What’s it like for him being in Egypt? Are people welcoming? Has he been able to find community with other Palestinians? Does he feel safe?

I thought the senator from the other time was Tom Cotton?

It reminds me of the time a senator repeatedly accused the Tiktok CEO if being Chinese while he repeatedly told him he’s Singaporean. American politicians are a bunch of racist clowns.

Is that in cash or is it the equivalent value in Afghan fighters?

As far as US liberals go I think it’s driven more by ideology than material interests. Unless you actually work in the military industrial complex, you’re unlikely to get any benefit from supporting the war in Ukraine, for instance.

In the US, there are basically two acceptable positions with regard to foreign policy:

1. The US is magnanimous and aims to be a force for good in the world, and apart from a couple hiccups and honest mistakes (mostly caused by the other side), it generally succeeds at that. We must fund the military as much as possible and oppose anyone who could challenge our hegemony so that we can keep bringing democracy and freedom to the backwards, uncivilized people of the world.

2. The US is magnanimous and aims to be a force for good in the world, and this is a bad thing on the basis that the lives of non-Americans are worthless. Trying to do good things abroad is even worse than trying to do good things at home, which is bad because it’s communism. We should fund the military as much as possible so that we can take whatever we want from anyone who can’t defend themselves and other people can’t take stuff from us.

These positions can track directly with the two prevailing historical perspectives regarding settler-colonialism. The “progressive” perspective was that the natives were only backwards, evil savages because their backwards, evil, savage culture taught them to be. You could remove a native child from their culture and raise them as a Westerner, and they could be just as civilized as any other Westerner, and their aim was to do this and seek to eradicate cultures in order to bring people into the fold of civilization. The “less progressive” perspective was that the reason they were “uncivilized” was not because of their upbringing but an inherent quality of their race. The perspective that the culture and way of life of native people is worth preserving and that Western culture is not inherently superior was not present in the discourse at all, as that would imply full-on opposition to the entire settler-colonial project.

Liberals will never restrain themselves in supporting imperialism because they believe that any opposition to their project must be grounded in racism or nationalism. They haven’t fundamentally changed or questioned their assumptions from the old times when they were eradicating native cultures, and the idea that someone could be opposed to their whole entire project on a non-self-centered basis just doesn’t compute.

Conservatives sometimes, occasionally, rarely restrain themselves because they don’t believe in that project and just want to take people’s stuff, and when you just want to take people’s stuff, then you have to consider whether their stuff is worth taking and how well defended the stuff is. There’s the most basic possible level of cost-benefit analysis, which still somehow beats liberal takes sometimes just because liberals don’t even bother with that at all.

“Suppose I’m a worker in a Retreat factory and my latest batch is behind schedule and desperately needed on the front lines…”

Time to learn how to say “I surrender” in Mandarin and start practicing yelling it as loud as I can.

I’m not in a rush, I’m just checking in on my retirement plan.

Hey news nerds, just a quick check in, are we within five years of me fragging my officer after getting drafted into WWIII, or no?

When you put the they live glasses on

Otoh the game proves that bi people make superior soldiers because they get accuracy bonuses from trying to impress everybody.

I actually enjoyed the game’s aesthetics on the basis that I saw it as reverse Orientalist. Let’s just mash WWI and WWII together, ignore how they’re each historically regarded and use a tone that is completely off, and just pick and choose whatever aesthetics we think look cool and plop whatever story we feel like into it. I genuinely don’t think there’s any deeper meaning to the bad guys being geographically Russian because that would require closer attention and faithfulness to the setting than anything else about the game indicates.

If you wanna say that Orientalism is still bad when directed towards Europe, that’s totally valid and fair, and my take is probably bad from an objective standpoint, however, I just personally enjoyed seeing a perspective capable of treating it that way. The concept of “WWI but with the tone of Fire Emblem” is just so alien that my curiosity overrides my sense of it being inappropriate.

I may not like Hitler, but it just goes to show that even he can see how uniquely bad Trump is.

Wait, didn’t you hear the news? The ghost of Hitler endorsed Kamala Harris and she boasted about it on Twitter, supposedly it’s going to win over a bunch of moderate Republicans.

I like fusion so I’m gonna go with the one on the bottom left

It’s literally just like, “It’s fine if my beliefs never manifest into any difference in material action, just so long as I know I’m holding the correct ideas in my head.” Peak idealism.

I never had it with voting but admittedly the same kind of logic held me back from going vegan for a long time, like, “I feel bad about eating meat so that makes it less bad when I do it, somehow.”

https://tankie.tube/w/diZe8gctzSd7SWwuw8BCNg

Wrote this like 3 years ago in response to someone on