Thomas S. Kønig

If you have a preference for the western empire because it benefits your immediate material interests, that’s fine, but you don’t have to frame it under this big brother protector narrative.

How does a wolf abandon its prey to the wolves? That is a meaningless distinction.

Deport the lazy parasites stealing our jobs!

The bourgeoisie.

And now with the ICE protests we’re seeing how mercilessly any meaningfully state-antagonistic organized resistance to injustice will be crushed even on the smallest regional scale. Give the kettle a minute and democracy manifest will come home to roost.

Even then, what of black Wall Street, what of the MOVE bombing. To me it seems purely by equal parts happenstance and malicious design that the U.S. has evaded directing its violence inwards because just enough of its subjects are either hyperpolarized, domesticated, complacent, or all of the above.

They’re not nicknamed Black Sites for their reputation for being transparent or humane.

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So aside from this answer, the hill you want to die on now is that the Iranians have (statement of fact) taken brutality itself to a new level, because you speculate (shit you made up) they MIGHT be doing cartoonishly evil stuff you saw in a SAW movie once?

Hell, Abu Ghraib we only learned of because investigative reporters somehow dug up smoking-gun-level photo evidence, because the ex-detainees (many innocent), when they told the story previously, were painted as scheming terrorists doing a woe-is-me sympathy tour in the West.

John Kiriakou *literally* was not allowed to report the CIA’s torture program at Guantanamo Bay to the public, which is the comparison you’re drawing.

That’s why, as I said, he went to prison for it. Because the government did not allow him to share it. “It” being the brutality of said government.

I like very specific.

Is it trans rights when you can get HRT but the person you elected bombs trans people all over the world and makes deals with reactionary governments that directly persecute them?

I hate it here. Late stage capitalism sucks, dude.

Is it morally best if the poor only suffer a little bit on some society-allowance, or is it morally best that everyone’s entitled to not give a shit about the poor so they can fend for themselves but pay marginally lower tax rate — provided they don’t die in the concrete jungle first?

Is a pride parade a bad woke virtue signal or is it good but only when it is pro-capitalist, pro-imperial, family-friendly to conservatives and the gays remember to smile for the zookeepers and show us how grateful they are we finally stopped murdering and othering them after like a millennium?

And it co-opts every-fucking-thing. Is it feminism when liberal upper-class women can exploit au pairs so they can go girl boss, or is that a step too far and feminism is instead only when a blind recruitment policy lets her sit in Nestlé’s C-suite to exploit child slaves and doom our planet?

Of all of liberalism’s innumerable crimes, it may well be its universalization of political illiteracy which dooms us all. There’s only one true political divide left: Neoclassical Econ or Neokeynesian Econ.

Everything else is derivative down-stream fluff from those or banal culture war idpol.

As much as I detest the Iranian regime and its repression of the population, I worry these kinds of bombastic action movie narratives minimize part and parcel western brutality on the world stage and romanticizes a severely ahistorical notion of our moral purity.

Of all of liberalism’s innumerable crimes, it may well be its universalization of political illiteracy which dooms us all. There’s only one true political divide left: Neoclassical Econ or Neokeynesian Econ.

Everything else is derivative down-stream fluff from those or banal culture war idpol.

If I punch kids, and you punch kids, and I say you’re the devil for it, and someone asks me how I claim the moral high ground when I myself punch kids too, that person is neither defending you nor punching kids. They’re protesting unevenly applied moral standards when NOBODY should punch kids.

They may. Wouldn’t surprise me. I’m asking what, in any meaningful sense, is “worse”. Insofar as brutality exists on a scale, what’s worse?

You do know we only learned of the CIA’s torture program at Abu-Ghraib because of a whistleblower, right? And that he went to prison for blowing said whistle?

It’s this but in real life and there’s nobody across the table trying to convince him otherwise because they all agree

Does it really? I certainly do not want to defend the Iranian government, but does it really take brutality to “a whole new level”? Does that exist?

What comes after attaching a naked, wet and freezing person’s exposed genitalia to an electrical generator with alligator clips for shits and giggles?

As much as I detest the Iranian regime and its repression of the population, I worry these kinds of bombastic action movie narratives minimize part and parcel western brutality on the world stage and romanticizes a severely ahistorical notion of our moral purity.

Does it really? I certainly do not want to defend the Iranian government, but does it really take brutality to “a whole new level”? Does that exist?

What comes after attaching a naked, wet and freezing person’s exposed genitalia to an electrical generator with alligator clips for shits and giggles?

if god didn’t want us being furries why did he give us a TAILbone, atheists

I bought an activated charcoal face mask and applied it but then got interrupted by an electrician ringing my door bell because he had to do some maintenance in the stairwell

there’s now a non-zero probability he thinks I just walk around at home doing recreational blackface

neither of which hold a candle to the sequel of Barbie: Race & Ride, a.k.a. Barbie: horse adventures - wild horse rescue, a.k.a. game of the year every year in perpetuity until the heat death of the universe

Ironically, of course, Fukuyama himself shares this sentiment, following up “end of history” with “liberalism and its discontents,” which, for all its genuinely interesting insights, could provocatively be summed up as “turns out history is back”

my best guess is that Fukuyama has irredeemably poisoned the well for several generations, because if you genuinely cannot conceptualize a third option to “cancer for some or cancer for all” it makes sense to ride or die for “cancer for some”.

Few things irk me more than people trying to shame me into going to bat for their top-down anointed feckless company man candidate lest I hate women and trans people and love fascism and then have the gall to call me defeatist if I say no and suggest votes should be earned, not pledged prima facie.

This it what is so immoral about representative democracy, particularly, systems with "first past the post" rules. It hardens democracy, often into binary choices, forcing voters to choose the lesser evil, rather than making the personal choice they deem to be good. 1/2