If you can afford to go to court and if you have proof.

Incredibly based. Just having someone with a voice in that chamber would be huge.

The Chinese embassy issued a response here

I don’t read French, but from Google translate, the Chinese narrative is roughly as follows: Ling Huazhan approached the embassy claiming that he had been taken in by Falun Gong and burned his passport as a protest, but had changed his mind, and was now out of money and in need of help. The embassy put him in contact with a charity that provided him with room and board, while contacting his family in China, who purchased a plane ticket for his return. Due to the delicacy of the situation and his history of mental health issues, he was accompanied to the airport, at which point he abruptly changed attitude and claimed to be being abducted, in order to create a diplomatic incident.

I’m not claiming that that narrative is true, but just describing their response.

Yes, that’s what I said at the end. The US didn’t get involved until directly attacked.

It’s notable that the US decided to get involved and to focus on the European theater, despite being attacked by Japan. But that doesn’t really tell us about motivations. It could be that the US considered Nazi ideology more dangerous than Japan’s ideology, or it’s possible they were more interested in Europe for the sake of their allies, or it could’ve been a purely strategic decision.

If he didn’t need to appease the hawks, he’d probably be dove-ish because that’s better for business, and a booming economy gets his name in the news and dollars in his pocket.

War is great for business. You just have to make sure that you’re in on the cut and that the costs are borne by other people. You get to use other people’s money through taxes to take other people’s money through plunder, and in the process you get to give lucrative contracts to military contractors and get kickbacks for it. And Trump doesn’t really benefit from a booming economy, especially since he can’t get a third term.

I’ll agree that he’s not as ideologically driven as some of the more dangerous hawks like John Bolton. But in office he was/would be surrounded with those types and can be influenced in their direction. Apathy can just as easily mean telling them, “sure, go ahead, do whatever.”

But in any case I would agree that I rate Chase Oliver well above Trump and Biden, so I’d say this is a minor disagreement.

That’s a complicated question without a clear answer. It’s hard to establish the motivations of an individual person, but much harder when you’re talking about the entire country. Generally, people were united in the war effort, but for a variety of reasons. The NYT downplayed the Holocaust and specifically tried to avoid focusing on antisemitism, in part because they were worried that people wouldn’t like the idea of fighting a war to protect Jewish people, as racism and antisemitism were very much present. On the other hand, you had people like folk singer Woody Guthrie who explicitly connected the war to anti-fascism in his songs. But there were also plenty of people and media who had been praising Hitler, before he started invading everywhere.

Basically there were lots of reasons for lots of people to dislike the Nazis, so it’s kind of hard to detangle who was motivated by what and to what degree. Generally though, if they had kept to their own borders, it’s unlikely that any other country would have invaded them just for being fascists, and many countries went through great lengths not to go to war with them, because nobody wanted to recreate the devastation of WWI. Even then the US wasn’t willing to get directly involved until it was directly attacked.

When I say libertarian, I’m referring not solely to the libertarian party, but to Republicans who hold libertarian values. I suppose I was unfair to people who actually vote libertarian.

Idk, he seems closer to a realist dove trying to appeal to hawks. He wants to invest in business, not democracy, so anything he does militarily is largely saber rattling to try to get more favorable trade deals. That’s it.

That’s the image he puts on but it’s not consistent with his record. He nearly started a war with Iran and bombed Syria and Yemen, for example. As I pointed out, his rhetoric is contradictory and contains both dove and hawk elements, but his actual governance indicates that the hawkishness is more in line with how he’ll actually behave.

But don’t vote for Trump, he’s not genuine on any issue, he just wants power and prestige.

On that we agree.

If Biden loses to Trump the only people to blame are the ones who didn’t go out to vote. If Trump loses to Biden the only people to blame are the ones who didn’t go out and vote.

Funny, I would’ve thought that the people voting for a candidate are the ones responsible for the candidate getting elected.

This is about the most incorrect analysis I can imagine.

Democrats right now would vote for Biden if he was in a coma

You would. But this core contingent of “vote blue no matter who” people is not large enough to win in the general.

Biden, unlike other potential democratic candidates is more likely to have some non trump Republicans voting for him.

Biden represents the same thing the Democrats have been offering for decades. Anyone who’s a Republican has already seen people like Biden and said, “No thanks, not interested.” Yeah he’s a centrist, but he doesn’t cut across party lines because he doesn’t bring anything new or different to the table.

The fact that media is only talking about Biden without urging trump to step down shows me the whole thing is astroturfed.

This is an absurd conspiracy theory. There have been plenty of high level Democrats calling for him to resign, as well as a significant number of Democratic voters. His debate performance raised concerns about his mental competency that everyone who isn’t self-deluding can see.

It’s completely meaningless to call for your enemy to step down. Why on earth would Trump listen to Democrats and liberal media outlets telling him to step down? What you’re suggesting is stupid and pointless, it accomplishes nothing and serves only to justify your conspiracy theory.

And? Does that contradict what I said in some way?

TIL 32% of Democrats are pushing conservative propaganda to discourage people from voting Democrat.

The “everyone who disagrees with me is a bad actor” conspiracy theories keep getting less and less plausible.

This is random and nitpicky, but can we talk about that ad’s soundtrack?

Maybe things have changed and I’m out of touch, but I thought the thing was to put suspenseful horror movie music over attack ads, you know, like the classic Michael Myers theme. The music they used is like, kind of dark, but it’s more like an action movie, like the way the bass drops at 0:33 is the part of a trailer where they’d so some really cool stunt, and around 0:50 the pace is picking up to where it’s like, trying to hype you up to see the movie. Like, it’s not that far off from the soundtrack in the trailer for Inception, where it’s like, yeah there are some dark aspects to it, but it’s still supposed to be fun and entertaining. I know I’m not the target audience, but this just left me wondering when the Kamala movie dropped, and not like, worried about some sinister plot.

The whole thing feels kinda disjointed tbh. At first the message is, “Biden is senile, Kamala is really running thing, and she’s gonna let the immigrants in, be afraid,” but then by the end the message is, “Haha, Kamala is saying all this incoherent stuff, she’s a joke!” It’s like they got distracted and lost the plot halfway through a one minute ad. I guess they’re just throwing stuff at a wall to see what sticks, but it’s very unfocused and low effort.

“And the Trump administration kept to the pact, reducing U.S. troop levels from about 13,000 to 2,500, even though the Taliban continued to attack Afghan government forces and welcomed al-Qaeda terrorists into the Taliban leadership.”

So should the withdrawal have been stopped at that point? Exactly how much longer do you think we should’ve stayed in Afghanistan?

And that criticism was always bullshit. There’s no “right” way to retreat, it was always going to play out the way it did. Journalists criticized it in bad faith, because it generated clicks and because they never actually opposed the war, because again, war is great for clicks. In reality, what happened when the US pulled out was the culmination of 20 years spent doing nothing to stabilize the country and only making the Taliban stronger.

But go ahead then, armchair strategist, and describe to me what specifically could’ve been done differently about the withdrawal that would not have resulted in things playing out the way they did.

Opposing the withdrawal is the same as supporting the war. The withdrawal was one of the only good things Biden did in his whole career and liberals will never forgive him for it. Worse yet, you want to allow Trump to claim credit for it when Biden’s the one who actually saw it through and had to deal with the flak from it.

“But what if we accidentally help too many people?”

Liberals will criticize ending a pointless 20 year war and somehow still not realize that they’re jingos.

Because suggesting your enemy do things is meaningless.

People are freaking out that the president can legally kill people now but that was essentially already the case, de facto. Obama did it via drone strikes, for example, Anwar al-Awlaki, who was involved with the Taliban but never given due process, and later his 16 year old son Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, who was never even accused of terrorism - both American citizens. Of course, Bush also set up a completely illegal system of detention without trial at Guantanamo Bay, which also included American citizens and which continued long after his term. There was also of course the illegal mass surveillance program that began under Bush and continued through Obama, Trump, and Biden, with the only legal action being against the person who exposed the crime.

In all of those cases, the Justice department simply chose not to investigate or press charges, as is within their power to do. If the president straight up shot someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue, it would be up to the Justice department to decide whether or not to prosecute, and if they say no, that’s that (though it would also be possible for congress to act via the impeachment process, which would require a majority of the house and 2/3 of the senate to be on board).

This ruling doesn’t give the president a blank check, but rather, it gives the court an easy legal argument to give the president a pass on any case they hear. The court can still rule that something wasn’t an official act. Practically speaking, before they still could have still found the president innocent for whatever bullshit reason they could come up with, but they’re now saying that they don’t even have to pretend to have a reason.

Of course, if the president wanted to start killing Supreme Court justices or other political opponents, a piece of paper was never going to be the thing that stopped that. Whether the president can order the military to gun down congress is just a question of whether the military decides to listen to them and whether anyone manages to stop them. It was always the case that if you can kill anyone who could find you guilty, you can do whatever you want. On the other side of that, even if the ruling did authorize the president to kill all of his political opponents on some technicality, he would still face the same obstacles if he tried to do it.

What the law says only matters insofar as it can be enforced, and ultimately laws represent threats made by the powerful towards the rest of us, and among the powerful the way of settling disputes is power, with legal power being but one of many forms that can take.

I didn’t say the relations were good, but they were certainly a lot better 5 years ago.

Amazing. So because the NRA met with Russian weapon manufacturers to try to get rich, it means every one of the 5.5 million NRA members has been swayed by Russian propaganda. Absolutely zero of them were legitimately just gun nuts who were always going to vote Republican because they oppose gun control, 100% of the members were swayed by Russia the moment someone on the board met with a Russian arms dealer.

I guess it becomes very easy to show that a large number of Americans have been influenced by Russia if you’re allowed to play like 6 degrees of separation like that. Why don’t we count anyone who ever used Facebook too, while we’re at it? What percentage of Americans bought a coke in 2020, while Coca-Cola was doing business in Russia? This goes way deeper than I ever imagined.