Ok, I’d really like to know what this image has to do with classical conditioning then.

This pathway from A to B is so full of twists and turns, I never know what’s going to come next.

The level of smugness is completely off the charts.

You literally didn’t respond to any of my counterarguments at all. Not a single word. All you did was lay out an opening position and instantly declare victory, over and over.

Listen kid, I’m all for not killing brown people by the millions too. I’m glad we agree on that.

If you support American imperialism, then yes you are. You can pretend to have a problem with the more grotesque elements necessary to maintain your goals all you like, your criticism is purely rhetorical, and even then extremely soft.

“I only support US global hegemony, but I’m opposed to the bad things done to promote US global hegemony (only after they’re already done and can no longer be changed, of course)”

You are not the CEO of Raytheon, you’re a smug petite-bourgeois who stupidly thinks your interests have more in common with the CEO of Raytheon than with the people of Afghanistan. You’ve probably sold your soul for their blood money and become a loyal fascist ghoul, or if you haven’t yet, it’s what you aspire to.

And yes, in fact, an Amazon worker is a loaded representation of “the people.”

It absolutely is not. It’s an extremely common job. The second biggest employer in the US next to Walmart.

so you can continue to ignore how thoroughly it was put down?

It wasn’t put down at all, least of all not thoroughly. You just act like it was because you’re a smug asshole who thinks you’re better than everyone because you align with the “smart” establishment, completely ignoring actual reality and material class interests.

I hope some day you find yourself on the receiving end of what you support.

And in the meantime, their tax money has to go to support it, and the military equipment that’s produced for the war is brought home and given to police, where it can be used against protests and labor organizing. All in the name of “cheaper foreign goods,” which also means that it won’t be as profitable to produce goods domestically. Fucking Reaganite, supply side economics. Hey, notice how in the time we’ve been doing the thing you want, wages have become completely divorced from productivity and everything’s getting more expensive anyway?

“BOOM!” wow you really owned me, yeah you really showed me how stupid I am for thinking we shouldn’t kill millions of random brown people in the Middle East. Calling neoliberals like you the moderate wing of fascism is being way too generous, you’re literally just fascists.

Also, calling an Amazon worker “a cherry picked example” is so fucking revealing about which class you belong to. If you know a hundred employed people, on average, one of them would be currently working at Amazon - unless, of course, you don’t interact with the poors.

Of course, they are ignoring the fact that our alliances add up to American world domination, which has uniquely tremendous economic benefits for the US.

It has tremendous economic benefits for the ruling class. And since the ruling class is the direct enemy of the people, the more they benefit, the more it hurts us.

The only people who actually benefit from the empire are politicians and Raytheon executives. Please explain to me how the average person working in an Amazon warehouse benefitted from, how much their “personal reality depended on,” shit like the invasion of Afghanistan.

There’s a lot of diversity of opinion between leftists and liberals. Generally speaking, conservatives don’t contribute anything and drag down the quality of debate because they are openly anti-intellectual, and their presence also drives away people who are actually worth having. The only thing that would happen if there were more conservatives on here would be more cable news tier screaming matches and more verbal attacks on minorities. Liberals still only want to talk and think at a cable news level, but at least they aren’t openly hateful and anti-intellectual.

People are more likely to change their minds or have productive conversations when they approach a topic from the same basic values and beliefs about the world, like if two people agree on the goal of uplifting the global proletariat, they can discuss how best to go about it, but if one person’s goal is to uplift the global proletariat and the other’s is, idk, to drop minorities out of helicopters, then both are just going to be screaming at each other. Not only that, but if two people are discussing how to uplift the poor while the other guy’s in the room, it’s going to have a negative effect on their ability to do so, because they’ll constantly have to worry about everything they say getting attacked by dumb, right-wing arguments. Imagine two doctors trying to discuss the nuances of their profession in the same room as an antivax nutjob.

I’d really like to know what in this image relates to Stalin.

I’m not a conservative but there’s a logic to it beyond this, “because Putin!” circlejerk nonsense. Tariffs are a reaction against Neoliberalism and the economic intelligencia that has fucked everyone over. Many of them blame NAFTA and the offshoring of union jobs to other countries with cheaper labor and fewer protections, and they think they can bring them back through tariffs.

Many of these people understand well that they have been fucked, but can’t really name capitalism directly because it’s a sacred cow. Still they’re going to react poorly to “the establishment” telling them they’re dumb and wrong, and that includes libs screaming at them that they’re “serving Putin” without even understanding what they’re actually trying to do.

Tariffs aren’t going to bring those jobs back, at least not without significant subsidies that the government will never do. Also, for the record, those jobs have raised the living conditions of the people they went to, and are one of the reasons China was able to lift 800 million people out of extreme poverty in the past 40 years, but the pitch of, “You might not be able to find a decent job, but hey, at least a poor Chinese rice farmer can afford a washing machine now,” doesn’t exactly go over well with the right. We should be focusing on the super-rich who have enough hoarded wealth to make everyone rich, regardless of national borders and whatnot, but they see that as communism, because it is communism.

Ultimately, tariffs are a way of rebelling against an economic orthodoxy that isn’t working for a growing number of people and they fit into the nationalist narratives about why things are so bad (because of foreigners) without having to name capitalism itself as the problem.

This follows a long historical trend in America where people don’t want the government to do anything ever but also need the government to do things to address crises and allow society to function so we have to come up with convoluted approaches that “don’t count” as government interference, for whatever reason. For example, the New Deal was too restrained to actually end the Depression, but once WWII happened we could take the gloves off with government spending (on the military) which was economically necessary, and since then, military bases have served as an inefficient and corrupt way for the government to infuse cash into local communities by paying people to just walk around with guns in like Nebraska. This goes all the way back to people like Jefferson, who absolutely hated the idea of big government but also casually doubled the size of the country with the Louisiana Purchase. There’s also the classic psychology of, “Keep your damn, government hands off my social security!” A big reason American politics are insane is because there is a battle in everyone’s mind between ideology and material interests, and the way in which material interests are persued is roundabout, convoluted, and ineffective, because everyone’s trying to avoid being/sounding like a communist.

Honestly the worst thing Lincoln ever did was choosing Johnson as his VP. Even then, I learned recently that he asked a different (better) guy, Benjamin Butler, to be VP but he turned him down. Had he lived to do Reconstruction, we might have more to critique, certainly he’d have done better than Johnson (not a high bar), but since he died he’s off the hook for figuring that one out.

You could also criticize him for not being committed enough to ending slavery from the start. But really, other than the mass hangings of the Dakotas (which could’ve been worse but was still not great), most criticism of him is just Lost Causers whining about “authoritarianism” by freeing the slaves and expanding the scope and power of the federal government as was necessary to free the slaves.

Yeah, nobody at that time knew slavery was wrong. Well, I mean, except for all the slaves, obviously, they knew, but there was no way for them to get their perspective heard because they were cut out of the political process. Who cut them out of the process? Well, uh, well you see…

I’ll believe Trump actually intends to cut the military when he does it and not a minute sooner. People on both sides like to pretend he’s an isolationist but military spending only went up in his first term. Likely, he’s just going to pivot to China.

Ofc it’s congress who sets the budget so he can just quietly sign off on the increases the same way he quietly gives tax cuts to the rich.

What they think they’re doing and what they’re actually doing are two different questions. What they’re aiming to do is keep things trucking along while making as much profit as possible, more or less the same as most politicians, but with a bit more of a realpolitic approach. There is no long term plan, and that goes for basically anyone remotely near to the levers of power. What we have is a system of competing groups all singularly focused on maximizing their profits for the next quarter, nobody’s actually at the helm and it’s an open question whether anyone could take the helm and alter the course from the natural progression determined by systemic forces.

Where we are actually headed, regardless of who’s in charge, is a matter of several inconvertible facts. First, the US is clearly in decline and will eventually lost its spot as global hegemon, at this point, there is a serious risk that it will start WWIII in response, as Americans are not ones to accept defeat gracefully. Second, climate change will render more and more areas in developing nations unstable or uninhabitable, causing a major refugee crisis which has already started and is going to get considerably worse. What measures will be taken to maintain the dividing lines that keep people from poor countries out of rich countries is another question, and it may well be answered with genocide.

If, by some miracle, cooler heads prevail and we don’t start WWIII, and you’re lucky enough to have been born in a rich country, then we will likely just see things get gradually and progressively worse. But it will be the kind of apocalypse where you still have to go to work. Day to day life will carry on, just with more uncomfortable things you have to push out of mind, more frequent shootings, the reemergence of all kinds diseases and more pandemics that you’ll be expected to work through. There isn’t going to be a tipping point that causes a revolution, nor are the elites going to unveil a secret plot to make everyone eat bugs or whatever. You’re just going to be working longer hours, affording less, retiring later (if at all), and probably having to navigate and even more bullshit process for applying for jobs. Going further into this sort of “boring dystopia” is almost certainly where we’re headed.

The two most important political priorities, arguably the only two priorities that really matter, are demilitarization andopposing war with China, and opposing genocide of foreigners/refugees/immigrants. These are the things we will be facing, perhaps within the next 10 years (but if not then certainly later), and if we aren’t able to organize resistance along those lines, things are going to get very ugly. Actually stopping the decline is very unrealistic/implausible and has been for some time.

I was raised Catholic but rejected it pretty much immediately when I reached the age of reason (~13 or so).

So all I have to do is listen to and obey everything my parents, teachers, and religious leaders tell me and I’ll go to heaven, but, if I had been born into a Muslim family in one of the countries we were bombing, doing that would get me sent to Hell and I need to reject everything I was taught, get on a plane, randomly walk into the right church, and believe everything they tell me. Oh, and if I was like some random Chinese farmer a thousand years before planes were invented, I guess I’m just fucked. Yeah somehow I don’t believe that an all-good perfectly-just god would have every soul play fucking roulette to determine what their chances in life will be of getting into heaven.

It wasn’t until much later that I learned about the history of this contradiction, which goes back to a 400’s debate between Augustine and Pelagius regarding original sin. Pelagius argued that it was theoretically possible, but incredibly difficult, to live a life free of sin and therefore not need Jesus’ forgiveness. He was also critical of the way Christians were integrating with the Roman empire, with all the same practices but now the social climbers called themselves Christian to win the emperor’s favor while otherwise doing all the same shit they would otherwise. Augustine rejected this, arguing that the Father would not sacrifice the Son unless it was strictly necessary, furthermore, Pelagius’ arguments would undermine the authority of the church (this was stated explicitly). Augustine invented the concept of original sin as something passed down through generations (despite this making zero sense), cited a mistranslated passage from scripture to support it, and used that to explain how even someone who lived a perfectly innocent life deserved to go to hell. This included, of course, fetuses. It was the Church’s position for a very long time that if you have an abortion, or even a miscarriage, then your baby’s soul is burning in hell.

What’s particularly funny to me about this is that, after Pelagius was denounced as a heretic for saying people needed to actually live virtuously instead of just relying on Jesus to forgive them, he became so reviled that people were often accused of “semi-Pelagianism.” All through the Reformation, everyone was accusing each other of being “semi-Pelagians” and trying to position themselves as the true inheritors of the Augustinian tradition. It wasn’t until relatively recently that anyone started saying, “Hey, maybe the Augustinian position is actually kinda fucked up.”

Historically speaking, in most cases where the state has had loose control the “justice” enforced by populations hasn’t been pretty. The idea of decentralized community enforcement is only able to be romanticized because it is distant, and it’s distant because it fucking sucks. Lynchings, witch burnings, and especially feuds and unending cycles of retributive violence - although the places they have happened in were not stateless, they primarily happened in areas where state control was loose.

Feuds are the natural consequence of a lack of centralized authority. If a Hatfield goes out and kills someone, then the McCoy’s deliver “decentralized community justice” by killing the murderer. Except the Hatfield’s say their guy was innocent and the accusation was a pretext, the McCoy’s are the real killers, so they go out and deliver “decentralized community justice” by killing a McCoy. And so on and so on for generations until everybody’s forgotten what even started it.

The only thing that actually puts a stop to that is the big bad state coming in and saying, “Anytime anyone murders anyone, it is an offense against me. No more “settling the score,” the score is settled now because I say it is, and if either of you keep this up you will be charged.”

But it’s not just the historical examples, which I’m sure “won’t count” for whatever reason - the effect is also observable in game theory.

In the case of the “Iterated Prisoner’s Delimma,” the most effective strategy is “tit for tat,” where defection is punished with defection and cooperation is rewarded with cooperation, which tends to result in cooperation with others following the same strategy. But what happens when we expand beyond two players?

For example, a game with a hundred players where everyone can put money in a pot, and the pot is doubled and then redistributed equally to everyone. In this case, it’s impossible to do “tit for tat” because punishing defection with defection means defecting against everyone else, who would them try to punish you for defecting, and so on. In this case, the most effective strategy is to contribute nothing, and it’s only a matter of time before everyone stops contributing.

This is a basic collective action problem, applicable to many irl situations, and the way to solve it is, again, to have a big bad centralized authority come in and tell everyone they have to contribute to the pot whether they like it or not. “The pot” could mean social services, infrastructure, common defense, etc.

a fairly significant sign they are an ally.

And the US funding and training the other groups was “a fairly significant sign that they were allies,” but you excluded them based on them not technically/formally being allies. If you wanna use that standard, then “fairly significant signs” are irrelevant, the question is whether they have signed a formal military alliance, as in, NATO. As Ukraine is not in NATO, they aren’t allied. You don’t have to read into the signs, it’s an objective fact.

“Security guarantees” aren’t alliances. Or if they are, then we’re using the term informally, and it’s therefore valid to talk about it in the context of funding and training people.

Live by the technicality, die by the technicality. You don’t get to have it both ways.

The Soviet Union was never an expansionist project in the military sense (they wanted to spread the revolution abroad, such as by assisting the Republicans in Spain and giving weapons to the Vietnamese in their anti-imperialist struggle)

I don’t think this distinction mattered to the capitalists. Whether we’re talking about military expansion or about supporting a socialist revolution in Germany, the capitalists didn’t want it to happen and Hitler could serve as bulwark against both. Had he kept to his own borders, Britain and France would’ve been perfectly satisfied with that result. Instead, because he invaded Poland, a country he, again, would have had to go through to reach the USSR, they declared war. I really want to emphasize and repeat this point: If Britain and France wanted Hitler to invade the USSR, what physical route was he supposed to take?

The fact that all of these western leaders talk of the USSR using the Molotov-Ribbentrop as an “odious but necessary defensive measure”, proves to me that they understood that the USSR wasn’t something they needed to be militarily defended of by a weaponized Germany acting as a buffer, hence that can’t be understood as Germany’s role in the situation in my opinion.

But, as you mentioned, the Soviets had supported the Republicans in Spain - even if they were too vulnerable to launch a military invasion of Germany, there was a possibility of them supporting a revolution in Germany, and Germany of course was politically unstable. The capitalists already had their “win” of the German communists being defeated and the class conflict appearing to stabilize, that’s plenty of villainous motivation on its own.

It seems completely implausible to me that they wanted Hitler to invade but then when he started moving his borders closer to making that possible, they suddenly flipped out and did a 180 and declared war instead.

We signed treaties with a government that was overthrown, and “signing a treaty” does not make a nation an ally. You seem to be the one confused about what an ally is. There was no formal alliance, just informal support, the same kind given to the people who you claim don’t count because they were never allies.

Britain and France also had an alliance with Czechoslovakia, which they sacrificed. I’m very confused about where exactly Germany was supposed to invade from without a shared border, and the fact that Britain and France had an alliance with Poland in the first place contradicts the idea that they wanted Germany to invade the USSR.

Of course there was no love between them and the USSR and the capitalists were persuing material interests and all, but there was also a widespread hope/belief that WWI was “the war to end all wars.” “Peace in Europe” was a major political selling point.

I read all of your quotes and none of them seem to support your narrative over mine. My only point of disagreement with you is whether Britain and France wanted Germany to invade the Soviet Union, not about the Soviet assessment of the situation. It’s not even that big of a disagreement, I agree that they wanted to use Hitler but it’s clear they wanted to keep him on a leash and have him serve as a first line of defense, not offense. It shouldn’t be that hard to believe that the powers that be wanted to preserve the status quo and their position in it rather than throwing everything into chaos.

You make the point yourself that they didn’t want “The Nazis to get too big” but if they invaded the Soviets and emerged victorious, they’d be much bigger and pose a major threat to the other Allies (of course, there was also the possibility the USSR won, which would also pose a threat).

since they wanted the Nazis to invade the Soviet Union.

I’d dispute that based on the fact that they declared war on Germany immediately when Hitler invaded Poland, dispite the fact that he was closing the buffer to the USSR. The capitalists’ real hope was that Hitler would be more of a bulwark, a guard dog who would be content suppressing communists within Germany’s own borders and being militarized and prepared in case the USSR tried to expand. Hitler was granted a lot of leeway in that hope, and it’s possible he misread that as either weakness or wanting him to attack the Soviets. But and the end of the day, if he wanted to fight the USSR, and Britain and France wanted him to fight the USSR, then he would’ve wound up fighting the USSR with little conflict with the other Allies, possibly even with their support. There’s a grain of truth to what you’re saying but imo it’s exaggerated and doesn’t fit with the facts/timeline.

Ukraine was never an ally of the US either, by that metric.