unreliabledragon

[unreliabledragon]

Of all the signs from this weekend this one hit me the hardest in the feels because the Right has co-opted patriotism and we have let them. There is nothing more patriotic than fighting for your country to be better and fighting for your countryman to have better lives

[unreliabledragon]

I never got the whole don’t threaten me with the Supreme Court thing in 2016. Hillary Clinton wasn’t threatening anything when she said if she lost democrats were going to lose the Supreme Court for a long time. She was telling you what the consequences of her losing would be and she was right. It’s not a threat to tell you the realistic outcome of an election.

[unreliabledragon]

[unreliabledragon]

You guys know fordo and natanz and isfahan are remote, hardened military sites, right? Specifically built to enrich uranium and withstand the kind of attacks that come from doing so? They’re not dual-use power plants that are hooked up to cities, there is no civilian use for them.

Im seeing a lot of assumptions going around that the US is bombing civilians but there isn’t… really any evidence of that. It’s actually kind of impressive how isolated our strikes have been. Like I get that America bad and the existence of the second gulf war means every military operation is exactly the same, but what if we, I don’t know, observed material reality sometimes? You can look at the satellite images, they’re publicly available.

[unreliabledragon]

The destruction of Elam was not the Holocaust, just as the Rwandan Genocide wasn’t the Holocaust or the Cambodian Genocide. The destruction of Elam wasn’t the Rwandan Genocide. The destruction of Elam wasn’t even the Assyrian destruction of Israel a century or so beforehand. The St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, the anti-Huguenot pogrom that killed between 5,000 and 20,000 people in France in 1572, differed meaningfully from the many anti-Jewish pogroms in the later Russian Empire. The Holocaust wasn’t the same as the Herero and Namaqua Genocide, the mass murder of indigenous people in what is now Namibia by the German Empire between 1904 and 1907, despite the fact that both were carried out by German authorities just a generation apart. Each of those incidents and campaigns of mass violence stands on its own. Their logic was different. They proceeded in different ways, with death tolls ranging from the dozens to the millions. Some were straightforward land grabs in which killing was incidental. Others were ideologically motivated campaigns of murder for which the groundwork had been laid for decades or centuries. Still others were the result of sudden explosions of ethnic or religious hatred against a background of oppression or conflict. But what ties them together, aside from the mass violence, is the fact that utterly ordinary people participated in all of them. It doesn’t take all that much for a baker from Aššur or a truck-driver from Hamburg to turn into a willing enslaver and killer, even a mass murderer who pulled a lethal trigger hundreds of times, under the right circumstances. If those in positions of authority tell them that it’s acceptable or even admirable, if they’re given the tools and the opportunity to do so, then even the most average people can commit horrifying acts.

-Patrick Wyman, Ordinary People Do Terrible Things

[unreliabledragon]

ukraine has wiped out 7 billion dollars of russian nuclear bombers in one day. this is what i mean when i say even at the most cynical reason to support ukraine russia's military power and sphere of influence can be undermined with such ease if allied nations would just pull finger and hand over whatever outdated equipment is in inventory.

the bombers struck make up a large portion of russia's nuclear triad. now instead of being able to ensure a nuclear strike by land, air or sea its now much more feasible for russian nukes to be interdicted. many of the airframes are no longer in production so they are in effect irreplaceable. now when russia threatens to nuke the west every other month we can point and laugh at the piles of ashes that was their strategic fleet

we should be supporting ukraine because its the right thing to do but that is rarely the modus operandi of geopolitics. at the very least it proves if russia is going to keep threatening the world with nuclear hellfire, their toys will get taken away.

[unreliabledragon]

The trick to not getting sucked into the cycle of “things were better under Democrats” “yeah well they weren’t perfect.” Is to remember that the people saying the latter are already conceding your point. They know things are better when Republicans aren’t in charge but their internet clout is built entirely on shitting on Dems to up their leftist cred to their friends even if it means being a useful idiot for Republicans. It’s not up to you to convince each of these disingenuous clout chasers to get their heads out of their asses, it’s up to us to remind each other and people susceptible to this kind of online propaganda that Democrats are a better option on every issue and to point to places where that’s verifiably true.

[unreliabledragon]

it rly is weird how theres this culture in progressive spaces where like you can be as mean, as CRUEL even, as you want as long as youre not being explicitly bigoted towards any marginalized group of people and still be seen as a really good person with good morals who nobody is allowed to have beef with bc theyve never done anything racist or homophobic

[unreliabledragon]

Iran blinked.

[unreliabledragon]

Ngl some of you are way too comfortable spreading Russian propaganda about Ukraine to have reliable takes on any international conflict.

[unreliabledragon]

Lessens history teaches us that are actually relevant to to the present:

Nationalism is a sham.

Democracy is young and fragile.

Things can always get worse.

Both sides have complicated and understandable reasons for feeling the way they do, but not good enough reasons to excuse all the human rights violations (universally applicable to every geopolitical conflict).

Anything beyond that is merely academically interesting. And it is very interesting! But people who insist on the relevance of history beyond these four points are usually just trying to make you forget at least one of them.

[unreliabledragon]

Genuinely hilarious that the far left faction of tumblr believes that Kamala Harris stating Iran is an adversary means that she was going to bomb Iran without congressional approval and try to declare war and not pursue other diplomatic pathways to avoid this exact situation… lol

[unreliabledragon]

[unreliabledragon]

I’m sorry but I can’t even get on board with anti “both sides” posts when they still tell some kind of lie. I just saw one that started by alluding to election rigging in 2024, and stop. I’m sorry, but more people voted for Trump than Harris. That’s just it. Musk influenced the election by pouring millions into Trump's campaign and running a gigantic social media site that pushed anti-Dem/pro-MAGA content, but there is currently no evidence that actual votes were tampered with. We cannot become conspiracy theorists like the right. If Musk could actually change votes, then he would've done so with the Wisconsin Supreme Court seat that the Democrat won, despite Musk's support and campaigning for the Republican. Then the post was like "we probably still would've gone to war with Iran but--" stop. This not only ignores Harris' statements and platform, but Biden's actions, because Biden did actually try to prevent a wider war from breaking out in the Middle East and told Israel not to attack Iran, but this goes against the mainstream narrative of the internet, so no one cares. And then the post said immigration would still be horrible but at least ICE wouldn't be acting the way it is now. That's a hell of an understatement. There will always be issues with immigration because the average person is xenophobic as fuck, but hundreds of thousands of people are now vulnerable to deportation while litigation plays out about the termination of TPS because Biden granted them that legal status, and one of the last things Biden did in office regarding immigration was to try to create a pathway for citizenship for undocumented spouses of immigrants. But again, this goes against the radikewl narrative, so no one cares.

I am tired of the relentless, dedicated distortions, lies, ignoring reality, and the constant need to place one's edgelord radikewl identity above all else even when far-right fascists are destroying society. I am tired of people acting like rhetoric has no impact, and that a solid decade of "Dems still suck shit tho" in the face of blatant fascism isn't part of what got us here (perhaps that's why these people comfort themselves with election conspiracy theories, because that's easier for them to process than the possibility that they enabled Trump's rise). I do not care if your statement ends with "but I guess Republicans suck more" when you still feel the childish need to signal you're still part of the internet cool kids clique with "fuck the Democrats" at the beginning of your post that is fundamentally about Republicans ruining people's lives. I don't care if you reluctantly admit Republicans are worse when you're still lying about Democrats. Dems aren't just "not as bad", they actually do good things while they're in power, but 2021-2024 proved that these people will do nothing but ignore those things at best and lie about them at worst. It doesn't matter how bad things get; these people will never stop acting 12 years-old, so we should treat them like children and exclude them from adult conversations about politics.

[unreliabledragon]

It's pretty easy to call "Trump is the anti-war candidate" stupid now, but to be clear, it was also pretty easy to say that during the campaign. And during his first term. And during his first campaign. And

[unreliabledragon]

Trump is unilaterally reorienting all future US policy towards violence and coercion by destroying the trust and good credit that other solutions will depend on for many administrations to come. What future president can make a nuclear deal after this? Bombs will be the only option left.

[unreliabledragon]

glad the sharpest bulbs the u.s has to offer are on the case