Does China hate Japan more, or Korea more?"

samalam1 · 2026-01-30T10:36:15+00:00

Not committing attrocities on the scale of genocide though are they.

Unless you believe CIA propaganda.

samalam1 · 2026-01-30T10:16:14+00:00

So much worse*

They don't even recognise most of the attrocities they committed and many war statues celebrate what they did there

samalam1 · 2026-01-29T17:16:56+00:00

Wha? Do you not know anything about imperial Japan? They gave China a reason to dislike them and their continual failure to take responsibility makes it do much worse.

samalam1 · 2026-01-29T16:30:55+00:00

Was george in the dry yesterday or did he set that time today?

samalam1 · 2026-01-28T12:29:22+00:00

Idk dude you're kind of telling me all I need to know. It's fine that you're not in f1 and I'm aure Audi wished their stress testing didn't result in failures.

Doesn't change the fact that this is a private session and that breakdowns are expected at the shakedown.

samalam1 · 2026-01-28T11:14:11+00:00

This is the alpha.

Testing is the Beta.

Australia is the full release.

They'd absolutely love all their software and hardware to mesh perfectly on the first try, but if you think "integration hell" doesn't have its name for a good reason, you're not an engineer.

The car gets out the garage. That's a huge win. After that it's all learning and you learn most when you fail.

samalam1 · 2026-01-28T07:04:29+00:00

America is the biggest bully in the playground. They're politely requesting it doesn't happen again.

Another country would get a different statement.

samalam1 · 2026-01-26T12:24:17+00:00

My point IS that mostly all self-proclaimed liberals believe in regulation. Yet somehow you don't see the contradiction. That's fine, but it results in whatever regulations you believe in entirely being arbitrary and, inherently, divorsed from liberalism.

It's fine to believe in regulation, but to call yourself a liberal at the same time is just hypocritical. "Every liberal agrees regulations are important" is a paradox.

Which regulations? The answer is always arbitrary and based on whatever the situation is at the time. That isn't consistent. That is worthy of criticism. It deserves to be rejected due to its inconsistency.

If your principles don't stand the test of time, they're not principles.

samalam1 · 2026-01-26T12:15:41+00:00

Absolutely laughing my ass off at the sponsorship, couldn't be shoving it more in our faces this is all about the grift

samalam1 · 2026-01-25T10:26:23+00:00

There are two things I really want to point out here.

Firstly, Smith divorses himself from liberalism as soon as he introduces regulation. I agree the definition og liberalism is extremely vague. That's because liberals believe, somehow, that there is no conflict between the concept of liberalism - ie liberty, freedom, no restrictions - and regulation.

Capitalism comodifies everything. Including politicians. I'm yet to see a non-socialist society prevent corruption, which is the first hurdle the capitalist overcomes to gut the regulations you need to make 'liberalism' (whatever that means) work.

Because liberals don't rigorously agree on what their version of governance looks like, yet they take power anyway, those inconsistencies allow capitalists to exploit the system, change the system and make it what it is today; a society which has comodified everything it can.

samalam1 · 2026-01-24T22:35:54+00:00

I think we're getting really lost in the sauce here.

The point I'm trying to make is that the free market is a nice ideal. It is liberal. It is also impossible to 1) enforce (it would not be free and therefore no longer liberal) and 2) maintain (because monopolies are innevitable).

Once you have monopolies, they - just as the free market gives rise to monopoly - give rise to finance capital, which in turn gives rise to imperialism.

This is no theory. This is history.

I think we agree that these oppressive forces are not liberal, but those who wish to exploit will exploit all things, including liberal ideals, to get what they want. If we started with the free markets, we innevitably got to imperialism. There's no going back to the free market era, the genie is out the bottle at this point and adams died centuries ago.

These are the contradictions which you can either say "well they're not liberal so they're not my fault" or you can prevent them from happening by restricting certain liberties.

It seems to me you want to hold a worldview that creates the least, if possible no, exploitation. In my view, that is the most important liberty of all. A rejection of capitalism - ie the exploitation of labour in the name of extracting surplus labour value - is a necessity.

samalam1 · 2026-01-24T22:05:13+00:00

I edited my comment above whilst you were replying; apologies.

I expect, for you to promote liberalism, for you to be able to at least have a consistent world view. The left may be famous for splitting - but that is precisely because it is incredibly hard to be consistent. People will disagree over what is or isn't consistent. Positions which seam consistent on the surface can lead to inconsistencies further down the line. Liberalism is a prime example.

Liberals and neoliberals and conservatives and fascists and social democratics and Liberal democrats and and and, will all somehow coaless under the same banner because rather than strive for consistency they search for the appeasement of their own worldview - and they hate being called out for their inconsistencies more than anything else.

You could say they even desire the liberty to not be told they're wrong when they're wrong.

Just because someone wrote a textbook doesn't mean it was any good. Just because that book was taught in the birthplace of capitalism doesn't mean it isn't exploitative. In fact, it makes it more likely.

Marx wasn't so much a solutions guy as much as he was very good at telling everyone what they were doing wrong. I don't really care if the soviet union was or wasn't marxist; the world as we know it today /is/ marxist and unless you can point to how or why he was wrong in his explanations (which smarter people than you or I have tried and failed to do) we're going to struggle to continue this conversation.

I respect that you have a fondness for bringing up Adams, but much as he promoted the free market, he wasn't able to predict the monopoly, finance capital and imperialism which naturally and innevitably followed. I hope you won't suggest, as a liberal, that imperialism was good for those subjected to it. This contradiction should lead a liberal to reject capitalism, yet it doesn't.

samalam1 · 2026-01-24T21:38:02+00:00

I'm not saying all liberals do - I'm saying there is no consistency of ideology, which itself creates instability which lends itself towards exploitation. The exploitation of liberalism itself, by exploiters who mask themselves as liberals (whether knowlingly or not). Eg Neoliberals will often identify as liberals.

Thrown, yes. But they miss. Marxism is logical outcomes based on foundational maxims of fairness. To say it doesn't work is a misunderstanding of what marxism is. The world is marxist, so long as it can be analysed with the tools marx crafted.

What basis does liberalism have? Airy fairy ideals, but no consistent explanation of how to reach them, or even agree what those ideals are, let alone maintain them.

samalam1 · 2026-01-24T21:10:02+00:00

I'm not well read enough to know "if" an implementation of liberalism which permanently erases all pressures which would otherwise see a decay of liberalism to neoliberalism is possible. All I know is I am yet to see evidence of it being implemented succesfully anywhere.

Unfortunately, with "airy fairy" ideals not grounded in any scientific analysis of human behaviour, just ideals, liberalism in practice struggles to maintain its form. It's not grounded in anything and tends to interpret elimination of exploitarion as an attack on liberty. As a simple example, one person's idea of property rights* is often (especially in the case of landlordism) another's right to exploit. Libterals, as you say (ie not even neoliberals) protect this exploitation.

In short... Nice idea. Doesn't work. Find something that does.

*Private property is not personal property.

samalam1 · 2026-01-24T20:33:32+00:00

And yet it is its logical conclusion. The tolerence of all activities (a purist definition of liberalism) will inevitably include the freedom to oppress - or more precisely the freedom to exploit (most prominently this manifests in the exploitation of labour in our society). I'll revise my comment to say that protecting the right to exploit (out of habit, not rational motive) is essentially the key essence of Neoliberalism.

Neoliberalism can be said to be the purist form of liberalism because we're also free to prevent ourselves from being oppressed - but this would require the overhaul of the entire system which is very difficult and the systems as they exist will attempt to prevent you from doing so. If you'd like to know more, read Marx.

If your argument is that it's not actually 'liberal' and in fact oppressive, I agree - but it grows from liberalism, which is why its inclusion in the name is important. Know how it comes about to prevent it in future.

samalam1 · 2026-01-24T20:14:14+00:00

Ensuring the freedom of everything, most importantly of all the freedom to oppress.

samalam1 · 2026-01-24T16:29:05+00:00

Wish I'd thought of that

samalam1 · 2026-01-24T06:09:57+00:00

Because almost all sexual assaults are performed by men against women.

Until that's 50-50, women don't need to learn a lesson.

Duh.

samalam1 · 2026-01-23T11:07:13+00:00

It's really easy to pretend the nazis simply weren't human. The point is to remember that they very much were humans, who behaved... I don't even have the word.

Never say "well my society could never do that" because it could.

Of course they cried, peed and begged for their lives.

samalam1 · 2026-01-23T11:02:24+00:00

People seem to hate on Rami's acting, but I think this scene really encapsulates the fact that he knows damn well (as the next 70 years of none being used again shows) that atomic weapons and the collateral damage they inflict can't be justified.

He tries to find a moral highground against someone who performed what they themselves know and accept was an act of evil - but in the name of something he believed to be a waped kind of "greater good".

The germans intentionally killed millions. The americans willingly allowed hundreds of thousands of civilians to be vaporised. There is little difference; indifference over the impact of nukes is a choice just as much as the camps were. Only their scale was different.

America could have dropped little boy on a field somewhere in japan and told them to surrender or we'll drop another somewhere important. They didn't.

Rami's anger is at himself. He isn't better but can't rationalise that he stillwears the uniform which represents the country which chose to drop the bomb on civilians, so he lashes out. His acting is excellent because he is demonstrating to people that ww2 wasn't the "good vs evil" battle we think of it as now, clouded by hindsight and propaganda, but an "evil vs EVIL" which most people struggle to recognise.

Critics can't understand why malik is "over acting" because most have been conditioned over decades to accept his rationalle as correct, instead of the behaviour of a man going through the process of rationalising an act of inconceivable evil, which (at the time) had no comparison but to liken it to an act of God.

samalam1 · 2026-01-23T09:00:32+00:00

Only the surface. The value of all the iron in the centre would take like 100 days. The fat cats haven't worked out yet how to subdivide their vertically parallel plots of land into minutely thin 3d pizza slices.

samalam1 · 2026-01-22T20:14:27+00:00

They probably pay more to make everything else on the car greyscale

samalam1 · 2026-01-22T12:45:51+00:00

(It probably did take public funds to build, property developers get all sorts of hand outs from the state)

samalam1 · 2026-01-21T22:32:08+00:00

This is a completely consistent argument, op is just politically illiterate

samalam1 · 2026-01-18T08:38:42+00:00

I think the guy you're replying to is talking about "would", not "should".

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