That it’s trivially easy for them to just casually decide to do a genocide with no input or oversight from any democratic process that could hold them accountable or allow the people to actually control what our foreign policy is.

It’s actually old hat. Users on r/cth (where hexbear came from) were catching admin bans for upvoting the “wrong” posts years ago.

What was wrong about them?

they often approve of the racial genocides, hunting down of the lgbt and other morally reprehensible stuff this authoritarian regimes did.

K.

And that in itself is a reason why the intelligence community cannot be allowed to exist in its current form.

As I said, communists/Marxists. Marx was an “authoritarian” socialist, and by far the largest strain of Marxism in the world is “Stalinism,” aka Marxism-Leninism, the second largest probably being Marxism-Leninism-Maoism.

And, as I said, it’s derogatory, which suggests the people saying it view such strains of thought as “tyrannical.” So no part of your correction was at all necessary.

And I think it’s funny that you’re blatantly lying about what other people believe, and your response to that is, “Ha! Not every word that comes out of my mouth is a lie, only lots of them!”

Of course, the classic “don’t ask, don’t tell” of the national security state. The careerists don’t want oversight and the president wants plausible deniability so they’re left to just do whatever tf they want with no democratic accountability whatsoever.

Despite his contributions, he was forced to undergo chemical castration because of his sexuality, so it was a pretty big deal.

due to choices made by the Indonesian government

If you knew anything at all about the thing you’re talking about, the democratically elected Indonesian government were some of the ones being targeted in the genocide, by far-right groups who were able to overthrow it due to US backing. Absolutely disgusting to try to blame this on the Indonesians and trying to absolve the US of guilt.

If I go through your post history, what’s the over-under I’ll find you blaming Russia for the rise of the far-right in the US?

Yeah, but that resulted in John Tyler who was a pro-slavery democrat in all but name. Can’t really win.

I agree with most of this, but slave owners could dream of a lot of violence.

I have never seen anybody on any platform anywhere defend Pol Pot.

The reason to hate Carter is that a lot of the economic policies attributed to Reagan had their beginnings under Carter.

The post WWII economic consensus was Keynesianism, but beginning around the time of Nixon there was an economic phenomenon called “stagflation,” which refers high unemployment at the same time as high inflation, something that isn’t supposed to be possible under Keynesianism, which advocates confronting high unemployment with injecting money into the economy, and then reducing those injections when employment comes back down. Nixon attempted to address the problem with price controls as a short-term solution, Ford’s idea was just asking people to spend less, but Carter was the one who made the decision to view inflation as a bigger problem than unemployment and began moving towards Neoliberalism.

The big difference between Carter and Reagan was branding. Carter branded the policy terribly which is to say he was honest about it. Work was going to become more alienating and purchasing power would decrease, but it’s ok, because we as a society will just have to pursue meaning outside of the economic sphere, making do with less, cultivating out personal virtue. There’s likely a connection between Carter and the right’s meme of, “You will own nothing and be happy.”

Reagan has much better branding for these policies, which is to say he lied. Look at how cheap we’re gonna make everything! You’re gonna be able to buy so much stuff, it’s gonna be great, let’s party and celebrate capitalism and consumerism! Of course, with wages divorced from productivity and the decline of the power of organized labor, purchasing power would decrease, but the effects of that would take time to fully manifest.

There were a wave of wildcat strikes during this period but unions had already defanged themselves, they kicked out all the communists and the leadership sold out, because from the New Deal era up to this point things were going fine.

Reagan definitely bears a lot of the blame but there wasn’t a huge difference in economic policy, the democrats didn’t really have anything to propose as an alternative and voters weren’t given much of a choice about it.

It means they can make people see more ads.

Read On Authority by Engles.

It’s bullshit, as I always say, “if someone claims something happened on the fediverse without providing a link, they’re lying.” This didn’t happen on the fediverse but that rule also applies to r/cth. Like the way a lot of people found it was by crybullies making shit up and complaining about it and then people would check it out and see that it wasn’t at all like what they claimed.

Reddit never gave any actual reason for banning r/cth, the mods tried to communicate and offered to work with them and never got a response. Even at the time, there was no way to prove what content was responsible so the narrative the community went with was “advocating violence against slaveowners.”

The closest you get to what they’re saying is that there were somewhat problematic jokes about “white genocide” and “forced bimbofication,” mocking the right for taking such things seriously. The site wasn’t really all that tankie, really, it aimed to be a big tent leftist shitposting community and most people were just into Bernie, while also having a sense of humor and not putting up with crybullies (the main reason Redditors hated it).

Derogatory term accusing someone of being a communist/Marxist.

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…

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.