GarbageShootAlt2

I rarely see it, but MBFC is an atrocious website that defines bias by distance from the center. It's just nonsense.

Social mobility only describes the ability of the hierarchy to reorder itself. It does not negate or even mitigate the fact that most people are poor.

Israel's actions now are, like the American military's actions in Iraq and Afghanistan, both propped up by American imperialist interests and the MIC. The people opposed to Israel's campaign of genocide are more analogous to the (admittedly totally ineffectual) anti-war crowd from back then.

I don’t see many central European states killing people for the reason of having different ideologies these days.

Of course not, they are nestled comfortably within the imperial core, they can better-afford to export their killing (see Germany's devotion to Israel). Most imperial core states are not like America, where protest leaders get lynched and then it gets called a suicide, because they rely on vassal states to be attack dogs.

As their position in the core becomes less and less firm, you will find that their liberalism decays into something much harsher. This has already begun with growing fascist movements in Germany, France, Italy, and so on.

Without any kind of repressive system you’ll have anarchy.

Agreed, though this is not necessarily a bad thing, depending on the particular structure of the society. However, in the meantime, it is also the socialist position that the state is repressive and, in the circumstances we currently find ourselves in, repression is necessary, it's just a matter of who is doing the repressing and who is being repressed.

I am very concerned

If you'd use such a flimsy excuse to dismiss the opinion of someone advocating for the poor, I have no reason to believe you are anything but a concern troll.

As if you're that concerned with the opinions of beggars.

In a sense he is right, since more people without work means more people you can employ in a new business, it's just that this makes the case that our economy is organized in a bad way rather than that poverty is good.

I seem to remember a book where TVs watching people was a core element of the setting. Ah well

Well, you can look at it as the rags in question being more inclined to receive such claims with uncritical credulity if they say something like "CCP bad," etc. They don't need to lie, and in fact strategically shouldn't (though some of them countenance an alarming amount of direct lying, here I am thinking of the NYT), they can just accept what they are told by the US government, which obviously dings itself by lying but a) with the source being anonymous, how will you pin it on them without the receiving journalist destroying their career by revealing an anonymous source? and b) they're the US government, it's already kind of understood that they have a record of lying, but their position of power nonetheless acts as a sort of font of credibility, especially to US citizens.

Are you suggesting the WSJ manufactured a quote by a senior US defense official?

That is probably not what they meant. Usually when a major paper reports a story hinging on a "tip from an anonymous US official" and the story is bunk, it's not because the paper invented the source but because the source was lying according to instructions from the State Dept.

That's just my understanding though, I'm not trying to say this with any authority. I furthermore have no opinion on this story and will wait for more substantial reporting on it.

I don’t think China should invade Taiwan but it drives me up the wall that so many people think that they are some plucky little democracy standing up to the big, bad, commies, when the reality is that they are just another hyper-capitalist settler-colonial project in the same vein as the US, Israel, Canada, etc.

I agree (including that China shouldn't invade, which China also thinks), it drives me crazy how people feel fit to say anything at all about Taiwan when they know so little about it that they think "Taiwanese" is the language they speak or that the dominant ethnicity isn't Han Chinese or that they hadn't been part of China before US intervention in the Chinese Civil War. These are all things that I've encountered in person.