I should make sure to say that Western prosperity isn’t liberalism the philosophy of liberty & self-determination. These are distinct things. That the longest running democracy is also an empire of exploitation is a case of multiple things being true, not the same thing.

Why does it necessitate that? I don’t think that having civil liberties & self-determination require any of that exploitation & murder. That we have those things is, I think, a holdover from what preceded liberal democracies, & a manifestation of nationalism & greed.

The default answer to everything for MAGA is violence. That's how it's going to be when Trump wins.

Main Line Republican Couple Threatened After Filming Kamala Harris Ad

Things did not go so well for these Main Line farmers.

To be clear, I do not think that war crimes & genocides are a given. But so far in all of recorded history, we can see that they have been perpetrated by and within every system of gov’t so far. Why do we think another system, which may lack self-determination & civil liberties, would be better?

It’s not a handwave so much as that every system of gov’t that’s existed has a documented history of war crimes & genocides. So with that as the basis of our understanding, if all systems come w/ those things, is liberalism really not the best of what’s been tried so far?

“It's not just the megarich, the billionaires with yachts for their yachts. It's "don't call me a millionaire" millionaire homeowners, it's doctors, it's car dealers, it's cosmetologists.” www.liberalcurrents.com/its-not-the-...

It's Not the One Percent. It's Your Neighbors.

The rentier economy that has a stranglehold on American quality of life includes a lot more than one percent of the population.

Considering that every political philosophy has its own literal pile of corpes, is it useful to point out that liberal political systems have also waged war & persecuted people? It certainly seems a preferable ideology to the various authoritarian ones we’ve otherwise seen throughout history.

i wonder if the guys who get real mad about "ATM machine" and "PIN number" also get mad about "olive oil"

This graph is astonishing. The people that bang on about “natural birth” and “women have been doing this forever without help” need to be forced to stare at this until their eyes water.

In order to determine whether a 15-year-old volleyball player was transgender, Florida police sought out her medical records to determine any changes in her body weight and asked her teammates if they had ever seen her nude. One detective referred to the girl as "it"