#not actual neocons

[nugothrhythms]

If you live in or near the Long Beach, California area and are over the age of twenty-one, there is a free goth show at Alex's Bar tomorrow night

[qqueenofhades]

I don't know why I thought it was a good idea to argue with people about the worthlessness of voting third party. They just keep insisting that the influence is worth it, and that I was a coward for daring to suggest that we don't HAVE any other options than Democratic. I even cited how voting third party likely played a part in Al Gore losing ffs.

There's no "likely" about it, Ralph Nader DID directly cost Gore the election. He ran explicitly on the same "both parties are the same, so leftists/liberals should vote for me instead" rhetoric that we are still seeing among the Online Left, and it was successful: he got, for example, over 97,000 votes in Florida. Bush won Florida (and thus the presidency) by a miniscule 537 votes, after the fuckery of Bush v. Gore and SCOTUS ordering the recount stopped in Bush's favor. If the tiniest percentage of those Nader voters had gone for Gore, we would have had a president who was arguing in favor of tackling climate change in the year 2000. We would have been incredibly ahead of the curve. We would, in all likelihood, have a president who took the CIA's warnings of an impending al-Qaeda attack in the US seriously. We would not have had the disastrous Afghanistan and Iraq invasions and the "War on Terror," the rampant Islamophobia, "No Child Left Behind," the 2008 economic crash, and everything else that Dubya and his band of bloodthirsty neocons inflicted on us in the early aughties. Look, I try not to look back too much, but having Gore instead of Bush as president would have reshaped the entire timeline we're living in to such an unfathomably better degree that every moron thinking of voting third party For The Protest should be sat down and forced to learn this history intimately. Of course, they already saw it happen in real time in 2016, but they didn't care about that either.

The good news is: there are plenty of persuadable voters out there, and you can do work to reach them and convince them to vote for Democrats! They're just not online, because all the Online Leftists are terminally brain-poisoned against voting anyway and trying to argue with them is generally a waste of time. Instead, what you should do is take a gander at the following links:

This is the one-stop shop page for volunteering to get Democrats elected. You can do in-person and remote work, there are tons of different ways to get involved (i.e. you don't have to go directly out and knock doors if that's not something you're comfortable with), and your local Democratic party will welcome the volunteer help. There is also a page for finding your state party website:

I went there, clicked on my state, opened the webpage, and there was a "Volunteer" link right in the header, with an easy and quick form to fill out to register your interest and explain the kinds of work you would be interested in doing. You can canvass directly, you can manage data on the back end, you can phone bank, you can send texts and postcards to voters who may need an extra nudge, you can otherwise work with your state party in lots of ways, and it will be so much more productive and make you feel so much better than arguing with online idiots who will never, ever change their minds. What you can do is reach out to voters in your own community, in your own state, and have conversations with people who actually ARE willing to listen, but might need a little more educating on the facts, what's at stake, the truth about this election, and the danger that Trump poses. All of this will convert into critically important Democratic votes, and you can actually put your desire to make a difference into action. So yeah. I would 100% suggest you do it this way instead. Good luck.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

The conservative movement is cracking up

I'll be in Stratford, Ontario, appearing onstage with Vass Bednar as part of the CBC IDEAS Festival. I'm also doing an afternoon session for middle-schoolers at the Stratford Public Library.

Politics always requires coalitions. In parliamentary democracies, the coalitions are visible, when they come together to form the government. In a dictatorship, the coalitions are hidden to everyone except infighting princelings and courtiers (until a general or minister is executed, exiled or thrown in prison.)

In a two-party system, the coalitions are inside the parties – not quite as explicit as the coalition governments in a multiparty parliament, but not so opaque as the factions in a dictatorship. Sometimes, there are even explicit structures to formalize the coalition, like the Biden Administration's Unity Task Force, which parceled out key appointments among two important blocs within the party (the finance wing and the Sanders/Warren wing).

Conservative politics are also a coalition, of course. As an outsider, I confess that I am much less conversant with the internal power-struggles in the GOP and the conservative movement, though I'm trying to remedy that. Books like Nathan J Robinson's Responding to the Right present a great overview of various conservative belief-systems:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/14/nathan-robinson/#arguendo

And the Know Your Enemy podcast does an amazing job of diving deep into right-wing beliefs, especially when it comes to identifying fracture lines in the conservative establishment. A recent episode on the roots of contemporary right-wing antisemitism in the paleocon/neocon split was hugely informative and fascinating:

https://www.dissentmagazine.org/blog/know-your-enemy-in-search-of-anti-semitism-with-john-ganz/

Political parties are weak institutions, liable to capture and hospitable to corruption. General elections aren't foolproof or impervious to fraud, but they're miles more robust than parties, whose own leadership selection processes and other key decisions can be made in the shadows, according to rules that can be changed on a whim:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/30/weak-institutions/

Which means that parties are brittle, weak vessels that we rely on to contain the volatile mixture of factions who might actually hate each other, sometimes even more than they hate the other party. Remember the defenestration of GOP House Speaker Kevin McCarthy? That:

https://apnews.com/article/mccarthy-gaetz-speaker-motion-to-vacate-congress-327e294a39f8de079ef5e4abfb1fa555

Even outsiders like me know that there's a deep fracture in the Republican Party, with Trumpists on one side and the "establishment" on the other side. Reading accounts of the 2016 GOP leadership race, I get the distinct impression that Trump's win was even more shocking to party insiders than it was to the rest of us.

Which makes sense. They thought they had the party under control, knew where its levers were and how to pull them. For us, Trump's win was a terrible mystery. For GOP power-brokers, it was a different kind of a nightmare, the kind where you discover that controls to the the car you're driving in high-speed traffic aren't connected to anything and you're not really the driver.

But as Trump's backers – another coalition – fall out among each other, it's becoming easier for the rest of us to understand what happened. Take FBI informant Peter Thiel's defection from the Trump camp:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/11/12/silicon-valley-billionaire-donors-presidential-candidates/

Thiel was the judas goat who led tech's reactionary billionaires into Trump's tent, blazing a trail and raising a fortune on the way. Thiel's support for Trump was superficially surprising. After all, Thiel is gay, and Trump's running mate, Mike Pence, openly swore war on queers of all kinds. Today, Thiel has rebuffed Trump's fundraising efforts and is reportedly on Trump's shit-list.

But as a Washington Post report – drawing heavily on gossiping anonymous insiders – explains. Thiel has never let homophobia blind him to the money and power he stands to gain by backing bigots:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/11/12/silicon-valley-billionaire-donors-presidential-candidates/

Thiel bankrolled Blake Masterson's Senate race, despite Masterson's promise to roll back marriage equality – and despite the fact that Masterton attended Thiel's wedding to another man.

According to the post, the Thiel faction's abandonment of Trump wasn't driven by culture war issues. Rather, they were fed up with Trump's chaotic, undisciplined governance strategy, which scuttled many opportunities to increase the wealth and power of America's oligarchs. Thiel insiders complained that Trump's "character traits sabotaged the policy changes" and decried Trump's habit of causing "turmoil and chaos…that would interfere with his agenda" rather than "executing relentlessly."

For Trump's base, the cruelty might be the point. But for his backers, the cruelty was the tactic, and the point was money, and the power it brings. When Trump seemed like he might use cruel tactics to achieve power, his backers went along for the ride. But when Trump made it clear that he would trade opportunities for power solely to indulge his cruelty, they bailed.

That's an important fracture line in the modern American conservative coalition, but it's not the only one.

Writing in the BIG newsletter, Matt Stoller and Lee Hepner describes the emerging conservative split over antitrust and monopoly:

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/is-there-an-establishment-plan-to

Antitrust has been the centerpiece of the Biden Administration's most progressive political project. For the left wing of the Dems, blunting corporate power is seen as the necessary condition for rolling back the entire conservative program, which depends on oligarch-provided cash infusions, media campaigns, and thinktank respectability.

But elements of the right have also latched onto antitrust, for reasons of their own. Take the Catholic traditionalists who see weakening corporate power as a path to restoring a "traditional" household where a single breadwinner can support a family:

https://www.capitalisnt.com/episodes/when-capitalism-becomes-tyranny-with-sohrab-ahmari

There's another reason to support antitrust, of course – it's popular. There are large, bipartisan majorities opposed to monopoly and in favor of antitrust action:

https://d3nkl3psvxxpe9.cloudfront.net/documents/Antitrust_Policy_poll_results.pdf

Two-thirds of Americans support anti-monopoly laws. 70% of Americans say monopolies are bad for the economy. The Biden administration is doing more on antitrust than any presidency since the Carter years, but 52% of Americans haven't heard about it:

https://www.ft.com/content/c17c35a3-e030-4e3b-9f49-c6bdf7d3da7f

There's a big opportunity latent in the facts of antitrust's popularity, and the Biden antitrust agenda's obscurity. So far, the Biden administration hasn't figured out how to seize that opportunity, but some Dems are trying to grab it. Take Montana Senator John Tester, a Democrat in a Trump-voting state, whose campaign has taken aim at the meat-packing monopolies that are screwing the state's ranchers.

The right wants in on this. At a Federalist Society black-tie event last week during the National Lawyer's Convention, Biden's top antitrust enforcers got a warm welcome. Jonathan Kanter, the DOJ's top antitrust cop, was praised onstage by Todd Zywicki, whom Stoller and Hepner call "a highly influential law professors," from George Mason Univeristy, a fortress of pro-corporate law and economics. Zywicki praised the DoJ and FTC's new antitrust guidelines – which have been endlessly damned in the WSJ and other conservative outlets – as a reasonable and necessary compromise:

https://fedsoc.org/events/national-press-club-event

Even Lina Khan – the bogeywoman of the WSJ editorial page – got a warm reception at her fireside chat:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0FwdAxOSznE

And the convention's hot Saturday ticket was "a debate between two conservatives over whether social media platforms had sufficient monopoly power that the state could regulate them as common carriers":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rwoO7bZajXk

This is pretty amazing. And yet…lawmakers haven't gotten the memo. During markup for last week's appropriations bill, lawmakers inserted a flurry of anti-antitrust amendments into the must-pass legislation:

https://www.economicliberties.us/press-release/fsgg-approps-bill-must-support-enforcers-not-kneecap-them/#

These amendments were just wild. Rep Scott Fitzgerald (R-WI) introduced an amendment that would give companies carte blanche to stick you with unlimited junk fees, and allow corporations to take away their workers' rights to change jobs through noncompetes:

https://www.congress.gov/congressional-report/118th-congress/house-report/269

Another amendment would block the FTC from enforcing against "unfair methods of competition." Translation: the FTC couldn't punish companies like Amazon for using algorithms to hike prices, or for conspiring to raise insulin prices, or its predatory pricing aimed at killing small- and medium-sized grocers.

An amendment from Rep Kat Cammack (R-FL) would kill the FTC's "click to cancel" rule, which will force companies to let you cancel your subscriptions the same way you sign up for them – instead of making you wait on hold to beg a customer service rep to let you cancel.

Another one: "a provision to let auto dealers cheat customers with undisclosed added fees":

https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/BILLS-118hr4664rh/pdf/BILLS-118hr4664rh.pdf

Dems got in on the action, too. A bipartisan pair, Rep Thomas Massie (R-KY) and Rep Lou Correa (D-FL), unsuccessfully attempted to strip the Department of Transport of its powers to block mergers, which were most recently used to block the merger of Jetblue and Spirit:

https://www.congress.gov/amendment/118th-congress/house-amendment/640

And 206 Republicans voted to block the DoT from investigating airline price-gouging. As Stoller and Hepner point out, these reps serve constituents from low-population states that are especially vulnerable to this kind of extraction.

This morning, Jim Jordan hosted a Judiciary Committee meeting where he raked DOJ antitrust boss Jonathan Kanter over the coals, condemning the same merger guidelines that Zywicki praised to the Federalist Society:

https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/7jxc8dp8erhe1q3wpndre/GOP-oversight-hearing-memo-11.13.23.pdf?rlkey=d54ur91ry3mc69bta5vhgg13z&dl=0

Jordan's prep memo reveals his plan to accuse Kanter of being an incompetent who keeps failing in his expensive bids to hold corporate power to account, and being an all-powerful government goon who's got a boot on the chest of American industry. Stoller and Hepner invoke the old Yiddish joke: "The food at this restaurant is terrible, and the portions are too small!"

Stoller and Hepner close by wondering what to make of this factional split in the American right. Is it that these members of the GOP Congressional caucus just haven't gotten the memo? Or is this a peek at what corporate lobbyists home to accomplish after the 2024 elections?

They suggest that both Democrats and Republican primary contesters in that race could do well by embracing antitrust, "Establishment Republicans want you to pay more for groceries, healthcare, and travel, and are perfectly fine letting monopoly corporations make decisions about your daily life."

I don't know if Republicans will take them up on it. The party's most important donors are pathologically loss-averse and unwilling to budge on even the smallest compromise. Even a faint whiff of state action against unlimited corporate power can provoke a blitz of frenzied scare-ads. In New York state, a proposal to ban noncompetes has triggered a seven-figure ad-buy from the state's Business Council:

https://www.timesunion.com/state/article/noncompete-campaign-raises-state-lobbying-18442769.php

It's hard to overstate how unhinged these ads are. Writing for The American Prospect, Terri Gerstein describes one: "a hammer smashes first an alarm clock, then a light bulb, with shards of glass flying everywhere. An ominous voice predicts imminent doom. Then, for good measure, a second alarm clock is shattered":

https://prospect.org/labor/2023-11-10-business-groups-reflexive-anti-worker-demagogy/

Banning noncompetes is good for workers, but it's also unambiguously good for business and the economy. They "reduce new firm entry, innovation by startups, and the ability of new firms to grow." 44% of small business owners report having been blocked from starting a new company because of a noncompete; 35% have been blocked from hiring the right person for a vacancy due to a noncompete. :

https://eig.org/noncompetes-research-brief/

As Gerstein writes, it's not unusual for the business lobby to lobby against things that are good for business – and lobby hard. The Chamber of Commerce has gone Hulk-mode on simple proposals to adapt workplaces for rising temperatures, acting as though permitting "rest, shade, water, and gradual acclimatization" on the jobsite will bring business to a halt. But actual businesses who've implemented these measures describe them as an easy lift that increases productivity.

The Chamber lobbies against things its members support – like paid sick days. The Chamber complains endlessly about the "patchwork" of state sick leave rules – but scuttles any attempt to harmonize these rules nationally, even though members who've implemented them call them "no big deal":

https://cepr.net/report/no-big-deal-the-impact-of-new-york-city-s-paid-sick-days-law-on-employers/

The Chamber's fight against American businesses is another one of those fracture lines in the conservative coalition. Working with far right dark money groups, they've worked in statehouses nationwide to roll back child labor laws:

https://www.epi.org/blog/florida-legislature-proposes-dangerous-roll-back-of-child-labor-protections-at-least-16-states-have-introduced-bills-putting-children-at-risk/

They also fight tooth-and-nail against minimum wage rises, despite 80% of their members supporting them:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/04/04/leaked-documents-show-strong-business-support-for-raising-the-minimum-wage/

The spectacle of Republicans in disarray is fascinating to watch and even a little exciting, giving me hope for real progressive gains. Of course, it would help if the Democratic coalition wasn't such a mess.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/14/when-youve-lost-the-fedsoc/#anti-buster-buster

Image: Jason Auch, modified https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Antarctic_mountains,_pack_ice_and_ice_floes.jpg

CC BY 2.0

[olderthannetfic]

You know what obnoxious thing I keep seeing in fandom I wish would stop? This absolute need some people seem to have for their ship to be Representation in some way. Shipping is just imagining scenarios between two characters! You don’t need it to be a Special reason or whatever? I have a ship that is popular and people make weird vague comments about how the fandom is racist because both of them are white and there are other ship options that have poc so the white ship being big is a reflection on how racist the fandom is but the thing is…

Look I’m going to be real with y’all the fandom is for the game Detroit: Become Human and let’s just say the two major black characters are basically stereotypes written by a neocon lib boomer in a story that itself is imho…let’s call it tone deaf and corny af rather than overtly racist but yeah. Black folks on twitter regularly mock this game for good reason. It is very much a boomer white man’s idea of the civil rights movement but with robots. The robots sing actual slave hymns. The main character is essentially a light-skinned Martin Luther King Jr (dubbed Markus Luthur King by blktwt lol) and the religious allegories of him as a savior figure are very on the nose. It is bad lol. It’s not that I wouldn’t want to explore the black characters but the fandom is full of young white people singing the praises of this writing while patting themselves on the back about it which is genuinely uncomfortable to be around. Just my 2 cents but the virtue signaling and insane policing around those two characters makes it unbearable to interact with their content it is deeply sanitized and you WILL get death threats if you attempt any nuance or are critical of the (kinda racist imo) way they were written in canon.

The worst part of this is that Markus has a popular ship with a character a lot of people read or interpret as a more soft or femme gay man and you know what zoomers hate? Femme gay men. So obviously this is made to be ‘problematic’ in some way because these people can’t just admit to being femmphobic/homophobic themselves.

Sometimes it’s easier to stick with the boring white characters in the background because they aren’t being closely guarded by stupid reactionary people who are used to flashing their favorite fictional poc characters as tokens of their own goodness and virtue.

--

The pinnacle of this game is that moment when the black lady lectures her son about why they need to run the robot underground railroad to Canada.

I watched some playthroughs. Unsurprisingly, I liked the buddy cops with the good development, not the cringey activism plot with too many foils and not enough development of any single relationship and not the the Women Care About Babies plot.

But if I were going to do something fannish with Markus, I'd write him having a fucked up relationship with his mentor's son post game—the surrogate son who thought the guy was great and the estranged son who knew he wasn't but who has also done a bunch of shitty stuff himself.

It's especially hilarious when tryhards think the problem is not enough people shipping Markus with North as if the slashers are going to be into 1. het and 2. yet another unnecessary traumatic sex stuff backstory for a lady.

Even worse, half the whining isn't even about that Nines fanon nonsense being more popular than Markus: it's about how Markus/Connor would be better than Hank/Connor because old people are ew.

Sorry, children, a lot of people are here to thirst for Clancy Brown and because they'll turn up for any Caves of Steel ripoff. Other Connor ships were never in the running.

[tanadrin]

“american militarism bad, therefore any conflict america is involved in however tangentially is 1) america’s fault, and 2) america is on the wrong side” is just such a thoroughly stupid take. you do in fact have to actually engage with the facts of the world to understand it; politics is not a series of teams you reflexively root for or against!

and it’s super frustrating to me that leftist commentary on foreign policy is so fucking shallow, especially in the United States and here in Germany. it effectively cedes the whole conversation to neoliberal and neocon ghouls who can’t get hard without looking at videos of drone strikes on yemeni orphanages, but at least won’t try to convince you that the war in ukraine is somehow joe biden’s fault.

[angellic-critique]

Stop spreading neocon fascist femcel rhetoric. The wisdom of repugnance is fascist ideology popularized by terfs using faux progressive language to remove queer art from the internet.

Criticize the things you dislike without becoming a nazi.

:]

I'm spreading anti-semitsim how anon??? If you're referring to helluva/hazbin then boy howdy do I have some ROUGH news for you :/

Also vivziepop took the femcel nearly terf-like behavior as well do you SEE How she writes her female and trans characters it's not a good look.....🤔

This is why the fandom can never take or handle criticism while queer people are coming from a genuine place all they want to do is scream over how 'wrong you are since you don't get it', read a book bro you're quick to insult over insight. I've actually met some holocaust survivors and frequently visit the memorial museum within my state to pay respect. Do your research babe<3

[mariacallous]

From the homeless to a new global color line to immigrant “safe havens,” the harm will be absorbed by the unseen and the unheard.

While I’ve been at a mind-jolting workshop in Canberra about “progressive” foreign policy, my head has just been spinning the entire time from everything going on in the world. Countless political cross-currents happening at the speed of Twitter right now.

But the J.D. Vance thing stands out as singularly significant, in part because people can’t help but comment on it while appearing to be confused about what the Vance nomination actually means for everything from the defense budget to “great-power competition,” and from NATO to war in America.

This take, for example, from Murtaza Hussain—who is generally of quite sound mind—totally misreads Vance based purely on a selectively hopeful reading of Vance’s rhetoric.

I’ve made it a point to digest every Vance speech, quote, or piece of writing since 2017 (or at least as much of it as I could find). Not because I thought he’d be Veep.

Rather, initially, I was trying to understand right-wing #NeverTrumpers (he had once been one). But Vance also intrigued me because it was obvious from the beginning that he was a class subversive, cosplaying as an Appalachian working-class explainer while actually following a typical Ivy-League-to-finance-bro pipeline. He was exploiting, rather than representing, a particular rural, white working-class grievance—and that made his presentation distinct from typical defenders of ruling-class privilege.

Now, you don’t need me to tell you all the reasons why he’s a bad candidate or a danger or whatever. Plenty of people doing that right now.

What I can add is an explanation of:

How Vance’s ideas about violence are explicitly racialized (envisioning a Global Color Line),

Why a Trump-Vance presidency will never yield foreign-policy realism (because of neocon infiltration), and

How the political terrain we’re operating on has changed (Washington’s foreign policy imagination is becoming post-hegemonic in a particularly reactionary direction).

[doctorbleed]

Project 2025 vs Agenda 47: A Quick Rundown

Been seeing a lot of stuff online about Project 2025, an absolute horrific and dystopian set of policy proposals from the heritage foundation. I'm making this post to try to get information out there about it that I don't see a lot of people sharing. Especially the difference between it and "Agenda 47."

To make a long post short: Don't panic about it, but don't get complacent either.

Per Wikipedia, Project 2025 is "a collection of conservative and right-wing policy proposals from the Heritage Foundation to reshape the United States federal government." It goes really, really far with proposals for things like mass deportation, abolishing the FDA and other vital federal groups, and even toys with the idea of banning pornography. The Heritage Foundation itself is a hard right Neo-conservative organization. Several Trump aides and allies have contributed to it.

However, for his part, Trump has publicly denounced the plan and is on record saying he's not a fan of the heritage foundation, openly calling some parts of it 'terrible' (paraphrasing). Trump, for his part, is a Paleo conservative, not a Neo Conservative. The difference is insignificant to most but vital to some.

Trump's actual plans for his presidency are outlined on his website as "Agenda 47." Which has some overlap with Project 2025 but is missing many of the key points.

It's also important to add that many of the things outlined in Project 2025 are blatantly unconstitutional, and the others would require a level of legislative support Donald Trump simply isn't statistically capable of getting.

So, Project 2025 as actual policy is heavily disputed. Trump claims not to have known about it and says he doesn't want to enact it, and quite frankly, I'm 50/50 on whether he's trying to save face or he genuinely hates it because it's not his idea.

I worry the true danger and likelihood if Project 2025 is being exaggerated in order to win Democratic votes, though I also worry a significant chunk of the stuff in it would actually be enacted, as I firmly believe it would be worse for the country if any of it happened.

I'm making this post because I've seen people on Reddit mention Project 2025 as a major source of stress and depression, and most horribly at all, they've mentioned it in suicide notes and other kinds of desperate cries for help. I wanted to add my two cents in to hopefully calm some of the hysteria because I desperately don't want people getting hurt over something that should be taken with a grain of salt in the first place.

Again, TL;DR is most likely, Project 2025 is just the radical fantasy of a neocon think tank Trump himself hates. But that doesn't mean you should pay very close attention. You need to vote this election season, not just for president, but for local and federal politicians as well. You need to fight for what you believe in and advocate for your own interests.

[arizona-green-tea-absolutist]

I think the consistently baffling thing about progs and neocons is the relentless ethnic advocacy for ethnicites besides their own. That's what actually inspires the disgust: cucking their own people

[steampunkforever]

Every now and then I play a game in my head called "How would you win 9/11?" Not in the Mark Wahlberg sort of way but from the perspective of "if I were not a neocon ghoul, how would I handle this and avoid/postpone the sandbox forever war?"

Hard mode: Bin Laden has to still escape the battle of Tora Bora alive.

Extreme mode: you still have to invade Iraq at the behest of Reagan Era advisors still mad about Iran 30 years ago.

Easy mode I would just play the PR machine hard with the launch of Enduring Freedom. Like Panama, I'd hit hard and all at once with a coordinated force. The American people would need blood quick, and looking like a strong president is imperative for your first term, especially after such a hit to the American Ego.

Definitely approving the Ranger battalion's deployment to Tora Bora is the best path here, but the key is to pull out just as fast as we went in once we get our guy. Keep it feeling fresh, like Panama or Desert Storm. Afghanistan frankly has very little advantages for any army (according to most imperialist conquests of the area) so leave the government to the people that live there. The important part is that Americans feel that NYC has been avenged.

Hard mode means you don't get Bin Laden til 2011 as per current day, and therefore need to do a bit more cleanup during enduring freedom. Frankly my methodology here isn't much different than the current US anti-terror doctrine of airstrikes and deploying elite squads for night raids.

When you're fighting an asymmetrical war, using small units and remote explosions to hit key points (putting the "terrorism" in "counterterrorism") and match guerrilla fighters both costs less and beats the bad publicity of shipping corpses not old enough to drink home in flag wrapped caskets.

A low-impact campaign (read: less of a full on occupation) like this with US logistical support (and the input of people who're actually experts in Afghan geopolitics) would hopefully allow the US to avoid the protracted war with the insurgency that lasted literally 20 years and ended with the Taliban stronger than ever. Give it a couple years, call it a success, and hunt down the big guy until you get him in 2011.

Extreme mode isn't ideal (We shouldn't have been in iraq) but putting Bremer in control was really the nail in the coffin. I would demote him to janitor and find someone who understood the situation instead. Why build a highway next to an existing road? The obvious way to rebuild a country you bombed into fine gravel is to take advantage of the infrastructure you left behind.

I personally would've avoided treating Ba'athism like we could just denazify iraq, and rather pull key leadership and left the rest relatively intact so as to better rebuild the country. Allowing the military to remain standing (and in fact work as a method of reconstruction) and set up a client state that could keep Iran on its toes, sort of like how Iraq was before Desert Storm. Which still wouldn't be ideal but at least we'd significantly lower the chances of outright spawning ISIS through American cultural and administrative incompetence. There are no good imperialist wars but there are ways to not completely bungle it too.

[darkmaga-retard]

Let’s get real here. Our Neocons have convinced our political leaders that Putin will NEVER push the button. Among these pathetic world leaders cheering World War III along with Biden are UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, and most EU heads of state. The leader of the American Neocons is Secretary of State Anthony Blinken. Russia does not want nuclear war, and it keeps trying to warn the West, but our Neocons tell the politicians, don’t worry, be happy; they can conquer Russia, and Putin is bluffing.

On the opposite side is former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, who the press diminishes as just fake threats. Yet Medvedev warned last week “a nuclear response is an extremely difficult decision with irreversible consequences,” adding that “patience comes to an end.”

Only Reuters actually reported that Dmitry Medvedev was not bluffing. “Russia was not bluffing when it spoke of the possibility of using tactical nuclear weapons against Ukraine and warned Moscow’s conflict with the West could escalate into all-out war.” Even Newsweek finally reported with the headline:

Putin Ally Issues New Nuclear Warning: ‘Irreversible Consequences’

Even Britain’s Independent reported that “The former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev has warned that the Kremlin could reduce Kyiv to a “giant melted spot” if Ukraine’s allies give the green light for them to fire long-range missiles deep into Russia.” Ironically, that may be the only way to save the world. Ukrainin’s hatred of Russians is personal and can never be eradicated. This is like the Hatfield vs McCoys. It is not much different from in the Middle East with Sunni vs Shite. We are on the WRONG SIDE here and Ukraine is irresponsible.

[jyndor]

begging people to stop spreading the tweets and posts of fascist grifters. palestinian liberation is not antisemitic. but no movement is free from people in it who may have bad politics or be bigoted. do not platform fascist grifters who really do actually just hate jews - I'm talking about jackson hinkle, I'm talking about censored man or whatever that guy is called, etc. do not engage with them except to call them the grifters and fascists they are.

frankly listen to and platform PALESTINIANS. first off it's the right thing to do because this is their genocide we are seeing but also because it's safer and you're less likely to platform fascists.

in the west this movement is a largely leftist movement, which differs from how it is seen as like a universally agreed upon issue in the arab world for instance. we do not need western racist antisemitic islamophobic bigots making money off of palestinian liberation. we do not need their input - if they actually cared they'd be pro-refugee, they'd be anti-racist, they'd be silent and reflective. change their politics.

yes now most conservatives including fascists are pro-israel bc it's a western-aligned fascist white supremacist nationalistic state that murders brown people who are largely muslim. but do not forget that there are MANY fascists who aren't neocons - the return of paleoconservatism is nothing we need to be associated with.

paleocons are just straight up vile antisemites and nazis. we do not need their ideological descendants. remember that red brown alliances are not only immoral and antithetical to everything we should care about but have never historically worked out for leftists either.

[daenystheedreamer]

Rhaenyra is a bisexual socialist and Alicent is upholding problematic medieval ideals

honestly..... modern au hotd. rhaenyra is a bisexual libertarian and alicent is a closeted neocon wife of a senator. daemon is also a bisexual libertarian but mostly interested in age of consent laws. actually scratch that rhaenyra is a monarcho-libertarian.

[qqueenofhades]

Was trump really able to do that much? One of the criticisms I keep seeing is that Trump actually did things (even if people disagreed with said things) while apparently Biden's hands are tied for every issue? And I kinda feel like that's intentionally misleading? iirc Trump issued a ton of executive orders, and the bills he pushed through happened because he had majorities. Why are people expecting Biden to be able to do the same when he doesn't have that

The thing is! Trump didn't actually do that much!

Yes, he issued some awful executive orders (most of which were repealed by Biden on Day 1) and got the compliant Republican Congress to approve giant tax breaks for the rich and other traditional GOP economic thievery, but aside from that, his legislative successes were very limited. They didn't even manage to repeal the Affordable Care Act, which they really wanted to do.

By FAR Trump's biggest impact, and the one that will continue to screw us for decades in the future, is that he got to fill three Supreme Court seats with hard-right neocons, helped by Mitch McConnell's brazen cheating. Which a lot of Democrats were warning about before the election, and which Hillary Clinton herself was ALSO warning about: that SCOTUS was in a vulnerable position with many elderly or retiring justices, and the next president would reshape it for the next generation. But too many Online Leftists went Wah Wah BernieorBust, too many ordinary Americans bought into bog-standard misogyny and decades of Republican smears against HRC, and here we are.

Likewise: anyone who bitches about "Biden Not Doing Anything" has not read a single actual news source, or made any effort to educate themselves on what he has actually accomplished, in an extremely adverse legislative climate and with Manchin and Sinema reliably on hand to torpedo his agenda in the Senate. Biden has actual PAGES of accomplishments made through the legislative process, which are harder to undo than just repealing executive orders. I'm not a fan of him, say, approving the Willow project and I hope the administration hears about it, but that doesn't take away from the fact that yet again, a Democratic president was called on to fix the absolute stinking shitshow left by the Republican incumbent, and not only did that, but made some huge generational (and long-overdue) systemic reforms, even in a difficult political climate, because he worked through the system and made sure they stuck. What a thought.

[tuurverheydepoetryandprose]

There's something so NIMBY-ish and pathetic about the ostensibly liberal 'gender critical' set. Of all the things you could do with your finite existence, you've chosen to harass a group of people who just want to live as themselves.

And you don't even have the guts to openly state you're on the side of reactionaries who want to restrict bodily autonomy and bring gender and sexuality back to the fifties. Instead, you have to play this pseudo-feminist game of claiming to protect women and girls, but whenever actual policy is brought up...

the mask slips every single time: restricting bodily autonomy, eugenicist language and strategies, catering to conversion therapy ghouls... You just can't help it. Full on fascists and neocons are openly thanking you for furthering their anti-feminist, anti-liberal agenda and still you're standing there, head held high, self-proclaimed saviour of women.

Some of these folk are fine with being the gate-way to full on fascism, but some of them are still trapped in the belief they are liberal and I wish they would just drop it.

No one who is this willing to demonise a group of people for their identity will stop at that. Fix your heart or openly join the fascist scum you've been propping up. This charade has gone on for long enough.

[dosesofcommonsense]

When did Imperialism get linked with Republicans? Imperialism is a #DeepState and #Globalist movement. It’s not a Neo-Con or Neo-Dem thing, though I’ll admit NeoCon sounds a lot better than NeoDem.

Lindsey Graham needs to meet a formidable opponent. Someone who can actually debate him on issues and his swinging opinions.