You could start by reading about the School of the Americas, Operation Condor and Operation Gladio. See how the USA treats its “friends”.

Read about cointelpro and see how it treats its citizens. Some tactics are still in use today.

Add to this one another map of past CIA-backed coups and despair.

My argument would be that individual actions are useless or even harmful. Collective, smart action is required. This problem is bigger than any one of us but not bigger than every one of us.

Liberals tend to say that the system just needs a few tweaks here and there while the reality is that the entire thing is rotten to the core and the stuff they enjoy now in their “developed” countries was built upon centuries of exploitation of other people, which is still ongoing stronger than ever.

When confronted with these facts, some liberals act defensively and instead of learning and growing in their understanding, they start aligning with right wing thinking. That’s why the saying goes “scratch a liberal and a fascist bleeds”.

Wealth redistribution is only resetting the board, not a change in the game.

Her talent is in marketing/making money through music. Artistically, she hasn’t risked going half a millimeter from the mainstream. Were she as talented as her (loud! Jesus, we already know you like her) fans think, she would be creating new forms of art unknown to humanity. She just found a group of people over the internet and a way to influence them to milk them for money with 27 million versions of the same album and merch.

It doesn’t hurt being ultra WASPy and the daughter of the super well connected, super wealthy vice president of Merrill Lynch who basically harassed other people and companies into giving TS a space.

They can exploit the impulses of some vulnerable people.

The US controls gigantic parts of the information/entertainment space: movies, music, social networks, YouTube, TV, even their politics is a keyfabey circus for the rest of the world. American propaganda is literally everywhere.

It’s an image of consumption and individualism above even self preservation, so deeply internalized that Americans and perhaps half of the rest of the world don’t notice. Sometimes it feels like the US lost its mind in 9/11 and started hurting itself in confusion but it was never a “smart player” in the world, just a narcissistic bully.

It’s not necessary for the CIA to be involved because it’s literally superliminal and grotesque at this point in time. The US throws its weight all around the world and is brutish and callous with its “use of force”, which means murdering people (and destroying property, oh they love them some property) in case there’s people in this thread that are lost in so many layers of euphemisms and irony.

Americans need to deal with this instead of becoming defensive and recurring to whataboutism. Yes, China and Russia are horrible and murderous in their own ways and at a different scale, but one must not use them to avoid self reflection.

You are clearly not a victim of these issues and the situation is so alien to you that apparently the only way for you to relate to them is via the news. Violence and prejudice are things that happen to “other people”.

Real people are suffering real oppression every day. Some in a small almost invisible way and others live in permanent fear of violence because of who they are.

That things were worse in the past is no reason to stop progress. And things did get better because people fought for them, often to death.

I hope you are arguing in good faith and have the moral strength to accept you may be blind to some realities and reconsider your beliefs.

Conservatism by definition is thinking “Things are good right now, let’s not change anything” or even worse: “Things were better before, let’s go back to that”.

The issue is “better for who”? Women, queer people, POC, working class people were NOT ok. Implicitly you can see that conservatism is bigoted by (at a minimum) ignoring or misrepresenting the realities of people they don’t care about. It’s just that lately, more and more conservatives are explicit about it and showing their true colors, but the philosophical underpinnings are the same.

I’m as leftist as they come but I think it’s their prerogative to defederate from any instance they want. If you and/or your content are not welcome there you should respect that. It would be kind of authoritarian otherwise, wouldn’t it?

Censorship is not what’s happening, because you’re always free to express yourself in countless other spaces if you want. That does not mean that they’re are forced to read what you say.

Crack’s certainly involved in all this.

It will be full of nsfw pictures of people wearing lab coats in no time. So, an absolute win.

It doesn’t appear like they value growth for growth’s sake. And that’s cool because it lets them focus on other, arguably more important, stuff. Many of our preconceived notions about social networking don’t translate well to the federation model.

This and having a fuckton of scummy users being sent our way by accounts like Libs of TikTok. Harassment will be unbearable and large-scale, especially for tiny instances.