Inshallah, Iran will win this war.

Hell yeah

Thanks!

“repper”?

I also was thinking yesterday that I suspect it too! Here’s hoping that she gets to undergo the " most depressed dead-inside man to vibrant happy woman pipeline" sooner than later

I watched the video of some trans women looksmaxxmogging him the other day and it was funny, but I generally just feel bad for the guy. He had no joy, no amusement, no ability to appreciate the absurdity of the whole encounter. He just looks miserable. I don’t follow him much but what glimpses I’ve caught portray deep misery . I’m sure he’s a terrible person but it’s still pretty unsettling to behold

I thought WSWS was kind of a joke, especially with the “Socialist AI” thing they’re trying to push, but this is a very good article.

Unfortunately, as far as I can tell the Pakistani Army is owned by the USA. Imran Khan was trying to assert independence and sovereignty – pulling back from being a US base of operations against Afghanistan, trying to strengthen ties to Russia – so the Biden admin pressured the army to replace him with someone more compliant.

Hell yeah, the more text gets added the more leftister it gets (I love the little details)

They would turn the AKs in to the FBI because violence is bad and only bad guys need guns

Thank you for sharing that. I’d only known Mearsheimer from his prediction that US policy regarding Ukraine would lead to war, had no idea he was still pro other wars

I would never sleep with a military spouse (because anyone who willingly sleeps with the soldiers of the 4th Reich doesn’t deserve my head game)

Obviously I want to believe but I find it hard to.

I was thinking about the use of “scientific socialism” and “objective reality”: I think there is pretty clearly such a thing as reality, and many aspects of reality are not subjective. Like you can’t say “in my opinion the people Israel/America just blew up are actually still alive” and be taken seriously; Reality contradicts that opinion.

But, people’s feelings are very much a part of that objective reality. The grief and torment people feel, the void in their lives where the people who were taken from them should have been, those are real and that pain matters immensely. That pain destroys lives. That pain gives people incurable PTSD. That pain tortures people. That pain drives people to suicide. That pain poisons the rest of their lives. To argue that it is irrational to take people’s feelings into account is bad methodology at best, evil at worst.

idk about that so much anymore: http://archive.ph/2x19K

Things have changed in the decades after the inflation of the armed forces through conscription during the Vietnam “war” (read: Genocide) and the subsequent defeat and deflation. In the transition to a primarily volunteer force, something counterintuitive to the first-worldist left occurred. The first-worldist left expected the military to be utilized as some kind of refuge for the poor periphery of the united $tates population. However that is not what happened. Especially in the decade after 9/11, the military has transitioned into a gun club for amerikkka’s wide-eyed middle class sons. The imperialist volunteer vengeance force that was raised to fight international “terrorism” in the Muslim countries of Iraq and Afghanistan (as well as those who were trained to rain missiles on a dozen more) were less and less the victims of a “poverty draft” which had been imagined into existence by those who remembered the inequities of conscription and service in the 1960s.

This has been documented by the neo-conservative Heritage Foundation in their study on the recruitment demographics of the united $tates military, which found that only about 10-11% of the united $tates military recruits come from the poorest quintile (defined as making less than $33,000 annually), with a fourth of the military coming from areas whose median income is more than $65,000 annually.[1] They gathered this information using addresses of personnel at the time of recruitment, which has faced much criticism by those who argue for the existence of a poverty-draft. What problems do they see with this method? Well, according to the Boise Weekly the statistics are unreliable because “[m]any recruits are college dropouts who list their last address—their college dorm—when they sign up”, which they believe would provide an inflated statistical portrait of average income.[2] They assert that this is the case without actually presenting any evidence.

As for the validity of the claim that, by and large, the military is made up of college dropouts who use their college residence as their permanent address: that is already a questionable assertion. It also raises questions about the kind of people they assume are “forced into the military by poverty” who are still equipped with the financial support to move out on their own to attend university. Furthermore, their label of “uneducated” seems a hardly fitting descriptor for a military which does not accept people without a highschool diploma.[3] This is a deliberate deception; their assertions rarely contain vital evidence and rely on definitions of “education” that hardly fit the bill. Even more interestingly, this article assumes that those who do not finish college or do not attend must automatically be poor and forced into the military for that reason. This assumption is further jeopardized by the fact that most amerikans have not earned a college degree. It is true that the Heritage Foundation, being quasi-fascist troop-worshippers, have their own motives for promoting a class-collaborationist and prosperous image of the military, however we judge their study on its merits rather than the inconvenience of its results.

I appreciate that you took the time to explain, and I also regret asking for it and reading it.  I fervently disagree with almost everything you argue here but I’ll just leave it at this:

You may be surprised how many people who’ve been brutalized by the empire want – no, need – revenge in order to move on and perform some semblance of rebuilding.

No, they don’t “need” it, and this is a ridiculous idea when you look at it seriously.

Yes in fact I am looking at it seriously, more than you.  I know how I feel, and I’ve seen people on hexbear and lemmygrad and substack and elsewhere being very clear about their antagonism to the empire and their burning pain.  I consider any “leftist” who stands in the way of the oppressed taking vengeance upon their oppressors to be a peace policing collaborator at best, and I think people – and yes, I will include revolutionary heroes in this category too – are uncaring, unfeeling fools if they deny victims their deserved retribution.  The material outcome is worse than spitting in the faces of the surviving victims and pissing on the graves of the dead.

Che … was emphatic that they could not be tried by their victims, but by uninvolved people (with extensive testimony from surviving victims who wanted to offer it, of course) so that they could determine the best way of dealing with each defendant rather than have their actions dictated by maladaptive sadism (which is what this “need” for revenge fundamentally is).

Well, I guess nobody’s perfect, even Che had his flaws and made his missteps.

And fuck you for calling a need for revenge, which is the closest thing possible to justice when justice is physically impossible (or do you know of a way to bring the dead back to life?), “maladaptive sadism”.  Maladaptive, certainly, but that is a maladaptation foisted upon the victims by the oppressors’ sadism; paying that sadism back is not sadism.  Bring our loved ones back, heal them and us, pay reparations, and we’ll no longer want (need) vengeance.

Theoretically, a lot of people here are Marxists

Ok.  I’m cherry picking, but didn’t Marx say these?

We have no compassion and we ask no compassion from you. When our turn comes, we shall not make excuses for the terror.

and

Far from opposing so-called excesses, such as sacrificing to popular revenge of hated individuals or public buildings to which hateful memories are attached, such deeds must not only be tolerated, but their direction must be taken in hand, for examples’ sake."

I see how they’re different: They use a worse reframing because Wokisme didn’t get the point the first time, so I ran what I said through a respectability politics filter to rephrase my points.

Yay, I hope this happened to those pilots.  Thanks for possibly cheering me up :)

I will stress that I’m not arguing against the killing of American troops by Iran

Then what precisely are you doing with this comment? /genuinely asking

they shouldn’t be contorting their approach based on moralizing nonsense that won’t actually bring murdered children back to life.

I was not aware that killing enemy soldiers in war is “contorting one’s approach.” /genuinely sarcastic but also confused, see the original question.

As for the rest, America’s never bombed my family so I can’t speak for Iranis.  But:  idk if you actually love anyone, but I actually do want blood in recompense for the atrocities which AmeriKKKa has inflicted upon my loved ones and upon me.  NOTHING can undo the harms of the past, nothing can bring back the dead, nothing can untorture the tortured, nothing can heal the mutilated.  So at the very least, the perpetrators should not get to go on to live charmed lives of luxury and joy; their continued happiness and their lives are salt in the wound; their suffering and their deaths are at least a bitter shred of solace, grim satisfaction that at least those bastards didn’t completely get away with it.  You may be surprised how many people who’ve been brutalized by the empire want – no, need – revenge in order to move on and perform some semblance of rebuilding.

Real victory is when people kill your family and you don’t kill theirs back, I guess /s

When the fuck did “morality” become a dirty word on the supposed Left anyway?  I’ve been seeing more criticisms of having a sense of right and wrong and justice and fairness around here lately which seems incredibly ass-backwards.

Making Americans feel bad is the only way to make war unpopular enough that careerist politicians reconsider going to war.

I also don’t see how shooting down an enemy plane such that it kills the enemy pilots could be strategically worse than shooting down an enemy plane but the enemy pilots survive and escape.  Not that there’s any such thing as strategically shooting down an enemy plane in a way where you can choose to let the enemies survive and escape.