GarbageShoot

In America there are "do not call" lists and I think it's illegal to cold-call numbers on those. Otherwise, you're free game if there's not a state or municipal law protecting you (and there rarely is). Maybe Australia has something similar.

Either way, you'll get far fewer inquiries from landsharks if you stop hoarding properties and parasitizing the wages of people who work.

And

Navel-gazing?

This is so fucking philistine that it doesn't even know the neoliberal definition of "neoliberal" because it still puts it in opposition to neoconservative when neocons are a type of neoliberal. Also muh wokies being more "Socialist" than the communists, but that's low-hanging fruit

Jesus

It costs money to renounce US citizenship, make of that what you will. I think it's like $500, but I'm not sure.

Russia is not going to stick its neck out for the DPRK, it's a state run by cynical mafiosoes. The only way that the Russian Federation gives a shit about the DPRK historically is simply wanting it to keep existing as a buffer against the US and its proxies for China, which as we have seen the sanctions have not stopped.

The PRC is trying to pick its battles (you will see that in the meetings connected to these, the PRC typically strongly discouraged the measures and called them needlessly escalatory). China almost never vetoes by itself, only vetoing when someone else also does (usually Russia), probably in large part because it tries to maintain a reputation of respecting the agency of other countries and not just crassly abusing its power like the US does, which is part of why it is able to position itself as a peace broker and engage in bilateral agreements with third world nations and so on. At least, this is a charitable reading consistent with what the PRC itself says, there are other readings as well.

I think there is a decent chance of vetoes in the future based on the warming relation between the DPRK and Russia, and I expect China to also veto these sorts of measures if Russia does.

Yeah, I'm with you on all of this and think your application of what I tried to communicate is much more useful information

That's the thing, in a proper sense (as far as informal fallacies go), an ad hom is not the same thing as an insult. There is a term for that, it's "insult." An "argumentum ad hominem," an "argument to the person," is the false refutation of the other person's argument on the basis of that person's own attributes when those attributes are not relevant. This gets flanderized to "insulting who you are arguing with" because of dumb debatebros trying to do gotchas ("You insulted me, I win!") along with the issue I expressed before about how it can be very complex to formalize a prose argument because of the sheer volume of things that could be left to implication, e.g. if I call you an asshole and say nothing more, what does that mean as a response to your argument? That it's wrong and you're an asshole for saying it? That what you say can be dismissed because you are an asshole? etc.

The case that I am making is that the thought-terminating label is done as the scaffolding for an ad hominem. If someone wants to feed the poor and I, as a reactionary, know little else about them, then to an American audience something like "That would be communism" pragmatically functions as multiple implied arguments, first the arguments for why I would call it communism and secondly the arguments for why it is bad to feed the poor. Because of context, we can supply premises and conclusions that in this case are around 5 times longer and collectively much more complicated than the literal assertion, some cartoon version being: "Handouts are communism, feeding the poor is handouts, feeding the poor is communism; communism is bad, therefore feeding the poor is bad; we should not do bad things, we should not feed to poor. QED"

Without exaggeration, the pragmatics of such a situation suggest that that little four-word sentence functions as the presentation of that entire argument. Incidentally, the argument I just produced is a version of the phenomenon you're talking about, just directed to be about a policy proposal. A slight change in the framing could make it involve an ad hom.

The Soviet workers had a saying, completely peculiar to their culture and representative of the pathology of socialism, "Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss."

I mentioned in a different reply that this isn't a new thing and you can probably find ancient authors discussing it. Just for fun, I checked a list Schopenhauer published circa 1851 that was basically just "38 things I've frequently seen assholes do to win debates" and lo and behold:

32. A quick way of getting rid of an opponent's assertion, or throwing suspicion on it, is by putting it into some odious category.

"Re-education program? Sounds pretty authoritarian to me. Quit spouting tankie shit." etc.

Obviously Schopenhauer is highly fallible and this is a discarded listicle that even he himself didn't like that much, but my point is that this is a common thought that may not be as present in the public consciousness now, but has been at various points in history among various groups.

I mean, the "thought terminating cliche" is a really old thing. You know the "Our noble government, their perfidious regime" cartoon? It's exactly that. Hell, Lenin's snark about "changing the name of things not changing the thing itself" is a part of it. You can probably find ancient Roman authors commenting on this practice if you look.