• Frank [he/him, he/him]
    ·
    8 months ago

    Why do liberals need to believe their dumbshit baby politics are complicated? "It's complex it's nuanced" it almost never is, it's just transparent corruption or warmongering.

      • CTHlurker [he/him]
        ·
        8 months ago

        I got told by my mom during an argument about Israel-Palestine that my solution (israel stops existing and israelis become equal citizens in Palestine) was utopian, shortly before she proposed nuking Israel because "they keep fighting no matter what, so this is the only way"

          • Frank [he/him, he/him]
            ·
            8 months ago

            Even things from living memory! "How will we solve the housing crises?!!" like seizing all the land and building more houses isn't staggeringly obvious.

          • Frank [he/him, he/him]
            ·
            8 months ago

            Every couple of months I get to hear, completely unprompted, how many hundreds of millions of Chinese people we could kill if we somehow interdicted the straights of Malacca. There's something deeply, horrifyingly wrong with Americans.

              • Frank [he/him, he/him]
                ·
                8 months ago

                I used to think that when I was, idk, 15? 9/11 had just happened and I was about as wise as a not particularly wise rock. It's so weird to look back on, especially now having watched the destruction of Iraq, Libya, and countless other nations while having more experience and perspective.

                • Aryuproudomenowdaddy [comrade/them]
                  ·
                  edit-2
                  8 months ago

                  Being on the opposite side of the country may have helped but I remember my teacher asking us how we felt about getting terrorismed and I couldn't fathom why I should care about a bunch of stock brokers getting got any more than a recent tsunami that had hit China and killed several thousand people.

                  • Frank [he/him, he/him]
                    ·
                    8 months ago

                    I was also about as far from NYC as you can get so I really didn't have much context for it. The day of was so weird. I woke up hours after it happened, jumped on IIRC having no idea, and some random Russian person messaged me to say "Sorry about what happened, good luck surviving WWIII". It was hours or maybe a day or two before I figured out what had actually happened. Some people thought China had attacked us (from where? The Atlantic? We were so ignorant). It was eerie, there was always a huge amount of air traffic in my city, big planes and small bush planes, and the skies were empty for days. The only thing up there was air force fighters on patrol. We had an air base, so I was used to seeing them, but not like that.

                    After that, I got caught up in the propaganda for a year or two, then started to get suspicious, then got dragged out to pride by my hippy girlfriend to put on a prison jumpsuit and a hood and walk in the parade with my hands chained over my head, protesting Gitmo. It was one of my first real political actions, and also the first of many times I got booed for "ruining" pride with politics. hexbear-gay-pride

        • roux [he/him, they/them]
          ·
          edit-2
          8 months ago

          Anyone who proposed the solution of nuclear warfare should seek therapy. I know your mom will never have access to nukes but it says a lot about someone's character when instead of solving a problem, they'd rather murder millions of innocent people.

          I don't mean to sound attacky. My own mom would say the same fucking thing.

          • Egon
            ·
            edit-2
            3 months ago

            deleted by creator

    • edge [he/him]
      ·
      8 months ago

      it's just transparent corruption or warmongering

      That's exactly why they need to believe it's complicated. If they recognized that it's not, they'd be acknowledging their own complicity.

    • context [fae/faer, fae/faer]
      ·
      8 months ago

      yes it's transparent corruption and warmongering, but it also maintains a system that provides me with cheap consumer electronics and year-round fresh tropical fruits, coffee, and chocolate, so it's fucking complicated goddammit!

    • Egon
      ·
      edit-2
      3 months ago

      deleted by creator

      • Frank [he/him, he/him]
        ·
        8 months ago

        "Starvation is complicated" No it isn't, we produce more food than we need and throw most of it out before it even reaches a store. Give it away.

        It's worse than that. The US massively subsidizes a lot of staples. They're dumped on foreign markets at below market prices. Local food producers can't sell their product and eventually fold, shutting down their farms. Or they switch to cash crops. Then, when the US decides to send it's grain somewhere else, or the market for hte cash crop collapses, there's either no money to buy food or no food at all and people starve.

        A lot of 20th and 21st century famines were caused this way, with western powers, the IMF, the world bank, destroying local food security, forcing cash crops on people, instituting expensive input intensive farming practices unsuited for hte land, then wringing their hands and holding Live Aid concerts when a famine ensued.

    • Adkml [he/him]
      ·
      8 months ago

      Also just makes them sound like an incredulous moron to everybody who perfectly understands the problem because they aren't desperately refusing to understand it.