Objection

Your "refutation" that you act like was so decisive was just reciting Reaganite supply side economic orthodoxy. And then failing to defend any criticism of it. You can't just spout Reaganite nonsense that's fucked everyone and act like it's a fucking mic drop.

The level of smugness is completely off the charts.

You literally didn't respond to any of my counterarguments at all. Not a single word. All you did was lay out an opening position and instantly declare victory, over and over.

collapsed inline media

Listen kid, I’m all for not killing brown people by the millions too. I’m glad we agree on that.

If you support American imperialism, then yes you are. You can pretend to have a problem with the more grotesque elements necessary to maintain your goals all you like, your criticism is purely rhetorical, and even then extremely soft.

"I only support US global hegemony, but I'm opposed to the bad things done to promote US global hegemony (only after they're already done and can no longer be changed, of course)"

You are not the CEO of Raytheon, you're a smug petite-bourgeois who stupidly thinks your interests have more in common with the CEO of Raytheon than with the people of Afghanistan. You've probably sold your soul for their blood money and become a loyal fascist ghoul, or if you haven't yet, it's what you aspire to.

And yes, in fact, an Amazon worker is a loaded representation of “the people.”

It absolutely is not. It's an extremely common job. The second biggest employer in the US next to Walmart.

so you can continue to ignore how thoroughly it was put down?

It wasn't put down at all, least of all not thoroughly. You just act like it was because you're a smug asshole who thinks you're better than everyone because you align with the "smart" establishment, completely ignoring actual reality and material class interests.

I hope some day you find yourself on the receiving end of what you support.

And in the meantime, their tax money has to go to support it, and the military equipment that's produced for the war is brought home and given to police, where it can be used against protests and labor organizing. All in the name of "cheaper foreign goods," which also means that it won't be as profitable to produce goods domestically. Fucking Reaganite, supply side economics. Hey, notice how in the time we've been doing the thing you want, wages have become completely divorced from productivity and everything's getting more expensive anyway?

"BOOM!" wow you really owned me, yeah you really showed me how stupid I am for thinking we shouldn't kill millions of random brown people in the Middle East. Calling neoliberals like you the moderate wing of fascism is being way too generous, you're literally just fascists.

Also, calling an Amazon worker "a cherry picked example" is so fucking revealing about which class you belong to. If you know a hundred employed people, on average, one of them would be currently working at Amazon - unless, of course, you don't interact with the poors.

Of course, they are ignoring the fact that our alliances add up to American world domination, which has uniquely tremendous economic benefits for the US.

It has tremendous economic benefits for the ruling class. And since the ruling class is the direct enemy of the people, the more they benefit, the more it hurts us.

The only people who actually benefit from the empire are politicians and Raytheon executives. Please explain to me how the average person working in an Amazon warehouse benefitted from, how much their "personal reality depended on," shit like the invasion of Afghanistan.

There's a lot of diversity of opinion between leftists and liberals. Generally speaking, conservatives don't contribute anything and drag down the quality of debate because they are openly anti-intellectual, and their presence also drives away people who are actually worth having. The only thing that would happen if there were more conservatives on here would be more cable news tier screaming matches and more verbal attacks on minorities. Liberals still only want to talk and think at a cable news level, but at least they aren't openly hateful and anti-intellectual.

People are more likely to change their minds or have productive conversations when they approach a topic from the same basic values and beliefs about the world, like if two people agree on the goal of uplifting the global proletariat, they can discuss how best to go about it, but if one person's goal is to uplift the global proletariat and the other's is, idk, to drop minorities out of helicopters, then both are just going to be screaming at each other. Not only that, but if two people are discussing how to uplift the poor while the other guy's in the room, it's going to have a negative effect on their ability to do so, because they'll constantly have to worry about everything they say getting attacked by dumb, right-wing arguments. Imagine two doctors trying to discuss the nuances of their profession in the same room as an antivax nutjob.

Bernie Sanders voted against Obama's attempt to "close Guantanamo," because all he wanted to do was close the specific location while keeping the prisoners and practices going in other locations, possibly on US soil which would've provided firmer legal precedent for it.

We have not only abandoned democracies (many of which were more democratic than Ukraine), we have actually been the ones to destroy them. Mohammad Mossadegh in Iran, Operation Condor targeting every democracy in South America, genocide in Indonesia, etc, etc. Trump's stance on Ukraine is, at worst, not doing enough to protect a democracy from external threats, but America has frequently been the external threat democracies need protection from. Don't you see how that's worse?

I'm not a conservative but there's a logic to it beyond this, "because Putin!" circlejerk nonsense. Tariffs are a reaction against Neoliberalism and the economic intelligencia that has fucked everyone over. Many of them blame NAFTA and the offshoring of union jobs to other countries with cheaper labor and fewer protections, and they think they can bring them back through tariffs.

Many of these people understand well that they have been fucked, but can't really name capitalism directly because it's a sacred cow. Still they're going to react poorly to "the establishment" telling them they're dumb and wrong, and that includes libs screaming at them that they're "serving Putin" without even understanding what they're actually trying to do.

Tariffs aren't going to bring those jobs back, at least not without significant subsidies that the government will never do. Also, for the record, those jobs have raised the living conditions of the people they went to, and are one of the reasons China was able to lift 800 million people out of extreme poverty in the past 40 years, but the pitch of, "You might not be able to find a decent job, but hey, at least a poor Chinese rice farmer can afford a washing machine now," doesn't exactly go over well with the right. We should be focusing on the super-rich who have enough hoarded wealth to make everyone rich, regardless of national borders and whatnot, but they see that as communism, because it is communism.

Ultimately, tariffs are a way of rebelling against an economic orthodoxy that isn't working for a growing number of people and they fit into the nationalist narratives about why things are so bad (because of foreigners) without having to name capitalism itself as the problem.

This follows a long historical trend in America where people don't want the government to do anything ever but also need the government to do things to address crises and allow society to function so we have to come up with convoluted approaches that "don't count" as government interference, for whatever reason. For example, the New Deal was too restrained to actually end the Depression, but once WWII happened we could take the gloves off with government spending (on the military) which was economically necessary, and since then, military bases have served as an inefficient and corrupt way for the government to infuse cash into local communities by paying people to just walk around with guns in like Nebraska. This goes all the way back to people like Jefferson, who absolutely hated the idea of big government but also casually doubled the size of the country with the Louisiana Purchase. There's also the classic psychology of, "Keep your damn, government hands off my social security!" A big reason American politics are insane is because there is a battle in everyone's mind between ideology and material interests, and the way in which material interests are persued is roundabout, convoluted, and ineffective, because everyone's trying to avoid being/sounding like a communist.

Really, because I was responded negatively to when I was just calling out misgendering.