Imperialism - building an empire by exerting control over foreign powers

de jure - by law

cassus belli - cause for war

So conquering other places is okay when the law says you have a good reason to send soldiers marching down their streets?

Yes, it was, but evidence doesn’t work on most people with severe depression. The disease impairs the part of your brain that processes good news. Drag understood the evidence, but drag’s dragon couldn’t, because it was sick. That’s what depression is.

1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15… and you’ve forgotten that two things can be bad again. Drag said genocide in West Bank is bad, so you assumed drag doesn’t oppose genocide in Gaza and must support Israel. It’s like clockwork.

So imperialism is okay when you have a de jure cassus belli?

Drag doesn’t understand what that has to do with the power of faith to fight depression.

If you want to make the effort, drag would prefer you use drag’s second person neopronoun, “drag”.

Drag is talking about 38 million Ukrainian lives, 3 million trans American lives, and 3 million West Bank Palestinian lives. Lives which you don’t care about. Lives you are so apathetic about, you can’t even see them as different from any other statistic.

These are some good arguments, you should go to Washington and present them to the DNC. This isn’t Washington, this isn’t the DNC, this is Lemmy. We’re not the Democratic leadership, we’re just a bunch of anarchists. And we don’t buy your argument that you’re not responsible for the consequences of your own decisions because a democrat is to blame. You should have done the right thing even if the Dems did the wrong thing. Instead, they did the wrong thing, and you decided to do the wrong thing too. You think you get a free pass because there’s someone else to blame for your actions. You don’t.

Once the election was won, we could have rallied. We’d have been united finally, and she wouldn’t have needed Biden anymore.

This is not how real life works.

Yeah, drag knows that’s not how real life works. In real life, y’all decided fuck left unity, let’s have a fascist president and make it every queer for themselves. So now we’re making plans to help our loved ones free the country. You think we have time to go to the Gaza rallies when we’re worrying about concentration camps? We could have all been at the pro-Gaza rallies. We could have marched, blocked the streets, lit up the media. We don’t have time for that now, we’re putting our own oxygen masks on first. We could have done something. This was preventable.

Let’s leave aside all of Kamala’s statements condemning Netanyahu and his genocide for a moment. And let’s instead ask whether you’re capable of perceiving the difference between one genocide and three. That difference is millions of lives. Do millions of lives matter to you, or are they just a statistic, inseparable from the thousands already dead in Gaza?

Drag voted for less genocide. You voted no preference on genocide. And you think that gives you the moral high ground, because less genocide is still genocide.

If you think we couldn’t have persuaded Kamala to drop Israel’s funding, if you think there’s absolutely nothing we could have done to help Gaza under any circumstances, then why make Gaza your single issue? You’re the one who says there’s nothing we could have done. Fine, then you should have continued to do nothing for Gaza, left the fighting for Gaza to us lot, and tasked yourself with preventing the other two genocides Trump was planning on.

No, it’s a Stalinist vote. Those people aren’t communists.

If Kamala had been elected, the left would have been free to slam her on the Gaza issue, AND she would have been free to break from Biden and say “fuck you” to Netanyahu. She had to toe the line during the election and so did we. Once the election was won, we could have rallied. We’d have been united finally, and she wouldn’t have needed Biden anymore. Now instead of pressuring a sympathetic president to end a genocide, we have to arm ourselves to die fighting a fascist president. There is no more path to less genocide. That path closed. All three genocides are gonna happen.

Zelensky is now trying to arm his country with nukes because he knows he can’t rely on America. Drag is talking to politicians in drag’s country about refugee visas for America. We’re all getting ready for mitigation and survival. We could have all been focusing on the Gaza issue instead. We could have done something.

Drag noticed something after the election: All the non voters say it’s not their fault, because Kamala is more to blame. They think blame is a limited resource. They think you can only blame either the DNC OR the voters, not both.

It’s the same as with China. They think if America is bad, then China has to be good. If there’s evidence of China being bad, the counterevidence is that America is worse.

Tankies think only one thing can be bad at a time. It’s the same with genocide, too. We can’t care about Ukraine and trans people and West Bank, because WhAt AbOuT gAzA.

The tankie mind only has room for one single bad thing in each subject. Only one bad genocide. Only one bad empire. Only one bad politician. They can’t conceive of two things being bad at the same time. It does not compute. When they say they understand two things being bad, they’re lying. They can only understand it in short term memory. They can’t internalise it and apply it to long term memory. Fifteen seconds after they admit two things can be bad, they forget it. It’s like clockwork. “America and China are both bad… 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15… China can’t be bad because America is bad! I’m not to blame for Trump’s win because Kamala ran a weak campaign! Gaza is the only genocide that matters!”

Si vis pacem, para bellum.

That’s Latin for “if you want peace, prepare for war”. It was true 2000 years ago and it’s true now. If you want to be a pacifist, you should learn a martial art. If you want a peaceful government, you should learn to use a gun.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qBFvxkvpi2w&ab_channel=TwinRabbit

how do you remove it

You can’t remove the bias in favour of aggression, but you can decouple aggression and oppression. You need to train the non-predators to get aggressive in defending one another. Look at elephants. They’re herbivores. They’re not out there attacking other species to exploit them. But no predator, not even lions, fucks with elephants. Because if you fuck with elephants, they’ll kick your ass.

without overseas military bases

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hong_Kong_Garrison

And if you’re gonna say Hong Kong doesn’t count because it’s already been assimilated into the empire, that’s not great evidence against it being an empire.

Maybe it doesn’t matter which empire is more problematic.