OBJECTION!

Because suggesting your enemy do things is meaningless.

People are freaking out that the president can legally kill people now but that was essentially already the case, de facto. Obama did it via drone strikes, for example, Anwar al-Awlaki, who was involved with the Taliban but never given due process, and later his 16 year old son Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, who was never even accused of terrorism - both American citizens. Of course, Bush also set up a completely illegal system of detention without trial at Guantanamo Bay, which also included American citizens and which continued long after his term. There was also of course the illegal mass surveillance program that began under Bush and continued through Obama, Trump, and Biden, with the only legal action being against the person who exposed the crime.

In all of those cases, the Justice department simply chose not to investigate or press charges, as is within their power to do. If the president straight up shot someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue, it would be up to the Justice department to decide whether or not to prosecute, and if they say no, that’s that (though it would also be possible for congress to act via the impeachment process, which would require a majority of the house and 2/3 of the senate to be on board).

This ruling doesn’t give the president a blank check, but rather, it gives the court an easy legal argument to give the president a pass on any case they hear. The court can still rule that something wasn’t an official act. Practically speaking, before they still could have still found the president innocent for whatever bullshit reason they could come up with, but they’re now saying that they don’t even have to pretend to have a reason.

Of course, if the president wanted to start killing Supreme Court justices or other political opponents, a piece of paper was never going to be the thing that stopped that. Whether the president can order the military to gun down congress is just a question of whether the military decides to listen to them and whether anyone manages to stop them. It was always the case that if you can kill anyone who could find you guilty, you can do whatever you want. On the other side of that, even if the ruling did authorize the president to kill all of his political opponents on some technicality, he would still face the same obstacles if he tried to do it.

What the law says only matters insofar as it can be enforced, and ultimately laws represent threats made by the powerful towards the rest of us, and among the powerful the way of settling disputes is power, with legal power being but one of many forms that can take.

I didn’t say the relations were good, but they were certainly a lot better 5 years ago.

I’m glad that the US has suddenly started caring about labor rights and the well-being of Muslims, and I’m sure that it’s just pure coincidence that it happens to be aligned with criticizing and fear-mongering it’s largest competitor.

There are plenty of poor countries with worse conditions than China. Major multinational corporations set up shell corporations to run their sweatshops and if they get exposed they say, “We had no idea,” maybe pay a tiny fine, then set up another company to do the exact same thing. Many of these countries are in the US’s sphere of influence, and many have to sign away control of their own domestic policies as a condition for entry into the global marketplace, while their resources, stolen by force by colonizers, remain in foreign hands.

Why isn’t the US concerned about their labor conditions? I’ll tell you why: because one of those cases means giving more money to rich corporations in the form of defense contracts, and the other means restricting the ability of rich corporations to exploit the poor. All the bombs the US is building will do nothing to improve the conditions of anyone living in China, while there are plenty of people who the US could be lifting out of poverty if it cared to.

The sudden decline in relations was not because the whole US just woke up one day and decided to start caring about the conditions of laborers in China, which used to be much worse than today. Don’t feed me that nonsense.

Not a dude, and the US got along much better with China, until around 2019 when the wars in the Middle East were winding down and the US needed a new justification for defense contracts, and when it needed to shift blame for botching COVID. That’s when all of a sudden everyone started hating China for no other reason than the news said to.

The US chose to saber-rattle with China before the war in Ukraine, which destroyed any possibility of this that might have existed. China was never going to agree to diplomatically isolating Russia when it would so obviously be next.

Fair, and people in swing states get inundated with ads as it is. Mostly I’d say it’s more useful for mobilization than persuasion, like if you get a text reminding you when voting day is maybe someone makes it when they wouldn’t have otherwise.

Ideally, volunteers could mean quality over quantity, less automated spam asking for money and instead actual humans responding to concerns and answering questions. Even more ideally, that could be paired with voters’ concerns being elevated and the party actually responding to them. The goal is to improve the quality of the campaign’s voter outreach, in whatever form that outreach takes.

I’m not a fan of Biden myself but I still think it’s worth discussing general electoral strategies.

The vast majority of Americans both already know how they feel about Trump and Biden and live in a solidly red or blue state. If you do want to focus on Biden, volunteer with phone banking or canvassing so that your efforts are directed to where they’ll actually matter and be organized in line with their messaging. Personally, I’d say you’re better off focusing on local races where you have more of an opportunity to come at it from a different angle and cut through people’s fortified positions. And as another user said, focus on mobilization, it’s easier to get someone who already agrees with you to register and make a plan than to convince someone to change their whole worldview.

There are also strategies outside of electoralism, such as protests and counter-protests. You can join an organization and form tactics and strategies to subvert the right’s actions, and engage with direct action to build trust and community that could be important in the future. Form strategies while being realistic about your goals and capabilities and coordinate with others.

I guess most the 400.000 - 800.000 Euromaidan protestors were CIA agents in Russias view then?

No, obviously, in the same way it would be ridiculous to claim that every single person who supports separatism is a secret agent for Russia. The claim in both cases is that the movement received foreign support, allowing it to convince more ordinary people to support it than they would have otherwise.

It’s well known that many people in Eastern European countries don’t trust Russia one bit after their experiences in the USSR.

Russia is not the USSR. And most people experienced a decline in quality of life, across every objective metric, following its collapse.

It’s also well known that many people in eastern Ukraine have ethnic, cultural, and family ties to Russia, so it wouldn’t be surprising if a lot of them wanted to have more favorable relations with them. This goes back to when the Soviets transferred the territory to Ukraine in the first place.

Before the war, people weren’t really aware of the situation in Ukraine and there were 100 other problems that seemed more urgent

Yes, that’s exactly what I’m saying. Americans don’t actually care about Ukrainians, most people barely knew they existed and couldn’t find the country on the map. The only reason people started caring is because they started being relevant to state interests.

Ultimately this has to be decided by the Ukrainian people.

No it won’t. The Ukrainian people do not have the option to vote on whether or not to accept territorial concessions, because they don’t have a democracy, and even what pretense of democracy they used to have has been suspended due to the war. The Ukrainian state may get to decide that, but that is not the same as the Ukrainian people. You don’t seem to be separating the state’s interests from the people’s interests at all.

I’m literally right here interacting on that exact topic right now. I’ve seen plenty of discussions from the people mentioned about the topic and newsflash, they don’t say that. Y’all just would much prefer to pass around rumors and dismissive charicatures rather than investigating what we actually believe.

Thank you. We can either have a good faith discussion based on facts and evidence and what was actually said, or we can have this cable news-tier bullshit of putting words into mouths and bad faith mischaracterization. I’d prefer the former.

Now, your claim is that Russia started the civil war as a pretext to invade and that the separatists are just Russian proxies. On the other hand, the Russian narrative would claim the same thing about the Euromaidan coup. I treat both of those claims with roughly equal skepticism. I don’t doubt that both movements have some degree of organic support, or that both have received foreign funding and support. I’ll also note that, for example, the American revolution had support from the French, so I don’t consider either movement accepting foreign support automatically disqualifying.

Regardless, the question is what the best scenario is going forward. I don’t see either side as being particularly concerned with the well-being of the people living there, or in actual democratic representation or anything like that. As far as I can see, it’s just about US/Ukrainian state interests vs Russian state interests, and I don’t really have a dog in that fight. The interests of states are generally disconnected from those of the people.

In my opinion, if people really cared so much about the Ukrainian people, then we should’ve been providing them with foreign aid for domestic development, long before any of this started. And if that had happened, the people would be happy and comfortable and loyal to whoever provided it. Instead, conditions declined, people became resentful and felt that there was nothing to lose, and now we have this conflict and people are being forced into a meat grinder against their will. It would be a better use of funds to accept territorial concessions and divert the resources used for war towards rebuilding. Likewise, Russia could’ve used the funds they’re using now to relocate the people loyal to them into Russia. This was is wasteful and destructive and benefits no one but the people in power on both sides.

I used precisely one adjective in that comment to describe Russia’s government, could you tell me what it was?

Answer the question, please. It’s not hard.

Surely you’ll have no trouble producing the receipts for what you said then, right? Since you didn’t make it up, can you link to where you saw it?

The great thing about never interacting with a group of people is that you can just make up whatever you want about them.

I used precisely one adjective in that comment to describe Russia’s government, could you tell me what it was?

No response tells me you can’t read.

Such as?

Yeah, I don’t fully agree with their decision to intervene in the Ukrainian civil war, just as I don’t agree with Ukraine’s shelling of Donbass in violation of Minsk II, or with the coup and banning of opposition parties that led the disputed territories to declare independence.

The best case scenario, as has been the case since the start, is for a peace agreement to be reached as soon as possible to prevent further loss of life. Which reactionary government controls the disputed territories isn’t worth people dying over.

Russia is terrible on LGBT rights.

Being a tankie doesn’t mean that you agree with everything any non-Western state does, it just means that you’re critical of war and are willing to consider internationalist perspectives.

Atlanta, Denver, somewhere in Virginia, Maryland, or DC, or possibly Ohio or Pennsylvania. There’s places like Austin and some places in Florida that might have cool people, but the state government is trash.

I saw Greenville recommended, and this is anecdotal, but last time I was there visiting friends, we (visibly queer) got followed around by this crazy guy with a metal pipe making all kinds of death threats. I love my friends but that sealed the deal for me on not wanting to live there. There are some neat places there ngl, the sex themed desert restaurant was a fun place for a queerplatonic hangout, but in general it’s not exactly going to be a refuge from Trump supporters.

Nothing he revealed was a shock, I was joking with my friends about them listening in on 2009 if not earlier.

Yeah, but you didn’t have proof.

The real world impact of the leak was a net negative for Americans.

Absolutely ridiculous. You just can’t distinguish between the state’s interests and the people’s interests. So what if the US’s global image is damaged? That doesn’t affect me. If anything, I’m glad, when the US’s global image was better it meant it could get away with getting involved in stupid imperialist wars that made life worse for everyone but the ruling class. Their interests are directly opposed to mine and hurting them helps me.

Had he been willing to go to jail for it the issue would have stayed in the for front and people would have put a lot of effort into getting him released, and I would have been a supporter of that initiative.

Again, this is literally the only reason you’ve given for why he should’ve done that, that you personally would’ve liked him more, which I don’t believe for a second. Nobody gives a shit what you think, certainly not enough to do something stupid and self-destructive. Snowden would’ve been an idiot not to protect himself.