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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • Probably better phrased as “the same way they did Korea.”

    1. Initially, the leftist credentials of the Cuban Revolution were in question. Castro visited Harlem right after winning, even. There was a real question of whether this was a government that would be friendly to U.S. business interests or not.
    2. There were no airstrikes called to aid the Bay of Pigs invasion (which occurred before the USSR stationed nukes there) because the civilian leadership (Kennedy) didn’t want a full war, and didn’t want to be seen as overtly knocking off a national liberation movement. This was when the U.S. still had a pretty positive image throughout the developing world. They didn’t want another Korean War. The civilian leadership of the U.S. didn’t really want the actual Korean War; that was (like the Bay of Pigs) more driven and escalated by the budding military-industrial complex (a term coined by Eisenhower, who had to delicately manage public dissatisfaction with the war during his '52 campaign).
    3. The U.S. had plenty of success with covert ops or small invasions in Latin America before, and would continue to do so throughout the Cold War, so an isolated Cuba was more of a hassle than a threat. Unlike Korea and later Vietnam, there was no strategic need to encircle China, or maintain an imperial foothold in mainland Asia.


  • MarxMadness@lemmygrad.mltoMemes@lemmygrad.mlLibs be like
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    2 days ago

    You’re right that there’s a difference between, say, Pinochet disappearing thousands of political opponents as a more-or-less open policy of internal repression and the level of police violence we’ve seen thus far in the U.S.

    You’re wrong that Biden is going to do anything to help.







  • Nah, they’re trying to win, they’re just constrained by:

    1. Being a capitalist party that can’t firmly promise much material aid to voters
    2. Being an imperialist party that can’t respond to widespread discontent with current imperial wars
    3. All upper leadership having golden parachutes in media, banking, law, etc.
    4. No real way to force Biden out
    5. No better option (again, given the restraints of a capitalist party) than an incumbent who’s already beaten Trump once
    6. Liberal ideology like “we need a strong Republican Party” and “we can’t simply arrest this guy we’re calling a fascist”
    7. The general incompetence that crops up when party leaders basically can’t fail their way out of endless party job opportunities

    If you and I got in a boxing match and for some reason I insisted on wearing 50 pound weights on my ankles, I could try really hard and would still suck given my self-imposed constraints.


  • Settler colonialism is a form of colonialism where the empire displaces or eradicates the natives in order to offer the natives’ land to settlers. This gives settlers a strong material incentive to migrate there (free land), as well as a common enemy to rally against (the natives).

    Classic examples of settler colonies are the British American colonies (later the U.S.) and Israel. Contrast with a colonial project like British India. Nazi Germany undertook a settler colonial project in Eastern Europe (that was directly inspired by the U.S. treatment of natives) that was stopped before it could be completed.




  • This has to help, though you wonder how much. Plenty of libs were radicalized under Trump, but plenty more went back to brunch when Biden won.

    The propaganda excuse for American atrocities is that they were isolated incidents, bad apples, unrepresentative of who we are. Even whole eras get whitewashed this way. Trump is so much more buffoonish than any president in living memory that he plays right into that.



  • Both bad takes.

    Setting aside the whole issue of how it looks for leftists to say they support Trump, for any reason, the State Department wouldn’t even let Trump pull troops out of Syria, so of course they aren’t going to let him do anything that would seriously damage NATO. Congress has already passed a law to keep presidents from unilaterally withdrawing from NATO, and you could just as well argue that the war in Ukraine is placing more stress on the organization than any pissy comments Trump made about who’s paying what.

    With the DPRK, Trump did nothing of material significance. He could wake up tomorrow and go back to calling Kim “Rocket Man.” Like with NATO, he’d face intense institutional opposition to any serious change, and he doesn’t care enough to try and fight that.

    Then there’s the whole issue of Trump being widely viewed as an aberration, which means NATO countries will take his yammering less seriously and U.S. decisionmakers will be less likely to view his actions as precedent.