The only real reasons liberals single out Trump with such vitriol is because he was a crude, boorish asshole who said everything out loud, thus shattering the notion that all presidents were 'good' because they were elected, and because Trump got lots of Americans killed.
Every president during my life has been a nasty bastard that would slip a knife into your spine if it meant moving up, and they have all killed people by the truckload; but Trump was the first to result in so many dead Americans. He wasn't even particularly racist for a president, unless you can find me audio of him talking about black people being synonymous with "monkeys wearing shoes", as good old saint Regan did.
Reminds me of Marx on the Third French Empire.
No Circe using black magic has distorted that work of art, the bourgeois republic, into a monstrous shape. That republic has lost nothing but the semblance of respectability. Present-day France was already contained in the parliamentary republic. It required only a bayonet thrust for the bubble to burst and the monster to leap forth before our eyes.
I don't think Trump actually is racist as I don't think he thinks about other people enough to care about things like that
He's definitely a racist. The whole Central Park Five thing for instance.
He is racist, he's just not significantly more racist than say, bush, or just your average US president. The issue is that he's loudly racist, without even bothering with clinton and co's dogwhistling bullshit about "law and order" etc - thats whats despicable to libs.
In my experience, literally every single person who says some shit like "Shaun's videos are great but his Twitter sucks" is just a Democrat who's mad that he doesn't think the Democrats are the good guys.
Shaun is one of probably, like, five good twitterers
He's almost enough to make me use twitter
It's like a bizarro version of c/the_dunk_tank where they only get mad at correct takes
Well okay if we're being honest, normal dunk tank is primarily finding satirical tweets by known lefty satirists and comedians, then getting mad by taking them at face value. But I still wanna give us more credit than these losers.
I've been saying for a while it's very revealing how Trump got actual fascists into the government like Gorka and Miller and not a lot changed.
"Not a lot changed" is a pretty bad take. Civilian drone strike deaths increased at least 330% under Trump (and that figure might be even higher), we went from détente with Iran to committing acts of war against them, the federal judiciary is now stacked with Federalist Society psychopaths to a degree that requires historic changes to even balance out, open fascism is more normalized than it's been since the 30s, and that's just what immediately comes to mind. Then there's the idea that Trump pushed a lot of limits that hadn't been tested in decades, if ever, which would give a slightly more competent or slightly more popular fascist a hell of a lot of data on how to do a lot more damage.
The fact that having Gorka, Miller, etc. in high places didn't turn out even worse is more a factor of their lack of familiarity with the bureaucracy, how difficult it is to make any major change happen in a continent-spanning country, and how easy it is to slow things down in the U.S. government in particular.
Breaking deals, enforcing sanctions, assassinating world leaders, and hiding civilian casualties are all standard fare for American presidents.
Even Obama's "reports of civilian deaths" (in quotes because, well...) are 10 times lower than the lowest independent estimates
Yeah we literally just watched a whistleblower be imprisoned for revealing the Obama-era civilian casualty rate of drones.
How much of this would have happened with or without Trump? idk.
Hillary largely ran on the promise of continuing the Obama years, and as a former cabinet member under Obama, that was plausible. She probably would have followed through on the Iran deal, at least kept in place the Obama thaw on Cuba, continued the bad-but-not-as-bad-as-Trump drone program, and done the coup attempts in Bolivia and Venezuela. Maybe some bad things she would have done a bit more competently (e.g., the Venezuela coup), but that gets back to your point about edging into "great man" territory. Presidents almost certainly don't plan the fine details of stuff like that, and the idea that Trump's incompetence hindered the national security state is overblown anyway -- they just started lying to him when he had a broken clock good instinct.
The US judiciary has always been stacked with RW freaks and every Republican president has furthered that mission.
American presidents constantly renege on deals, especially ones created by earlier presidents.
I find the hypothesis that Trump's Fascists didn't understand the bureaucracy to be a much less convincing explanation than the alternative: the United States of America has never not been Fascist. Fascists aren't popping up because Trump became President; both issues are the result of the United States being a Fascist nation with Fascist culture. The US already invades and plunders whoever it pleases. It has 1/4 of the world's prison population, and effectively enslaves minorities via racist criminal justice. It kills millions around the globe and occupies several countries. The country is largely run by unaccountable, bloodless lawyer psychopaths. The United States is already at just about Maximum Fascism.
Trump was not uniquely bad, but he definitely changed things for the worse compared to Obama (who was also bad, of course).
As for the idea that everyone in mainstream American politics is just a different shade of fascist, that's an ideological dead end, not to mention an enormous oversimplification. We will get nothing done if we call the vast majority of politically active Americans fascists, so believing that would be tantamount to giving up. Luckily, it's only believable if one uses an incredibly loose definition of "fascist" that renders the word almost meaningless.
The United States is the Third Reich with a PR department. I don't know how any Marxist can disagree.
95% of Jewish Israelis supported Operation Protective Edge. From this, the conditions in Gaza, and the ongoing occupation of Palestine, it is safe to say that Israel is a Nazi country with a Nazi society.
You can do this with any number of American genocides and wars. The genocide in Korea vegan with 80% support. The genocide in Vietnam began with 65% support.
Does this mean 65% of the country are bloodthirsty Nazis, stomping on babies and operating concentration camps? No, but that was also not true of the civilian population of the Third Reich.
As with the population of the Third Reich, Americans are fed a steady diet of lies and propaganda. As with the Third Reich, wars are based on false flag attacks and billed to the populace as defensive. As with the Third Reich, there is a criminally prosecuted race that is openly brutalized by the state. As with the Third Reich, there are many agents of the state perfectly willing to commit everyday atrocities, whether they're police, prison guards, ICE agents, FBI agents, CIA, or any other number of death squads. As with the Third Reich, there is an ethnic cleansing campaign conducted by official agents of the state, ICE. As with the Third Reich, there are concentration camps operated by the state: Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, ICE camps, etc. Like the Third Reich, the state collaborates with corporate interests in the utter crushing of the Left. Like the Third Reich, the US has enacted a Holocaust, unlike the Third Reich that Holocaust has been diffuse and global.
The US is the #1 influence with a bullet on the Third Reich. The Nazis admired our race laws, our pioneering concept of second-class citizenship in the form of a "national," our genocide of the natives, our subjugation of black Americans, our vibrant eugenics movement, and more. Nazi lawyers studied the American legal system and its numerous ways, covert and overt, of maintaining racial supremacy. Hitler outright stated that the US was the first nation to advance the interests of the white race. Lebensraum is literally Manifest Destiny in Europe.
Does this mean 65% of the country are bloodthirsty Nazis, stomping on babies and operating concentration camps? No
This is what I was getting at. The issue is that -- in practice, when we're trying to win people over to our side -- it's extremely difficult to square "most people aren't fascists" with "everyone in mainstream American politics is a different shade of fascist." There's a ton of overlap between "most people" and "everyone in mainstream politics" at the lower levels of government, which is where a huge amount of governing actually occurs (including the vast majority of policing, for instance). There are a ton of people who would be considered mainstream politicians who oppose the fascist stuff the government does, and who are actively trying to change it. There are a ton of people outside politics -- and this does reach a majority of the country -- who oppose fascist stuff, but not so actively that we would have considered them real opponents had they lived in Nazi Germany.
So it's an ideological dead end, because you can't build a mass movement by calling basically everything people recognize as legitimate politics "fascist." It simply will not compute for most people, and if it won't work, whatever other merits that idea has are immaterial. And that's not even getting to how stacking up each country's list of atrocities glosses over crucial differences in how the U.S. and Nazi Germany function.
I hate when assholes try to act like Shaun being Br*tish is reason enough to disregard his (correct) takes, as if he isn't obviously very well read and knowledgeable. Lindsay Ellis did this same shit, yelling at Shaun when, close to the election, he was saying something bad about Biden, and Ellis acted like he was doing some evil thing and shouldn't be commenting since he wasn't American. As if the US and its policies don't hold hegemonic control over the entire world.
acted like he was doing some evil thing and shouldn’t be commenting since he wasn’t American.
Didn't hear that many br*tish people saying that when it was :long-corbyn: vs. The Blob.
B-b-b-but my 23 and me results say I'm from Germany! :theiss-explanation:
WOW. So much for the tolerant left! @neera_tanden you were right!
the top comment in that thread is "not true. trump also supported terrorism (jan 6th)."
Uhm.
Holy shit!
I've noticed a lot of Leftist often can't distinguish between harm caused by US presidents internationally vs internally. That is to say one person killed by the US abroad is equal to one killed at home. Though this outlook isn't bad in itself, I think most people would agree that a leaders primarily responsibility is to protect their own citizens first, so harm caused by a leader to their own people is a greater violation.
Donald Trump is pretty much responsible for killing 600,000+ Americans through his mismanagement and deliberate misinformation. This is a harm he perpetuated against his own citizens. Not to mention this number is comparable to deaths incurred in Iraq for example. The Iraq Body Count Project estimates that a total of 208,547 Iraqi civilians died as a result of the Iraq War, with total deaths starting around 600,000 too.
average vaushite. I've noticed a lot of leftists dont value american lives over other people's lives, is there anything we can do to fix this???
Badempanada picked through another Shaun freakout thread on vaushite reddit and began to get legitimately pissed and disgusted by how openly those fuckers argued that foreigners count as less than americans
lot of leftists dont value american lives over other people’s lives,
That is because communists on principle are internationalists. Our allegiance is to the workers of the world, not just of your home country.
This goes back to the Second Internationale where the Communists and socialists split over the question of whether to support the proletariat in your home country by helping them win whatever slaughterhouse war the bougeoise send them into vs sending the bougeoise into the slaughterhouse to end their wars for the proletariat worldwide to win.
This is why the Left dispises electoralism for the theatrical play that it performs to distract the masses from the crimes against humanity committed in their name by the State.
Yeah its pretty obvious these Vaushite people are liberals, cosplaying their anticommunism as radicalism.
The Iraq Body Count Project estimates that a total of 208,547 Iraqi civilians died as a result of the Iraq War
which means it's 2 million minimum
All those numbers only include the deaths that the military willingly labeled "civilian". They totally ignore all of the "collateral damage" "military age" murders.
also doesn't even get into indirect deaths due to famine, loss of shelter, etc
damn, so it's already confirmed to be much more than 1.2 million
Jesus, incredible how they can go from “leaders should prioritize providing basic services for their own citizens before providing international aid” to “killing innocent foreigners is fine as long as no white people were killed” without batting an eye
As if the US covid disaster was caused by Donald Trump being a baddie and not by the material conditions of US class society. Hundreds of thousands would have died under a Clinton presidency as well.
This post is in honour of the brave Mujahideen fighters of Afghanistan.
I can’t have conversations with anyone who isn’t a leftist anymore because they simply do not live in reality
Politics began in 2016 when Trump starting saying mean things on twitter. Everything before that was just Great Men doing Great Things
Wonder what they're getting pissy about
"but he tried to cheat in an election"
And we've had Presidents successfully do so.
"but he's racist"
Applies to literally everyone except maybe Obama
"but he’s corrupt"
Lol
"but he got a lot of people killed"
A very popular tradition which starts our beloved George Washington.
Bush 2.0 is literally all of those things within living memory.
But he paints pictures of German shepherds! How could a man who paints pictures of German shepherds be evil?!
Most v*ushites were probably not alive during the bush administration
I would say Obama was racist in the same way all liberals are.
The complete faith in institutions that are filled with racist people and basically created and maintained to uphold white supremacy, all while bombing Libya, Iraq, and Afghanistan.
Trump is racist in the Thanksgiving Uncle way. He loves the police shooting black people to death because they will always deserve it.
Obama hangs his head in shame upon hearing the news, then shakes a Police Chief's hand and their funding goes up so they can pay for "Don't Murder Black People" classes you go through when you join.
Wasn't Obama also racist? Arguable about black people(and not my argument to have) but definitely against Arab and Latines?
Regardless of his personal views, he forwarded the interests of US racial capitalism and appointed a segregationist as his running mate
Using any metrics radlibs pretend to care about, "death toll", "corruption", "racism" Shaun's point is objectively true
Hit dogs holler
I've got a copy of capital vol I that's literally like that, just blurry registration like they printed it off a PDF, lol. Glad i have it though.
No suprise libs are all about great man theory of US presidents.
Also George W Bush was president of the USA in 2008 and was worse than Trump, so even by their rules the US has had worse presidents in recent history
I've looked in that sub a couple times and they're somehow more defensive of the Democrats than the neoliberal sub.
Are the Vaushies mad at Shaun cuz they agree with (vanilla) libs that Trump "WASN'T NORMAL!!!"?
The comments were full of people saying American lives matter more than others
wait he's british? why do the good ones always have to turn out bad :trans-sad:
