Two good questions for people to re-frame anti-Soviet propaganda:

1. If the USSR was some Evil Totalitarian Empire doing 1984 to its populace, how come it simply... broke up peacefully?
2. If the USSR was some starvation state unable to fulfill even basic human needs, how come every successor state had an immediate and sustained collapse in life expectancy and standards of living?

A great line to push with libs is that everyone who knew and hid it should resign or be forced out. It's simultaneously hard to argue with, but not such a "radical" proposal that they'd reject it out of hand.

This is why media criticism is how I try to start deprograming libs. Citations Needed is probably the easiest option for them to get into.

Have to interrupt that backsliding or you'll never get anywhere.

A debate would likely work in her favor:

• Needs exposure and an opportunity to get a fawning lib media cycle
• Pretty sure Trump has taken a hit in the polls after every debate where he faced a live opponent; he is a piece of shit and constantly reminds people
• Trump also looked real old at the last debate, but that was overshadowed by Biden’s brain shutting down

It'll produce some great content whatever the outcome.

I trust Trump about as far as I can throw him... But dudes clearly speaking to a public sentiment here.

Reiterating all this (that Trump doesn't really care, won't have total control of foreign policy, and this is mostly a play to popular sentiment), there's a lesson here in how to present ideas so that people agree with them.

Talking about a single issue and giving a humanist position on it will beat an ideological position that necessarily (because it's your whole ideology!) invokes other issues. Trump could have given an eloquent anti-imperialist take (lmao) and it would not have played as well. But "we need to stop all this killing?" Who's going to disagree with that? It reveals all the NATO freaks as the monsters they are for playing geopolitics with people's lives. Same as if you talk about healthcare in terms of "the richest country in the world shouldn't have people choosing between medicine and rent" instead of starting with the ideological basis for that belief.

Not to say you should never get into ideology, just that the humanist justification for positions should be at the forefront, because it keeps the discussion focused and is harder to oppose. It does help to think about how best to present these ideas; that's a lot of what politics is.

It's important to note that Nazi Germany mobilized something like 18 million people over the course of the war and saw over 5 million military deaths. When Stalin suggested that the Allies would need to execute 50,000 Nazis after the war, he was talking about a small sliver of Nazi leadership and those most directly culpable for atrocities.

I then decided to shoot my shot and ask her out for dinner.

she responded that she wouldn’t really have time and we should just hang out with the whole friend group instead

I’m having a really hard time interpreting this... Maybe proposing dinner was also too uncreative?

I see this as a very clear (and very polite) "no."

The way I look at it is: if she was interested in going on a date with you, would she respond that way? An interested person who really was just temporarily busy would propose a better time, or a different activity, or they'd fit it in because it's something they're excited about. They'd work with you some. Someone who can't find time and does not try to find a way to make it happen is not interested in making it happen. It's no fun to hear.

I don't know. You can waste a lot of effort on convincing people of the need for security, establishing significant security, not weirding people out in the process, and actually sticking to it, only to find out that it's not as good as you think/it's yet another program with some sketchy back door built in. Or you do everything right and there's a fed in your group in person, a tactic they've used for at least a century. Or there isn't, but a serious adversary can piece together who's in the group and when you're meeting based on public posts and phone data.

This isn't saying orgs should take zero steps on information security, more that you're never going to be able to hide a domestic political group from the U.S. government. Expect leaks and wreckers from the start and you can set up ways to minimize their harm.

historic low point

When your knowledge of China dates back to maybe the Nixon administration

Hard to tell how much is pro-Palestine, how much is actual anti-Semitism, and how much is simple self-preservation/people who actually thought they would be "defending their country" when they joined the National Guard. It's also possible (assuming this is real, of course) that, like many higher-ups, this general does not actually have his finger on the pulse of the people under him. If he does, we don't know if this is localized to his troops or present more broadly.

Yep, the man himself

When a Cuban defects to the U.S., that's treated as proof of the oppressive nature of the Cuban government