I don’t have any pressing addictions right now but I’d still enter a coma just for the good sleep and possible trip to Silent Hill

While that is something to work around, it also seems like an opportunity to nonviolently collect some names and faces

Most times the US military has gone up against the general population of a society, the US military has lost.

Opening Hexbear is gonna be like the lib version of opening the cursed mummy’s tomb

I think it was a slow-burn, building awareness after every incident that this wasn’t someone i wanted to be: it felt juvenile and embarassing. One day it reached a point where that awareness matched the blind rage i felt and allowed me to choose (with difficulty) not to do it in the moment. After that the choice got easier each time until the urge faded away. I still yell more than I’d like but I’m no longer destructive

I used to be a stereotypical wall puncher, it was so fucking embarassing. Been sober off the drywall dust for a few years now

Get ready for one trillion more identical arguments about America’s geopolitical rivals

The Knifepoint Horror narrator

I have separate and unrelated blood feuds with every one of Santa’s reindeer

Russian is the second most commonly spoken language in Ukraine, and your opinion that speaking it is “missing on their culture” puts you in league with the far right who were doing ethnic cleansing in that country since 2014. Reconsider your opinions.

Yeah it’s not like they’re mass-producing the best electric cars in the world or anything🙄

Nah, it’s a very apt description for chauvinist liberals who uncritically buy into an American exceptionalist worldview and end up supporting fascist policies and movements out of “grim necessity” because they believe that doing so will bring back the mythical good old days (the 90s end of history). People who believe, even if they don’t say it, in a softer and more polite version of western supremacy and butt heads with the open fascists over the latter’s garish bloodlust and impropriety, while supporting the same systems and most of the same goals.

They’re all on a summer camp daytrip to Breenland for the duration of the story

Removed by mod

Reddit loves a singular figure to make the focus of an overly simplistic epic bacon mythology, and they’ve already run Teddy Roosevelt and Chuck Norris into the ground

I want evidence. Provide it to convince me.

You are excusing it

“It” being something that doesn’t exist

You are, in this thread, are tolerating it

“It” being something that doesn’t exist

you want to focus on this US issue, go for it

Thanks, I will

but that doesn’t mean dismissing another issue,

An issue that doesn’t exist

and as you describe it intentionally watering down the very real problem of both issues.

“Chinese slavery is super real bro, you gotta believe me. No I will not be backing up my jingoist hunch with anything, why do you hate justice?”

Mind you this thread STARTED with a callout of slavery in China, was whataboutismed to include modern American slavery.

This thread started with you lazily repeating a jingoist cliche with no evidence, and me pointing out that our government are both world-historical liars and provably guilty of that exact crime at an unprecedented scale. It’s like saying “this thread started with a callout of Miss Rachel’s cannibalism, and was whataboutismed to include Richard Chase.” Or “This thread started with a callout of Saddam Hussein’s nuclear weapons, and was whataboutismed to include the United States.” This is not a matter of two equally guilty parties, this is a matter of what the world’s biggest propaganda machine says about other countries to justify horrifying acts against them.

I am actually opposed. I vote, organize, boycott, strike, etc against it.

That’s good, but makes it all the more important that you understand the dynamic at play here. Would you casually accuse Venezuela of being a narco state in league with jihadists, as the news here has insanely suggested? Of course not, because you would recognize that that’s a story cooked up to justify American hostility towards Venezuela. “Chinese slavery” is no different. If you’re on the side of the overwhelming masses of humanity, you have to be able to recognize this bullshit when you see it, or else you may find yourself repeating tall tales invented to justify people’s repression by the world capitalist empire.

Its defeatist to just accept evil. Call it out. Its not normal. Its not ok.

Correct, it’s not normal or tolerated in most of the world, including China. The only countries saying it is normal there are the countries who are themselves guilty of it and seeking to muddy the waters by projecting their crimes, like how Israel accuses Hamas of harboring genocidal intent. You need to be more discerning about believing what the countries where slavery is legal and normal say about the countries where it isn’t. Of course the slave states are going to try to tell you that everyone is doing it, that it’s “whataboutism” to focus on their well-documented crimes and not on the crimes they want you to believe, with no evidence, that their rivals are committing. It’s on you to be smarter than that.

Its imperial propaganda to say slavery is wrong?

It’s imperial propaganda to respond to the fact that we are the biggest slave state by implying that the countries the empire wants you to hate are probably secretly worse. You didn’t get that idea on your own, you learned to yadda yadda into equivocating the incomparable the same way we all did: through constant exposure to imperial media.

To take the side of the oppressed against the oppressor no matter who they are?

To pretend that everyone is an oppressor just like us, yes. That is imperial propaganda, designed to foster hopelessness and disengagement. If you confronted someone who was abusing their children to an absurd degree, and they responded by saying “Psh, everyone does it, probably”, you would immediately see that for the weak deflection that it is. It’s no different here.

You know there are more sides then just those in control of the state in both the US and Chinese governments right?

“You know there are more sides than just the police and the parent here, right?”

Not when it comes to this argument. In this specific argument there are exactly two sides: what is known and verifiable on the one hand, and the habit of vague, proofless insinuation we were taught to engage in from childhood on the other. It’s a coping mechanism, a way to make up reasons for the obvious not to be true when it makes us uncomfortable. In this case, the obvious is that we are the world’s biggest perpetrator of the evil of slavery, and the cope is the fantasy that those sneaky Chinese are probably worse but hiding it.

This is a classic trope of American apologia. You pick a thing where we’re clearly the worst, then just say that (Other country) is probably worse than us, but just expertly lying and hiding it, and hey both are bad and there’s totally evidence (no evidence provided) so really there’s no point in differentiating between these two totally equivalent things (that are incredibly different) and the correct answer is to be above it all (never having to admit you’re wrong).

It’s the final layer of imperial propaganda. Nobody can say with a straight face that the US is good anymore, so we cope by saying that everyone else is secretly just as bad or worse, so why bother taking a side?