I always find it interesting that using drone strikes on an objectively evil group (in this case Al Qaeda) gets so many panties get knotted…

I'm so glad that we'll always be able to trust the president to unilaterally decide which groups are evil and to use his power in the interests of the people.

I mean, can you imagine what would've happened if some bad actor got in and used those sorts of things for precedent? Like, what if a Republican president had got in and decided to, I don't know, accuse random Venezuelan fishing boats of being "narco-terrorists," and used the exact same power to kill them for sport? Just spitballing here.

But I mean, what are the odds of that, right? Surely we can trust the United States president with the power to be judge, jury, and executioner for the entire globe. This is a very sane and reasonable position, and I just can't understand why anyone would get their panties in a knot over it.

This is literally what happened before to get us to Trump, and it's on track to keep happening.

Bush was a violent extremist who started multiple wars of aggression and had people tortured in all sorts of horrific ways (some of whom were later proven innocent). But he also occasionally said not to be openly racist against all Muslims. The failure of the "War on Terror" was because of the aggression, and because of the wanton violence, torture, and disrespect for basic rights. But, the lesson people, especially on the right, took from that, was that the Bush administration lost because it was too humane, too "woke."

So they went to Trump, who was openly racist, who appointed Hegseth, who, well, is Hegseth. And he still lost in Iran. Rather than questioning whether their ideas about the effectiveness of cruelty, the right concludes that the problem was that they still weren't cruel enough.

Go back even further, it's the same shit with Vietnam. Dropping agent orange all over the place, slaughtering villages, just extreme cruelty, but the propaganda was about "nation-building," about "liberating" the Vietnamese. So when they lost, they blamed the equivalent of "woke," they blamed the limp-wristed politicians who supposedly tied the hands of the military.

When President Fuentes gets his ass kicked invading wherever the fuck, the right will just say he was too woke and will vote for someone who changed his name to Adolf Hitler. It'll continue until they start a nuclear war and end all life on earth.

Fundamentally, because right-wing ideas are just wrong and don't produce the results they expect them to, the people who hold them will grow increasingly frustrated and increasingly extreme, thinking they just need to go further and try harder, never questioning the approach itself.

It's socialism or barbarism. The "middle road" of aggression and interventionism while pretending to be nice, that's going to keep failing and the more it fails the more it fuels their narratives. We need to put an end to the aggression altogether, to put an end to foreign wars. We need to ditch the notion that our acts of violence and terror were ever driven by some kind of "benevolence," and instead denounce them for the brazen acts of imperialist plundering that they are. No war in Iran, no aid to Israel. Full stop.

This article is hilarious. What planet is the author living on?

First off, religious people generally don't give a shit about these kinds of "gotchas" or contradictions, because their beliefs and texts are full of contradictions to start with. Second, nobody expects someone like Trump, who is not a religious leader, to have exactly correct answers to theological questions. Third, nothing he said there is really all that bad.

If people are pushing back (the article is very light on actual examples), it's because the midterms, and the failed policies leading to them, have weakened his status as a "sacred cow."

The article is complete nonsense.

They also want to avoid left-wing priorities such as ending US support for Israel or abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

These people are so useless.

The people are done with being told we have to tighten our belts while watching billions of dollars be sent abroad to fund war and genocide. Before Trump, that was the message that "centrists" of both parties pushed, with regards to Afghanistan and elsewhere. Then, the Trump administration made the insane decision to attack Iran and talk publicly about how gas prices were soaring because everyone just had to tighten their belts for the sake of "liberating" the Iranians. That's the single biggest reason the Republicans got slaughtered in the midterms! Now they want to keep going all in on Israel, because it's not a "kitchen table issue?" It is absolutely a kitchen table issue!

The Democrats took a hard right shift on immigration in 2024, running as border hawks, trying to push the line that they were the ones who would actually go after immigrants, and as a result, they lost the Latino vote. Now, Trump has been sending ICE to raid workplaces, going after citizens and non-citizens alike, people live in fear going about their daily lives, businesses in Latino communities have seen their customer base either locked up or to afraid to come out. I happened to see a Latino mall the other day and there were all sorts of signs posted declaring that ICE did not have permission to enter. How on earth is this not a "kitchen table issue?" I guess didn't realize that phrase meant specifically white people's kitchen tables.

You want to argue the mandate is limited in scope and doesn't extend to "culture war" issues, fine. But they're acting like there isn't a mandate at all! If they won't address these issues, then what on earth would they be addressing?

One time this Taiwanese guy showed up to a board game group and when he found out I was sympathetic to China he told me:

If you want to know more about the cultural and historical reason causing the seemingly crazy Chinese expanding ambitions. I highly recommend you read this book. It explains why Xi is being so aggressive these years and why it’s almost inevitable. It’s not the same logic most people in the world understand. Even most Chinese people aren't aware it.

And he linked me to "The China Order" by Fei-Ling Wang. I skimmed it, and it was complete drivel.

The central thesis is that Europe developed a peaceful Westphalian model that led it to respect the sovereignty of states, throughout it's history and into the present day (somehow ignoring the entire history of colonialism, the Cold War, etc), while China's historical model was based around "tianxia" which basically means that it ruled the known world, which is why it will always be a big evil meanie out to conquer the world.

Apparently this is a whole genre. Taking random snippets from China's thousands of years of extremely varied history and picking out anything that supports the thesis that China is just inherently evil. There's tons of works with similar theses written by white people, but I really can't be assed to skim more than one, Fei-Ling immigrated from China to the US and has a doctorate, and he still writes this crap, in a university press, I can't even imagine how bad the shit written by "China watchers" and pundits gets.

What's funny to me about this is that I once watched a film made during WWII produced by the US government, "Why We Fight: The Battle for China" which made the rather dubious claim that China had, "never once waged an aggressive war in it’s 4000 years of history." Change your posture towards the US, and your entire history going back thousands of years gets rewritten.

It's just so lazy and childish to paint all of Chinese history with such a ridiculously large brush like that, it's unbelievable.

Yes, dumbass. He was the head of the head of the DoD, he was the commander-in-chief, with full authority to appoint whoever he wanted to be secretary of defense and to overrule them, literally whenever he felt like.

Do you not understand how the government works? Whatever happened to "The buck stops here?"

Trump and Hegseth made that OK to do.

Trump escalated it, but it actually goes back to Clinton if not before. From Wikipedia:

According to Clinton administration official Richard Clarke:

'extraordinary renditions', were operations to apprehend terrorists abroad, usually without the knowledge of and almost always without public acknowledgment of the host government ... The first time I proposed a snatch, in 1993, the White House Counsel, Lloyd Cutler, demanded a meeting with the President to explain how it violated international law. Clinton had seemed to be siding with Cutler until Al Gore belatedly joined the meeting, having just flown overnight from South Africa. Clinton recapped the arguments on both sides for Gore: 'Lloyd says this. Dick says that.' Gore laughed and said, 'That's a no-brainer. Of course it's a violation of international law, that's why it's a covert action. The guy is a terrorist. Go grab his ass.'

It escalated under Bush and continued under Obama, and now we're at a point where they've straight up abducted a head of state.

My personal experience is that there are plenty of people on the right or center-right who despise centrist Democrats moreso than they do progressives. Like, my parents are conservative Catholics who would never dream of saying a kind word about someone like Clinton, Biden, Pelosi, or Schumer, but with Sanders they said things like, "I disagree with him on abortion but I do think he's trying to help the country." Even my brother, who watches shit like OAN, criticized him for "not actually being that different from the rest of them." The mainstream, centrist wing of the party is a known quantity and they hate their guts, they don't agree with or trust progressives, but if they had to pick they'd rather roll the dice.

People think of politics as being a linear spectrum of left-right but for most people it's more complex than that. Some people are able to see people like Schumer for the slimeball that he is, but for whatever reason they might have a blind spot for the other side's flaws.

No idea how relevant that is to your father-in-law but I'd wonder if he even knows anything about Van Hollen other than that his name isn't Chuck Schumer.

Here is a clip posted by Forbes which has his full, unedited answer to the question, from a few months ago.

This is pure theater, unenforceable, and it wouldn't hold up in court for a second. You can't just add "no takebacksies!" to a law and make it permanent.

Most people rejected his message. They hated WoodScientist because he told the truth.

To be honest, I think there's a serious possibility, if a president attempted to dismantle the "national security" apparatus, the NSA would stage a false flag attack themselves to discredit them and protect their positions. Even if the president had hard evidence that they had done so, it's doubtful that Americans would believe it or care. There'd be back to back media coverage talking about how the move puts Americans at risk and warning of an attack, then an attack happens, people's minds would be made up in an instant, and any pushback would be seen as both treasonous and blindly loyal to the president.

Look at the Cold War and how many times the CIA manipulated elections or overthrew democratically elected leaders, just for the sake of bananas being a little cheaper from a minor country half the world away. Do people really think they didn't have contingencies in place for the possibility of a socialist president being elected, or just one who interfered with their aims? Why? Did they just have so much respect for democracy? Or did they somehow lack the capability to interfere, when they so easily did so abroad? And if they had contingencies then, what happened when to actually break that power?

The last time a president really acted against the aims of the intelligence community was when JFK fired Alan Dulles, months before he was assassinated. Dulles somehow ended up on the investigative committee into the assassination. Whether he was behind it or not, he was treated as above suspicion despite having the clearest motive.

Even if you somehow avoid getting assassinated and stop them from orchestrating a false flag, it's likely they have connections in the media they can use against you. Try to suppress that, and you're an evil authoritarian tankie. Basically any tool that the president, or that any head of state around the world, can use to survive when US spies are trying to get rid of them, is "authoritarian," which in turn can be used to justify acting against them more openly.

As far as I can tell Van Hollen is a decent choice from what's realistic at the moment. He supports M4A and at least stopping "offensive" aid to Israel. The biggest criticism I could find is just that he's deep enough in the machine to not be fully trusted, but that also means he has the experience to make the case of being qualified for the role. He's a compromise candidate between the left and right wings of the party, which is preferable to Schumer and the most that can be realistically achieved right now.

Anything short of that shows they aren’t serious about wanting to fix the damage they helped cause.

Serious? Since when do they even have a pretense of wanting to fix that damage?

Vegetables don't exist.

Through taxes, obviously.

Don't act like it's impossible. In the USSR, rent amounted to about 3% of people's incomes. This was true even relatively early on. And even Ancient Rome had a grain dole.

It's amazing that anyone could look at the level of productivity we have today in comparison to history and think that such things are impossible.

It’s really strange, we pay these people to act as our representatives full time

The amount you pay them in taxes is pocket change compared to what they get from the ruling class to not do that.

Yeah, this is part of why I've been saying that it's a silly and naive fantasy to think Trump would ever see significant legal consequences for his actions. Has been since day 1.

The Democrats' mandate, especially Democrats like Hamilton who won in a red state, is to end the war and lower gas prices. Trump did plenty of corrupt and illegal shit in his first term, Kansas still voted for him overwhelmingly three times. It's not the voters' priority. And the reason they can't "do both at the same time" is because it's not a question of having the "time" to do it, but having the political will. Hamilton would presumably like to have a chance a reelection, and going hard after Republicans is not going to appeal to Kansas voters. And you don't just need people like Hamilton, you'd need Republicans to defect and turn against their own party.

This isn't the first time it's played out this way, and I can only hope that this latest example helps people to see the system more clearly for what it is.

3. Should socialists support bourgeois-led national liberation movements?

A Caricature of Marxism and Imperialist Economism flows fairly naturally from the previous point.

In the previous text, Lenin argues that those who refuse to call for revolutionary actions against their own governments in WWI, but rather called for "neither victory nor defeat" were essentially taking the same stance as "the defense of the fatherland," and accepting the framing that fighting the war was necessary to protect the nation, to guard against defeat. After this critique, Kievsky argued that the same logic should apply to bourgeois-led national liberation movements, that to support them is to support "the defense of the fatherland."

Lenin repudiates this misunderstanding. The problem with "the defense of the fatherland" slogan is not that it is always wrong to "defend the fatherland," but rather that WWI was not actually about defending the fatherland, rather, it was about the control of various colonies. Therefore, while it is unjustifiable to adopt a position of "the defense of the fatherland" in WWI, this does not mean that we must always reject any course of action that happens to defend somebody's fatherland.

With this misunderstanding cleared up, Lenin presents the method by which we should understand conflicts: by viewing them as a continuation of policy, and by looking, on a case-by-case basis, at what dispute prior to the conflict led to the war. This does not mean looking at "who started it," as he says in Socialism and War (cited in this text):

For example, if tomorrow, Morocco were to declare war on France, India on England, Persia or China on Russia, and so forth, those would be "just," "defensive" wars, irrespective of who attacked first; and every Socialist would sympathize with the victory of the oppressed, dependent, unequal states against the oppressing, slaveowning, predatory "great" powers.

Instead of looking at conflicts in terms of who's the aggressor and who's the defender, we should look at things in terms of class, and in terms of oppressor and oppressed. Imperialist powers do not have the right to defend their sovereignty; after all, if they did, then revolution would be unjustified.

From chapter 5 of the same work:

Here, Lenin makes a remarkable point. He argues that real international solidarity requires unity of action, but not necessarily unity of rhetoric. Specifically, in the case of Norway seeking independence from Sweden, he argues that Swedish socialists, those of the oppressor nation, were correct in giving unconditional support to Norway's right to secede, that, if they had been critical of the movement and imposed conditions, then they would have been chauvinists. On the other hand, Norwegian socialists were correct to be critical and skeptical of the movement, on the basis that it was a bourgeois-led movement.

One way to think of this is two people bumping into each other on the street. If they both apologize, then there's no conflict, even though they're taking different stances on who's at fault. On the other hand, if they try to arrive at a unified line on whose fault it really was, then there may be more conflict.

Lenin notes, here and in many other works, that there should be no inherent preference for large or small nations, for breaking apart or coming together, but that such questions should be considered in terms of how to best unite the proletariat and advance socialist goals. Secession movements can be used by the bourgeoisie to "drive a wedge" between people, however, this wedge only becomes stronger when such movements are opposed by the dominant group. You might say, "if you love someone, let them free," the hope being that they will choose voluntarily to remain united.

Later, from the same chapter:

Here, Lenin provides one more condition for supporting a national liberation movement: it must not be a struggle "of the reactionary classes against imperialism and capitalism." This phrasing can generate confusion, as imperialism and capitalism are often thought of as being reactionary. But he provides the context that "capitalism is progressive compared with feudalism," meaning, the "reactionary classes" he's discussing are classes which aim to return to a feudal system, such as the aristocracy, as distinct from the bourgeoisie.

To sum up, when looking at secession or an imperfect national liberation movement, or whether a nation should be defended, we should consider the following questions:

A. Is the conflict actually about national liberation, or it really about something else?

B. Will it start WWIII?

C. Is the movement not merely flawed, but reactionary, even relative to capitalism?

D. Am I in a position to critique the movement, without engaging in chauvinism?

2. Should socialists support the "lesser evil" or "underdog" in geopolitical affairs?

Lenin writes in Socialism and War:

Here, Lenin rejects the argument that Germany should be supported in it's fight against Britain and France, regardless of the fact that Germany possessed fewer colonies than the others, because Germany was not fighting to free those colonies but rather to claim them for itself.

I have sometimes seen similar "lesser evil" arguments used to argue in favor of Russia in the modern day. But it should be understood that this particular line is inconsistent with Lenin's stances. Yes, we can today see how much of the world is dominated by the US and NATO as compared to Russia, but if (mind the if) it is conceded that Russia is fighting merely to acquire resource colonies for itself, then it would be in a similar position to Germany in WWI, and should not be supported, critically or otherwise, from a Leninist perspective.

However, we must also look at (what I consider to be one of his best and most important works) The Defeat of One's Own Government in the Imperialist War:

Here, Lenin once again rejects the idea of supporting the "lesser evil" by rejecting Trotsky's framing of his position in that way. Rather, Lenin calls for the proletariat of all belligerent countries to conduct revolutionary actions against their own governments.

Lenin concedes the fact that such revolutionary actions will benefit Germany, but this is merely a side effect. To view the conflict merely in terms of which nation comes out ahead is to engage in "the political methodology of social-patriotism." Rather, we should consider class struggle to be the foremost and most important conflict, and the conflict between the imperialist powers to be bourgeois infighting, in which whoever comes out on top is not all that important. To avoid and denounce revolutionary action out of concern of giving Germany an advantage is not remaining neutral, rather, it is taking the side of Russia, and saying that we must be so invested in Russia's victory that we must put aside our own priorities and form a class truce to protect it.

But Lenin makes a very a clear distinction between taking actions that may benefit Germany, and being ambivalent to who wins, compared to actually supporting Germany, critically or otherwise. He points out the example of the Paris Commune, which weakened France in a war against Germany, but was then attacked by Germany and defeated. While both were fighting the French state, neither set aside class conflict in order to do so. To look at the Paris Commune as being merely "fifth columnists" of Germany would be plainly ridiculous, rather, it was its own side.

1. Should socialists participate in bourgeois elections?

This question is answered in "Left"-wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder. In this work, Lenin rebukes the German communists for refusing to participate in elections.

We can see in this section that while Lenin generally calls for participation in bourgeois elections, he does so with two stipulations. First, it should be done "while you lack the strength to do away with" them, which is to say, while the masses still support such systems. Second, you must do so while "telling them the bitter truth," with the whole purpose of that participation being to "educate the backwards strata of it's own class." In cases where you are not able to speak freely, this can change the analysis.

Supporting this, we can look at Should We Boycott the State Duma?

The distinction between a "bad parliament" and the Duma, which he denounces as a "police fraud," (in today's terms, a "honeypot"), is whether it is legal to conduct agitation, to challenge the legitimacy of the body and to call for revolutionary change. Socialists should not fear the possibility of being "tainted" by participating in a flawed institution, but should be mindful of what such participation requires, and whether it means that the party line will be compromised. To abandon the truth for the sake of winning elections is, of course, opportunism, and if abandoning the truth is required to even participate in elections, then those elections should be rejected.