The way the bipartisan “foreign policy wonk” world builds up its own elaborate, totally fictitious, moral ecology that always presents the US as bumbling democracy-promoters is truly something. This Vox “explainer” video is just promotional collateral for weapons contractors
Don’t have time to do a complete breakdown because there’s so many lies, omissions and bullshit but off the top of my head
1. Totally ignores extortion racket NATO, LatAm “alliances” are based on 2. Totally ignores scores of informal (but very obviously real) dictator allies
3. Totally sanitizes and glosses over US aggression in the Middle East 4. Erases millions of Palestinians living in open air prisons 5. Ignores the 4-7 million dead Laotians, Vietnamese, Cambodians, Koreans needed to create this “liberal world order”
6. No mention of the dozen or so bloody coups the US carried out to “contain communism” which, more often than not is just CIA-speak for “suppress the popular will of the masses of landless poor” 7. No mention NATO’s budget went UP under Trump
8. Blood red Russia and China are always presented as aggressor, the US is just reluctantly defending its “allies” & always “lagging behind” (of course) 9. No discussion at all of a potential global order not based on zero sum aggression w/ China and Russia. Simply not an option
Just look at how Vox visualizes the US invasion of Iraq/Afghanistan (1 million+ dead) vs Russia’s invasion of Ukraine (13K dead). US gets subtle yellow curved line, Russia gets cartoon tanks and blood red. The whole video is like this, a CIA PowerPoint with high production values
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reason there was so much hostility to Sanders campaign was ideological but it was also not. There’s a gentlemen’s agreement of silence around the revolving door of dem politics and corporate consultancy/PR/think tank world and Sanders surrogates we’re sometimes softly critical of
this, which is the single biggest taboo in that world. There has to be a general cultural acceptability of being “progressive” while working with, for, being funded by, and going in and out of Amazon, Lockheed, Walmart, Uber, etc. to call this out is to undermine the gravy train
Which is central to professional democratic politics. Warren FP advisors came from Cohen Group and Brunswick Group both of which work for Saudi butcher regime. It’s so baked in even “anti-corruption” progressives don’t care. Sanders sometimes gently poke at this which implicitly
A truly amazing piece of US govt stenography from the NYT. 1900 words on how the Evil Chinese and Russians are trying to steal US vaccine research then when they address the obvious follow up “is the US stealing vaccine research?” they say, uh, maybe but it’s totally on accident!
Reminder that the most fundamental axiom of American “foreign policy” and “national security” reporting is the US can never be an aggressor. Ever. They must always been RESPONDING to aggression. They are perpetually bumbling around trying to keep up with primary mover bad actors.
All missile systems are defensive missile systems, all propaganda is counter propaganda, all war budgets are presented as being in response to “emerging aggression”. We can never draw first blood by definition
this article claims CN argued "complaints about cancel culture are a matter of rich & powerful celebrities complaining about being justly criticized." The is false. What we argue is The Harpers Letter™ is mostly whiny celebrities because it objectively is. Big difference!
This is like if we were to say "Pompeo is cynically wielding the language of human rights to demonize Iran" and someone said we loathed human rights as such. The power dynamics and motives of the person evoking these abstract concepts is CENTRAL to the discussion. Intent matters.
Because I’m a thin-skinned weirdo I want to talk about this for a minute.
This is very much correct. Dems embracing Law and Order Lite is superficially attractive to the rudderless mercenaries running Bidens campaign but is totally incoherent and—like a saluting John Kerry going after Bush for doing jingoism badly—is a weird half measure doomed to fail
Trump’s venality & narcissism has caused 10,000s of excess covid deaths, shut down society & wrecked the economy. Why Biden would center anything else until Nov is beyond me. I’m strategy trolling here but it seems obvious to me playing on republicans home turf is always a loser
“Trump is ACTUALLY the one causing [accept rightwing premise of runaway crime and urban centers on fire here]” is a variation on “Trump is ACTUALLY the one who loves dictators and wants to marry China”, a dum dum gotcha that’s only impressive to soulless Georgetown graduates
Looting Discourse providing cheap, moralizing sister souljah points for liberals without any regard to the broader arguments being made here, namely that our pearl clutching around "looting" is arbitrary, heavily informed by racism, and centers symptom rather than disease.
the strategic argument (which invariably follows the fake moral one & ALWAYS cites Wasow's dubious research) is largely incidental though I think it's worth noting that we wouldn't be having any of these conversations if the Minneapolis police station wasn't burned down. Which...
... is less an endorsement of looting as a tactic and more an absolutely scathing indictment on the liberal order and its horrific failure to channel popular unrest and meaningfully improve the lives of black people in this country.