“Well we could immediately escalate any conflict to end human civilization” is not the boast you think it is.

Look at the current war in Ukraine – the closest we’ve come to direct conflict between two nuclear superpowers. Nukes are useful only to the extent they make the other side think twice about a large, conventional invasion. If you actually use them against someone who can retaliate, you lose.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/14/world/middleeast/israel-gaza-military-human-shields.html

After Israeli soldiers found Mohammed Shubeir hiding with his family in early March, they detained him for roughly 10 days before releasing him without charge, he said.

During that time, Mr. Shubeir said, the soldiers used him as a human shield.

Mr. Shubeir, then 17, said he was forced to walk handcuffed through the empty ruins of his hometown, Khan Younis, in southern Gaza, searching for explosives set by Hamas. To avoid being blown up themselves, the soldiers made him go ahead, Mr. Shubeir said.

https://www.cnn.com/2025/03/12/middleeast/israel-gaza-human-shields-investigation-intl/index.html

In an interview with CNN late last year, an Israeli soldier said his unit had forced a Palestinian man to enter a building ahead of troops…

The exact scale and scope of the practice by the Israeli military is not known. But the testimony of both the soldier and five civilians last year indicated that it was widespread across the territory: in northern Gaza, Gaza City, Khan Younis and Rafah.

One of the civilians, Mohammad Saad, age 20, told CNN that IDF soldiers had detained him in Rafah.

“They would ask us to do things like, ‘move this carpet,’ saying they were looking for tunnels,” he said. “‘Film under the stairs,’ they would say. If they found something, they would tell us to bring it outside. For example, they would ask us to remove belongings from the house, clean here, move the sofa, open the fridge, and open the cupboard.”

https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/news/israeli-soldier-palestinians-human-shields-gaza/

Tommy [an anonymized name] said his commander ordered his unit to use Gazan civilians to search buildings for explosives instead of dogs…

Breaking the Silence has acted as a watchdog body over the Israeli military for more than 20 years. It said it had corroborated Tommy’s account with other soldiers.

Multiple eyewitness accounts from both sides, and stories from anonymous sources match up with each other, as well as with stories of named sources.

ethnic Russians’ history of ethnic cleansing

Maybe because “the Russian brainpan is predisposed to genocide” is self-evidently racist and nonsensical.

Conscription for popular wars doesn’t get to the point Ukraine is at. The U.S. drafted soldiers in WWII without the situation deteriorating to this point, for example. Then when they tried that for an unpopular war (Vietnam) it created all sorts of problems and the draft was scrapped.

Cool campfire story

The communist party however has already covered up

The conspiracy theory here is this.

Moat people still don’t connect arming extremists in Afghanistan in the 80s to 9/11. There’s an obvious risk of a bunch of Azov Nazis turning to terrorism against former allies who “stabbed them in the back” here, too.

You think China peacefully reintegrating Hong Kong from British rule is… Chinese imperialism?

I’m not sure what you mean about “the greatest global crisis since WWII” during 2020

Covid. It hit the U.S. in March 2020.

The “talking points against the left” already happened and do happen regardless of Bernie backing Biden.

You’re right that they will trot it out whatever the facts are, but that doesn’t mean it’ll stick. It didn’t stick after 2016 because Bernie campaigned for Hillary after dropping out, and so far I haven’t seen it stick that well after 2024 because “I won’t endorse genocide” is hard to honestly oppose, especially when Trump forced Israel into a ceasefire before he even got inaugurated.

It would have stuck in 2020 had Bernie split the party, because that really would have had an impact on a Biden loss.

Bernie contributed to helping radicalize people, but then he reached his limits and pulled back, and from where I’m standing, he’s no longer much of a help with that.

That’s about where I am, yeah.

Bernie is done as a political force, and failing the easiest “do you oppose genocide” test ever is inexcusable. There’s a big danger of projecting this backwards and taking the wrong lessons from 2016-2020, though.

I give his campaigns as a whole and the volunteers and activists in its orbit some credit for helping educate people and get them more active in politics as a whole. But the man himself caved pretty easily and backed Biden.

I think you’re vastly underselling the importance of education/activation and overselling Bernie’s alternatives once the fix came in during the 2020 primary.

Showing people that there’s a viable set of policies to the left of Obama is the very first step towards anything resembling a socialist mass movement. Making Medicare for All the centerpiece of his 2016 campaign checked so many boxes: popular, radical, building off an existing program, and highlighting a huge difference between Obama Democrats and even a tiny step left of them. Most succinctly, it’s the first major Democratic policy proposal since the 60s that hasn’t been neoliberal “give a tax credit so qualifying businesses can do it” garbage. There’s a reason why so many leftists today trace part of their radicalization back to Bernie.

And once the fix was in during 2020, Bernie had exactly two choices: back Biden or split the party in the middle of the greatest global crisis since, what, WWII? Keep in mind the split would have been over essentially internal party politics (“you played too dirty in the primary”). There’s no principled stance to fall back on, and you’d just be handing neoliberal Dems endless talking points against the left for decades to come.

Trump is making all sorts of anti-imperialist noises, just like he did during his first term. Running against the War on Terror was popular for Democrats in '04 and '08, and for Republicans in 2016. There has been a sea change in public opinion towards Palestine in the last 15 months.

There is a lot of opposition to anti-imperialism, but there’s a ton of support, too, and that’s without any major political figure taking a dedicated anti-imperialist stance in decades, maybe going back even further than WWII.

They could barely penetrate a Ukraine with its pants down

The rest of your comment is spot-on, but this isn’t a good assessment of the Russian invasion. They’re very clearly fighting a limited war (i.e., they don’t want to occupy the whole of Ukraine, they just don’t want a U.S. puppet and NATO member as a neighbor) and it’s possible-to-likely that their initial sprint to Kyiv was only withdrawn due to the early peace talks that the UK and US scuttled.

literal children, or Russian bots

“I’m so fucking smart, no reasonable person could possibly disagree with my flawless takes”

Heading off predictable counterpoints is often a good rhetorical strategy, especially when those counterpoints are so ubiquitous.

Do you think everyone in China works for the government?

And getting the same answer sounds more like a language issue or brush off than anything significant.

You don’t get to keep your weapons when you surrender. It’s just not an accurate summation of the situation. The big difference between surrendering to an opponent vs. agreeing to a ceasefire is that with a ceasefire you can re-start fighting at some point.

Hezbollah surrendering without a ceasefire in Gaza

I don’t think they surrendered to anyone – they just negotiated a ceasefire between them and Israel. Bad, but they’re not off the board like Syria.

Assad won’t really be missed for anything but his compliance in transporting weapons to Lebanon.

Who knows what information Hezbollah had about the impending collapse of Syria that we didn’t have? Who knows how that impacted their ceasefire decision?

things that fall off the police radar or weren’t getting any attention

Think of all the murders that happen in large American cities that don’t get anywhere near the police attention as this one.

The worst would be getting a bunch more people killed and then still losing

As a result of Yoon’s enhanced role in U.S. military strategy in Asia, the disgraced president has been the darling of the think tanks and Korea “experts” in the U.S. capital. Deputy Secretary of State Kurt Campbell has even suggested that Yoon should get a Nobel Peace Prize for putting aside Korean differences with Japan to make the trilateral alliance work.

Is there even one foreign leader the U.S. likes who is actually decent?

Yet even as the United States backs Yoon’s stance on North Korea, the enhanced ties between the Pentagon and the South Korean Army, coupled with memories of what happened in Gwangju 44 years ago, is an explosive combination. Many Koreans remember that after Chun’s coup and the slaughter in Gwangju, President Jimmy Carter directed the Pentagon to help the Korean martial law command crush the uprising by sending an aircraft carrier and advanced reconnaissance aircraft to monitor the actions of the Korean troops dispatched to the city from the Combined Forces Command. After assisting Chun to reassert military control over the country, South Korea suffered seven more years of authoritarian rule.

Even in the most generous possible reading, the South Korean government has been a straight-up U.S. puppet for much of its history.