1. If someone claims something happened on the fediverse without providing a link, they’re lying.
  2. Downvotes mean I’m right.
  3. It’s always Zenz. Every time.
  • 3 Posts
  • 405 Comments
Joined 7 months ago
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Cake day: April 30th, 2024

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  • What a fascinating standard.

    I’m curious, does this mean that you would consider China to be absolved of responsibility for arming Pol Pot, who used their weapons to murder millions of innocent people, on the basis that they never expressly told him to do it, and “merely” kept arming him while it was clear that that was what he was doing? Because I’m pretty sure that kind of apologia would catch you a ban even in the tankiest of tankie spaces, and rightly so. But switch out China and Pol Pot for the US and Netanyahu, and dronies consider not taking that position to be “misinformation.”


  • Why are americans so fuckin dumb? Instead of pointing their fingers at millions of trump voters, they are pointing it at people with empathy for having anti-genocider stance.

    It’s because of do-gooder derogotation, and generally not caring about winning or learning from mistakes so long as they can save face and protect their egos.

    Do-gooder derogation is a phenomenon where a person’s morally motivated behavior leads to them being perceived negatively by others.

    One possible reason for do-gooder derogation is ‘anticipated moral reproach’. This describes a threat to one’s moral standing and to their sense of self-worth.

    Research suggests that since people are highly sensitive to any criticism or challenge to their morals, they are more likely to put down the source of this ‘threat’.




  • Right, I don’t deny that Harris was less evil on other issues, but I do not subscribe to the ideology of lesser-evilism. Just because one side is more evil doesn’t mean that the other side is worth supporting when they’re both irredeemably evil genocidal psychopaths who deserve eternal torture in the deepest circle of hell. Lesser-evilism doesn’t make sense from either a moral or strategic standpoint.

    There’s a social experiment that’s been studied where the researchers give two people $100 to split, but the first person makes one offer on how to split it, and if the second person doesn’t agree, then neither of them get anything. If lesser-evilism was correct, then what would happen is that the first person would offer a $99-$1 split and the second person would accept, because $1 is a lesser evil than $0. But that’s not what actually happens. The reality is that most people have a certain minimum threshold, somewhere around $70-$30, and below that they’ll tell the other person to get fucked.

    This is not really an irrational behavior, though it may appear so in the context of the experiment. For example, if the experiment were repeated multiple times with the same participants, than accepting the $1 means that you will only ever be offered $1 in future negotiations because you’ve shown you’ll accept it.

    In reality, I’m pretty sure that lesser-evilists understand this concept on some level. It’s just that either their minimum threshold does not preclude the genocide of foreigners in far away countries, or they convince themselves that the democrats aren’t actually as bad about that as they are. But for me, I do recognize that Harris is a complete monster, and I also place value on Palestinian lives, so I said no to the $99-$1 offer and now I have $0 which I fully anticipated and have no regrets over. Maybe next time they’ll come back with a reasonable offer that doesn’t include genocide.


  • she’s someone we could have talked to and could have felt the pressure of her voters.

    No, she absolutely isn’t.

    Politicians are never more receptive to voters’ concerns than just before an election. Once they have people’s votes, they tend to shift further in the direction of interests groups and the establishment. Like, for example, on the campaign trail, Obama promised to end mass surveillance and protect whistleblowers, but once he was in office, he did the opposite. Harris on the campaign trail, after the widespread campus protests, was the most pro-Palestine she would ever be, which is to say not even the slightest bit and completely unconditionally supportive of material aid to Israel.

    It used to be that politicians would promise to do good things on the campaign trail, and then usually not follow through. But now they don’t even have to promise anything, because people will just project whatever views and values they hold onto whichever candidate they like regardless of anything they say or do.

    Harris and Biden are unconditionally supportive of everything Israel does. Short of direct involvement of the US military, it’s not really possible for Trump to be meaningfully worse than that.











  • Then I don’t know why we’re even having an argument.

    I said that agencies like the CIA being competently run was a bad thing because it would mean that they’re better at doing bad shit like hunting down leftists. You accused me of not being a leftist for saying that and corrected me to say that the CIA being competently run was a bad thing because it would mean that they’re better at doing bad shit like hunting down leftists. Then I said that I don’t have any sympathy for the CIA. You accused me of not being a leftist for saying that and then said that you don’t expect me to have sympathy for the CIA. Like, what even is this conversation? You’re just agreeing with everything I say in a bizarrely combatative way.

    What’s really happening is that you’re twisting yourself into knots trying to reconcile the inherent contradiction between the obvious fact that the CIA sucks shit and the obsessive need to paint everything the Orange Man does as THE WORST POSSIBLE THING EVER and anyone who isn’t on the same page about whatever the latest story of the week is The Enemy, no matter what their actual positions are. And of course, if you can reaffirm your loyalty to the state and pass yourself off as “one of the good ones,” all the better.

    Some of us are capable of recognizing that Trump is bad without 24/7 freaking out about everything he does, to the point of this bizarre doublespeak you’re doing about how the CIA is both bad and good. All it does is discredit the left and allow people to paint us as representatives of the widely (and correctly) hated establishment, which helps Trump (ridiculously) pass himself off as an outsider, while at the same time crying wolf and discrediting the left when we call out the actually heinous shit he does.

    Of course, the US intelligence community is a much larger threat to what semblance of democracy we have than Russian intelligence could ever dream of. To say otherwise is to suggest that they lack either the capability or the willingness to interfere, both of which are absurd. The last president who seriously went against what the wanted was JFK, when he fired the guy who’s job was assassinating world leaders, then got assassinated shortly after, with the guy he fired being placed on the investigative committee into his death. Do you seriously believe that the agencies that would overthrow democratic governments around the globe if it meant a banana company could make 3% more quarterly profits didn’t put contingencies in place for Americans electing a socialist, or just anyone who would get in their way? Or do you think that Russian spies are just so much more competent that they have more influence than American spies do, even in their home field?

    Oh, but those American spies are American, is the difference, isn’t it? Nevermind which class they work for, we have to put aside all those pesky class divisions and unite on national lines against the foreigners, amirite? But, like, in a totally leftist way.


  • Yes, clearly my insufficient level of sympathy for the fucking CIA proves that I’m just a misanthrope who hates everyone.

    Or, alternatively, it’s precisely because I give a shit about the vast majority of humanity, which has been harmed by them, that I despise the CIA.

    Again, y’all’s ideology is completely incomprehensible. Anyone who’s unsympathetic towards the CIA can’t possibly be a real leftist, right? Where the hell do you even get this ideology from? Is there, like, a book I can read that makes Anarcho-CIAism make sense?