of the 60s protests.

I can only correct this so many times, so here's my drop into the ocean on this thread:

The paradox of tolerance is that if you're too tolerant to nazis, they might take over everything and you wind up with less tolerance.

It is NOT a get out of jail free card for "you don't have to be tolerant to people that you label as intolerant, in fact terminate them with prejudice". You need a credible threat of the 'bad people' taking over and limiting tolerance for it to hold together.

Thank you for coming to my ted talk.

The leader of the proud boys once stuck a dildo up his ass, on stage, in order to "own the libs". It's documented, you can look it up.

I think you're underestimating lib owning as a motivational factor for these guys.

Because we're all idiots who got taken in on this by 4chan.

The symbol became irresistible to that guy after watching liberals lose their minds at it. If it hadn't bothered the libs, it would have no use to him.

To the extent that our media and politicians live on Twitter, its become the public square and their policies are de facto policies for American public discourse.

I personally would prefer that they didn't all live on Twitter, but they do and so here we are.

No, but it totally should be, I managed to defend both Parler and ISIS on this thread.

Note that it's totally uncontroversial, bordering on mandatory, to support our return strike which killed dozens of people.

Also firmly in bounds to insist we stay there and do it on a nightly basis, forever. Majority opinion of people with microphones.

But the other guys? On the other side of the fight? Completely unconscionable to host any of their speech. We don't encourage violence.

It's worth emphasizing that this is already the 2nd escalation, too.

People who didn't like twitter's policies were smugly told "go start your own twitter". So now we had these Parler guys on AWS, they actually did it, oops, turns out starting your own twitter is also not ok.

I hate to defend Parler, but like you said, first they come for..

Is 'please don't commit arson at your protest' a conservative viewpoint?

American foreign policy was wrong-headed because it envisioned China happily assimilating into a world order which recognized US as rightful hegemon of all oceans and most land. This was more of an unspoken assumption, the spoken version had all the stuff you said.

Why would they accept that? There's a billion and a half of them and they work harder. They're going to have regional hegemony over their area as a matter of arithmetic.

Remember that nobody was threatened or, as a result, morally offended by China until the last few years when we figured out we couldn't keep them at the bottom of the value chain forever.

How do we live in a society where we can just be aimed at a new foreign enemy and all of our free, enlightened citizens go along every time? Russia (support afghanistan), Iran (support Iraq), Iraq (support gulf emirates), Al Qaeda, Afghanistan, Iraq again, now China! It seems so normal to us, because that's all we know.

They're not perfect, we're not perfect, and both states are feeding off of national rivalry to legitimize themselves because that's what states do.

Those are minor product quibbles.

I'm not saying Google is the great Satan or anything, I'm just saying it's impossible for most people, especially the typical Googler, to simultaneously work at a place for a nice paycheck and think it's bad for society. Everyone justifies, whether it's Phillip Morris or Google.

Working there in the first place limits thought. Nobody wants to think of themselves as part of the problem.

The language, at best, just makes the cognitive dissonance a little easier.

You could just Google 'chaz shooting'.

It sounds like you see this as a tribal issue. Where it's your tribe vs the other tribe and saying something like "it got out of hand at times" would be conceding ground.

Consider the current moment where critical race theory has now been weaponized back against liberals and used to delegitimize legitimate points and problems we have. Maybe this could have been avoided if the movement had told Robin DiAngelo to shut up and stop giving them ammo. Instead they tried to 'cancel' anyone who saw this coming a year out, like Lee Fang or David Shor.

You happy with the results? Was it worth it? Where are the wins?

Ideally we could unmoor it from the arbitrary 100 year old census categories. Yeah, you have to draw arbitrary lines somewhere but our current set is really dumb.

He was at a BLM protest and lit up that cop car. I checked, his quote was "I got carried away".

No comment on CHAZ killing 3 black dudes? Is that a pro or anti 'black lives matter' action?

You can define your personal boundary for who "counts" and not, have it include all the peaceful people and none of the bad/unwise people, and call everyone who disagrees a concern troll.. and hey, you'll be right, according to you.

Look at the news the last two weeks, blanket condemnation of the Afghanistan withdrawal despite 70÷ approval for it and the fact that all of these educated news people have been around watching for the last 20 years.

Yet we can't get a microphone, airtime or column inches for anyone in favor of the withdrawal.

I'm free to post pseudonymously though!

And you can lose your job for posting a controversial opinion in the US, completely privatized.

It's a way more stable system. Allow a very narrow band of opinions in practice while claiming that everyone's free to think whatever they want in theory.

There's nutpicking and then there's having your movement taken over by nuts.

The public face of BLM at its peak, for better or worse, featured a large number of nuts. Like your bro in Seattle there. Or those CHAZ people, also Seattle, who actually killed 3 black guys in as many weeks as part of their black lives matter protest. In the mainstream, anyone who acknowledged black-on-black crime or said that rioting might be a bad PR look was called a fifth column or concern troll.

Mob mentality is a thing, I'm not perfect either but a lot of people got carried away.

Then you're sacrificing consistency guarantees. If less than a majority have committed a write, it could be lost while the cluster still has a quorum up.

Waiting to report success until a majority have committed allows you to make guarantees with a straight face.. "it will probably be committed in the near future" is not the same thing.

China built nationwide high speed rail without breaking a sweat.

I'm with you that the USA isn't going to collapse tomorrow but we do need to rediscover how to build actual physical things.