@Boxhead_31@realRodeoGoat@goddek That’s like saying, if someone takes a swing at your face, and you bring your arm up to block the swing, you attacked first, because your arm made contact with his arm first.
@Boxhead_31@realRodeoGoat@goddek That there was a recon sub at pearl was the first part of the overall attack. Shooting up an enemy recon sub in your own harbor isn’t an attack, it’s defensive. Was it the first bullets fired? Perhaps. But it does not mean America attacked first.
@ImBreckWorsham Close, but no cigar. The true test of freedom is understanding that all forms of government are inherently based on initiating violence and subsequently are immoral.
You teach use-of-force doctrine, yes? Do you teach students to draw and shoot immediately after one single physical contact? I think the public at large and some cultures specifically have a skewed idea what acceptable use-of-force entails in a conflict. It's my opinion that the gross misunderstanding of proper self-defense that drove most of the conflict here.
That said, someone having a hair trigger with respect to what they consider an act worthy of lethal response is indeed a danger to society. I have poor balance, if I bump into someone on a busy street, and someone misunderstands it as a purposeful assault, are they justified in immediate lethal action?
What the West Still Doesn’t Get It:
Communism’s True Core: The Systemic Lie
Most people in the West think they understand communism. They picture bread lines, gulags, failed five-year plans, and the collapsed Soviet Union. They treat it as a discredited economic theory – an experiment that proved that abolishing private property doesn’t work. Case closed, history moved on.
This misunderstanding may be the most dangerous intellectual failure of our time.
Communism was never primarily an economic system. Economics was the surface. Beneath it lay something far more insidious: a total, systemic, institutionalized commitment to lying. Not occasional dishonesty. Not spin or propaganda in the ordinary sense. Something deeper – a civilizational war against truth itself, waged through every institution, every classroom, every newspaper, every conversation, until reality itself became negotiable and the lie became the air people breathed.
The Words We’re Missing
The Polish language, forged by decades of living under this system, produced words for this phenomenon that English simply cannot match:
Zakłamanie [zah-kwah-MAH-nyeh] – a state of total, pervasive, socially embedded falsehood, a condition in which an entire society is saturated with lies so thoroughly that truth becomes almost inaccessible.
Obłuda [ob-woo-dah] – a deep, performative hypocrisy, the gap between what is proclaimed and what is actually practiced, the mask worn so long it begins to feel like a face.
These are not words for individual liars. They describe a system – a mode of social organization built on organized mendacity, where the lie is not the exception but the foundation. English has no single word for either concept, and that linguistic gap is not a coincidence. It reflects a gap in experience. Cultures that did not live under communism lack the vocabulary because they lack the wound.
And because they lack the vocabulary, they struggle to recognize the thing when it reappears in new clothing.
The Continuity: Communism, Leftism, Wokeism
What we call wokeism today, or the broader radical left, is not a new phenomenon. It is the same operating system running on updated hardware. The specifics have changed – instead of the proletariat, we have marginalized identity groups; instead of bourgeois class enemies, we have racists and transphobes; instead of socialist realism, we have DEI statements. But the deep structure is the same.
That deep structure is this: truth is not discovered, it is assigned. Reality is not something to be understood honestly but something to be narrated strategically. Language is not a tool for communication but a weapon of power. And anyone who resists the approved narrative is not simply wrong – they are dangerous, and must be silenced, shamed, or destroyed.
This is zakłamanie in its modern form. This is obłuda wearing a human rights badge.
The same movement that insists men can become women will insist, with equal fervor, that questioning this is an act of violence. The same institutions that claim to champion free inquiry systematically suppress dissent. The same people who invoke tolerance as their highest value are among the most intolerant forces in public life. The contradiction is not accidental – it is structural. It is the system working as designed.
Why the West Still Doesn’t Get It
People who grew up in freedom tend to assume, at some level, that bad actors know they are lying. That somewhere behind the ideological performance, there is a cynical operator who privately acknowledges reality. This assumption is wrong, and it is why Westerners consistently underestimate what they are dealing with.
The totalitarian lie, at its mature stage, is not cynical. It is believed. Or rather, it creates a condition in which the distinction between belief and performance collapses entirely. People learn to say things they do not believe so fluently, and for so long, that they lose access to what they actually think.
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@WTF2025SUCKS@realRodeoGoat@goddek Because the US was waging an economic war, starving them of resources, due to their expansionist activities, in China, Korea, and across the Pacific. Their only option left was to cripple the US Navy so they could take Philipines and Indonesia.
It took 90 minutes for planes to launch from the carriers, gather into formations, and fly to Pearl. Are you suggesting that a sunk recon sub was the impetus to launch an all-out surprise attack, and that the decision to do so was made in just minutes, and that it could have been possible to organize such an attack in that same very short time period? Nevermind the fact that there just *happened* to be an enormous carrier group exactly in position to exact revenge for this recon sub?
Can you see how this is completely fucking absurd?
Part of the reason the homeless problem is so huge is that for decades, towns and cities in the interior would buy one-way bus tickets for homeless folk to coastal cities. Portland, SF, LA, Seattle.. all since the 70s. Portland got hit especially hard in the 80s with the Rajneesh situation.