OBJECTION!

I’m just telling you that no normal (and by normal, I don’t necessarily mean good!) leader (i.e. one who is not a megalomaniac, a narcissist or a (wannabe) dictator) would demand a military parade for their birthday. Honestly not. And even if you don’t care because it’s “symbolic,” you should still care because it shows you the type of person he is.

So if you already have a negative opinion of his character, it reads as demonstrating a negative aspect of his character.

Don’t get me wrong, you’re right about his motivations, but it’s still based on personal interpretation. He’s not explicitly saying it’s about himself. And it’s a reasonable interpretation, but if someone doesn’t see him that way already, this won’t convince them. This sort of plausible deniability is part of Trump’s MO, he wants to be criticized over such non-substantive issues, because it makes it look like it’s the most severe criticism people have of him, and it allows him to control the narrative and draw attention to the parade, which the average person will probably not have a problem with, because people like parades.

Instead of taking the bait and freaking over every random, forgettable news cycle, it’s better to keep criticism focused on things that have a material impact on people’s lives, such as tariffs and deportations. Deportations in particular are much more of an indication of fascism than a parade is - people are being abducted off the streets and taken to black sites with no due process or oversight. If Trump wasn’t doing shit like that that actually affects people’s lives, he could dance around however he likes and I wouldn’t mind.

Maybe I’m just a spoilsport, but my hatred for Trump is disciplined. I don’t see any reason to freak out every time he sneezes. I’d rather focus on the important, unambiguously bad things that he’s doing.

It is a very important distinction. I can’t even imagine the prime minister of my home country insisting on a military parade for his birthday.

It’s not even a real distinction because it’s also the Army’s 250th anniversary.

Even if that wasn’t the case, it’s a totally meaningless and purely aesthetic distinction. “Oh this kinda has the vibe of something bad people do,” that’s the only real objection to it that any of you have.

The legitimate reason to care is because it’s glamourizing the US military, which is an incredibly evil institution. Even so, of the things the military does, a parade is one of the most innocent and innoculous. But between glamorizing a shitty president or a shitty institution, why should anyone give a shit?

Insane that there’s people in this thread being like, “I should stop paying taxes.” Really, this is where you draw the line? Hundreds of thousands of civilians murdered in illegal invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, but Bush never had a parade to celebrate himself so I guess it’s fine! I’ll never understand liberals’ priorities.

Sounds like a very important distinction to you, for some reason.

Are we acting like this is the first time the US has had a military parade in history for some reason? Pretty much every country has military parades. If “only tinpot dictators have military parades,” then name a country that isn’t a tinpot dictatorship.

Don’t really have a problem with a $92,000,000 parade so much as I have a problem with the 1,000,000,000,000 military budget.

Edit: It appears I have offended the libs by trying to bring it back to a larger systemic issue rather than freaking out over aesthetics. My apologies.

I don’t know how you can defend this shit, because I can’t.

I’m not. Just because I don’t like Trump’s policies or approach doesn’t mean I’m supporting the status quo. They’re both bad.

I just think the concept of universal tariffs is very much solid especially in terms of ethics

Why should we place tariffs on countries with better labor laws where things are more ethically produced?

You might as well be waiting for someone to go on TV and look directly at the camera and say, “I am a dictator” (which Trump even kinda did). We’re always going to have elections because they’re a valuable tool of controlling the population. Nearly every country in the world has them, including ones that are generally considered dictatorships.

Without elections, the only vehicle of change or expressions of popular will would be actions, and those actions are generally more disruptive and effective than voting is. We didn’t always have elections in the first place, and we didn’t vote our way out of monarchy.

With elections, people put their anger on hold for years, waiting for the appropriate time to express it, and the way it’s expressed is by choosing a different corporate lackey to support. Gerrymandering, corporate finance, a compromised press, etc ensure that will be the case. Even better, they get people forming their whole political identity around their preferred corporate lackey and half the population hating the other half for it, making organizing on a large scale extremely difficult.

It’s a very silly place to draw a red line. Even if it happened, you’d still “have to” pay taxes for the same reason you do now, because of force. What, are you paying taxes and following laws and shit right now because you think the US government represents some kind of moral authority?

Archive link for the paywall.

Consumerism is a pox on the nation, this should fix this.

Leftism is when you fix consumerism by rendering common people too poor to buy shit. What a take.

Why are we opposed to exploitation and pollution here at home but are ok when China does it because it allows us to buy a year’s worth of clothes every week for the price of single ethically produced garment??

Well, first off, these tariffs aren’t focused on China. They’re hitting everyone, including countries with better labor laws and more environmental regulation than the US, such as the EU. Second, the tariffs aren’t conditional on countries making improvements, like if you want to argue we should have tariffs based on emissions per capita, that’s not an unreasonable position (although we’d have to tariff ourselves somehow), but that’s not what’s actually happening at all.

Turns out Trump may be a tankie after all.

No, he isn’t.

I’m glad to hear they’re hurting and not anyone else.

Unless you’re accused of being an immigrant and are deported, or you’re trans, or in Yemen or Palestine, or like, have/want a job that isn’t subsistence farming. Look at the Depression, it wasn’t just investors who were hurt.

Trump might be accidentally causing some good things to happen, but a lot of regular people are going to suffer too.

What I can’t believe is how easily the US military is giving up on this conflict. Letting the swamp win is disrespectful to the fallen. We need to send another truckload of troops into the swamp, and if they sink into it too, send another, and another, until eventually they can drive a truck in without it sinking. We can’t let the cost of these sunken troops go to waste.

Anyone who says we shouldn’t do this is secretly a pro-swamp infiltrator or an accelerationist who hates America because they just want to watch the world burn.

I’m still the asshole if I scream it at her corpse during her funeral.

How’d you feel when bin Laden was killed? Did people mourn respectfully, and should they have? Or do the actions of the organization you’re fighting for affect whether you deserve to be treated respectfully?

I’m gonna go with never.

I have an out-of-state ID because it was a hassle to get it updated after I moved, and when I went to vote (in Illinois), they required me to provide proof of residence, I forget exactly but like a copy of my lease or utility bills - pretty much the same documents you’d use to need to show to get an ID in the first place. You still have to prove you are who you say you are.

Plenty of people including virtually the entire intelligence and diplomatic corps of the western world, along with virtually everyone in Washington DC, disagrees with you.

Imagine bootlicking so hard you think it’s a bad thing to be on the other side of the exact same ghouls who lied us into the Iraq War. How can any of us live with ourselves knowing that Dick Cheney thinks we’re bad people?

Bro’s out here talking about the sodomy demon, they’re all sodomy demons if you play your cards right 😉

What are we supposed to do, not put golf courses all over the desert?

They’ve forced children as young as 6 to defend themselves in court with no right to an attorney, and it’s been going on for years. The right to counsel isn’t applied to immigration cases. It’s truly insane, kangaroo court shit.

If the interpretation that they don’t need a warrant stands, it means that ICE could walk into anybody’s home, abduct their child, accuse them of being an illegal immigrant, do a show trial, and then ship them off to Guantanamo Bay where no press is allowed. Or, for all we know, to Little St. James or anywhere else.

If you had told me a year ago that one party had to stop holding town halls because they were afraid of their constituents, I would’ve assumed it would’ve been about heavily armed far-right militias intimidating Democrats. People can downplay it but it does seem kinda significant to me that Republicans have effectively been deplatformed by their own constituents, even if the specific example in the article (a town of 4,500 people) is pretty insignificant. Combined with the narrative shifting to, “things will get materially worse in the short term, but that’s good, actually,” it’s starting to shape up to a potentially big shift in the midterms.

Clearly the problem is that Dick Cheney wasn’t far enough right. Maybe if someone started a podcast and invited Charlie Kirk and Steve Bannon - wait, shit - uhh I guess they weren’t far enough right either. Who’s next, Richard Spencer and David Duke?