Supah_Schmendrick
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User ID: 618
Supah_Schmendrick
4mo ago
Presented without comment from the opening of Antony Beevor's "The Battle for Spain, 1936-1939":
'A civil war is not a war but a sickness,' wrote Antoine de Saint-Exupery. 'The enemy is within. One fights almost against oneself.' Yet Spain's tragedy in 1936 was even greater. It had become enmeshed in the international civil war, which started in earnest with the Bolshevik Revolution.
The horrors in Russia had undermined the democratic centre throughout continental Europe. This was because the process of polarization between 'reds' and 'whites' allowed both political extremes to increase their own power by manipulating fearful, if not apocalyptic, images of their enemies. Their Manichean propaganda fed off each other. Both Stalin and Goebbels later exploited, with diabolical ingenuity, that potent combination of fear and hatred. The process stripped their 'traitor' opponents of their humanity as well as their citizenship. This is why it is wrong to describe the Spanish Civil War as 'fratricidal.' The divisiveness of the new ideologies could turn brothers into faceless strangers and trade unionists or shopowners into class enemies. Normal human instincts were overridden. In the tense spring of 1936, on his way to Madrid University, Juian Marias, a disciple of the philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset, never forgot the hatred in the expression of a tram-driver at a stop as he watched a beautiful and well-dressed young woman step down onto the pavement. 'We've really had it,' Marias said to himself. 'When Marx has more effect than hormones, there is nothing to be done.'
Supah_Schmendrick
4mo ago
If Israel's military is so great why have they failed to take an area the size of a suburb in almost two years despite massive brutality and having to beg for boundless supplies of weapons?
Because they aren't actually being all that brutal. Depopulating and securing an area is quick and easy if you're willing to adopt the ROE of Ghengis Khan or the Greco/Turkish war.
Israel's main military asset is propaganda
This seems wildly inaccurate.
giving low IQ west bank settlers the capacity to do things that are seen and heard globally effectively turned that on its head.
I think you've got that backwards.
Supah_Schmendrick
4mo ago
No, they would have been ordinary arab citizens of Jordan, Egypt, Syria, and/or Lebanon.
Supah_Schmendrick
4mo ago
(Also: would you have accepted the same argument regarding the Nazis and their victims?)
President Truman did...
Supah_Schmendrick
4mo ago
Supah_Schmendrick
4mo ago
This can be spun into "radical far right killer 4chan tried to pin the blame on trans", and to an extent it will be. This is such a disaster.
I would bet $50 that ~no-one will remember this aspect after three weeks.
Supah_Schmendrick
4mo ago
Supah_Schmendrick
4mo ago
the DNA lounge in San Francisco has a "neck shot" special tonight
That is in exceptionally poor taste.
Historically, that kind of thing would have likely resulted in some form of mob event - tarring and feathering the proprietor, smashing of the saloon, etc. But we live in more temperate, and less small-d "democratic" times...
Supah_Schmendrick
4mo ago
In that case the wisdom and sanity of Hamas's senior leadership - who surely knew all this and more - is deeply in question.
Supah_Schmendrick
4mo ago
Kirk wasn't just an influencer. He was a major GOTV activist (he basically ran the GOTV effort for Trump 2024), pundit, organizer, and behind-the-scenes staffer/connection-maker.
Supah_Schmendrick
4mo ago
anyone who would be addicted already is, and the only effect of keeping the drugs illegal is that criminals are in charge of selling and producing them instead of capitalists/entrepreneurs who are above the law, and that there will be less stuff that is spiked/laced because of regulations.
The cartels have a significant leg up on would-be legal operators; the cartels don't have to pay capital costs to create new production infrastructure. The cartels already have extant and significant distribution networks that new operations have to create from scratch. The cartels don't have to comply with the significant regulatory and tax burdens that legal operations have to comply with. This isn't to say that legal operations can't ever compete, just that it's not the lol capitalismzorz curbstomp that the legalization argument presumes.
Also, cartels already deal in legal products (just with a side of violence). Diesel fuel and avocados, are two significant examples. In fact, cartels need legitimate businesses in order to launder their drug proceeds and provide cover for the movement of product and purchase of materials for drug production/cultivation/processing.
Supah_Schmendrick
4mo ago
Your gloss on human trafficking vs. illegal immigration misses the mark completely due to this baffling refusal to believe that pro-immigration advocates care about immigrants' welfare as human beings, as an end unto itself.
Those may be their feelings, but closer examination of the actual facts of migration policy reveal this to be, at best, Mrs. Jellyby-ism. So much undocumented immigration is facilitated by truly horrific cartels/people-smugglers that the U.S. government has long balked from designating the cartels as what they are - para-state criminal enterprises fully deserving of the foreign terrorist organization label just like the Haqqani network, Hezbollah, etc. - out of fear that it would open many illegal immigrants to criminal liability for materially-assisting an FTO.
Supah_Schmendrick
4mo ago
"You lost fair and square" is a bad objection to Democratic congressmen pursuing their own mandates. Politics is always going on all the time, power is always being renegotiated, and no side is entitled to their enemies laying down arms.
In the words of Nancy Pelosi, "elections have consequences."
Supah_Schmendrick
4mo ago
No such thing as current Democratic party platform is conceivable in Asian countries
No, but nor is there some sort of inherent immunity from western-style progressivism in epicanthic folds; sometimes Asian progressivism is more extreme than the western version.
Supah_Schmendrick
4mo ago
Why couldn't they make all those workers legal?
It appears Hyundai was doing what previous practice had established to be "legal-ish" enough for federal enforcement purposes...only then the new administration started enforcing the letter of the law, not the cozy de-facto waiver that had been in place previously.
Supah_Schmendrick
4mo ago
Unfortunately in most of my IRL friend group, casual wishing of death on Trump and veneration (literally, in the form of faux-votive candles) of Luigi Mangione is the norm. I've known and cared for a good number of these people for over 20 years, but SoCal shitlibbery won out.
Supah_Schmendrick
4mo ago
Kinda, but that itself was viewed as evidence of misogyny. Contemporaneous examples: The Guardian, CNN, Time.
Supah_Schmendrick
4mo ago
Civil War was obviously very bad, but things recovered and the nation got stronger over the next 50 years.
I mean, kinda? The south went from one of the richest regions in the world with major influence over the federal government to basically being an internal colony which was systematically shut out of power until the Wilson administration.
You can argue that this was a good thing, or necessary in order to expunge slavery, but there's no denying that it happened.
Supah_Schmendrick
4mo ago
Not just about voting procedure - that argument was itself a proxy for a large number of other policy fights over, e.g. getting rid of the nobility's exemption from most taxes, reform of the Gabelle and internal trade barriers, abolishment of mandatory tithes to the church/forced labor on church lands, conspiracizing about food hoarding, proto-socialistic agitators in Paris, etc.
Supah_Schmendrick
4mo ago
If France had been able to overcome people worrying about formal procedures in 1785 they could very well have avoided the revolution.
This...does not accord with really anything I've read on the early French Revolution, and I would be very interested to hear what you mean by this.
Supah_Schmendrick
4mo ago
JFK (a different type of charming scoundrel, still deified by Democrats today)
Which is odd, considering that JFK's main political policies were cutting taxes on the rich, beefing up military spending based on lies, and bungling regime-change adventurism.
Contrastingly, JFK's main rival, Richard Nixon, re-instituted wage and price controls and founded the EPA.
Supah_Schmendrick
4mo ago
To the left, he was like an out-of-touch manager who couldn't empathize with the working class at all.
The democrats also, in one of the most brazen acts of political gaslighting I think I've ever seen, somehow managed to turn Romney's own efforts at sex-based affirmative action into evidence of his sexism.
Supah_Schmendrick
4mo ago
Previous administrations had the decency to do corruption under a mantle of plausible deniability.
Errrrrr..... this stuff dates back to at least the Clinton administration, e.g. the Lincoln bedroom affairs, the Chinese campaign funds scandal, and the Marc Rich pardon, inter alia, and likely before - I'm just not as knowledgeable about the Bush I, Reagan, etc. presidencies.
Supah_Schmendrick
4mo ago
One creator (read: one single internet girl) has certified gross earnings in 2024 of $82 million. This puts her at the same level as the highest paid pro athletes, the managers of the largest hedge funds, banks, and private equity firms. The only people out earning her are founder-shareholders of giant public behemoths (Zuckerburg etc.) and this is through wealth appreciation rather than "straight cash homie!" income.
Weak numbers, bro! Ladies have been forcing bros to light money on fire for coochie for centuries.
...Were largely civilians, waving machetes and operating under no military discipline whatsoever. Those Tutsi militias were veterans of several other brush wars in Tanzania and Uganda, and were led by a quite effective and battle-hardened leader (Kagame)
It does if your objective is, as many allege, to simply depopulate an area through violence. The Rwandan genocide took a little over 3 months, during which mobs of civilians armed with blades and a few small arms killed a million people. It defies credulity that the IDF, armed with modern weapons, somehow is so incompetent at genocide as to only kill less than 10% as many over a period of time six times longer, especially when all the would-be victims are penned up in a tiny area like Gaza.
No, if the Israelis were actually the Nazis that so many here portray them as being, they could have just treated Gaza like the Warsaw ghetto and it would have been over inside a month.
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