GarbageShoot

You should have placed the recommended timestamp about 20 seconds earlier, because I think that's the real highlight, when he sanctimoniously says "ask ALEXEI NAVALNY or any of his followers . . . "

Thanks, Jon, we're glad to have you back so you can sanctimoniously cape for a literal fascist. That's what late night "comedy" really needed, another finger-wagging liberal doing drive-by name-drops of stories he chooses not to understand in order to grandstand to scoundrels who are just a hair's breadth worse than he is personally.

Let's be fair, there's a reason it's "Smokey Brown" and not "James Robinson", not to put too fine a point on it.

But yeah, fair point about the Nazi thing, I was just thinking in the libertarian direction.

Netanyahu needs a them so people wont question his clinging to power.

This is true but really not the fundamental issue. Zionism was born before him and will die after him. Without understanding the economic basis of fascism and other reactionary social formations, all you can do is produce silly stories like this. Israel is a settler-colony, it is economically (and existentially) dependent on the deprivation of the people whose land it took and continues to take.

no, because what happens if he takes a hard line on this, he looses all his political capital

Capital, that thing that you need to never spend because when you spend it you don't get it back. Oh, sorry, that's "The lives of genocide victims", "capital" is something you do spend ("invest") to get more of it.

Was Lucy Q underage or do you mean the name of the African American kid?

Monster is comically anticommunist, at least. Like, I think there might be one episode where they "both sides" things a little, and obviously it's also anti-Nazi, but the main plot hinges on completely absurd anticommunist brainworms about Soviets torturing children to, uh, make another Hitler or something? It's really hard to keep track of what anything means because the mangaka has the worst Mystery Box proclivity that I've seen in literally any medium.

Meanwhile I think Chainsaw man is at least mildly progressive, way to OOP's left, considering the allegory about nukes that implicates the Japanese and US governments in absolutely heinous crimes. idk, I guess you're right that Denji being porn-brained means channers would like it, but is that really why it's on here?

They also might just be bullshitting for some of these.

I like Jojo, but in the rare instances where it really offers political messaging it's basically libertarian bullshit (see the end of Stone Ocean episode 27, where Araki takes a strong stand against motorcycle helmet laws on existential grounds for some reason)

The main thing I like about Jojo is its derangement, so this doesn't bother me too much

Who is center left? She looks like a second Bleach villain, though I guess the shading style is a little different.

Exactly, though traditionally it was that the property rights of the owner of the corporation should be able to do with the corporation as he pleased, the "corporations are people" thing is a more recent and much more harebrained framework.

The slogan of the country, Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness, was originally written to be Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Property.

Minor correction, the original Locke slogan was "Life, Liberty, and Property", not "Pursuit of Property". He was making a (clumsy, ridiculous) deontological argument that one must never infringe upon the "Life, Liberty, or Property" of another as a means of defending aristocratic property relations against egalitarian movements that would redistribute land.

Looking it up, the definition of liberalism specifies a belief in maximum personal freedom, especially as guaranteed by a government.

From a certain perspective, this is true, though I do not consider it the most useful framing. What liberalism is oriented around is freedom of a person to own many different things as property and to have personal sovereignty over that property (to an extent). Everything else, the freedom that can be interpreted as extending beyond that, is functionally for the most part freedom to use property as you like. To communists, the most notorious example is freedom of speech as practiced in liberal states, which is the freedom of the owners of media empires to saturate the public sphere with whatever messaging they like. What a private citizen says doesn't matter in this context, but by couching it in personal expression rather than the publishing ability of capitalists, you can protect the latter with a legal common cause with the former.

Considering that 90% of governments in the world are endlessly corrupt, capitalist or not,

I'm not invested in telling you what you should conclude here, but speaking broadly of "corruption" without investigating the political-economic systems is worse than useless. You can't get anywhere opposing something when you don't know how it works.

It's even more of a weaselword when you look at how "corruption" as a legal distinction obfuscates the legal methods of controlling the government that are nonetheless completely monstrous, like the notorious state of "lobbying" (legalized bribery) in the US.

I'd much prefer one that guarantees its citizens rights as a matter of course rather than begrudgingly grants them privileges that can be taken away without public oversight.

And here we have already run into a practical consequence of the failure of the "corruption" analysis, because these two are not as-given at all different. In a country like the US, you still just have rights until you don't, see the Patriot Act, Qualified Immunity, Expedited Removal, etc. See how Austria has recently announced that professing to value Palestinian lives is a terrorist act or look up all the people arrested in the UK for protesting the monarchy. Here you can hear about the Minneapolis police having committed documented hate crimes in a systemic fashion and to this day facing no repercussions.

I can keep listing examples, but the high-order point I mean to convey is that you have built your castle of rights on open air and you are as a sinner in the hands of an angry God, where in this metaphor the Capitalists are God and Fascism is the drop into Hell. They need merely choose it and you will have no recourse but to fall.

Do y'all really trust your governments to look after your best interests?

This is "socialism is when the government does stuff" thinking. No, socialists aren't interested in merely trusting the government more, they want a system of power in which the state is wielded by the people to suppress the capitalists so that actual democracy can run things.

As a U.S. American, I know I wouldn't trust my government or politicians to do anything but enrich themselves at my expense, but I don't have to; my rights are guaranteed by our constitution.

As I said, they are guaranteed until they aren't. I don't understand how someone can look at the last quarter-century of comically flagrant constitutional violations with no recourse for the people to take and say "It's not a matter of trust, my rights are guaranteed". It's not even a matter of trust, it's a matter of denial.