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Finkelstein is actually someone who would still go on about how great Chomsky is and how good of a friend he was. At least that was true as of a few years ago (podcast interviews come to mind, one of them for sure from RevLeft Radio) and I remember thinking how much better overall Finkelstein turned out as a human being compared to Chomsky, even if he never received the kind of recognition or accolades Chomsky did... which of course he didn't, because Finkelstein had integrity and honesty particularly to stand up to Zionists, all but ensuring his career would be constantly pushed towards obscurity, but nor did Finkelstein work as a sheep dog to corral wayward pinkos back towards liberalism like Chomsky. So it was hard to hear Finkelstein gush about Chomsky so much, but I wonder if he is having more thoughts now about how good of a guy Chomsky really was in light of these recent revelations, or even the ones of a few years ago.

same smugness he responded to people who asked him about his Epstein connections

An example I had on hand if anyone is morbidly curious.
youtube link in case nadeko isn't working: https://youtube.com/watch?v=166857p5R6Y

You know how they accuse us of "Whataboutism"? Well this is some real "public-intellectual"-grade whataboutism for ya.

I did. But thank goodness I deepened my knowledge enough to leave him behind as an understandable if unfortunate contributor to my early leftism, something to be matured out of. I was fortunate that I did not to end up one of the people who he was put into place deliberately to siphon away from radicalism to be shepherded back to liberalism. But there are many from my age group and older (my father to some extent an example) who did end up like that, just as planned. I'll be curious to see what excuses are made or whether those I know who did idolize him will finally start to grow out of it.

I do think @Awoo@hexbear.net's take on it, cynical as it may be, is accurate - he knew what he was doing. Good on you and others for never falling for it like some of us though.

It seriously is like they want people to be antisemites.

They do! Supremacy ideologies thrive on and even require a victimhood complex. Zionists are Jewish supremacists and I know it's nothing new to anyone here to point out the immediate material reasons Zionists especially have for drumming up hatred of Jewish people.

Funny how the motto has quietly shifted from "never again" to "you don't count."

I know it's been noted before, but this sure is a succinct and blatant example.

Working class people in Poland and Estonia were given the means of production and yet never overcame the anti-Russian racism despite 5 decades without a local owning class creating such propaganda.

And yet Estonia was made part of the USSR. Should it not have been? Should the Soviets not sought to unionize more countries like the one you're using as an example of a country with a racist and reactionary working class? Should any country that doesn't have a sufficient amount of the populous amenable to socialism be "isolate[d] and sanction[ed] said countries the way Cuba has been"? Which brings up another question, what is enough support, where do you draw the line as to how much of the population and by what metric is enough to warrant struggling to expand the revolution there rather than leaving their working class to keep suffering?

you can at best support preexisting movements, but you need a regional vanguard party for this to happen

In a world dominated by socialism, it is ridiculous to think no such parties would exist in every country, and where they don't, it would not be from a lack of trying, but from their immediate destruction by their state (as what happens in the US, most famously with the Black Panthers).

The comment you were responding to was "Seems like a socialist world would not let millions of people suffer like that" and it is absolutely true. No one is saying revolution will "happen spontaneously and overnight," but if a world where more countries operated like Cuba does today, or in a world where the Soviet Union spread throughout MENA and Europe, it makes no sense from a Marxist, materialist perspective, that they would simply leave any countries with a more highly propagandized public to simply suffer without any kind of intervention.

Communism will not be achievable until it is a global project. You also are treating "countries" as a monolith, with the entirety of the "country" being the problem rather than its ruling class. That is liberal idealism and totally lacking class consciousness. We're talking about class conflict here, are all the working class people within a country responsible for what their bourgeoisie does to keep them oppressed? In a world where socialism is thriving and capitalism is on its back foot, it would not be materialist let alone Marxist to just leave capitalist oppressed nations to their own devices, even if it's true what you say (and I don't think it is) that you can't peacefully address the rotten superstructure even though you can solve the base by putting the means of production in the hands of the working class.

Do you think we're "a lot closer to idiocracy now" because "stupid people" are breeding too much so there aren't enough "smart people"? How can you keep missing that that is what is eugenicist, not the portrayal of Americans? If you really think that is the problem with the US, you are a eugenicist. And that is how the movie frames the problem, explicitly from the very opening.

It was a joke. I know exactly what A Modest Proposal was written to be, @LeninWeave@hexbear.net. It was a way to end a heavier comment with a lighthearted poke. Hexbears Understand Satire Challenge: Impossible, indeed, juniper, but I'm not the one who failed that challenge here.

I understand the thought process, but I don't think carnism is based on "They're too weak to stop me"

Not OP, but I don't think he's saying carnism is "based" on that presupposition, rather it is ultimately the justification that allows for the objectification of something that undeniably possesses sentience. It is the point of failure in the supposed reasoning that most carnists would use as their rationale for not doing to humans what they readily do to animals.

Just as you might not eat an animal due to e.g. its capacity for suffering. A carnist wouldn't eat you due to your being a human.

But that's just it. Why did you change the second sentence to "a carnist wouldn't eat you due to your being a human" rather than stick with the reason you gave for a vegan not eating an animal? Yeah, a vegan wouldn't eat an animal due to that animal's capacity for suffering, but so too, a carnist wouldn't eat a human due to their recognized capacity for suffering.. The fact that you further distanced the carnist from the root of the issue as you already stated it (empathy - the recognition of a capacity for suffering) by making it about "being human" is very telling. Why should the humanness matter? Ultimately it's because (or it should be - it's what most would claim is because) we empathize with other humans - we recognize their capacity for suffering. What is it about an lifeform being human that stops we modern people from thinking it's ok to objectify humans to the extent that we would be ok with slaughtering them because they taste good? Empathy - the recognition of their capacity to suffer as we ourselves do. But many non-human animals who carnists still are ok slaughtering because they taste good have that capacity to suffer too, and that is where the carnist's disconnect in their stated reasoning occurs, that is where BeanisBrain is pointing out that the carnist is failing to live by the thing that they (and generally we as a society) claim is what matters when it comes to other humans - as a human I know other humans suffer. We are now at a point scientifically, philosophically where we can say with the same certainty as the previous statement that as a mammal I know other mammals suffer. So carnists have to come up with other excuses, often telling themselves the lie that these non-humans don't suffer, but it is too obvious of a lie that they don't on some level recognize it as such, so doing so reveals that ultimately, it is not actually their empathy that keeps them from harming other humans, because that empathy fails when it comes to creatures that don't lack the capacity for suffering but only DO lack the capacity to stop the carnists from objectifying them, ignoring their suffering, and slaughtering them because they taste good. I'm really tired, inebriated and I know I've been repetitive and less than perfectly cogent, but I really hope some of this has been enough to shine some light on how your comment is really proving OP u/BeanisBrain's point.

Nobody's calling for the consumption of orphan children.

u/tomenzgg beat me to it, but apparently you haven't read A Modest Proposal.

It's obviously not mandatory or anything, but posting an archive link is always a nice thing to do even when the news site you're posting isn't paywalled or blocked. For one thing, if the article gets changed or removed, it will still be there on the archive site, in the form it was when the snapshot was taken. It also doesn't give that site traffic when people reading your post click through to read the article, and usually that's good, considering the profiteering of mainstream news sites is not something leftists like to contribute to. Those MSM sites also can't track people who see the archived version instead of going to their site. And finally, although sometimes some ads will get archived along with the snapshot of the news site, generally it makes it a lot better for folks who don't use an adblocker, as it cuts down if not eliminates intrusive ads.

So yeah, no big deal, but it can be a helpful, considerate thing to do for future reference. I'm only explaining all this because you asked the person requesting the archive link what they meant.

This is the kind of video I need to see to maintain hope. A thing of beauty.