A hero is a concept

It’s a descriptor of a person or personality.

“Help! Help! I need a doctor.”

“I’m sorry ma’am, but a doctor is more of a conceptual term. Nobody here can fulfill your request.”

Anything in particular? Or is this just bad vibes?

His politics seem to lean closer to libertarian nut-job than anything else

Sure, but you could say the same of Luigi Mangione and that isn’t slowing anyone down.

Case in point, Glen Greenwald broke the Snowden leaks, and I considered him one of my heros for a time,.but these days he sounds more like Tucker Carlson than anyone else.

Glenn was always a libertarian crank. But after he got ousted from The Guardian, his economic needs superseded his politics. I might suggest that if Glenn had ended up on MSNBC rather than the gutter for FOX News washouts, he’d be denouncing Snowden today rather than praising him.

The point is, admire heroic actions, but don’t make people your heroes.

I don’t think you can criticize Snowden because the guy who interviewed him ended up becoming a crank. But I also don’t know of what became of Snowden, outside “he fled to Russia after Hong Kong wouldn’t hide him”.

I might suggest that Snowden was only able to leak what he did because he climbed up the ranks through Booze-Allen to begin with. And there you’ve got an inherent problem with whistleblowers - either coming or going, they must have done something you don’t like.

But I’d say his turn of conscious and his work ethic and professionalism in how the information was aggregated, leaked, and confirmed makes him a role model for anyone else who aspires to turn coat against a fascist regime. Whatever you think of the individuals, you still do need Role Models in order to inform how you might achieve similar results. That means studying other people - studying history at the individualist level - and asking how they did what they did. Ideally, you’re studying people you admire because you want to be more like them. Realistically, you’re going to study people and see their warts. And that might shape what you think about their motivations and whether your own motivations lead you the same way.

Okay, well then I guess I’ll just wait for that to happen

Israeli settlements

Strange that the prohibition would extend to cat’s paw of the fascist regime, but not the massive genocidal police state that enables it.

Let’s not glorify Hezbollah

Well, they’re Evil Brown Muslims, not Righteous European Judeo-Christians.

On day 1 they’d institute hijab requirements and stone gay people

Westerners discover gay rights (kinda) and five years later they’re slapping the rainbow flag on tomahawk missiles.

The whole “democracy” thing is little more than a show, if you ask me.

American Democracy has a lot of angles to it. If money was the only object, Jeb Bush would be in his third term.

Given the way that impeachment ended, I’m sure a lot of people would like if we did

Do you really think that Trump and his billionaire cronies don’t have the media under their thumb?

I think media owners regularly have to discipline Trump with negative news stories and right wing hecklers.

Neocon Hecklers got him into the Iran War. Wall Street hecklers got him to sign a deal. And Zionist hecklers will likely convince him to blow it up again.

The fact that he’s still in office at all borders on a miracle

Once you prove you can get elected, you develop a level of inertia that keeps getting you elected.

Yes, Eisenhower was a scumbag. But compared to

The big difference between Eisenhower’s two terms and Trump’s two terms boils down to the alignment of the US national media at the time. Eisenhower had them under lock-and-key day one. Trump’s had an off-and-on relationship going back to his Central Park Five ad.

The dirty truth of Presidential politics is that lots of these guys are corrupt, lots of them are incompetent, and lots of them are complete assholes. But public opinion hinges on whether the national media wants to scream at them. Trump getting into a four month long disastrous war with Iran is - frankly - a huge improvement over the Bush Jr (decades in Iraq/Afghanistan) or Reagan (instigated the Iran-Iraq War which killed millions) or Eisenhower (toppled multiple liberal Middle Eastern governments from the inside). Assuming this peace deal sticks, he’s going to go down as one of the least reprehensible US Presidents to meddle in Middle Eastern politics, by volume of atrocities committed.

Drump is actually the best representative this country has ever had.

He’s definitely a symptom of the US decline. But given our nightmare run at foreign policy across the region, that’s somehow managed to be an improvement.

Biden is responsible for not prosecuting Trump when he was in the crosshairs. And Biden is responsible for ratcheting tensions in the Middle East when he should have been fortifying Europe. And Biden is responsible for falling into the same “Looming Threat of China!” trap that Dick Cheney set nearly 30 years ago, forcing the two countries together after Nixon/Kissinger had so neatly split them apart.

If it were up to that orange pedo, all support would be cut off.

Trump was dumping billions of dollars into the Ukrainian defense budget in 2018.

This blind insistence on Trump being a “Putin Puppet” is in direct odds with US foreign policy going back to Obama. Trump’s interested in Trump and has been more than happy to break bread or turn coat on anyone and everyone.

Eisenhower was, compared to today, still a reasonably decent person

glances at the Korean War, the Dirty Wars south of the border, CIA operations across the Middle East and East Asia, backing for the early Apartheid government in South Africa, Operation Plumbbob, Nixon…

this country isn’t sending billions to Ukraine

It absolutely is. What are you talking about?

Hezbollah should make Israel pay. But they won’t, because they don’t have the hardware or the manpower.

If Kiev could have leveled Moscow, they’d have done it already.

he is the secretary general of NATO

He has little to do with the US

Jesus fucking Christ. Guy’s been a lapdog of US foreign policy since Iraq in 2003. Get the fuck out of here with this Know Nothing bullshit.

Tell you what, I’ll start condemning China for fighting “Taiwanese Civil Society Participants” when I hear your people start condemning the mass forced closure of Confucious Centers in the states.

The number of Confucius Institutes at U.S. universities and colleges declined since 2019, from about 100 to fewer than five. Schools most commonly cited the potential loss of federal funding and external pressures as contributing to their decision to close their Confucius Institute. More than 60 percent of the 74 respondents to GAO’s survey stated that the potential loss of or ineligibility for federal funding, such as Department of Defense funding subject to limitations in the FY 2019 and FY 2021 National Defense Authorization Acts, contributed to “a great extent” to the institution’s decision to close the Confucius Institute. Schools also cited pressure from U.S. government, congressional, or state representatives among other factors that contributed to their decision.

every time China wants to cancel a human rights event in Zambia

RightsCon 2026

Bow-motherfuckin’-wow.

I do like how you rebutted the “China builds a hospital, UK sends a lecture” by linking to a series of TED Talks, though.

The same is true for Kenya

I bet it is.

NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte accused China, North Korea and Iran of helping sustain Russia’s war against Ukraine

tapping the brakes

Hey, Secretary General Mark Rutte, what were you doing back in February when the US abruptly ended nuclear nonproliferation talks with Iran by assassinating its leadership and killing tens of thousands of its residents in a surprise attack?

Every time China visits we get a hospital, every time Britain visits we get a lecture

~ Dr Lubinda Haabazoka, Director of the University of Zambia Graduate School of Business and former President of the Economics Association of Zambia

Direct disenfranchisement is a drop in the bucket

It’s more than enough to swing elections by margin of victory