True of other artistic mediums as well. Everyone wants their hobby to be “art” but nobody wants to actually engage critically with anything which they consume. For most people, film, literature and music are sources of cheap dopamine hits, and the artistic output of the twenty-first century shows it.

i.e., we’re bombing them again in two years

I can NOT believe I forgot about this gem.

Do they realize how out of touch they are? Rhetorical question, I know, but they’re doing that thing again they tried with Bernie. “Look at all these objectively lovely things this Stalinist puppet wants! Why would ANYONE think good things are good!? What about the RICH!?!?” Soviet cartoonists drawing pig-faced capitalists couldn’t conjure up better caricatures.

“Crash out” originally comes from AAVE, everyone else says it now because they either heard it from TikTok or through cultural osmosis.

I’m sorry, can this possibly be anything other than satire? Mads Mikkelsen?

Starts match

Scores one (1) point

“We should stop now.”

Obligatory “where are you going? I thought this was your ancestral homeland?”

Carlson: You’re a senator who’s calling for the overthrow of the government, and you don’t know anything about the country.

Cruz: No, you’re the one who doesn’t know anything about the country.

Oh my god…

Escalates

Escalates more

Escalates harder

One more time with feeling

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Telling that these grievances all center around foreign policy and trade. “We uphold the commitments we make!” YOU can uphold the commitments YOU make with MY tax dollars, I’ll just go and mind my own business.

If I were to feel inclined to fight in the streets, it would be over the unlawful deportation of my neighbors, the genocide my government is financing, or my right to live as a woman and love who I deem fit. Ukraine will simply never be on my list of priorities.

It doesn’t matter if we consider China capable of solving our crises and absolving us of our sins. Painting China as complicit in Israel’s genocide is still completely unfair. You can argue that they have not done enough to stop the bleeding, but to say they’ve made no attempts, diplomatic or otherwise, to disrupt Israel’s genocide is simply untrue. It’s also not the job of the Chinese people or their government to clean up after our messes in the first place, especially at risk to their own national security and economic development.

This kind of thinking, where major powers are culpable for all the evils of the entire world over, is rooted in the Anglo-American imperialist mindset. It makes sense for the Brits or the Yanks to feel responsible for all the suffering in the world. We are! But are Chinese people also meant to feel this way? If so, why?

Whether or not “poet” counts as a real job is irrelevant. They would’ve had to step around a few hundred factory laborers, grocery clerks, and agricultural workers to find even one. What was wrong with all these other people?

A writer/poet/editor, a graphic designer, and a “sustainability expert.” Could they not find any normal people to interview?

It’s hard to get good concessions from someone who’s already called your bluff. I don’t envy Donald, but it simply would not be me.

“We at the White House are very concerned about the antisemitic rhetoric on our college campuses, so we’re deporting all our Arab exchange students to CECOT (and the Chinese ones too for good measure). Also, how dare you criticize our neo-nazi diversity hire?”

“Maoists” are often westerners who have inherited decades of failure to achieve socialist revolutions in their own countries. They are free to spend too much time thinking about what socialism should be and could be in their heads rather than what socialism is. To many of us, socialism is simply the opposite of capitalism rather than its negation, therefore socialism must be the absence of the most hated features of capitalism in our experiences and opinions. China doesn’t always live up to these expectations.

If you’ve never actually lived under socialism, you have no frame of reference for understanding how it’s different from capitalism. If you’ve never seen anything but capitalism, you don’t know how to identify its absence. This, more than anything, is what ultras struggle with. I think that’s something we can all relate to on some level, even if some have a better handle on it than others.

So sad that their romantic vision of being settlers in occupied Palestine has been dashed. Imagine how many Arabs they could have killed together!

That is actually NOT what I was going for but I appreciate that you noticed.