Probably not half as exhausting as being as obtuse as you

What an odd thing to write

Libs 12-year old maladjusted kids

Resorting to chauvinism whenever someone disagrees with them.

Read a book

Also Taiwan is a staging ground for a US invasion, claims sovereignty over China, has it’s airspace go far over mainland China, and so much more. Somehow China not being a fan of this is the same as when the United States coups another country because it elected someone that doesn’t align 100% with us policy.

Is it possible for more than two things being true at once? Is it in fact possible that reducing everything to “both sides bad” isn’t some supreme insight, but instead just a mantra that allows libs to support the status quo of us imperialism?

There used to be strong anti-EU movements on the left, but they’ve all died out. It’s a shame

Brexit/ukip is/was an independence movement of sorts and pretty shit.

Are two things true at once in this thread by the way? I looked for someone saying it yesterday, but no one ever said so.
I’ve got a liberal bingo I am trying to fill out.
I’m also looking for someone writing in speech affectations a la “ummm… Wo-wow did you just say that? Haha that’s uhh crazy” and if you’ve got an checks notes then that’s nice too

If Tibet was actually ever “freed” (it already is free) then that is sort of what would happen

There’s so many Types Of Guy that could make you, it’s hard to count.

And Taiwan is very vocal about having airspace that goes several hundred miles over mainland China. Taiwan is also very vocal about being a part of china, so what are you gonna do?

Also, why would I be against a full incorporation of Taiwan into China, if it has popular support? The island was occupied by the fascist Kuomintang, the party carried out a genocide on the native population and it’s only around to day because it can function as a military launching ground for the US.

What’s the actual rational explanation for why Taiwan should become an independent nation when that’s not what Taiwan wants nor what China wants and doing so would only be in the interest of the imperialist US?

If this is the kind of stuff you actually care about, then why not start with all the national sovereignty that whatever place you’re from doesn’t respect? You know, something you can actually influence, instead of doing something that just so happens to further imperialist interests?

Authoritarian is a nothing-word used to describe enemy-nations. It’s like calling their government a “regime” or their intelligence agencies “secret police” or the vice-president the “hand picked successor”.
I’ve never seen a definition - neither academic or by some farthuffing Redditor - that wasn’t so broad as to just be describing a state or so specific it wasn’t just a longer way of spelling “China”.

Every state is authoritarian. Reducing political analysis to wether a state does stuff and not what it does, why it does it, or with what amount of popular support, is top-tier liberal winecave apparatchik intelligentsia thought. No actual insights, but it makes you seem like you know stuff, if you don’t think about it at all. And going against the concept makes you seem like a villain because who wants to defend “authoritarianism”?

The definition came out in the fucking 60’s while the US was busy beating the shit out every protestor it could, yet somehow that wasn’t authoritarian.^[1]
Running around with HUAC screaming about authoritarian communism. Funding death squads, secretly approving money to royal families, forcibly relocating the poor and marginalised, all the shit the west did in Africa, all the crackdowns in west Germany, the ongoing colonialism, Robert Moses and his European copycats, shit like the syphilis and LSD experiments; all this occuring in the nations decrying the USSR - and now China - for being “authoritarian”.
Britain is a police state today; the US is a modern Prussia, but the army is replaced with 17 different types of cops; the EU is funding concentration camps for refugees abroad and I can tell you from experience the cops have pretty free reign here too. We’re all surveilled up the ass and out again, but somehow China is an authoritarian danger? I’m supposed to be afraid that TikTok tells Xi Jinping knows when It take a shit, but its completely fine that my own overlords get the same info from the billion other trackers that are everywhere? People say “two wrongs don’t make a right” in response to this, but it seems like they think one of the wrongs is pretty right, and it’s the wrong that’s hanging over our heads - while the one around the globe is something to worry about^[2]

Its the same shit as totalitarianism - incidentally both concepts popularized by Hannah Arendt - which was just a fuckass way for dumbasses to sound smart when they uniquely observed that both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union used state power to do stuff - What stuff they did apparently having no matter at all, what percentage of approval from the populace or involvement mattering neither. No, what was important was that both states Did Stuff and that meant they were the same.
Now what if you pointed out that the US Did Stuff too? Well that’s whataboutism, a clever Russian ploy to make you want to have a consistent ideological throughline in your geopolitical critique.
What if you pointed out how old colonial powers like France were still Doing Stuff?^[3] Well that’s Old Stuff so it doesn’t matter. Or it doesn’t matter because they aren’t superpowers or whatever.

Here’s someone else shitting on her better than I could https://mirror.explodie.org/Losurdo___Critique_of_Totalitarianism_(2004).pdf

If you’re not a commited anarchist then I will not hear you utter a word in favour of Authoritarianism as an academic concept.
If you claim to be one then I am going to need to see some serious dissertation on leftist theory from you, as well as proof that you actually organise in the real world, because I know there’s enough larping lemmitors who don’t want to admit they’re just libs, because they can’t stand the thought of not being a special smart little kid.
Even then I am going to shit in your mouth if you’re an anarchist and you’re more concerned or preoccupied with what china is doing rather than whatever hellhole of a nation you live in yourself.

@Saapas@piefed.zip who I can’t respond to for some reason: good point! Wish I’d mentioned that

Alternatively if you’re trying to dunk on someone have the basic respect for the audience and be either effective or original, which “two things can be true at once” is, ironically, neither.

Whoops. Read the rest of the text next time buddy.

Considering how they reacted when Putin explained basic Eastern European history to you’re probably right

I didn’t know wether the word filter would get it, so I self-censored when I shouldn’t have.
By “old age” I just meant him dying for no real reason.

You do understand how saying “two things can be true at once” as if you’re talking to an actual toddler is incredibly condescending and not a good place from whence to start a conversation, right? Have the basic respect for someone you’re talking and assume they also have object permanence.
Stepping into the room like you’re the enlightened Buddha whose shit don’t stink, because you just figured out that both Biden and Trump can be senile at the same time, only has the effect to make everyone else look at you like the idiot you are for

1. Not figuring it out earlier and
2. Behaving as if you’re presenting some novel insight.

Alternatively if you’re trying to dunk on someone have the basic respect for the audience and be either effective or original, which “two things can be true at once” is, ironically, neither.

Edit: its also an incredibly reductive way of approaching geopolitics. Reducing critique of US foreign policy to “our guy bad yes, but their guy bad also!!” is in fact what whataboutism is supposed to describe. It’s a rhetorical trick drawing a line where the only discussion about world events can be about wether one of the two things the iniator mentions is more true than another. Bring up a third thing or a more in-depth critique of one of the two pre-existing things and you’ll get drowned out.
It’s a thought-terminating cliché.

If Putin said the sky was blue, would you suddenly insist it wasn’t?

Also: “everyone I disagree with is a russian propagandist. I am the only sapient creature in the world” - You, when you’re particularly honest with yourself

It’s not a perfect metaphor, but Texas would be the the two Ukrainian states with a majority ethnic russian population that sought independence after eurromaidan

Sadly I’m looking for the specific phrase. It’s a cliché so it comes up often enough

I dunno, Russian man seems pretty sensible all things considered.
If the warzaw pact was still a thing and it had slowly been inducting south- and central American nations, despite agreements not to do so, and it was now about to induct Mexico (which had had its government couped and replaced with a pro-russian government some years before), then I think it would be pretty sensible of the US to draw a red line at mexican Warzaw pact membership and invade in order to avoid it.
Also in this analogy Texas is part of Mexico and the Mexican government has been bombing Texas for eight years, in breach of two treaties with the US.

The United States didn’t start invading and meddling in other countries until trump?