“People used to live to be 900 years old.”

They also used to be able to fly, according to my dad, who was not happy with me when I laughed it off because I thought he was joking.

This is a really dumb perspective, in general. By that logic I could say, “If Holocaust denialism is so baseless, then why does it get censored so much? If there’s no truth to it, wouldn’t you want people talking about it?” No, it’s censored because it is baseless, because we don’t want people spreading around long debunked misinformation. Just because something is untrue doesn’t mean that people repeating it can’t create confusion, doubt, etc.

I mean, look at all the bullshit propaganda the right puts out, and because they have so much money backing it, strengthening their signal, it’s all some people ever hear, and if some spends thousands of hours watching Fox News, and the other side gets like 20 minutes once a year at Thanksgiving, which narrative they go with is going to have very little to do with what’s actually true.

That same far-right media sphere has spread out from the US to all sorts of small countries around the world. If you look at them, you’ll often find right-wingers in those countries screaming about shit that doesn’t even apply to their country, because it’s what this propaganda network told them to be mad about. I mean, fucking anti-mask protests in Japan, for example.

Regardless of your perspective on Tienanmen Square, this logic of, “If it’s not true then there’s no reason to censor it” doesn’t really hold up.

Kiseido Go Server (KGS)

If KGS’s UI looks like it hasn’t been updated in 20 years, that’s because it’s already perfect. There’s no ads, it’s purely functional, it does exactly what it needs to do and nothing more. If you click on “KGS Plus” you have the option to spend money on lectures given by human pros. Otherwise it’s completely free, and it’s still an active go server that’s been around forever.

Elad Barashi, who has worked in the Israeli entertainment industry for several years, sparked outrage after posting on X: “Good morning, let there be a Shoa (Holocaust) in Gaza.”

In another post, he wrote, “I can’t understand the people here in the State of Israel who don’t want to fill Gaza with gas showers… or train cars… and finish this story! Let there be a Holocaust in Gaza.”

They have demonstrated that they are not “leftists” by defending the cruelties of Israel. There is no “infighting” here.

“Bans all criticism of Israel” is not the title. The title is that they are banning criticism of Israel, which is true. It’s also true that if someone bans oranges, then they are “banning fruits,” it would only be untrue if they said, “banning all fruits.”

The title does leave it ambiguous in a way that people might think it extends to all criticism, but that’s not actually what it says.

The best way to prevent another Holocaust is to make it illegal for anyone to ever warn that anything happening is similar to the Holocaust or to the Nazis and should be stopped before it goes further. Brilliant. Genius.

Equal rights for all, but with Jewish people being more equal than everyone else.

The main thing is the bigotry and making marginalized people feel unwelcome and unsafe. Having trans people and Nazis existing in the same space isn’t really tenable, in practice, most marginalized people would rather be in a space where their existence and basic rights aren’t up for debate and where they won’t receive slurs and threats of violence. So the question is, who would you rather have in your community, oppressor or oppressed?

Of course, this person applies this standard blindly by including “tankies” as “right-wingers.” She’s just abusing a valid argument by using it to dismiss any perspective she doesn’t like, left or right, bigoted or accepting, bad faith or good faith, as “right-wing.”

Vietnam. Decent enough government and standard of living, and they whooped America’s ass so bad that it’d be political suicide to go back there. I mean, what kind of timeline would we have to be on for someone to be stupid enough to… hmm.

Considering that fucking Greenland is caught up in it now, idk that anywhere is safe.

I’ll believe Trump actually intends to cut the military when he does it and not a minute sooner. People on both sides like to pretend he’s an isolationist but military spending only went up in his first term. Likely, he’s just going to pivot to China.

Ofc it’s congress who sets the budget so he can just quietly sign off on the increases the same way he quietly gives tax cuts to the rich.

What they think they’re doing and what they’re actually doing are two different questions. What they’re aiming to do is keep things trucking along while making as much profit as possible, more or less the same as most politicians, but with a bit more of a realpolitic approach. There is no long term plan, and that goes for basically anyone remotely near to the levers of power. What we have is a system of competing groups all singularly focused on maximizing their profits for the next quarter, nobody’s actually at the helm and it’s an open question whether anyone could take the helm and alter the course from the natural progression determined by systemic forces.

Where we are actually headed, regardless of who’s in charge, is a matter of several inconvertible facts. First, the US is clearly in decline and will eventually lost its spot as global hegemon, at this point, there is a serious risk that it will start WWIII in response, as Americans are not ones to accept defeat gracefully. Second, climate change will render more and more areas in developing nations unstable or uninhabitable, causing a major refugee crisis which has already started and is going to get considerably worse. What measures will be taken to maintain the dividing lines that keep people from poor countries out of rich countries is another question, and it may well be answered with genocide.

If, by some miracle, cooler heads prevail and we don’t start WWIII, and you’re lucky enough to have been born in a rich country, then we will likely just see things get gradually and progressively worse. But it will be the kind of apocalypse where you still have to go to work. Day to day life will carry on, just with more uncomfortable things you have to push out of mind, more frequent shootings, the reemergence of all kinds diseases and more pandemics that you’ll be expected to work through. There isn’t going to be a tipping point that causes a revolution, nor are the elites going to unveil a secret plot to make everyone eat bugs or whatever. You’re just going to be working longer hours, affording less, retiring later (if at all), and probably having to navigate and even more bullshit process for applying for jobs. Going further into this sort of “boring dystopia” is almost certainly where we’re headed.

The two most important political priorities, arguably the only two priorities that really matter, are demilitarization andopposing war with China, and opposing genocide of foreigners/refugees/immigrants. These are the things we will be facing, perhaps within the next 10 years (but if not then certainly later), and if we aren’t able to organize resistance along those lines, things are going to get very ugly. Actually stopping the decline is very unrealistic/implausible and has been for some time.

I was raised Catholic but rejected it pretty much immediately when I reached the age of reason (~13 or so).

So all I have to do is listen to and obey everything my parents, teachers, and religious leaders tell me and I’ll go to heaven, but, if I had been born into a Muslim family in one of the countries we were bombing, doing that would get me sent to Hell and I need to reject everything I was taught, get on a plane, randomly walk into the right church, and believe everything they tell me. Oh, and if I was like some random Chinese farmer a thousand years before planes were invented, I guess I’m just fucked. Yeah somehow I don’t believe that an all-good perfectly-just god would have every soul play fucking roulette to determine what their chances in life will be of getting into heaven.

It wasn’t until much later that I learned about the history of this contradiction, which goes back to a 400’s debate between Augustine and Pelagius regarding original sin. Pelagius argued that it was theoretically possible, but incredibly difficult, to live a life free of sin and therefore not need Jesus’ forgiveness. He was also critical of the way Christians were integrating with the Roman empire, with all the same practices but now the social climbers called themselves Christian to win the emperor’s favor while otherwise doing all the same shit they would otherwise. Augustine rejected this, arguing that the Father would not sacrifice the Son unless it was strictly necessary, furthermore, Pelagius’ arguments would undermine the authority of the church (this was stated explicitly). Augustine invented the concept of original sin as something passed down through generations (despite this making zero sense), cited a mistranslated passage from scripture to support it, and used that to explain how even someone who lived a perfectly innocent life deserved to go to hell. This included, of course, fetuses. It was the Church’s position for a very long time that if you have an abortion, or even a miscarriage, then your baby’s soul is burning in hell.

What’s particularly funny to me about this is that, after Pelagius was denounced as a heretic for saying people needed to actually live virtuously instead of just relying on Jesus to forgive them, he became so reviled that people were often accused of “semi-Pelagianism.” All through the Reformation, everyone was accusing each other of being “semi-Pelagians” and trying to position themselves as the true inheritors of the Augustinian tradition. It wasn’t until relatively recently that anyone started saying, “Hey, maybe the Augustinian position is actually kinda fucked up.”

I’m on the side of both Palestinians and Jews, extremely opposed to the side of Zionism.

Congresswoman Sarah McBride is the one that really hurts for me. First trans member of congress at a time when that kind of representation is desperately needed. She would be a ray of hope and a rare bit of uplifting news, but she has to be a fucking Zionist. Many trans spaces I’m in want nothing to do with her over it.

Putting aside everything else, approximately when do you believe that happened?

As much as we might criticize the whole, “End of History” idea, I feel like the 90’s was the last time Americans had anything like that kind of optimism. There was a feeling that we were entering a new age of international cooperation, and although I was only a child that was something I really believed in. But we soon found new conflicts to be embroiled in a the dream has died and was proven to be foolish and naive, and now everyone across the political spectrum is highly cynical.

I’m sure that there are many cynical people in China too, but I can hardly remember the last time I saw someone who wasn’t cynical when it comes to politics. Whether or not it’s naive, it hits me on an emotional level.

China hasn’t had a war in over 40 years.

Tbh, I was shocked. Much as I’m sympathetic towards China, but I still usually look at it through a lens of realpolitik, like, “Of course they’re vying for dominance like everyone else, but at least they’re doing it through economic development instead of wars, and it’s better if there are two major powers instead of one.” Maybe that cynical perspective is more realistic, and maybe XHS users aren’t a representative sample of all Chinese people, but still, the fact that so many of the replies were so hopeful and internationalist was genuinely moving to me.