Yeah, me too. I think it was just a lack of reinforcement of those earlier plot points because most of them are literally never mentioned after chapter 1.

But this is the very beginning, not the middle

Well, you can look at it as the rags in question being more inclined to receive such claims with uncritical credulity if they say something like “CCP bad,” etc. They don’t need to lie, and in fact strategically shouldn’t (though some of them countenance an alarming amount of direct lying, here I am thinking of the NYT), they can just accept what they are told by the US government, which obviously dings itself by lying but a) with the source being anonymous, how will you pin it on them without the receiving journalist destroying their career by revealing an anonymous source? and b) they’re the US government, it’s already kind of understood that they have a record of lying, but their position of power nonetheless acts as a sort of font of credibility, especially to US citizens.

Are you suggesting the WSJ manufactured a quote by a senior US defense official?

That is probably not what they meant. Usually when a major paper reports a story hinging on a “tip from an anonymous US official” and the story is bunk, it’s not because the paper invented the source but because the source was lying according to instructions from the State Dept.

That’s just my understanding though, I’m not trying to say this with any authority. I furthermore have no opinion on this story and will wait for more substantial reporting on it.

I found the smartest hasbara-spewer.

This does not read to me as a response

There’s no evidence Trump will be worse on Palestine than the Dems. The idea that Trump is worse than any future frontrunner is myopic alarmism, you’ll be whipped into a new frenzy just the same with most or perhaps all future candidates (some of whom will be substantially worse). Furthermore, most people live in states where their vote doesn’t have any impact on the winner of the election, sothem voting blue only serves to legitimate the popular mandate of the genocidal dems. I don’t know, this is all very obvious but it’s like my 50th time saying it in this stupid thread.

You say we’re on the same side, but your ideology is one of supporting perpetrators into perpetuity because the tautology you’ve been talked into has no off-ramp, no point in the future where you stop taking “emergency” “temporary” “provisional” “compromises” to “reduce harm” and instead make actual positive progress. There will always be a new election, there will always be a new Republican platform that declares an interest in doing heinous shit, and very frequently there will be more sincere fascists than Trump, like if Tom Cotton ever runs, and there will never be some demon democrat you won’t vote for because they are running against someone who is 1% more reactionary, and that thereby necessitates everyone giving them unconditional support.

It’s an unserious strategy based on the panicked mindset of people who are stuck in an abusive relationship with liberal media.

Vote third party, put actual pressure on the Dems to make concessions. If they have your vote no matter what, they have no reason to listen to you.

When did I ever say I would do that? I am plainly not advocating for such a thing.

Biden is already supplying arms and Harris has vowed to do the same and gone on endlessly about Israel’s “right to defend itself” and how anti-genocide protesters are pro terrorism and so on. I’m not saying Trump won’t fully support Israel, I’m saying there is no light between that and the Biden-Harris position.

How do you think that will play out with Palestine should he get in again?

Liberals keeps saying that Trump will do genocide x 2, but they have no evidence, nor any indication of how.

Look, it does actually work in Western Europe, the UK, Australia and NZ. All this talk that it can’t work is plainly wrong.

Your courts are mostly more professional than America’s but I don’t find that to be a compelling argument when every country you listed is a reactionary shithole, Australia especially. NZ is the only one that I’d give kind of a pass to there.

I said

admitted that there may be

Which is what you said. I characterized your statement correctly.

Campaigning on the issues will lock judges into their biases.

What does this mean? Everyone has biases, I don’t see how campaigning matters for that. Do you mean, perhaps, that it prevents judges from changing for branding purposes? Because that objection has two serious problems: 1) what the public wants will change over time and 2) people should do what they’re elected to, so what does it matter if someone keeps getting elected for maintaining the same popular platform?

But you yourself admitted that there may be no such thing as “neutral,” “apolitical” justices. If there aren’t, what good does pretending do?

It seems to me like all it’s accomplishing is another layer of abstraction rather than a real mechanistic distinction, but I’ve seen what “bipartisan” action looks like in the US, and the billions in arms given to Israel are a decent start. Republicans and Democrats absolutely have the capacity to collaborate and, when they do, it’s monstrous.

Voting at least gives the people a chance to resist the machinations of the bipartisan consensus and get progressives installed.

If making a given ruling is political, it stands to reason that a contrary ruling would also be political. It’s not like slavery is political and abolition is apolitical, it’s just that one has a positive character and one has a negative character (in the mathematical sense).

Some things are dangerous to the people and political, some things are beneficial to the people and political. We should support a system that encourages judges to do promote the latter.

No, judges are mostly appointed in the US

Slavery looks a lot more popular when you don’t let the slaves vote. If the slaves could vote – i.e. if there was a greater degree of democracy – there would surely be no slavery. It was the repression of the political power of a large segment of the population that enabled slavery.

Surely, if we educate people on class consciousness, they will generally act in alignment with the common interest, right prole? Certainly it’s not a better solution to dictate morality to them unilaterally through some technocratic institution (that’s rather like what the aristocracy was), because we have no particular way of ensuring that they will act in the common interest – which is not especially their interest – unlike the common people, for whom the common interest is their interest.

Not doing that is also political

Between these two options:

1. indulging in the delusion of neutral judges and letting the elite pick the ones who do the best job of pretending to be neutral while representing their interests

2. discarding the illusion of neutral judges and picking ones who openly state (and ideally have a record) that they will seek to pursue and enact justice as both they and the better part of the population interpret it

I think one of these is clearly superior for “promoting justice”. Do you disagree?

Someone should tell them that “avoiding ‘politics’” is just the lazy method of supporting the status-quo rather than achieving being “apolitical”.