If someone claims something happened on the fediverse without providing a link, they're lying.
Evidence or GTFO.
Roll executive power back at least to how it was pre-9/11, overturn Citizen's United, and make drastic cuts to the military in order to invest in communities and improve people's material conditions.
Technically correct. It's a valid comparison to Catholicism and Catholicism is, indeed, a bad faith.
This shouldn’t be misconstrued as women being less than a man it’s just that their roles are different.
Oh, I get it, they're separate but equal!
What a load of horseshit.
Catholic and Orthodox have way less loonies comparatively than either evangelicals or the fedora wearing atheist crowd which is basically another form of protestantism.
I've never been religious by my little sister was. She loved helping out at Mass every Sunday, and volunteered to be an alter server. She was one of the most faithful and good-hearted Christians I've ever met. As long as you didn't bring up abortion, anyway.
Then one day the priest said she wasn't allowed to anymore, because she was a girl. He said that only boys should be allowed up in the front of church. His justification was that being an alter server was practice for being a priest, and only men were allowed to be priests.
Do you happen to know what the Catholic Church's justification for only allowing male priests is, by the way? Well you see, God is male, obviously, and the Church is symbolically married to God, so that means that the Church must be symbolically female, and priests are symbolically married to the Church (the Church is poly?) meaning, of course, that priests have to be male.
If you get a Protestant or a fedora atheist, you're basically rolling the dice, but if you get a Catholic, you know for a fact that they're at minimum fine with being part of a deeply sexist, homophobic, and authoritarian institution.
Fucking Amazon would be a better moral authority than the Catholic Church because at least Amazon doesn't explicitly descriminate based on sex. Always the last to be dragged into the future, kicking and screaming the whole time, since Galileo if not before.
This is why I keep telling people that Trump is not an anomaly and is not new. I think a lot of people on here must be too young to remember the Bush era.
The line from the Star Wars prequels of, "So this is how liberty dies: with thunderous applause" captures how it felt and was clearly about Bush's policies. If Trump is worse than Bush, it's only because he's standing on the shoulders of fascist giants. And tbh I still regard Bush as the more dangerous of the two because he was able to command such overwhelming support, there was zero opposition in government anywhere, at all. He could ride his bike with no handlebars.
The war powers act gives the president the authority to invade any country on earth, he only needs congressional approval for operations lasting longer than 30 days. Congress also gave the president blanket authorization to invade any country he thinks might be harboring terrorists, following 9/11, with this absurd, fascist decision to grant the executive dictatatorial powers passing the Senate 98-0 and the House 420-1 (and with nearly 90% of Americans supporting Bush at this time). Trump's actions in Venezuela therefore, while a brazen violation of international law, are fully within US law. It's virtually impossible for a president to actually violate US law through military actions abroad.
Any attempts to rein in these ridiculous laws should be fully supported and are badly needed. Even if Trump ignores them, it can then be used to discredit him and prove that he is acting against the will of the people.
Having more guns.
Might want to ask the indigenous people how effective pieces of paper are at holding back the US military.
In the US you get two options and both are completely uninterested in "firming up the laws" and reining in the power of the executive. Trump can do basically whatever he wants, because after 9/11, Democrats fully supported measures like the Patriot Act that vastly expanded executive power, and when Obama came in after Bush he did nothing to hold him accountable for war crimes and torture, while continuing to use the same tools for largely the same purposes. No president wants to prosecute a former president for illegal activity because that would open the door for being prosecuted for their own illegal activities, which they all perform.
It doesn't really matter if the average American cares about guns or about something else. We've never been given an opportunity to vote on the power of the executive just like we've never been given an opportunity to vote on Venezuela or Palestine or Iraq or Afghanistan or Yemen. The powers that be decide these things, all the voters do is choose which face they want doing it, which aesthetics and justifications will be used for decisions that have already been made.
In my experience, and maybe some churches are different, you're just supposed to pretend to take it seriously, if you actually take it seriously you'll find yourself very unwelcome.
If I went around saying, "I'm a Christian, so obviously that means I oppose the Iraq War," or, "Christian teachings clearly call for opposing the war and anyone supporting it is living in sin," I would get a lot of strange looks. Swap out the war for abortion or gay marriage and it would be perfectly normal. Between those subjects, Jesus was constantly talking about nonviolence and said nothing at all about abortion or homosexuality.
If you base you beliefs around a good faith attempt to understand Jesus' teachings, you won't be accepted in those circles. Heck, even if I based my beliefs around the Catholic Church's teachings, for example, going around insisting that being "pro-life" requires you to oppose the death penalty, I would be out of place in most Catholic circles, considered annoying at best.
I still don't really understand what I would've had to have done to fit in there. Somehow, a lot of people seem to see morality as something that is almost exclusively related to sex, and the idea of applying morality to things like war or executions is a completely foreign concept. I'm not sure how you're supposed to arrive at that point but it clearly wasn't from a good faith reading of the gospels.
I think you have to have the same emotional impulses somehow, like, to really fit in you need to have a drive to tear down people with more exciting sex lives than your own, and that was something I had no interest in. So it was either keep calling myself a Christian and try to reclaim that label, which would just confuse everyone, Christian and non-Christian alike, or find a better label. So, now I just tell people I'm a communist.
My dumb ass thought people actually believed Jesus' teachings.
9/11 happened and 10 year old me was running around going, "Well, now obviously is the perfect time to turn the other cheek, be good to those who hurt us, and forgive not just seven times, but seven times seven times."
Strangely, all the people who had taught me those things didn't hear the words I spoke but apparently heard something along the lines of, "Allahu akbar, America deserved 9/11, death to America, Bin Laden did nothing wrong, and I'm happy about dead firefighters." They extremely did not like me trying to apply what they had taught me in that context.
I think I must be autistic or something because it seems like everybody else picked up on some sort of subtle understanding that none of that stuff was meant to be taken seriously or applied to real life, and I'm just over here like an absolute dupe who didn't pick up on the joke.
Colbert at Bush's correspondence dinner:
The greatest thing about about this man is that he's steady, you know where he stands. He believes the same thing on Wednesday that he did on Monday... no matter what happened on Tuesday.
The BRICS aren’t outside US sphere of influence.
But they aren't wholly within it either.
India is squarely within it.
Is that so? Then why didn't they cooperate with the US oil embargo on Russia?
Russia had been friendly under Bush and early Obama.
Yet more reason why US influence was greater during that period than it is now.
And China’s our number one trading partner -
It's actually #3 after Canada and Mexico.
hardly an enemy, except in the fevered imagination of anti-China hawks.
Absent a serious geopolitical rival - the USSR
What made the USSR a more serious rival than the PRC? The USSR was generally committed to deescalation and detant.
China's trade policy serves several purposes:
- Providing Chinese people with access to foreign goods, to avoid repeating the dissatisfaction that contributed to the USSR's collapse
- Expanding China's geopolitical influence, and building up a competing market such that countries have another choice besides the West
- Making Western aggression costly through economic dependency.
In other words, they are building soft power, which is proving highly effective at swaying countries away from the US.
I can't understand why you simply don't recognize the utility of soft power. And yet you talk about corporations being "the seat of real material authority," yes, that's correct, but how do they wield and exercise that authority? Is it through hard power? Does Amazon have aircraft carriers and a standing army? No, obviously, if hard power was all that mattered, then it would make no sense to say that corporations are more powerful than the government. The government could, if it wanted to, seize every Amazon warehouse and throw Bezos in prison, while Bezos does not have that capability over the government. Even through your own hard power lens, your perspective makes no sense.
Countries in the BRI:
Countries in BRICS (red/orange):
I'm not sure that iron fist strategy is working out so well. The US is clearly in a state of decline and the soft power it's able to wield today is considerably less than it held in the past, because the right is high on their own supply and doesn't understand that you need soft power in order to rule the world.
While it's true that the US was pretty brazen in invading Korea and Vietnam, it was also able to control the narrative better and did things either covertly or had some sort of pretense for it, and the postwar order also involved significant economic investment in places like Europe, Taiwan, South Korea, and Japan, all of which helped generate soft power.
The world has never been more beholden to the US than it is today.
I disagree. It was more beholden to the US during the 90's and 00's when it was the only real superpower. But it abused that status and that's what allowed China to present itself as a more stable and reliable trading partner and thereby begin to challenge US hegemony. I don't see how anyone can look at the world today and think that the US is more dominant than it was after the fall of the USSR or think that it won't continue to lose ground to China in the foreseeable future.
For every Venezuela, there's a Colombia.
It's a slow, ongoing process. The more the US tries to use force to make countries fall in line, the more people look to alternatives. Countries that used to be unaligned are looking at China and countries that used to be aligned with the US are looking at playing the field.
Stop strawmanning me then.
Go learn what the word "strawman" means before you call anybody's arguments stupid lmao.
The fact that nobody mentioned Israel is the point. I stg. It isn't a "strawman" to point out possible unintended consequences of supporting a policy.
"I think I should jump off a tall building."
"Are you crazy? You'll die!"
"Wow, what a strawman. Nobody even said anything about dying. I don't support falling to my death, only the jumping."
It's not a "strawman." I understand that most people on here don't want the weapons going to Israel, which is why I made the point. But the reality is that, once a weapon is built, it's in the hands of politicians to give to whoever they like. If those politicians are pro-Israel, then even if you want the weapons for the purpose of defense, there's a significant likelihood they'll be used to perform genocide.
When it breaks. I don't remember how long I've had this one but it was made in 2019.