Notable quotes from OP:

Sure the FBI sent information to Twitter, but Twitter and Facebook etc. had the freedom to decide how to act on it.

They asked social media agencies to try to limit vaccine disinformation and far right extremism. It's a far cry from Chinese state media where any criticism of the state is punishable by arrest.

Go on about Assange all you like but he's a tool and Chelsea Manning proves we let people off easy for leaking state secrets

I support your free speech to go on with your Russian propaganda false equivalence nonsense, a freedom that would not be afforded to me if I tried arguing the evils of Putin in Russia.

yes invading Iraq was wrong, but a) we had and made use of the freedom to protest it and b) the plan wasn't to annex Iraq the way Putin is trying to do with Ukraine, for those people (not me) who supported it, it was to give them democracy and then let them vote on their own leaders in the aftermath of 9/11.

Afghanistan came first but both were GW Bush mistakes and I very much doubt our governments/NATO would make the same type of interventions now.

(About Iraq War) At least we had the freedom to protest and even the people who supported it had democratic ideals

Some notable takes from other :LIB: in the thread too, actually the whole thread is a gold mine. Have a look if you can tolerate being on :reddit-logo:

  • huf [he/him]
    ·
    2 years ago

    Sure the FBI sent information to Twitter, but Twitter and Facebook etc. had the freedom to decide how to act on it.

    this trick defeats libs every time.

    as long as the govt control over media is all "unofficial" and wink wink, it doesnt exist. to be fair, there's something to be said about the west having a superior technique for controlling the media. there's no visible office of censorship, it just ... happens. invisible hand of the market. it's clearly a better way the fool these rubes.

    it's just like them being absolutely unable to see a nazi until the nazi says "i am a nazi, sieg heil"

    • SaniFlush [any, any]
      ·
      2 years ago

      I’m not sure how to de-program that reflex out of a person.

      • huf [he/him]
        ·
        2 years ago

        if we knew that, we'd know how to get people to grow up into communists instead of fascists... communism would've already won

        so yeah

        • SaniFlush [any, any]
          ·
          2 years ago

          There's a good chance you're right but I still find the idea that most Westerners are hopeless to be viscerally disgusting.

            • SaniFlush [any, any]
              ·
              2 years ago

              Revolutionary defeatism, friend. If anyone invades the USA I'm surrendering to them immediately, like Otto Dix in WW2. I'm not sacrificing my life to defend Burgertown.

    • discountsocialism [none/use name]
      ·
      edit-2
      2 years ago

      The government usually doesn't just ask, they pay. They subsidize the effort outside of the grant system. Like how they give pro-american war movies a ton of money for 'edits' and access to military equipment for filming.

      Either that or they got a credible threat that they would be shut down.

      Doing the things they asked took a considerable about of effort and was likely expensive.

  • waterfox [none/use name]
    ·
    edit-2
    2 years ago

    LOL when the FBI raided James O'Keefe the confidential documents from his office were published in the New York Times within 12 hours. Tell us how there's any meaningful distance there.

    Say, what's it called when government and corporations merge? When you can't tell where one stops and the other begins? I'm sure we covered this in political science class once.

  • axont [she/her, comrade/them]
    ·
    2 years ago

    Go on about Assange all you like but he’s a tool and Chelsea Manning proves we let people off easy for leaking state secrets

    Chelsea Manning had been imprisoned multiple times, for over a decade, without trial. This is letting someone off easy? She's apparently still hounded by state department ghouls to this day. She's often not in a good mental state and has been repeatedly suicidal.

    This is half a brain cell liberalism. It's also a cartoon caricature of other countries. Iraq wasn't annexed, yet there were military bases installed throughout the country and its constitution was rewritten under American guidelines. I've said this a lot, if there were a single Chinese military base in the Caribbean, or perhaps in Canada along the American border, liberals would all go mask off. They'd immediately call for the arrest of all Chinese sympathizers. They'd demand immediate war and occupation.

    America has over 800 known overseas military bases. Several countries that have them, like Japan and South Korea, will arrest protestors who want the American bases gone. It's equally as villainous as these liberals fantasize their enemies to be.

    • huf [he/him]
      ·
      2 years ago

      ah yeah, libs totally confused by another transparent trick. you see the bad old empires like the british painted the map their own color and that was bad.

      the US doesnt paint the map american, it just puts bases everywhere and meddles in the economy and internal politics of countries.

      ENTIRELY DIFFERENT.

      how do they keep falling for the same fucking trick?

      • huf [he/him]
        ·
        2 years ago

        i mean yeah yeah, their material interests align with the empire, i know

        It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.

      • ssjmarx [he/him]
        ·
        2 years ago

        I think the plurality of Japanese people are anti-warhawk and anti-American base, but with most of the bases located on Okinawa the average Japanese person can kind of ignore the fact that they exist. It's one of the many ways Okinawans are kind of shit on by the mainland government.

  • Tommasi [she/her]
    ·
    2 years ago

    Wow, this is something special even for :reddit-logo:. A true pinnacle of unhinged :LIB: brainworms.

    Congrats on finding this one OP

    • AlyxMS [he/him]
      hexagon
      ·
      2 years ago

      I don't post often, but when I found this I just felt compelled to share it.

  • Ram_The_Manparts [he/him]
    ·
    2 years ago

    This one's a real banger

    I guess Voice of America is the main state-run media thing. But its nowhere to the China level of "Government dictates to the media directly"

  • Infantile_Disorder [he/him]
    ·
    2 years ago

    This is what happens when you are anti-X rather than having a real analytical framework.

    Musk said a thing. Therefore it must be wrong.

    Honestly there's probably a lot of things that could be considered somewhat true that Musk says, but he's only got half the picture or blames only individuals (see his earlier Soros tweet).

    • UlyssesT [he/him]
      ·
      2 years ago

      Broken clocks are right twice a day and so on and so on :zizek-fuck:

  • Zodiark
    ·
    edit-2
    3 months ago

    deleted by creator

  • Sinister [none/use name, comrade/them]B
    ·
    edit-2
    2 years ago

    If the plan was to annex iraq, would it not have been better for the iraqis, since the US would not had wrecked the place as much? The argument presented by the :reddit-logo: falls flat. Like russia plans to turn half of Ukraine into new citizens and acts accordingly.

    • ElmLion [any]
      ·
      edit-2
      2 years ago

      If anything, the US does all it can to avoid territory being regarded 'US soil', as that would mean they're legally bound by their constitution to give people on that soil a couple human rights. See: Guantanamo.

    • Alaskaball [comrade/them]
      ·
      2 years ago

      Annexation inferrs that there will be a modicum of assumed responsibility over the territory you're marching your troops through. What the US did was destroy Iraq, loot Iraq's wealth for the bourgeoisie, pass the cost of the imperial warmachine onto the American people, and pass the cost of rebuilding a destroyed country onto the Iraqi peoples.

      Literally nobody other than the capitalist ghouls were better off after the dust settled on the illegal and evil invasion of Iraq

  • Zodiark
    ·
    edit-2
    3 months ago

    deleted by creator

    • ElChapoDeChapo [he/him, comrade/them]
      ·
      2 years ago

      I still remember that BBC video where they defened :maxwell:

      Never heard of any Chinese media doing anything even half as disgusting

  • Huldra [they/them, it/its]
    ·
    edit-2
    2 years ago

    Westerners are proud of this because it allows them to clean their hands of guilt and responsibility, sure the government they so proudly voted in with the best democratic system in the world killed hundreds of thousands of people in the pursuit of global dominance, but they got to all get together and BE MAD about it.

    Then they elected a president that calmly told them its not the time to be mad right now, everyone who was mad needs to be friends with the people who happily killed hundreds of thousands, and so now they are, and you are cringe if you get mad about it outside of the scheduled BE MAD dates. There is a personal benefit to the propaganda, you get to be clean, and you get to be not mad about it, and you get to be proud and feel superior to all those countries where people dont get to BE MAD(according to what you read at least), and so you can feast on the slop of imperialism with peace of mind.

  • regularassbitch [she/her]
    ·
    2 years ago

    i had to stop reading this when i saw that one of the people in the thread was named "AndyTron_McBadass"

  • ssjmarx [he/him]
    ·
    edit-2
    2 years ago

    (About Iraq War) At least we had the freedom to protest and even the people who supported it had democratic ideals

    You know, there's a South Park episode about the Iraq War where they go back to the past to see the debate about free speech and come to an incredibly cynical conclusion, that the thing the first amendment does for America is allow us to have our cake and eat it too by letting the anti war crowd protest while the government ignores them and does whatever it wants anyway. This guy is basically arguing the same thing.

    Also like SP, he somehow doesn't conclude that "invading a country and killing millions is bad", which puts the war into a superposition of being both good that it happened and bad enough to warrant protesting against. It's the kind of logical pretzel you're bound to get yourself into if you can't get past the barrier of assuming that the US Government is a force for good.