Nothing really, it’s a lose-lose.

In terms of geopolitical strategy, Turkey could serve the same kind of function as Israel in terms of aiding the US in projecting regional influence.

And then morally, obviously, there is no case to be made for supporting Israel.

I guess the only real consideration is that Israel has nukes, but then so does North Korea, China, Russia etc.

This is purely ideological for Biden. If it was strategic his staffers likely wouldn’t be resigning, but they recognize that this is a product of fantacism.

He’ll only have himself to blame if he loses in November.

Utter fool.

In the future, it could power virtual avatars that render locally and don’t require video feeds—or allow anyone with similar tools to take a photo of a person found online and make them appear to say whatever they want.

…or open a dystopian hellscape of disinformation, scams and corporate police state control of information at an unprecedented scale! Three cheers for the reckless pursuit of technology for technologies sake!

Conan’s episode made me panic a little if I’m being honest, lol. It was funny (and a bit gross) but I think he also kind of blew up the format a little. He didn’t really give Sean much of an interview, he seemed very focused on the spectacle part maybe.

The democratic establishment downplays it, but people are pretty starved for non-establishment, non-corporate, left candidates. It’s quite easy to win a general if you appear convincingly progressive since, policy-wise, that’s what the majority of Americans want.

Fetterman checked those boxes pretty convincingly, especially when stood alongside some like Mehmet Oz who was the most inauthentic opponent Fetterman could’ve run against.

It’s a good object lesson for study, and progressives should use it to identify weaknesses in their strategy for identifying and lifting up genuine progressive candidates.

Sure, and I don’t see anyone on the left pulling their punches for Fetterman. The issue is this was his first election, so looking at campaign finance history (which tends to tell the real story of a candidate) wasn’t as helpful since there wasn’t any. If you look at his profile he did gather a large amount of small individual donations. Looking back, JStreet as a top funder should’ve maybe been a red flag.

He’s establishing a history now though and unfortunately that’s the only way you can know for certain with a relatively unknown quantity.

Plus the alternative was still Dr. Oz…

Who said anything about physically taking over the world? Like, yes, obviously China has imperial ambitions to expand their borders (limited only by the wests hegemony and the now undermined and faltering rules-based order) but that’s not the influence I’m talking about. I’m talking about the normalization of anti-democracy and the technologically driven hyper-fascist state. The more power and influence China gets, the more fascism thrives wherever it has roots.

North Korea also hasn’t been able to bomb a bunch of countries either, that doesn’t mean anyone but an idiot would argue they should be given more influence.

Just like Russia, there’s no global benefit to the CCP gaining more geopolitical influence, they aren’t going to “moderate” the fascist elements in the west, they’re going to inflame them in the interest of destablizing any kind of democratic norms.

Uh huh, no shit and eugenics was essentially born in the US. All information I learned here in the US.

History doesn’t change the fact that China still represents the next step towards a higher, more all-encompassing form of fascism and that your apologetics only further humanity’s movement in that direction by normalizing it.

China not having the geopolitical power to act on all of their worst inclinations does not mean those inclinations don’t exist.

Fascism can exist in more than one place.

And it can take a far more dangerous and intractable form in one place compared to another.

You are vastly, vastly understating the degree of fascist control in China, you’d have to in order to try and even begin to try and compare the US and China. You may as well try to claim that downloading Russian spyware gives you better info on the US affairs because they’re our adversary as well so they must be a better source of information than anything in the US, it makes no sense.

China has a pointed interest in deceiving you, they do not have any interest in ensuring you have accurate information about the US and its history, you’re foolish to believe that they would.

There is no true information about the US on TikTok that is not available to me outside of China’s information ecosystem. Yes, you’re not going to get reliable information from corporate media or far-right outlets, but that has not stopped me from learning about the black spots in American history. In fact I was taught many of those black spots in American schools. Go ask a person in China what actually happened in Tienanmen or in Hong Kong, or Tibet or what is happening to the Uyghurs as we speak.

Here’s the difference that you are keen to ignore; The US information ecosystem is not a monolith. It’s why I can go and find sources that are reporting accurately about events in Palentine, or the protests on Columbia campuses. It’s why I learned about the Trail of Tears, the Tulsa Massacre, or The Battle of Blair Mountain in school, why I can find that kind of information freely on the Internet. There are many independent media and journalism outlets that, if I practice some basic media literacy, are not difficult to find.

By contrast, the Chinese information ecosystem is a monolith, by design. It is built so that the state has control over all information and can censor at will. They are far ahead of the US in this regard, and when you carry water for the CCP by equating them to the US, claiming they’re better or “just as bad” you are pushing us further into fascism, not out of it.

Oh, whoops, you thought I was defending the US. Not what I said, but it’s the only way you can deflect from what the Chinese government is.

China being economically destitute for the last century thanks to terrible CCP domestic policies doesn’t somehow change the fact that they represent an even darker path forward for humanity than the US. It’s not really a point that can be argued. China has hundreds of concentration camps, forced mass relocation of Tibetans and other minorities to place them in dormitories they literally can’t leave except during work hours, a national information firewall to control everything their populace sees.

Like, Xi Xinping had fucking execution vans in his lead up to power. Your brain would have to be scrubbed bloody to think China and the US represent the same thing.

I like how you pretend people weren’t sharing their experiences and politics on the million other forms of social media that exist before TikTok. As if everyone was in the dark ages. I’ve seen all the ugly things happening in the US and I don’t use chinese spyware.

China is not just a “boogie man”, it’s literally a technofascist state that tightly controls all information coming into, out of and circulating within its country. It disappears a million Uyghurs into hundreds of concentration camps and its own population is literally the only one on earth that doesn’t realize its happened. The brutalization of peaceful Hong Kong protestors was broadcast around the world and yet mainland chinese still think it was some violent uprising. People there don’t even know the truth about Tinanmen or Tibet.

But somehow that’s all a gap in your knowledge of the world…hmmm, weird must just be a coincidence that the dude who gets all his info from TikTok doesn’t understand that China has the most developed censorship and social engineering apparatus on the planet…surely they suddenly give all that up when operating TikTok in the west.

Eh, I’ll take what I can get. The CCP is a far, far worse influence than the US, their global influence should definitely be restricted wherever possible until the regime changes.

Anyone who has problems with US geopolitical behavior should easily be able to recognize the CCP as a path to an even darker fascist future for humanity.

I think people’s revulsion to Israel’s actions say otherwise. Genocide is not some foregone conclusion of human affairs, nor is it “acceptably natural”.

It’s difficult to wrap your head around evil of this depth and scale.

The obsession incels have with ensuring men are depicted as having a monopoly on physical violence has always been weird to me.

They literally killed two Iranian generals and a bunch of other officials at a consulate. So yes, Israel is trying to escalate a regional war so Bibi can keep his genocide going. Iran has actually showed pretty remarkable restraint.

It’s the same old tired play that fascists do to stay in power. Like, literally every time, and somehow people don’t catch on…

Sure, and even now establishment Democrats are also quite conservative. Biden is just a Republican from 20-30 years ago. The main difference is he plays on the “enlightened centrist” type of idiot, rather than the religious/white nationalist flavor.

The party title doesn’t mean so much as the actual policy and political philosophy.

Well, no shit, the entire strategy of conservativism at any point in history has been to prey on the dumbest demographic of humans and form them into a support base.

There are two kinds of conservatives 1) idiots 2) Grifters who prey on the idiots