well established in general usage.

Only in the US. The “Liberal Democrats” in the UK are not understood to be the opposite of the Tories, and there are many similar cases in countries around the world.

The reason liberal is understood to mean the opposite of conservative in the US is only because historically socialism became such a dirty word, liberals did everything they could to distance themselves from it, and there was no major socialist party or movement.

Since socialism has become resurgent, it makes more sense, especially on an international platform like this one, to adopt the internationally understood meaning.

The fediverse was developed such that you don’t have to agree with the devs to use it. Unlike corporate social media, you’re free to set up an instance that’s rabidly at odds with the dev’s viewpoints.

Given that, if the devs criticizing the US is so “controversial” that you won’t touch any instance on the fediverse, if you demand that the devs speak in a bland, focus-group tested way, even though you’re not subject to their authority by their own design, then you should probably just stay on corporate social media. Facebook, for example, has a single authority with a marketing team that carefully curates their messaging to appeal as much as possible to a wide audience. We are not Facebook.

The devs built Lemmy as a passion project, and are not just looking to grow it to sell to some venture capitalist firm.

Thanks

Anything you do to act against or weaken a given state tends to benefit that state’s rivals. Unless you have some switch you can flip to overthrow every government at once, then either you refrain from meaningfully opposing your government or you make peace with the possibility that another government may benefit from your actions.

There are cases where leftists should refrain from opposing their government, for example, during WWII, it wasn’t the best time to strike or revolt if you lived in the US. On the other hand, in WWI every side was relatively the same, so there was no need to put class war on hold, it doesn’t matter if German capitalists or French capitalists came out on top, so both German and French workers would have been justified to strike and disrupt and revolt, even though French workers doing so would benefit German capitalists and vise versa.

Therefore, this “oppose all states” line is reductive. If someone paints the PRC as being so bad that they’re a threat on par with the Nazis, so we should put class war in the US on hold in order to stop them, then we need to evaluate whether or not that’s actually true. Which means first making the assessment, and then, if we assess that it’s not that serious of a threat, that means “defending” it (at least to an extent), it means saying things that will get you labelled as a tankie. If, on the other hand, you don’t do that, if you concede even the most extreme and far-fetched claims about them, then either you must also concede that we should drop everything to fight them, or you must adopt the unreasonable stance of weakening a state that stands between you and something equivalent to the Nazis.

Any actual opposition to a government (as opposed to opposition merely in principle) means at least being ok with that government’s geopolitical rivals benefitting from the internal conflict. Actual opposition will almost always mean getting accused of supporting enemy states (whether you do or not), or at least of not taking their threat seriously enough. It’s necessary to have an answer for why you’re not rallying around the flag to fight off that supposedly greater evil.

Grandad, you can’t tame the white supremacist power structure with cheese!

Idk similar vibes.

Yes, motherfucker. It’s generally how I refer to people who say ridiculous bullshit.

FYI: This year I’ve noticed the dbzer0 instance trending in the same direction as .ml, so I’d keep an eye on their users as well.

Does dbzer0 also “repeat Chinese and Russian propaganda,” or are people lobbing the same accusations at them just because they’re also critical of the US?

Motherfucker, did you hear how many people were talking about attacking Middle Eastern civilians across the US during that period? How many Americans talked about nuking the Middle East, turning the sand to glass, exterminating the entire region? Do you think that sounded peaceful to them? Do you think, then, that Al Qaida was justified in attacking civilian targets if said civilian had said something like that? If that’s what it takes, the majority of the US population would have been valid military targets. What a load of nonsense.

But no, it only goes one way. The US can set the rules that everyone else in the world has to obey. The US doesn’t have to obey anybody else’s rules. Why? Because the US has power and authority. Authority that you believe in asserting over the entire rest of the world. Because you are an imperialist.

That’s not even mentioning the fact that you completely ignored my entire argument. Even if it was justified to kill him in this case, it still involved giving the executive unilateral power to execute any person anywhere in the world, with zero oversight or accountability. Either you believe the executive should have that power, or you don’t. You don’t get to support it having that power only in the cases where you agree with the decisions the executive made. If you think you should have some say over such decisions, then you should support those decisions being democratically accountable.

masquerading as a far left American group.

Who said that we’re an “American group?” Some of our users (such as myself) are from the US, but we have people from all over the world.

But, I mean, it is true that the only possible reason anyone in the world would have for hating the US is if they’re on the payroll of the Chinese government, so I guess you’ve got us there.

I would simply not get stormed by 10 Al Qaida freedom fighters by not going to their country in the first place.

Also, can we just take a moment to appreciate how wildly you’re distorting this? He was not killed “storming” someone with 9 other people. There was no physical danger. He was killed by an unmanned drone, by someone probably sitting in an air conditioned room on the other side of the world. And this was in Yemen, a country we weren’t even at war with. So when you say, “that’s what you do in war,” apparently, it’s also what you think we should do in peace.

What would you say if Yemen launched a drone strike in the US, claiming that the US was harboring a terrorist? That cool with you? Is that just “what you do in not-war?”

Completely ridiculous. What you’re saying right now is exactly what actual authoritarianism looks like.

also an observed drop in traffic following ukraine strikes on russian datacenters.

Al-Awlaki is cited because he was the first US citizen to be targeted under the policy. The criticism isn’t about whether he was guilty or innocent, it’s about the flagrant disregard for due process.

It’s important to talk about cases like that precisely in order to confront the brainworms of, “He was probably a terrorist so who cares?” That mentality is precisely what got us here and it’s impossible to fix the problem without firmly rejecting that way of thinking.

You don’t get to give the government permission to ignore due process in some cases and not in others. That’s not how laws or systems work. Either they have to follow the process even when you personally think the person is guilty, or they can ignore the process even when you think the person is innocent. Once you’ve given the executive the power to make the decision unilaterally, you don’t get to challenge that decision. Because that what having the power to make a decision unilaterally means.

The slavery doesn’t count, that’s prepolitical because they had to have them

What in the ideology?

Explain themselves? Impeachment? Prison? Is that a joke?

The reason you don’t understand the backlash is because you don’t understand how this works.

Those were things that were at least theoretically possible in the pre-9/11 system. What Bush changed and Obama continued, was making it into a system with zero accountability. All the executive has to do is claim that they think someone’s a terrorist, there is no court, no evidence required, no higher authority they answer to or that could hold them accountable. One, single person has total and complete authority to kill anyone in the world. And what al-Awlaki showed is that this applies even to US citizens.

Theoretically, if Trump wanted to, he could launch a drone strike on Ilhan Omar’s house and the only obstacle would be the political backlash. Y’all simply do not appreciate the degree to which the executive acquired dictatorial power in the “post-9/11 world.” Bush was just Trump but with literally 90% of the country supporting him. Trump has only gone further because of the groundwork Bush laid. The “emergency” powers from post 9/11 are still in place, they were never going away.

The president can ride his bike with no handlebars.

“Ladies, Gentlemen, and the rest (of you).”

It seems the lesson they learned wasn’t “don’t do genocide” so much as “get someone else to do your dirty work to avoid being held accountable for genocide.”

That kind of honesty on craigslist is a rarity.

And those little spats are supposed to be enough for the US to vote against condemning Nazism out of spite? That’s nonsense. Unless the US was already relatively predisposed to vote against it.

Feel free to address any of the other aspects in that comment though, I’m not sure why you’ve dropped them.

What other parts would you like me to address?

I always find it interesting that using drone strikes on an objectively evil group (in this case Al Qaeda) gets so many panties get knotted…

I’m so glad that we’ll always be able to trust the president to unilaterally decide which groups are evil and to use his power in the interests of the people.

I mean, can you imagine what would’ve happened if some bad actor got in and used those sorts of things for precedent? Like, what if a Republican president had got in and decided to, I don’t know, accuse random Venezuelan fishing boats of being “narco-terrorists,” and used the exact same power to kill them for sport? Just spitballing here.

But I mean, what are the odds of that, right? Surely we can trust the United States president with the power to be judge, jury, and executioner for the entire globe. This is a very sane and reasonable position, and I just can’t understand why anyone would get their panties in a knot over it.

You’re absolutely right, the US had always been very level headed towards the Russian Republic and it’s precursor states, right up until 2022. Prior to that there has never been any major ideological disagreement between the two power blocs, and certainly never any attempts to do something absurd like “portray Russia as the ‘specter of communism’” in popular US media. No indeed, the US has a long and robust history of rational behavior towards the russophone world.

In 2005?? Who was saying any of that? That’s complete nonsense.