Magnets.

You ran out of ink too, didn’t you, ya bastards?

Personally I like to compare it to my favorite anime, Revolutionary Girl Utena, as they both have some surrealist themes and weird symbolism and homoerotic undertones with some normal episodes but overall being a mindfuck. I kinda see Evangelion as the shounen version and Utena as the shojo version, and I’m more into the latter but a lot of that is just which aesthetics you prefer.

Utena vs Evangelion, see, practically identical 😆

The word “quarantine” originates from a Venetian policy that every single ship had to wait outside of port for 40 days to ensure nobody had the plague. I’m sure the antivax people would have no problem with such measures?

When you say, “fucking stupid” is “stupidity” actually the problem? Like what, they can’t do math?

Raw brainpower is only a fraction of what’s involved in good judgement. Book knowledge is another fraction. But there’s a whole host of other factors that can influence decisions. Poor impulse control, psychological hangups, bad habits, greed, privilege, etc. That’s assuming that the education they received actually taught them how to think critically in the first place.

The vast majority of the time, when I have a problem with someone, it’s not just a matter of lacking brainpower or education. Condensing those problems down to “stupid” is, aside from any other concerns, simply inaccurate.

I picked China from skimming your comment history. Have you defended North Korea? jfc

Like I said, I’ll “defend” literally any country on earth. You have 195 to choose from! If I haven’t “defended” them yet, just spread misinformation and say we should start a war, and I will. I care about the truth, not some liberal purity test.

China did take Hong Kong

More like the UK returned Hong Kong to China after the lease agreement they had forced upon it through colonialism expired.

Same with Tibet.

You mean the slave-owning theocracy that was historically part of China, was never internationally recognized, which is also claimed by Taiwan?

Incredible that you have to go back 70 years and that’s the worst you can come up with.

They want Taiwan

What you personally speculate might happen in the future is not a mark against China.

They’ve “wanted Taiwan” for decades, just as Taiwan “wants” the mainland. And for decades, peace was maintained through the doctrine of strategic ambiguity, whereby Taiwan was not formally recognized as independent but was allowed to operate as such. US politicians, rather than maintain that peaceful compromise, have recklessly decided to start deviating from that status quo (because they’re psychotic warmongerers looking to manufacture threats).

If you actually care about Taiwanese independence, then what exactly is wrong with the status quo of de facto independence? Why are our politicians choosing to rock the boat?

But I highly doubt you even knew what strategic ambiguity was, much less that our politicians deviated from it. Because the media rarely really reports on that part or frames it as an escalation. They only report on China’s response to it. And that response is then used to frame China as being aggressive out of nowhere. They do the same thing with any country they don’t like. It’s kind of like how European countries will condemn Iran for retaliating but won’t condemn the US for starting the war.

The more extreme stuff against China may just be propaganda that China itself created to discredit the more reasonable claims

In that case, stop spreading Chinese propaganda, you tankie 😉

The truth is, China does pose a threat to the US. But that threat is economic and diplomatic. China has emerged as a reliable trading partner that stays out of conflicts, while the US burns itself out fighting in every corner of the world. Every year, neutral countries are becoming more aligned with China and formerly US-aligned countries become more neutral, and this trend did not start with Trump.

You want to counter China, you have to start playing the diplomatic game more seriously and stop trying to solve every problem through force. Whenever the US does something like attacking Iran, or invading Afghanistan, or even seizing Venezuela’s foreign reserves, there are countless little countries that see it happening and wonder if they’ll be next.

Trying to resolve the rivalry with China through military force would be absolutely insane. And yet, that seems to be the course of action our rulers are committed to. It’s terrifying to think that anyone would consider WWIII and nuclear armegeddon a viable solution.

I don’t want to go to war with any country. I am also willing to refute misinformation about any country. Those two things constitute 99% of what “defending” means in this context.

Why limit yourself to China? Just say, “In North Korea the government forces everyone to eat each other’s brains and we need to invade to get them to stop,” I’ll say that’s not true and we shouldn’t, and now you can attack me for “defending North Korea.” Surely there’s worse countries than China out there for you to pick from.

“We have to fight them over there or we’ll be fighting them over here.” I remember that line. They said about the wars in the Middle East, they said it about Vietnam, they said it about Korea. “If we don’t win, there’ll be a 9/11 every day.” But we lost, and somehow there hasn’t been another 9/11. “Vietnam is a domino, if we don’t stop them here, they’ll spread communism to more and more countries.” But we didn’t stop them there and they focused on rebuilding and self-defense.

Every major conflict the US has been involved in since WWII, top officials have evoke WWII and the Nazis. Many of those conflicts were wars of aggression, often seeking to prop up fascists.

If the US military was actually about defense, it could easily be cut in half. We’d still be spending more on it than any other country in the world. The US spends more than the next 9 countries combined and it is the fascist threat that other countries have to defend against.

Yes, sometimes the only way to solve a problem is through force. But it’s also true that when you have this massive hammer, everything looks like a nail. We have this whole industry built off that profits from war and needs a constant state of war (or at least threats) to justify its existence, and if there aren’t any threats, they’ll create them.

Once all the people involved in the previous unjustified wars is in prison, then if the people who threw them in prison want me to believe that there’s a genuine threat, I’ll consider it. But I will never support US military involvement in any conflict until that time, regardless of circumstances.

There’s no faster way to get called a tankie than opposing the construction of more tanks.

Opposing the construction of more tanks necessarily means arguing that those tanks are unnecessary. Arguing that tanks are unnecessary means arguing that the supposed threats our rulers want us to be afraid of are not as significant as they’d have us believe. And if you’re arguing that an “enemy” country is not as much of a threat as our rulers claim, then it’s trivial for someone to accuse you of minimizing the threat because you actually support the enemy.

This is how it’s always been. I opposed the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan from the start. Back then, instead of “tankie” they called you “terrorist sympathizer.” People who opposed the wars in Vietnam and Korea were called “reds” or “pinkos.” Those who opposed WWI were accused of being “Bolsheviks.” Some dude once criticized Rome’s violence and was accused of plotting violent insurrection and got executed for it. Same shit, different day.

I have a brother who fought in Iraq and Afghanistan, and while he’s always been an absolute chud, it was a very radicalizing experience. He came back with PTSD and then started “self-medicating” with meth. He made our family’s lives a living hell, like we were 24/7 911 operators, always waiting for the day he was going to act on his paranoid delusions. He finally went out to some innocent family’s house with a gun and pulled on the cops who’d followed him and got shot in the arm. He’s recovered somewhat, but still has relapses.

These experiences are the most traumatic thing that has ever happened to me or any of my family. Still it pales in comparison to what he experienced, which in turn pales in comparison to what the people living in those countries experienced. My dumbass brother chose to go over there, but they didn’t choose to be born there, and the casualty rates were so much higher for them.

People look at casualty rates (if they bother to) and imagine that that’s the full price of war. But my brother isn’t on any of those casualty lists, because his wounds were “only” psychological. The true scale of harm is literally incomprehensible.

I remember one night that I had come to visit and I went out to eat with my parents, thinking, hoping, that for one night things could be peaceful. Then the texts started coming in. Another crisis, more schizophrenic accusations, veiled threats, reading into every little thing. I remember the tears streaming down my mother’s face as she tried not to make a scene at the restaurant.

Whenever I think about any of the people responsible for those wars, I take what I felt in that moment and multiply by a hundred, a thousand, a hundred thousand, by as much as I’m capable of, and it’s still not enough.

The government and media do such a good job sheltering the public from what war really means. So many people just treat it like a movie or a video game because they know that more than they know about reality. The media rarely covers the human cost, especially of the other side. And so when I come on to Lemmy and vent about how war is bad and we should build schools and hospitals instead of tanks and bombs, people call me a tankie and accuse me of having some secret agenda. Because real life action movies are so cool, who could possibly have a problem with them?

I have 8 from .world and 6 from other instances.

It is difficult for me to imagine what “personal liberty” is enjoyed by an unemployed person, who goes about hungry, and cannot find employment.

Real liberty can exist only where exploitation has been abolished, where there is no oppression of some by others, where there is no unemployment and poverty, where a man is not haunted by the fear of being tomorrow deprived of work, of home and of bread. Only in such a society is real, and not paper, personal and every other liberty possible.

• Some guy

Sounds like Sultan’s Game would fit the bill, just be warned that it can get into some really heavy stuff.

We’re already divided, and this comic is just making fun of those who put partisanship above all else so I don’t see it as especially divisive. Moreover, there’s no reason to seek any sort of “common cause” with the right, because they lick the boots of the ruling class and create division by attacking minority groups. Trying to find common ground with reactionary elements of the working class just dilutes the message and alienates their victims.

Depending on where you split the clauses, there are as many as 18 commandments

And here I thought it was fifteen.

Lots of people treating the Torah as exclusively Christian in here.

Oh, look at that, you ignored the question for a third time, as predicted.

Were the reforms an improvement or do you prefer how things were under Mao?

Number 4, let’s go!

Were the reforms an improvement or do you prefer how things were under Mao?

Really simple question, and this is the third time I’ve asked it. And you will ignore it for a third time, because you types have no answer to it.

I have no interest in engaging with any of that complete nonsense you just posted.

So much projection. Literally you just see a bad thing about the US and accuse China of it based on nothing

Let’s ignore recent history because if you go back you see the enormous loss of life due to shitty policies backed up by propaganda and lies.

Is there a statute of limitations? If a country is at peace for a hundred years, but it was at war before that, is it “cherry picking” to point that out? What about a thousand years? Absolutely ridiculous, just full on comical.

If you have come to terms that China’s ruling party engaged in a cultural revolution costing millions of lives to just become what they literally fought against that is good for you

Do you actually know anything about the cultural revolution? Much of the violence and chaos was caused by independent, student-led militias. Naturally, there were calls for the central government to provide a greater degree of stability afterward.

Also, completely failed to answer my question. Were the reforms an improvement or do you prefer how things were under Mao? It has to be one or the other, or else you’re speaking in bad faith (which you obviously are).

If you recognize that they engage in imperialism and genocide that is good.

I don’t believe claims without evidence, no.

Lol what? So wars never end by that logic. The US is still engaged in the American Civil War.

Fuck off.