General Politics Discussion (V) [ARCHIVED] • Page 1533

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/arti...evil-is-now-pence-s-wolf-pack-of-rogue-states

Vice President Mike Pence has updated and expanded the “Axis of Evil.” The moniker for America’s biggest adversaries is now the “Wolf Pack of Rogue States.”

“Beyond our global competitors, the United States faces a wolf pack of rogue states,” Pence told U.S. ambassadors gathered in Washington on Wednesday for an annual conference. “No shared ideology or objective unites our competitors and adversaries except this one: They seek to overturn the international order that the United States has upheld for more that half a century.”

We're doing this again I see.

 

.........a.....wolf....pack.....? ugh.

 

I would not want to fuck with these guys

 

NOT NOW PETA.

 

wolves are cool as shit though

 

hOwwwwwwwwwwwuuuuuuuooooooooooollllllll.

Sorry, had to be done.

 

Tomdelongewhatthefuck.gif

 

Oh, so that's why Trump does it.

 

peta needs to fire their PR team because this fucking stupid

 

Needs some tape.

 

i dont understand how peta has so much money to do this stuff

 

to touch back on Obama and that thread this. unfortunately in real life... no i don't like that phrase, in offline life i never see any serious criticism of Obama unless it comes from the right which is usually disingenuous or just dumb. online provides spaces to highlight his drone bombing, deportations, shoddiness towards BLM and racism in general, all things which are usually cast aside. there's no energy for these things and thus no real changing these things. so yeah online twitter is different than views offline.

 

Good news, everyone!

Pence declares 'ISIS has been defeated' on the same day as deadly Syria attack - CNNPolitics

 

I think, almost uniformly, that these things are not weighed proportionally. Dead arab civilians are written off as "a negative" or put in "the mistake column" as opposed to recognized as moral atrocities, the likes of which would be more than enough to get an arab leader overthrown. And, yes, there are people on twitter who would deny he ever did a good thing and are also being disproportional. But if we compare the people who think Obama did nothing wrong and the people who think he did nothing right, which group has more institutional power? Which makes up more of the democratic apparatus and the broadly democratic media and punditry? And, taking the balance of both groups, which disproportionality still dominates Obama discourse?

It is hard to remember before 2016, before "left twitter" influenced the content of NYT op-eds (and before Liz Bruenig was a national op-ed columnist, lol), but back then Obama-hating socialists were....almost entirely negligible in influence. I think that is where that culture continues to grow from. We are comparing the disproportional judgement of Obama by actual Obama strategists to those judgments by people who were posting on something-awful when Obama hired that first group. And I think that's where that ? after strategy comes from because...those people aren't strategists, they are tweeters who have been elevated mostly, I think, by the rising tide of twitter in general. (Pareene specifically is a different story obviously but its not like Gawker was dominating national discourse in 2014, either.) And most of those goons (I mean we're talking about Chapo and adjacent right, can we just say it) don't feel responsibility to be fair to the guy who had been the most powerful man in the world for 8 years. And I don't think that's entirely unreasonable considering virtually everyone else is (at least was) being overly 'fair.' If Bernie starts parroting Chapo talking points about how Obama sucked (i.e. if they start influencing actual democratic strategy) we can have a conversation about whether they are being responsible with their influence but I don't think we are there yet.

There is also something to think about in how as left-Bernie twitter has risen, hard-left, actual-communist twitter has risen to some extent as well, but there is much less interaction between influence-wielding twitter and the latter than influence-wielding twitter and the former. Because of this, certain ideas - like an outright rejection of Obama (which, for the hard left, usually comes with outright rejection of any president or capitalist politician) - make it to influence-wielding twitter via left-Bernie twitter, but in a watered down form which doesn't include the broader critiques of capitalism and thus is judged by twitter and media at large against some idea of an acceptable president, which doesn't actually exist for the people with which that idea originated. Not sure if this last part made sense but I tried.

 

painful

 

way closer than I thought it'd be

 

please clap