they'll openly say that america is great because "we" dominate the globe through force and that is what makes our lives great and it needs to stay that way

I don't think it's quite this, certainly not in lib circles, and I don't think it's even common among Republicans. The justification for empire comes more in the form of "every non-ally is an evil authoritarian nightmare country that's impoverished and backward and has a rogue government that will kill untold numbers of people because they're evil." And would you rather have us running the show, or them?? Throw in a sprinkling of "they will greet us as liberators" where appropriate.

There's a real resistance to thinking of America as an empire. A ton of propaganda effort is poured into the idea that America is fundamentally good, and the bad parts were either isolated lapses or regrettably necessary to keep the barbarian foreigners from winning.

USA is special in their minds because of how willingly cruel we can be/have been.

It's very much the opposite. The propaganda narrative of American Exceptionalism is that the U.S. is morally superior. We aren't peasants ruled by some far off king, we rule ourselves with a democracy! Society isn't dominated by aristocratic failsons, your success or failure is based on merit! There's so much opportunity here, anyone can make it if they work hard! Capitalism raises all boats! We never had anything so gauche as an empire, we managed a bunch of territory for a while but either granted them independence or made them states! We're the only country to win a bunch of land after a major war and give most of it up!

Of course the reality is far different, but that's the American Exceptionalism narrative. The whole idea is that we aren't just another great power, we're the good guys. A shining city on a hill.

Today, Biden could:

• End all U.S. military support for Israel
• Veto any bill that contains one cent of funding for Israel
• Publically call a genocide a genocide
• Direct U.S. agencies to cancel contracts with companies that work with Israel, citing existing U.S. human rights laws
• Join the ICJ case against Israel
• Arrest Netanyahu's son Yair, who's just chilling in Miami
• Direct the National Guard to protect anti-genocide protesters
• Clean house at the State Department and other NatSec agencies to fire the people who have supported this genocide most vociferously
• Use the vast overseas surveillance power of the U.S. to document Israeli atrocities

How quickly would this stop?

And that's not even considering options like a decapitation strike on the Israeli government, which should absolutely be on the table to stop a genocide.

That lady is a casualty of the right-wing media sphere. She didn't come up with shit like bikes causing four-mile traffic jams; she was propagandized. She bears some responsibility for being gullible, but what kind of tools did her civics class give her to see through this?

Under a better government, she'd have started with better education and there wouldn't be a firehose of reactionary media pointed at her 24/7.

Huey Newton was not what you would call a good speaker. In fact, he had a kind of high pitched monotonous voice and his rambling for three hours about the negation of the negation was sheer disaster. People walked out in droves. Instead of criticizing what was happening, most of the Party members defended it. When I said that Huey needed speaking lessons they jumped down my throat. When Huey changed his title from defense minister to the ridiculous "Supreme Commander" and then to the even more ridiculous "Supreme Servant," damn near nobody said a word. That was one of the big problem in the Party. Criticism and self-criticism were not encouraged, and the little that was given often was not taken seriously. Constructive criticism and self-criticism are extremely important for any revolutionary organization. Without them, people tend to drown in their mistakes, and not learn from them.

One thing I see fairly often on here is the idea that trying to refine the presentation of leftist ideas = ceding ground to liberals, or watering leftist ideas down. The importance of good presentation is somewhere between "extremely helpful" and "absolutely crucial."

The BPP seems to have left a lot of potential untapped because they didn't care enough about how people received their ideas. We should learn from that.

“In Ukraine we have a saying that not everyone can become a lawyer, but a lawyer can become anyone,” he says.

Least pompous lawyer

Pick one: Russia is running on fumes, or Russia should have won a year ago.

The coherent opinion here is that it's a slow, grinding war and the side that has lost more and more territory as it continued will continue to do so.

This has been the narrative since shortly after the war began. All that's happened since is Russia has slowly advanced.

Taking everything you say at face value, the options for Ukraine are:

1. Take a deal that maybe you can't trust, but it at least gives you time to breathe.
2. Keep fighting, and with the war going how it is eventually lose more than what you've already lost.
3. Attempt to draw other states into the conflict so that you have a shot at what might be considered a victory, likely years more down the road under the best of circumstances.

There is no justification for 2, and 3 is highly unlikely -- if other states haven't entered the war already, they're not going to do so now.

This isn't capitulation, this is cutting your losses while you have something left to hold onto.

Do you have anything of substance to add?

:smuglord: "you're from Hexbear" isn't an argument

Even assuming Russian shells are lower quality (and you have absolutely zero evidence of that), a shitload of weapons that are lower quality can still beat you.

Since taking office in 2021, Biden has yet to meet the Dalai Lama. As a candidate in 2020, Biden criticised Donald Trump for being the only US president in three decades who had neither met nor spoken to the Tibetan spiritual leader.

Where's the Chinese figure from?

Domestic terrorist

Lmao there isn't even a shred of a suggestion that this guy is a terrorist

This seems like one where waiting for all the facts to come out is a good idea

I'm guessing there are women in it without

Zoolander is pretty funny, but world renowned actor?

A great lesson to apply to all sorts of organizations. You actually have to put in time and effort to develop people and have someone capable and popular to hand projects over to.

Even adjusting for inflation, it's common to raise prices to increase revenue (consumer expenditures). There are business people all over the world right now drawing up graphs of how much total revenue they can generate at different price points, and low price/mass sales is not a good approach for many companies.

This is an important point, because prices are set largely by what people are willing to pay, not costs + whatever margin a company picks, for example. Tons of right-wing media pretends industry does rudimentary cost + margin pricing to push talking points like "if our business has to pay one cent more in taxes or wages that will ultimately be paid by consumers," which is preposterous theoretically and has been disproven by real data over and over.