Jesus dude, you didn’t need to sweeten the deal, I was already for it!

“Yes, we’ve had one, but what about Second War?”

“I don’t think he knows about Second War, Pippin.”

The point is not that you need to unquestioningly think that China is the most evil country on earth. The point is that there absolutely are a notable subset of leftists (just wander over to .ml if you want to find them) who will dismiss literally any criticism of China as “Western propaganda” and basically act like they’re absolute paragons of good. Those are the people being called out here.

They couldn’t have provided a more obvious example of whataboutism even if they literally wrote one for a textbook.

This is the real trap of the Iran war. Trump either has to commit to a deeply unpopular invasion, or he has to be the first US president to openly defy AIPAC.

Reminder that it’s now public knowledge that the US had to warn Iran - through back channels - that Israel was going to attempt to assassinate their negotiators in a deliberate attempt to sabotage the peace process. It wasn’t a subtle attempt either; Israel sent jets into Iranian airspace to shoot down their plane.

Israel is openly working against the US’ interests. They’re basically an enemy nation at this point. And y’all want to hand them more resources and access to all your secrets. OK, sure, good luck with that.

I mean, the obvious difference here being that he can’t take a helipad with him when he leaves.

Kind of feels like there’s not really anything to complain about here. It’s a perfectly reasonable proposal. Presidents use helicopters. This isn’t some stupid vanity project - or doesn’t appear to be - and it has practical use.

Of course, it’s Trump, so he’ll do it in the worst, most corrupt and incompetent way possible, and the whole thing will run millions over budget, result in a tonne of embezzlement and fraud, and somehow catch on fire. And by the time the fucker croaks in office it still won’t be done.

The issue is that everyone thinks computers operate on magic, so they just ignore the idea that there might be practical limitations on doing the things that they want to do.

In reality there is no means of age verification that isn’t also a form of identity verification. And if you asked people “Should everyone have to hand over their government ID to private companies in order to use the internet”, you’d see much lower numbers of positive responses.

I’m expecting exactly the same thing. But we don’t assume that reality conforms to our expectations. We assess. We judge. We use fact based examinations of empirical evidence

Dismissing the validity of a piece of reporting because you have a vague feeling about the source is how MAGA got where they are. We can do better than that.

Even a source like Fox News can produce good - or at least useful - reporting from time to time.

What are your specific concerns about the article?

Being aware of bias and potential concerns about accuracy is good, but it’s not just some catch-all thing where you dismiss something entirely because it may be biased or because you have this broad notion that it’s untrustworthy. That just leads to either a) total hypocrisy or b) being forced to dismiss everything, because everything is biased. And trust is something that you always have to test and reaffirm. Sources are trustworthy because they continue to pass those tests.

Noting the bias of the source is just step one. If you’re not willing to do the rest of the steps then you’re not actually contributing anything.

Pity. One of the only good ideas that government has ever had. But of course, even when they’re right, they’re too corrupt and incompetent to actually get anywhere.