stumbled upon this gem while compiling resources for super secret chapo project #42069, thought I'd share

  • TankieTanuki [he/him]
    ·
    4 years ago

    Do you casually use “neoliberal” as an insult, even though nobody has spotted a neoliberal in the wild since Gary Hart’s 1984 presidential campaign?

    I stopped reading there.

  • vorenza [any]
    ·
    edit-2
    4 years ago

    Left out of Chapo’s two-paragraph summation of the Korean War was the small matter that it was the North that invaded the South, with Joseph Stalin’s assent, raising a real concern about the Soviet Union’s imperialist designs. Failing to check Stalin’s aggression would have had global implications for the democratic world, even though South Korea wasn’t there yet.

    Euggggghhhhhhhhhh

    Edit: I keep reading it and it keeps on giving

    We don’t learn about how the Clinton-era crime bill dramatically reduced domestic violence and banned assault weapons, and how increased incarceration was driven far more by state than by federal policies.

    Also unmentioned is how the Obama administration later helped liberalize criminal justice and reduce incarceration, including by enacting bipartisan (gasp) legislation to reduce racially discriminatory disparities in crack versus powder cocaine sentencing

    How can you write these parts back to back without seeing the obvious contradiction?

    • Sushi_Desires
      ·
      4 years ago

      Failing to check Stalin’s aggression would have had global implications for the democratic world, even though South Korea wasn’t there yet.

      If we hadn't nuked two cities in Japan despite having intel that the emperor intended to surrender, who knows what Stalin would have done!

  • CoralMarks [he/him]
    ·
    edit-2
    4 years ago

    They make bank by selling you a candy-coated version of socialism, one that may offend real socialists even more than liberal gruel-peddlers like myself.

    At least the author identifies himself correctly.

    Edit:

    The answer, of course, is that geopolitics is complicated and often lacks clear-cut moral choices. Containment of the Soviet Union made sense overall even if it didn’t justify intervention in certain places, like Vietnam. Ever since America’s birth, we have grappled with the tension between our stated ideals of freedom and our government’s sometimes illiberal actions—some justifiable, some horrific—taken out of self-interest. Cherry-picking the bad data points, oversimplifying the complex and ignoring the good is a great way to slap together what the authors themselves label “potted history.” At least, when others do it.

    This is pretty funny because in the sentence before this moral posturing and his pleading for being super nuanced he basically summarized Stalin as a mass murderer on par with Hitler, in literally one sentence.

    But what do I know ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

    • RNAi [he/him]
      ·
      4 years ago

      Ah the nuance understander logged on

    • Ketamine_device_tech [none/use name]
      ·
      4 years ago

      Ever since America’s birth, we have grappled with the tension between our stated ideals of freedom and our government’s sometimes illiberal actions

      No tension, they're both genocidal imperialism

  • RNAi [he/him]
    ·
    4 years ago

    Damn that dude is so annoyingly stupid.

  • Baader [he/him]
    ·
    4 years ago

    Cliffs: War good, ussr makes imperialism, those poor dictators had a right to live, too. Oh, and Stalin bad, of course.

    • invalidusernamelol [he/him]
      ·
      4 years ago

      Criticizing it as mediocre is different than criticizing it for not sucking Obama's dick and implying that the USSR maybe wasn't so bad.

  • GnastyGnuts [he/him]
    ·
    4 years ago

    Didn't they specifically rip on this guy in the book, for writing this kind of shit? Also, I remember shitlibs and chuds posting this around for a bit, like "this guy crying owns you, actually."