• PierceTheBubble@lemmy.ml
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    9 hours ago

    Isn’t it ironic how ICE agents wear masks, while scanning everyone else’s faces? Also props to Second Thought for not pushing defeatist mind-poison, because that’s exactly what they want: for us to feel powerless, and making it seem “resistance is futile”.

    • muusemuuse@sh.itjust.works
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      2 hours ago

      It doesn’t have to succeed for me. If my actions to lead to the success of another’s resistance that will still satisfy.

  • ParlimentOfDoom@piefed.zip
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    16 hours ago

    Rights violations in Iran was one of their many post-excuses for invading, while doing the literal same things domestically.

    Hypocrisy is a requirement in the Republican party. They are not ashamed of it.

      • ParlimentOfDoom@piefed.zip
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        6 hours ago

        Broadening the blame away from the worst offender only serves to help the worst offenders get away with it.

        Stop it.

        • Eugene V. Debs' Ghost@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          4 hours ago

          When the constitutional lawyer Barack Obama ran for president, he said that the was against warrentless mass surveillance.

          When Snowden revealed the wide of the PRSIM and Five Eyes agreements to enable mass surveillance of multiple countries without court order, Obama then had Snowden’s passport revoked while he was looking for political asylum, and said:

          On June 19, 2013, U.S. president Barack Obama, during a visit to Germany, stated that the NSA’s data gathering practices constitute “a circumscribed, narrow system directed at us being able to protect our people”.[21]

          Obama didn’t reel in the NSA when it was made public, as a constitutional lawyer because it was trying to stop terrorists. Like how Bush did. Like how Trump did. Like how Biden did. Like how Trump is now.

          They don’t care about you. They want you to think they do. But if they did, they’d end the panopticon state. Obama didn’t even close GitMo.

        • SocialistVibes01@lemmy.ml
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          6 hours ago

          Broadening the blame away from the worst offender

          No one is doing that, liberal. Reds and Blues are the same face of the same fucking coin.

              • dubyakay@lemmy.ca
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                4 hours ago

                The phrase is “two sides of the same coin”. Meaning exactly what you are saying. That they are both the capitalist party. As opposed to another proverbial coin, that of the socialists, anarchists, Monarchist, etc.

                • SocialistVibes01@lemmy.ml
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                  3 hours ago

                  Can’t you guys get neologisms and irony? I KNOW what is the original idiom. HOWEVER, I’m deliberately changing it to mean there isn’t even a simulacrum of difference between Democrats and Republicans. Ah, the eternal marvel of the English language: its breathtaking inability to stray from a pre-written script. No wonder it’s the language of contracts, with every clause so exquisitely, flawlessly delineated. Naturally, people then start behaving as if they’re perpetually executing contracts with one another, forever in hot pursuit of pecuniary advantage. And from that, of course, sprang Common Law, Capitalism, and Imperialism - what a coincidence. It’s just so delightfully easy to build colonies and murder on an industrial scale when the target is nothing more than a number. Precisely because they can’t think beyond greed and individualism, they end up so utterly, pathetically lost the moment they set foot in collectivist countries.

    • Dessalines@lemmy.ml
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      9 hours ago

      The US and Israel were trying to push the women’s rights angle with their manufactured protests, then bombed a girls school killing ~150 mostly schoolchildren.

    • LeeeroooyJeeenkiiins [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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      15 hours ago

      the Republican party

      Quick, chat, what did the democrats have to say about the u.s. military or Iran during the last election? Oh, Kamala Harris was literally even more bellicose?? yup those dang Republicans alright

      • slag@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        3 hours ago

        This world you keep imagining where Kamala would have invaded more countries than we have in this past year alone is quite the sight.

        Tell me more. How many times will congress fail resolutions to narrow her war powers? Will the DoD get renamed to the Department of War Crimes? Will she fill her cabinet with actual circus clowns instead of the hand picked pool of media sycophants who aren’t experts in their fields? Will she build her ball room on top of her triumph arch? (idk, maybe it has death lasers and satanic pentagrams, that would be cool)

        The “but Kamala” card requires entertaining the idea that literally any president other than the one that got voted in would have been able to outpace the malignant narcissism of senile Emperor Nero over here. It’s not an argument in good faith. It’s an argument for the guy who babbled incoherently about how tariffs work and then did exactly what he said he would.

        Edit: Tee hee. If there is one thing ML and MAGA still agree on, it’s that the US is on the best trajectory for everyone. Albeit for very different reasons.

        • Lenin's Dumbbell @lemmygrad.ml
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          2 hours ago

          Ngl as an ML, I sure hope I get to see the end of the US as a political entity. Trump winning was inevitable, because American capitalism is in freefall from a materialist perspective, and trying to grab as much as it can before it crashes.

          I don’t care how polite an American president is, they’re all war criminals that bomb West Asia and South America with 0 impunity.

          Death to the US

        • LeeeroooyJeeenkiiins [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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          12 hours ago

          Kamala harris wanted to “rebuild” the u.s. military into “the world’s deadliest” and said Iran was America’s #1 enemy. What the fuck do you think her intentions are with those statements, you absolute fucking imbecile? Or were you too stupid and ignorant to actually pay attention to the things she said during her 5 minutes of campaigning, so you don’t actually know what the fuck you’re talking about?

        • queermunist she/her@lemmy.ml
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          13 hours ago

          Harris had the same foreign policy goals as Trump, the difference between them is that she would have pursued those goals with more competence i.e. she wouldn’t have bombed Iran, she’d have kept up the economic war to cause the country to collapse. She might have bombed Iran by 2028, but the economic war was working. Iran was in really bad shape before the war.

          With this in mind, in terms of foreign policy, Trump is the lesser evil. Thanks to Trump, Iran has a path to victory.

          • Dessalines@lemmy.ml
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            9 hours ago

            Basically either the more honest, and less competent imperialists, vs the dishonest, more competent imperialists.

            • queermunist she/her@lemmy.ml
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              8 hours ago

              Yeah, it’s actually more complicated than just being mask-on vs mask-off. It turns out that only the competents wear their mask, because they’re competent enough to know why they’re wearing a mask. The incompetents think that masks are woke.

        • haxboar [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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          13 hours ago

          This world you keep imagining where Kamala would have invaded more countries than we have in this past year alone is quite the sight.

          Where did they say that?

          How many times will congress fail resolutions to narrow her war powers?

          Probably zero, considering that they didn’t even consider doing it to Obama or Biden. Ya know, the guys who bombed bunches of kids.

          Will she fill her cabinet with actual circus clowns instead of the hand picked pool of media sycophants who aren’t experts in their fields?

          She would have picked liars, simps, and sycophants, just like Biden, Obama, and Clinton did.

          The “but Kamala” card requires entertaining the idea that literally any president other than the one that got voted in would have been able to outpace the malignant narcissism of senile Emperor Nero over here.

          No, it just requires looking at her predecessors, and what she said she would do.

          It’s not an argument in good faith. It’s an argument for the guy who babbled incoherently about how tariffs work and then did exactly what he said he would.

          Wait, so your post full of made-up arguments are in good faith?

          funny-clown-hammer

  • unknownuserunknownlocation@kbin.earth
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    16 hours ago

    How about this: it’s awful in both places. Just because another country started doing it as well doesn’t excuse anything, it means they’re now both doing something unacceptable.

    • stumu415@lemmy.zip
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      2 hours ago

      I lived and worked in both the US and China. My life was infinitely better in China. You don’t even notice the cameras but what you do notice is that I can go to my café, leave my electric scooter unlocked with helmet on, get a table outside, put my laptop on it and then go inside to order coffee without any fear anything will get stolen. In the parks there are public coat racks and people put their jackets, backpacks and other stuff on without any hesitation. You feel safe at night walking down the street by yourself. This feeling I rarely have anywhere else. Delivery packages are left outside and gathered sometimes outside of the compound on the public walkway without being stolen.

      Now whenever I travel to Europe, I have to totally reverse this behavior otherwise all my shit will be gone. That to me is awful.

      • LuminousLuddite@lemmy.world
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        53 minutes ago

        I would rather live in a crunchy, gritty, unpredictable world thats actually real than the suffocating sterility of an authoritarian surveillance state even if it feels safer to those willing to overlook the deep violation of human dignity by the forced use of mass surveillance in any context. Surveillance may marginally improve safety due to the fact that it discourages bad behavior, but never forget that it serves the powerful much more than it improves public safety. If they really wanted to make us safe, they would provide everyone healthcare, housing, education and a living wage. Crime would plummet if most people were content and had enough money to just breath and enjoy life but instead they give us Flock and Palantir.

    • BurgerPunk [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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      11 hours ago

      That would be true if power didn’t exist. This framing - one where power dynamics are completely flattened - is a major pitfall of liberal thought which always falls apart the moment real life context is introduced. Your arguement serves nothing but to support the imperialist world order.

    • LeeeroooyJeeenkiiins [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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      14 hours ago

      Weird, for a country that’s awful to live in China surrrre beats the shit out of literally any western country when it comes to the approval of the population. Are you sure you’re not just a pig stupid ignorant cracker who’s been lied to?

      • Evilsandwichman [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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        11 hours ago

        Silly Billy, it doesn’t matter if the people in a non-Western country like their government, it only matters if we like their government (or to be more specific if our government likes their government; if our government doesn’t like their government and decides to go to war with them, we will also conveniently not like their government and it will be because we came to that position independently, not because we’ll feel we’re supposed to)

    • iByteABit@lemmy.mlOP
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      16 hours ago

      I was specifically calling out the hypocrisy of the USA’s excuses to do imperialism. With that said though, it is now clear as day that while China has the ability to do what the USA is doing technologically, they are using that surveillance more sparingly and for better reasons than the USA. It’s not in China that masked thugs are scanning you with their phones hoping to lock you up in some undocumented place and then either keep you there or send you to a random country away from your family.

      I’m not a fan of mass surveillance in any case, but it’s just so hilariously ironic that the same people who fearmongered 24/7 in their media about China being this panopticon dystopia, are the same ones now exceeding this in every way imaginable, far surpassing the imagination of fiction like 1984 or Black Mirror.