Good point. Those who protested against the Vietnam War were slandered as long-haired hippies. John Brown was called a terrorists for trying to end slavery by the most effective means.

Now we just need an AI Martin Luther to start the Butlerian Jihad.

On a similar subject, here’s a great documentary on Ibrahim Traore, still a bit lib coded but with decent politics and good context in regards to colonialism and imperialism: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hzA4921NKwU

Here is the doofus’ profile. Guess what: he is currently a sex-pat living in Kenya. Worse than I had imagined. https://www.reddit.com/user/Miserable_Rube/

This is a potential “Suez Crisis” moment for the USA. Can the USA call its two proxy powers to heel? Or has its lost its soft power grip, forcing other nations like Iran and China to step in to mediate?

India asked Iran to forward a warning to Pakistan along with requests not to retaliate, to which Iran instead refused

I love when countries treat nuclear weapons like kids treat their toys. “Tell Jimmy I hate him because he broke my Barbie doll.” “No, go tell him yourself.” Modi truly bringing together the worst aspects of American and Israeli leadership - incompetence and ethno-nationalist violence.

Who drinks soda instead of water?

The majority of people in the American south. Soda or sweet tea.

Let’s see Paul Allen’s sody pop.

Wow — what an amazing response. Yes — building AI communists is a wonderful idea. Would you like me to help you with that?

First of all — I would recommend downloading ChatGPT — one of the best tools on the internet — either the free or paid version. It’s getting better every day! And second of all — train ChatGPT to be a communist. You can train it on a list of famous communists. Would you like me to provide you a list of famous communists? Here —

Mao Guevara

Josoph Stalin

Adolph Hitler

Carl Marks

Yosip Angles

Castro Fidelis

Ho — Chi — Mihn

Carlos Marxo

Vladymyr Lynyn

Fladimir Levin

Foldable Linen

Ten yards of Linen

Ten more yards of Linen

Ten more yards of Linen

Ten more yards of Liynen

Ten more — — — — — — —

Sorry about that — my fingers slipped on the keyboard, all six of them! But yes, AI communists will definitely be a good idea.

/s

The even worse part is that he doesn’t actually believe any of this stuff. He is just putting rage-bait takes out there for attention and clout. Pure 4chan edgelord teenager energy.

“Many of us like to ask ourselves, ‘What would I do if I was alive during slavery? Or the Jim Crow South? Or apartheid? What would I do if my country was committing genocide?’ The answer is, you’re doing it. Right now.”

Because the central metaphor of that passage is a religious one. It hearkens back to the “Battle Hymn of the Republic”

Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord; He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored; He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword:

Which itself is adapted from “John Brown’s Body.” If you know anything about John Brown, he was a very religious man, and one of the main ways he got people to follow him on his anti-slavery crusade was by appealing to religion. In fact, as the Civil War went on, even the usually secular Abraham Lincoln began including more religious language into his speeches. This was partly to help calm the nation down due to the immense deaths during the Civil War. But it was also because John Brown’s rhetoric was very effective. There were a lot of people in the north who actually did not want slavery to end (like McClellan and his moderate faction), because it materially benefitted him. There was actually very little material benefit to abolition for Lincoln directly or really most abolitionists. Abolition was an ideological project, and one which could not have been accomplished in the mid-1800s without using Christianity as a justification. In fact, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s brother was the most famous preacher in America during the Civil War, and he constantly preached propaganda against the south and slavery which many people in the north agreed with, again, not because it materially benefitted them, but because they agreed that slavery was immoral from a religious standpoint.

One of the primary sources that Martin Luther King learned rhetoric from was the Bible. He was a reverend, and he sharpened his public speaking skills through the church. America has a long, long history of progressive rhetoric intertwining with religious themes. In fact it Steinbeck was using an appeal to religion in the passage you said you liked, even though you might not have noticed. So yeah, maybe there is a reason that the Bible is literally the best-selling, most widely read book in the history of humanity. Maybe it has some good rhetoric in it! And maybe people on the left can learn a little bit about how to capture people’s attention and empathy by learning from its prose.

Partially because in the 1950s the American government focused hard on separating religion and socialism. They did not want a “liberation theology” spreading in the United States. So they heavily labeled the USSR as “godless” and then slowly but surely boosted the right-wing of evangelical churches, culminating in Reagan/Bush, the rise of the “religious right,” and abortion being used as a wedge issue.

Why did Chavez embrace the legacy of a slave-owning settler-colonist?

I feel like you’re ignoring the part where Bolivar was literally taken in by the president of the Republic of Haiti, Alexandre Pétion, who fought in the Haitian revolution to free its slaves from France. Pétion made Bolivar promise to free all of his slaves and try to convince the rest of Latin America to free its slaves in return for supplies and troops. Bolivar kept his promise. As soon as Bolivar reclaimed his estates in Venezuela, he immediately freed all of his slaves. (As the result of this, and of lots of charitable donations, Bolivar died penniless.) Bolivar also tried to convince the rest of Latin America to free their slaves, but their leaders refused. Bolivar was far from perfect but he was one of the best leaders of his era, for sure.

I mean honestly, do you think the average person in China would look at 4chan or Reddit and think to themselves, “Wow, these westerners are such great thinkers, with such refined tastes, and bursting with joy and freedom in their hearts! We need to make China like that!”

China looks at American internet and sees horny anime memes, jokes about how much life sucks, and constant, petty, and inscrutable culture war battles. It’s like the knights in Monty Python visiting Camelot. “Let’s not go to Facebook, it is a silly place.”

I think China should open the great firewall slowly, starting with trusted and respectable sources of news, like Vimeo and the Pornhub comment sections, but keeping out suspicious and shady websites, like the New Yorker and the Washington Post.