Heresy in the 17th century actually wasn’t as big a deal as it was in the past. This was a couple centuries after the Protestant Reformation shattered the Catholic hold on Europe, leading to decades of war in which millions died, eventually resulting in the shitloads-of-denominations we see today, where almost all of them are “heretics” of some sort to all the other ones. I mean, modern day Mormonism isn’t really even a monotheistic religion anymore. This all has its roots in the breaking of Catholic domination back in the early 1500s.

Moon landing is even more recent. Didn’t like Buzz Aldrin or one of them deck a guy one time for insulting him and getting up in his face about faking it all?

One major issue with this: The left and right are fighting for different things.

The far right would ultimately like a military dictatorship of sorts. In order to pull this off in a way the majority of the public would accept, they need people to be afraid, to have violent enemies that can only be defeated with organized military force.

The left, on the other hand, is fighting for civilian rule. This is based on the idea that laws need to apply to everyone, and that military force should not be used to suppress the public at large. In order to pull this off, it must be true that military force applied domestically is not actually necessary to have a functioning society.

Because these goals are fundamentally different, the methods of accomplishing them become different by necessity. Some methods strengthen and empower the goals of the right, other methods strengthen and empower the left. These are distinct, and it’s very important not to be manipulated into playing into the hands of your opponent.

You don’t need to have full mutually assured destruction for nukes to operate as a deterrent. It’s a matter of degrees, rather than some sort of all-or-nothing safety.

Fair point. I suppose I would draw a distinction between education and athletics, though I know full well that is difficult to disentangle.

I think it’s important to remember that it’s not a decision for governments to make, but for sports governing bodies. The government has no need to or benefit from legislating how sports competitions are arranged.

Digital feudalism… I suppose that does make it easier to call up large armies of peasant levies when you need to wage an information war.

Also just fear of going out of business by alienating any potential customers. When your revenues have been steadily dropping for decades now and it’s starting to look like you’re going the way of Kodak, it becomes more tempting to pander to the middle and try to avoid pissing as many people off as possible. This in turn means you can’t speak the truth anymore.

They have f-16s now too. This allows them to use western air-to-air missiles in addition to air-to-ground, increasing the variety of options people have for giving them stuff.

A relatively small minority of people through history have wanted wars. But if we look at the past 4000 years, we nonetheless find many, many wars, the vast majority of which people have never even heard the name of. You cannot escape this by simply disarming yourself.

What did you think “make America great again” meant? That “again” is a keyword.

My fav is just that the sun is, all by itself, 99% of the total mass of our solar system. Most of the rest of that 1% is Jupiter.

It’s the “I know you are, but what am I?” defense. A real elementary school classic.

If true, does that mean he’s going to stand up against any attempts Trump makes to trample on personal liberties? As I recall, when he spoke at the Libertarian Convention, their reaction indicated they remembered what they (and he) really stand for.

https://youtu.be/dhgjnAxD6-k

You very well might be able to, actually, though I’m not going to guarantee it. Regardless though, if the line is commonly parroted by a certain group, then the claims are not particularly wild, are they?

And yes, there are lots of very useful tips that can identify most propaganda based off of common traits. This is not foolproof though. Still very good to know, though.

Nothing about the term tankie does or should deny their right to live. Advocating for the deaths of people who disagree with you is profoundly against everything liberalism (the freedom-based guiding principle of what we’d call “the west”) stands for.

To the contrary, as a pretty standard liberal American I fully support their rights to advocate for whatever they wish. Since there is no realistic way to accurately and objectively determine what is or is not propaganda, I support their right to create that as well.

Regarding the utility of recognizing where propaganda comes from, it can occasionally be useful to know, as it tends to follow certain patterns based on the goals of whoever created it.

Actually the goal of terms like that is efficiency. We could say “supporter of aggressively implemented authoritarian communism” if we wanted, but tankie is shorter.

Helps if you have the background to understand the specifics of what different “isms” support and thus what they disagree on that leads them into genuinely fighting each other. A fascist, a lib and a tankie really do have very core disagreements that cannot be realistically compromised on. At the most basic, a fascist wants a unified society with a strict hierarchy, the tankie wants a unified society with no hierarchy, the lib doesn’t want any kind of unified society. If any one of these people gets their way, the other two do not, which leads to conflict.

Left/right are more economic arguments with some wiggle room due to being more or less a spectrum, but also tend to feature significant real world disagreements.

Anyways, I do agree that it’s important to have conversations about these underlying details, but when you’re talking amongst other people who know the background already, some shorthand terms are going to start appearing. Since these are overarching governance philosophies that any person can adopt or discard at will, they’re also a little different from more inherent divisions, like ethnicity for instance. Being a tankie, lib or fascist is a choice, where being Arabic or gay or something is not.

Somebody needs to put this guy in charge of all the branding elements.

I think he’s going to go down in history as one of the most successful civilian wartime leaders, ever. I truly cannot even begin to imagine how much he has had to learn on the job, and it has certainly taken years off his lifespan. Pictures of him now vs pictures of him pre-war could almost be a father and his son. But his sheer effectiveness at rallying his people and the world has been nothing short of legendary.

“I need ammo, not a ride” is fully equivalent to “We will fight on the beaches”. So far I consider him in that same tier as the titans of history. This, I think, is what historical figures look like when you’re living alongside them, certainly mired in propaganda and debate, but with a certain shine that is hard to deny.

That’s a region. It’s also not what you said, you said rust bowl. You know bowls and belts are different things, right? Belts hold your pants up, bowls are dishes you eat food out of.