In other news

we "pandered" to regimes when we had something tangible to achieve by doing that that we thought benefited our citizens (which, I should remind you, should always strictly be the only rationale behind every political decision by state representatives).

we don't gain anything by treating a misogynistic regime in Syria with any respect, we should treat them as the uncivilized government they are and disrespect then at every occasion using our strength to force our superior and objectively preferable opinion about the fact that women are equal to men.

that's because we can so we should do it, because the end game is to westernize every human being alive

I did before you guys did because you guys never gave a **** about Qurds for example, while I do.

you are intermittently humanitarian, I am unapologetically pro western values and pro western dominance of the entire planet

Merkel's a dude, Bush was just giving him a bro-massage,

his wink afterwards when he's seated gets me every time

Luciom's sophisticated worldview, in a nutshell.

i always find it hilarious that people who've never been to various parts of the world or just passed through as a brief tourist assume a kumbaya mentality and fail to recognize just how much those people hate you for no other reason than you are not of them

i'm not talking going on a tour group and hitting the big touristy areas that are well patrolled and enforced

i'm talking leave the main touristy areas of japan and be told straight up that no foreigners are allowed in the restaurant so half the time you try to eat you need to change your plans and go somewhere else because they literally refuse to serve you, walking off the main streets in egypt and kids start throwing rocks at you, go to restaurant/shop in morocco and the staff stays out of the way while a scammer who followed you off the street attempts to scam you by posing as an employee of that business and the business owner/manager/staff just sit by and watch because the scammer will pay them if he succeeds

for example, in chinese, the name for literally every ethnic group other than han chinese has barbarian, smelly, drawf, etc baked into the characters - mao actually updated a lot of these to make them more pc, for example, the zhuang pre-Mao had a character for dog embedded in the one for them but he removed it, but the chinese still refer to jews as animals with claws, japanese as dwarfs, russians as stinky, etc

you would not believe the amount of stuff people used to casually say about me on a daily basis back when they assumed i couldn't speak chinese (most foreigners speak pretty good chinese these days so this happens less frequently) but i'd still regularly get old people attempting to spit on me on the street occasionally as well as youth gangs would gather and drive around looking for foreigners to beat up, part of "welcome to china" orientation as an expat is people would explain that never ever accept a fight with a local, even if you are 100% in the right or acting defensively because one of two things will happen:

1 one dude is baiting you into a fight and his friends are lurking there waiting for an excuse
2 even if there is not setup, other chinese are simply going to see a local fighting a foreigner and without knowing either combatant nor knowing the context of the fight, they will just blindly join in to fight the foreigner

and importantly, no matter what happened, the police are always going to rule the foreigner is at fault legally

It's your worldview too. You just don't like his rhetoric.

100%

That I personally support an "end game...to westernize every human being alive"? Nope.

I assume your point is actually that much of my (and your) western way of life supports such an end game, and there's certainly a lot of truth to that. That doesn't mean I can't make choices and support policies that run counter to it. I don't make enough of them, but I'm working on it.

He's yet to acknowledge it as rhetoric, and has instead doubled down. If he's being honest about his viewpoint, then that's a big difference, and a very problematic one.

He explicitly states the implications of Western Supremacism.

I’m glad you put it in the open thinking maga are kinda Marxist and trump a lefty with bannon .

People Can judge by themselves afterward when u speak about what is being left or right .

the fact is most people are willing to argue things based on how it sounds rather than what their heart of hearts wants

same reason why all the people who advocate for free healthcare, jobs, and support for anyone who shows up at the border is very paradoxically walking past homeless people on their way to work each day and not feeding, employing, nor housing them

it's easier to virtue signal, often done unconsciously, when you don't have to directly deal with the consequences of your stated vision

Sure, and you seem to believe there's no difference between being wholeheartedly in support of such supremacism, and participating in a western democracy in any way.

I'm not sure if by not voting, you absolve yourself of any blame, or if you recognize that not voting but still benefiting from the system is really no different.

But I can't imagine you mean that if one doesn't give up all but what they need to scrape by themselves and spend all their time directly helping, advocacy for others is virtue signalling. If not, is there a greater point here, or is it simply an observation?

well I dont believe that. but at least acknowledging the harm done by the West and realizing its further genocidal goals is pretty minimal. the thing in Syria should be ringing alarm bells for anyone who believes in human rights.

ofc I recognize that. voting is meaningless at best and often detrimental.

I cant help where I was born and I cant help that I benefit from the mass murder and rape and theft of much of the world. due to my selfishness and indoctrination, all I can really do is send some money to families being exterminated, stop buying mutual funds, and stop using Amazon and Mcdonalds.

oh and post on 2p2 😀

to be clear i genuinely like you - i think you're well principled and i don't think you're virtue signaling in bad faith, you're just not aware that's what you're doing

you are right that i'm not advocating that - that would be an unfair assessment

i'm merely highlighting the chasm between "how it should be" vs "how it will be once i'm personally involved" is often extreme and they shouldn't be

it's far easier to advocate something should be done when what is doing it is a government monolith

martha's vineyard has 20k permanent residents and 200k seasonal residents

it's one of the wealthiest and most liberal bastions in america

153k median household income, mind you that's median not average and average is always higher as it's inflated by the presence of the mega wealthy (of which martha's vineyard has plenty)
that number is for the permanent residents, it'd skew much higher if we included the season

in 2023, the median house sale was 1.5 million (with the average being 2.3 million)

in the 2024 election, only 22% of them voted for trump - they were voting for a candidate who ran on a platform of free healthcare for illegal immigrants

when they were sent a mere 49 immigrants they freak the f out and call the governor and have them shipped off the island to be interred at a military base instead

mind you, desantis sent them during the offseason, when only 20k of over 200k beds were being occupied - they still refused to welcome them in

you see this all the time - there's a massive disconnect between what people will say and vote for on a national level because it's out of sight and out of mind, that's why desantis was brilliant to send them up north to expose this hypocrisy that wealthy elites who were detached from the immigration problem were not willing to put their money where their mouth was when given the opportunity

49 immigrants bobo, that's it, that's all it took for haywire to go loose

i don't think one who votes for open borders and housing/welfare for migrants should be destitute in order to do their part, but a lot of those people would never give up their guest room nor willingly donate a thousand dollars to make it happen

I hate these two particular companies for possibly similar reasons butfor several others that arent really talked about - id of course add walmart as a major problem

But this is an area where i think lefties or left leaning dems or w/e they are called now, dont seem to grasp the implications of some of their ecomomic stances that they espouse. Its annoying AF to here chatter or policies that just continues to rek just about any business that isnt a FAANG and further monoploizes companies towards the largest.

Id love for a lefty herr o make their case on how we can succeafully bring back other businesses that have gone away in the last 5 years instead of some blanket elementary take that employers are the devil or some stupid ****

that's the worldview which has dominated the most powerful countries in the world in the last decades, I didn't invent it.

so you think it is BAD MORALLY to use every lever of power we have to stop infibulation worldwide? to stop marital rape being legal? to stop homosexuality being a crime? to stop countries to be able to arrest people without habeas corpus? because that's what westernizing humanity means.

if by "rethoric" you mean saying things I don't actually mean, no it's not rethoric.

I think we have a moral.imperatoce to use our power to change people who live under horrific regimes that don't respect unalienable human rights. and that if we were willing to use that power in full (which means being willing to kill anyone who opposes our morally superior aims at any step without regret, if he opposes violently) we would have been able to achieve that already

the matter is quite simple actually Bobo.

you either think it was moral for the north in the American civil war to kill hundreds of thousands of people in order to make it illegal for them to own slaves, or not.

if you do think it was moral to assassinate all those people to bring about slavery abolishment in the USA, then save your fake disgust at the idea it might be moral to do the same to abolish infibulation or the legality of marital rape or the criminalization of homosexuality.

if instead you think it was immoral for the north to wage war to abolish slavery then go on the record saying that. that's a coherent worldview but it goes against all western liberal tradition.

your pick.

either Lincoln was right and so I am as well, or Lincoln was a war criminal.

You were rooting for HTS a few weeks ago.

If you're referring to Luciom that's not my recollection.

he did hedge and say it was bad for the Syrians but good for the West and Israel.

anyway, the stuff in Syria is horrendous and was predicted for over 10 years by the "Tankies". I will admit I doubted them and bought into the Western narrative of Assad bad so its fine if hes gone. its def not fine.

also it turns out that a lot of footage and headlines of the prisons was fake news.

They're a country in the middle east, that alone means it's better to have a relationship. Plus they border our allies Israel and have a significant Kurd population who are our allies. On top of that, we literally funded them to overthrow Assad, so we have to deal with them like every other ME country that won't shake hands with women.

There is no way to know until we get the Hamas take.