KarlBarqs [he/him, they/them]

The book is specifically about the exact opposite: Scout learns over and over that The System (the prevailing culture in America) is shit, and learns to look outside of it. She learns the “creepy weirdo” who lives next door is actually just a mentally ill man who was forced into being a hermit by the culture around her. She regularly hangs out with the ex-slave community in her town and treats them better than the adults do. She watches her father fight for the rights of a falsely accused black man.

Like no, it’s not a revolutionary book by any means. Atticus doesn’t go full John Brown on the jail to break Tom out, and yes the Finches do have a black housekeeper - shit ain’t perfect by any means. But it isn’t a book about how we must all accept the system.

Real choice is going into the cereal aisle in a grocery store and seeing eighteen different brands of HFCS all owned by the same company.

In the 50s and 60s, the easiest way to gain entry into Canada for immigration was to show a Nazi tattoo. This proved one was ideologically anti-communist and thus safe.

Great ideas like what?

Great ideas like what??

The Lib has been scratched

In what way was the Khmer Rouge not a Communist party?

In literally every way that matters. A name is just a name, a political party can call themselves anything they want, and none of their politics were communist in any way.

Granted, you’re probably one of those dipshits who thinks the Nazis were socialist, given your fixation on names.

Worse, it’s part of a myth that if someone living in China ever reads about or becomes aware of the grievances in that copypasta, the government will send a goon squad to disappear that person immediately.

Which I always found just the perfect distillation of liberal ideology: China is bad for being a repressive police state, and so we’ll use that to ruin the lives of random Chinese people

My favourite bit about the video is that the tank column is leaving Tiananmen when this guy stops them, and I always get the impression he’s essentially asking the tankers to go back to the Square.

Naturally the lib framing is that he’s blocking them from entering the Square

Yes boss, you have catastrophically misunderstood the point.

The point isn’t that people were mean tk Russia and therefore they’re allowed little a invasion as a treat. The point is that they’ve been encircled by hostile nations since the 1990s despite all attempts at overture to them, and that the encirclement continues to get worse. NATO was formed explicitly to take on Russia, and the point of this thought experiment is to try and see this not from an emotional point of view (aka Russia bad) but from a geopolitical point of view of a nation’s leader.

Go back and read my post again. If you were the leader of Russia, knowing that decades of attempted détente didn’t work and that the organization who’s express goal is to break your country apart, and that that organization is doing its best to place troops and nuclear armaments on every inch of your border, would you accept that, or would you perhaps try and prevent that?

We know what happened when the shoe was on the other foot. The US placed nuclear missiles a thousand miles from Moscow on the Black Sea. When the USSR understandably got annoyed and placed nukes in Cuba, the US was seconds away from ending the entire world despite the Soviets repeatedly saying the nukes were defensive response to the Black Sea nukes.

So if we know that the US won’t accept hostile nations arming up on their border, why do we expect others to just kowtow to that?

You’re looking at this from an emotional standpoint, not geopolitical.

NATO’s existence is why Russia js aggressive. Think on it geopolitically, not emotionally:

You’re the leader of a country. The vast majority of your western border - the half of the country most inhabited by your population - is surrounded by hostile nations. The hostilities date back a few decades to the Cold War but that ended when the previous political system of the country dissolved. You spent the first decade or so of the new political system trying to make friends with these nations, but they keep refusing, all the while portraying you in all their media as the bad guys. Any move you make on the geopolitical scale for your own nation’s sake is tarred, while similar actions by the other countries are praised. No matter what you do, you cannot please these other countries, and they continue to threaten to put military bases and nuclear weapons on your border, eventually sealing your entire western border away behind hostilities.

What the fuck is one expected to do in this situation, and if this shit was happening to the US or anywhere in Europe, you know full well they wouldn’t take it lying down. Why is there an expectation that Russia does, when the world wouldn’t?

Remember, being paid minimum wage means that they’d pay you less if they could get away with it!