Jewish Zionists and Israelis certainly play a significant role, but the tail is not wagging the dog. As Biden has explained for decades, “Were there not an Israel, the United States of America would have to invent an Israel to protect her interest in the region.” Israel is America’s unsinkable aircraft carrier in West Asia. Consider also that most Zionists are not Jewish, but Christian. AIPAC Not Just for Jews Anymore

Yes, there is ample evidence that we should be distrustful of capitalist, imperialist states and the corporations & capitalists which run them. Previously. Previously.

100 gorillion dead stalin ribbentrop ate all the grain with his giant vuvuzela

/thread

🤣

• The victims of capitalism
• Engels’ Concept of Social Murder and Capitalism Today
• Social Murder: Capitalism’s Systematic and State-Organized Killing

The answer was about a vague ‘they’ wanted us to think that, but it wasn’t true anymore.

I hear the vague ‘they’ so frequently now it’s just a normal conversation.

If you want to know what “they” someone might be talking about, then ask them. Some conspiracies are very much real.

Michael Parenti, 1996, Dirty Truths: Reflections on Politics, Media, Ideology, Conspiracy, Ethnic Life and Class Power:

Almost as an article of faith, some individuals believe that conspiracies are either kooky fantasies or unimportant aberrations. To be sure, wacko conspiracy theories do exist. There are people who believe that the United States has been invaded by a secret United Nations army equipped with black helicopters, or that the country is secretly controlled by Jews or gays or feminists or black nationalists or communists or extraterrestrial aliens. But it does not logically follow that all conspiracies are imaginary.

Conspiracy is a legitimate concept in law: the collusion of two or more people pursuing illegal means to effect some illegal or immoral end. People go to jail for committing conspiratorial acts. Conspiracies are a matter of public record, and some are of real political significance. The Watergate break-in was a conspiracy, as was the Watergate cover-up, which led to Nixon’s downfall. Iran-contra was a conspiracy of immense scope, much of it still uncovered. The savings and loan scandal was described by the Justice Department as “a thousand conspiracies of fraud, theft, and bribery,” the greatest financial crime in history.

Often the term “conspiracy” is applied dismissively whenever one suggests that people who occupy positions of political and economic power are consciously dedicated to advancing their elite interests. Even when they openly profess their designs, there are those who deny that intent is involved. In 1994, the officers of the Federal Reserve announced they would pursue monetary policies designed to maintain a high level of unemployment in order to safeguard against “overheating” the economy. Like any creditor class, they preferred a deflationary course. When an acquaintance of mine mentioned this to friends, he was greeted skeptically, “Do you think the Fed bankers are deliberately trying to keep people unemployed?” In fact, not only did he think it, it was announced on the financial pages of the press. Still, his friends assumed he was imagining a conspiracy because he ascribed self-interested collusion to powerful people.

At a World Affairs Council meeting in San Francisco, I remarked to a participant that U.S. leaders were pushing hard for the reinstatement of capitalism in the former communist countries. He said, “Do you really think they carry it to that level of conscious intent?” I pointed out it was not a conjecture on my part. They have repeatedly announced their commitment to seeing that “free-market reforms” are introduced in Eastern Europe. Their economic aid is channeled almost exclusively into the private sector. The same policy holds for the monies intended for other countries. Thus, as of the end of 1995, “more than $4.5 million U.S. aid to Haiti has been put on hold because the Aristide government has failed to make progress on a program to privatize state-owned companies” (New York Times 11/25/95).

Those who suffer from conspiracy phobia are fond of saying: “Do you actually think there’s a group of people sitting around in a room plotting things?” For some reason that image is assumed to be so patently absurd as to invite only disclaimers. But where else would people of power get together – on park benches or carousels? Indeed, they meet in rooms: corporate boardrooms, Pentagon command rooms, at the Bohemian Grove, in the choice dining rooms at the best restaurants, resorts, hotels, and estates, in the many conference rooms at the White House, the NSA, the CIA, or wherever. And, yes, they consciously plot – though they call it “planning” and “strategizing” – and they do so in great secrecy, often resisting all efforts at public disclosure. No one confabulates and plans more than political and corporate elites and their hired specialists. To make the world safe for those who own it, politically active elements of the owning class have created a national security state that expends billions of dollars and enlists the efforts of vast numbers of people.

This “evil/not evil” metaphysical dichotomy is a moral framework. There are no intrinsically ”evil” people, and I would drop that moral framework.

Philosophy professor and YouTuber Hans-Georg Moeller:

• Why Sam Harris is Wrong - A Critique of Sam Harris’ “The Moral Landscape”
• If Morality Exists Everything Is Permitted. (Q&A)
• Hans-Georg Moeller - The Moral Fool: A Case for Amorality

No one abides by community rules 😞 or understands that c/asklemmy is supposed to be a clone of r/AskReddit.

1. Open-ended question

3. Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below

This is more a question for !lemmy@lemmy.ml.

IMO “developing” “masculinity”—“proper” or otherwise—is a fool’s errand. I don’t much care what various & sundry people think “masculinity” is or isn’t, and I’m not much interested in meeting the performance criteria of their varied & contradictory masculinities. I don’t hang out with the kinds of people who gatekeep gender.

Do you not even understand how time works? That Russia was feudal, and then socialist starting in the early 20^th century, and now capitalist since the late 20^th century?

Billionaires never get their asses kicked.

Under the past few Democratic admins, most of the US were complacent and they just put their faith in the imagined progressive forces of the Democratic Party to make things better. Under the Republicans, way more people get radicalized and start to look for solutions outside of electoralism.

Me eight months ago:

If Harris wins, the Democratic base will continue to sleep. You can do anything when the Dems are in the WH. It was under Trump that protesters shut down airport terminals, but under Biden the base sleeps regarding immigration & asylum. That’s what Glenn Greenwald and I learned from the GWB to Obama transition: the Dems sleep when their team is in office. Greenwald “changed” from hero to villain without changing the least bit; the only difference was who was in office. Unlike the Dem-aligned media, he didn’t go to sleep.

You can war as much as you want. You can run a fucking star chamber. You can stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody.

A little of column A, a little of column B. Masses, Elites, and Rebels: The Theory of “Brainwashing”

I don’t get it? Was this supposed to have sound that made it make sense? Or are we supposed to be familiar with this episode of Naked and Afraid?

You want them all to die for your evil cause.

TBF, most Westerners are misinformed about why the US wanted this war, so I usually don’t accuse them of being aligned with those interests. They usually imagine Ukraine as Western corporate media want them to imagine it: as a peaceful, monocultural European liberal democracy which was suddenly invaded unprovoked by an imperialist autocrat bent on conquering all of Europe.

Which Ukrainians?

• The oligarchs?
• The Banderites?
• The eastern & southern Ukrainians, who, after the Maidan coup, declared independence from an unelected government, and were subsequently terrorized by the Banderites for nearly a decade, with tacit and overt support from the Ukrainian and US governments?
• The men being pulled off the streets and pushed to the front lines against their will?

.
Previously. Previously.

When you have to go back 93 years to the Great Depression to find an example, you’ve made my point.

FDR did what he did to save capitalism from the threat of socialist revolution, and politicians have spent the last three generations clawing back the concessions he had made to socialist & labor agitators. They also purged socialists from labor unions, and they purged and even assassinated communists, to avoid any such thing happening again.

Chris Hedges, America: The Farewell Tour:

The New Deal, as Franklin Delano Roosevelt said, saved capitalism. It was put in place because socialists were a strong and serious threat. The oligarchs understood that with the breakdown of capitalism—something I expect we will again witness in our lifetimes—there was a possibility of a socialist revolution. They did not want to lose their wealth and power. Roosevelt, writing to a friend in 1930, said there was “no question in my mind that it is time for the country to become fairly radical for at least one generation. History shows that where this occurs occasionally, nations are saved from revolution.” In other words, Roosevelt went to his fellow oligarchs and said, “Hand over some of your money or you will lose all your money in a revolution.” And they complied. That is how the government created fifteen million jobs, Social Security, unemployment benefits, and public works projects. The capitalists did not do this because the suffering of the masses moved them to pity. They did this because they were scared.

I just think its swell that leftist is now cisgender heternormative and white.

If you’d developed class consciousness, you’d understand why neither party enacts progressive policies despite their popularity. Previously:

The US government was never not captured by the bourgeoisie, because the US was born of a bourgeois revolution[1]. The wealthy, white, male, land-owning, largely slave-owning Founding Fathers constructed a bourgeois state with “checks and balances” against the “tyranny of the majority”. It was never meant to represent the majority—the working class—and it never has, despite eventually allowing women and non-whites (at least those not disenfranchised by the carceral system) to vote. BBC: [Princeton & Northwestern] Study: US is an oligarchy, not a democracy