Viewing profile — yourbandsucks

Don't forget the part where they all have access to running water and penicillin now. They're responsible for the greatest humanitarian success story in world history over the last…

Every big country has got some skeletons attached to it, especially including the US. If you're primed to see the foreign country as monstrous and evil, you'll see it that way, wha…

Think of it as a scissor statement. Either it's the most mild, milquetoast statement possible or it's a declaration of war against Human Rights, Mom and Apple Pie.

Eh. I commented that "Chinese people are people too" the other day and got pretty heavily downvoted. Are those downvoters expressing a reasoned belief that Chinese people aren't pe…

I mean.. politics ought not to be an exercise in demanding conformity and punishing any non-standard thought.

Without LBJ, we wouldn't have had the Space Program, the various civil rights bills of the 60s, or Medicare. He also escalated Vietnam from a minor conflict to a major disaster. Mo…

Not really. Despots usually have politics to deal with. Not everything is possible. The companies in question had a massive technological and force advantage over the local populac…

Nazis are not in fact people for the purposes of discussion. They are movie extras who get shot as fast as possible. You really had to go full Godwin dehumanization on a billion pe…

The west believes in universal human rights as a story to tell the rubes and a stick to selectively enforce their interests. Pinochet, the Saudis, Saddam, but then he was a bad guy…

Chinese people are people too, you know.

That's certainly the official US line on the matter. How has the official US line held up, historically, when it comes to coups vs socialists in Latin America? Why should it be dif…

It's been like a week since the last US-backed Latin American coup.

"Rule of law" doesn't mean picking and choosing whom it applies to. Saddam was our best buddy when he was using mustard gas in Khuzestan against the right people. International pol…

How.. how many people have you shot on sight?

This development is actually terrifying. If socialism has no home on the left, we'll see it rise on the right, with nationalist tones.

Also very much part of politics, although not actually at issue anywhere near this debate, as nobody is arguing against those things.

If he would have? We should kick this guy out of the Linux Foundation because he hypothetically might disagree with us at a conference?

You seem to have your facts confused. Wood wasn't publicly planning to wear a provocative hat to a conference or anything like that.

Fighting over ethical norms is actually a pretty good definition of politics. Or one key aspect of it, at least.