lmao

I gave you the specific, identifying terms for both things, you can easily look into them with a Google search. If you spend 5 minutes looking for each and come back and say you could not identify them, I will go fetch them for you.

So what was Hunter doing in 2014?

The Biden admin + Canadian targetinh of Samidoun and the domestic forces have been increased throughout the admin via direct funding of cops and supplying with military equipment along with fighting to keep and expand Trump-era national guard deployments using the insurrection act.

The Biden admin is already going after Palestinian solidarity orgs and ramping up powers to use the military domestically.

Biden issued a blanket pardon starting in 2014. What was Hunter Biden doing in 2014 and how does this reflect on the idea of him simply passively getting “caught up” in something?

Biden is sharpening the knife that will be used against every other family while saving his crackhead failson.

Whomst among us hasn’t been given cushy jobs we aren’t qualified for in corrupt Ukrainian companies by our dad and then done a bunch of blow with prostitutes and tax fraud and illegally owned guns!? Clearly this is a witch hunt.

Sounds like some classic whataboutism. What time is it in Moscow, comrade!?

he was pretty good

he did some genocide but that is normal

You should do some self-criticism ASAP before you get correctly called a racist fascist.

If you think your political role is to uncritically support whoever is chosen for you by the Democratic party, you are simply throwing away your political power. Worse, you are indicating that their strategy of shaming you into compliance works and they never have to provide you with any political program that aligns with your positions.

Instead of doing what the party tells you, think for yourself and work to build actual power for the people around you, not the capitalists picking your pocket.

Given that Russia could always go scorched earth on Ukraine with heavy bombing campaigns like NATO countries do on their targets, they could have made Ukraine “fall” within days if destruction was their aim. We should all be thankful that their approach has been less brutal and barbaric than those of the EU, UK, and US.

We are now seeing small-scale examples of what was always on the table re: the Ukrainian power grid. It could have been gone literally overnight at any point in the last 2+ years.

It has been clear for some time that the RF is resigned to a slow meat grinder for Ukrainian troops, as any real negotiations were taken off the table by Ukraine’s real masters in the US and Europe.

Obama’s EOs were a slow walk bureaucratic attempt, basically how you try to avoid actually doing something by making it easy to stymy. Same as Biden’s broken promise on cancelling student debt. One stymied by the obvious avenues to do so, they can just sit back and let partisans repeat the excuses. They did not make real attempts to force the issue.

Here’s a liberal-friendly summary that largely just repeats the words of federal and party bureaucrats: https://web.archive.org/web/20240902004637/https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/08/01/why-obama-has-failed-to-close-guantanamo

Obama could have used executive action to shut it down anyways, diverting resources and personnel to pack up and get out.

He just accepted the excuse so he could keep doing what he wanted to: funneling money from the working class to finance.

Yes, I know what I said. I don’t conflate a mention of individual liberty tp be the same as discussing individualism itself.

So do you have any point to make? Any response to the bulk of what I said?

I didn’t speak about individualism at all, actually.

It’s not clear to me what your point is. Did you read my longer response to you? Do you have anything to say about it?

I actually have no given a definition of liberalism outside of the core I did originally. I have only listed a few self-claimed qualities and their inconsistency.

I also gave a rationale for why I went in this direction. Notice the complete lack of engagement with it.

I did not give an extensive definition because the self-description of liberalism, by liberals, is at odds with the historical actions of liberalism. It could be distracting and take a while to get the point across.

For example, liberalism self-defined with maximizing individual liberty while it also advocated for the “freedom” of corporations to work you as many hours as it could while shitting down your unionizing effort with violence. Liberalism also self-defined as favoring democracy and everyone having a say, but implemented this in a racist and sexist way that placed capital in charge while also colonizing others and depriving them of self-determination.

The common thread is really just that it is the dominant ideology of capitalism, its function is to extoll the virtues of capitalism and tying it to an illusion of liberation and self-determination while actually working against both of those things, as under capitalism, capital works against both struggles. The person that liberals have you read as foundational to liberalism, John Locke, worked to support an American settler colony and its slavery rules and explicitly supported child labor. Then, as today, there is a difference between how political figures present themselves and what their advocacy actually entails.

I’m very critical of American imperialism but I fail to see how the US is using Ukraine to hurt Russia.

The US and its proxies have constantly escalated using Ukraine as a proxy for over a decade and since the war started they have continued this pattern. There is no path to victory for Ukraine. If the RF wanted to end it they could run mass bombing campaigns like NATO members do. They are making the opposite calculation: that the status quo of a military meat grinder for Ukraine is better for the RF. Given that one of their goals is a demilitarized Ukraine, there is some logic to this idea.

It has been painfully obvious that Ukraine cannot win from the beginning. Nobody trying to escalate, provide Wunderwaffe, etc really things Ukraine will win, that is just not what any serious person thinks. This is also why there is such an intense and absurd propaganda campaign to say that Russia is losing more people and equipment, with the source nearly always being Azov Batallion, the UA MoD, or a combination of the two. They need to sell the public on the idea that Ukraine just needs your support and dang it they mogjt pull this thing off!

So then, if UA can’t win and the heads of state know they can’t win, what is their logic? What is the angle on who benefits? Well, the singular common thread of brinksmanship with Ukraine as proxy has always been to try anf peel Europe away from economic integration with Russia and to instead keep it in the EU bubble, with more American integration. And, lo and behold, look at how Europe has destroyed its own industry and made itself even more dependent on the US. This has the added effect of isolating Russia from Europe. While Europe still buys their fossil fuels from Russia, trade overall is way down.

In addition, there is the simple calculus that it requires manpower and productive capacity to wage war, capacity that could be directed elsewhere. Iran would likely have more and better air defense systems if Russia weren’t focused on Ukraine.

At no point does the suffering of the Ukrainian people enter the equation. There are no anti-war voices on the mainstream media about this aside from self-serving right wing “this is not our problem” rhetoric.

The fault always lies with the invader, Russia did this to itself. If I see someone getting stabbed and throw him a knife, implying I’m using him to hurt the other person attacking him is silly. Russia can leave anytime.

There are few countries thst tolerate a civil war on their border targeting the ethnicity of your own country, let alone an encroachment of the primary aggressor military force around the world couping them, let alone that neighbor remilitarizing despite agreements and not honoring their agreements. This is geopolitics, not a bar fight. War does not occur in a vacuum, it has a material basis. One does not need to justify war in order to understand that this did not occur in a vacuum and there is blame to go around.

I do agree tankie is thrown around far too much, I’ve been called one myself just for talking shit of the military, even though I never mentioned an other country or a political idealogie.

Yeah it’s really just a way for national chauvinist liberals to quiet their own cognitive dissonance. I also think it’s extra funny when a Trotskyist gets called tankie, since they invented the epithet.

The spread of the word as well as the constant villainization of China seems like prep for red scare 2.0, so we can have the population support bombing villages full of civilians (again).

Yes the US is trying to decouple on its own terms. Its constant attempts to provoke the PRC with Taiwan is also similar to what they did to Ukraine. To have the consent of their population to sacrifice their own well-being and justify whatever military action might occur, they will needs to be more racist and xenophobic towards China. It may not be Taiwan. It might be Korea or Myanmar. But constant escalation and provocation is the US game. Maximalist, relentless foreign policy pushing towards war and death.

The Russian Federation did leave Ukraine be. It was only after Western meddling, a coup, a civil war, not implementing agreements, toying with NATO membership, and resuming a civilian shelling campaign that the RF invaded.

The imperial core Western powers poked and prodded and used Ukraine as a pawn until the RF hit its limit.

Given that you likely live in one of the countries doing the relentless escalation, why not work against them doing so?