This is unironically the big moral dilemma presented by so much western entertainment media it’s nauseating. “Would you pRoTeCt yOuR FaMiLy even if it meant the world/everyone else would die?” and the correct moral position, after much soul searching and garment rending is usually presented as: “Yes, fuck the world, you gotta protect you and your own above literally ALL else.” And it’s always so contrived, with such manufactured scenarios to ignore the fact that in the vast majority of both real and imagined cases, the better option for the world is also going to be the better option for your family. But constantly pitting the individual and their immediate family’s interests over the well being of the community and society is fundamentally necessary to maintain the capitalist mode, so they gotta keep reinforcing that false dichotomy as some kind of universal conundrum that is best answered by being as self centered as possible “for your family.”

Or maybe try telling it to all the people of color shot by cops from 2020-2024, or the kids in cages that never went away when a Democrat was elected president but just silently forgotten about and suddenly ignored by the same media that had been using them for cheap political points during election season, or the thousands of people in NOT brand-new concentration camps but the ones that have existed the whole fucking time. Or are you saying that none of that shit mattered then since your blue team was in the big boy chair, but only matters now that a cheeto is office and it was a white person that got executed by the bipartisan fascists this time? Despicable.

That’s just not voting but with extra steps.

So voting for who or what we actually want is the same as just not voting. Got it. We HAVE to vote for fascists we’re opposed to or our vote is meaningless.

Sounds like a pretty fucking airtight argument for not voting then, dipshit.

The original version of this meme was problematic but my god this version of it is spot on accurate. And it still would be accurate for countless other things that could be put in the Biden/Trump speech bubble. Despite what Democrats pretend, and how they like to (ineffectively) play the role of opposition to Trump, they are fine with 90% of what he does, he just does it without any deference to the liberal theatrics of “law,” with too much bombast instead of fake personal difficulty making “hard choices,” and because he’s not on team Blue. Granted, there are a few significant things I think it’s safe to say would not have happened under a Democrat president, but vanishingly few of those are things they wouldn’t have wanted to do.

Uh, what? Look at the context of this post, jackass. The meme is trying to portray Russia as a misunderstood good guy

The flag of Russia isn’t even in the meme, “jackass.” The flag of the USSR is, though sadly it hasn’t existed for a few decades now. Like most clueless liberals happily drowning in propaganda, you are falsely equating modern capitalist Russia with the USSR.

And that’s not even getting into the fact that even modern Russia (whose flag appears nowhere in this image, genius) was wholly justified in entering the civil war that had already been ongoing inside Ukraine on behalf of the eastern regions of Ukraine whose civilians were being slaughtered by the Ukrainian government’s militias. But I admit that it’s hard to keep a straight face when talking to someone who uses NATO buzzwords like “unjustified foreign aggressor” because I keep having to facepalm.

You’re assuming libs apply their racism consistently rather than in whatever way immediately suits their interests. “How can you accuse me of hating black people, I loved Obama!” -countless libs.

As much as anyone on the left should agree that the fall of the Soviet Union was a horrible, tragic event for workers there (if not worldwide), I think many if not the majority of Social Democrats and even a few who like to call themselves Anarchists, would deny that fact as vehemently as any capitalist. Western hatred for the USSR runs deep. Chomsky is a perfect example, and there are droves of supposed “lefties” who readily side with him on insisting that “The collapse of USSR was victory for the working class.”

Here is a video of Chomsky from 2020, before the connection between JE and Chomsky had been revealed. He gets a little indignant and defensive about Epstein, interesting flavor info.

Did you maybe forget to paste the link for this? I’m assuming it’s probably this one, but if there’s another I’d like to see it. In this one, Chomsky first defends Epstein (and his own relationship with Epstein) by citing how it’s a foundational tenant of western law that a person who has “served their sentence” is then absolved or “the same as everybody else” as Chomsky puts it. Which is amusing in itself coming from someone who supposedly is such a critic of how asymmetrically that law punishes the weak and powerless vs the rich and powerful. He then does an actual whataboutism by basically saying “well David Koch was even worse, and he also gave money to MIT where I worked. Did anybody say anything about that?” Ok then, Noam, would you go have brunch with Koch on his private jet too, or are you saying that’s where you draw the line? I wish the interviewer, who was obviously dissatisfied with his answers had been less deferential to Chomsky.

But if I found out my best friend was hanging out with Jamie Dimon, Donald Trump, and Alan Dershowitz, as well as a cavalcade of notorious villains and literal monsters

I was surprised to learn how close Epstein and Steve Bannon were. Not at all surprised by the connection, but if you read the ongoing conversations they had, they were like a couple of teens gossiping with each other over the phone every night. I do wonder exactly how aware he was that his good buddy Epstein was besties with, as you said, notorious villians and literal monsters (like would Chomsky still be ok if Epstein had been good friends with David Koch for example?), but I doubt Chomsky was as in the dark about it as his fans would like to think. He was aware that Epstein had at least in the past, if not currently was outright human-trafficking children for SA on his private island, but apparently he did his time, and that makes him “the same as everybody else.”

It really is an illuminating example of how interconnected so many of the so-called elite really are, even those whose public personas would make us think they could be nothing but bitter enemies. My personal vibes-based belief is that it’s a soft form of class solidarity.

Its government came to power as a result of a US-backed coup, for starters.

edit: For the record, I upvoted you because your question is fair and valid if you don’t know the history and context of the situation. And the western media where many people understandably (if sadly) get their information from will never provide that history and context. That is why we get these confidently ignorant people coming into threads like this gobsmacked that anyone can deny what they see as the obvious truth of Russia’s “unjustified invasion by a foreign aggressor.”

This post is the one I was referring to when I used the word mandate, a post made by someone I believe was an admin at the time, but maybe not. But I also talked to someone at the time from there who was a frequent commenter in places like the lemmy c/worldnews comm and they were very angry about having their posts and comments removed, while others were banned. I checked the modlog and sure enough. I’m really not trying to stir shit, it’s just something I’m sincerely curious about because it seemed so… off brand to me, to use a lib phrase.