Personally, I sub out the chlorine for hydrogen and oxygen, which I know are safe because that’s what’s in water. It also helps keep my soup nice and warm whenever I sprinkle it in.

Eating sodium chloride is kind of insane. It would be like if you took my stuff and poured a bunch of hydrochloric acid on it and then sprinkled that all over your food. Yeah, no thanks.

More or less agree with your take, but:

I am reasonably confident this would not have happened in a Dem regime.

I’m fairly confident in my memory that Israel attacked Syria under Biden, taking advantage of the instability to expand it’s illegal settlements in the Golan Heights. Am I wrong?

As opposed to Biden merely calling their decisions “outrageous” and strongly condemning them while supporting Netanyahu after they issued a warrant for his arrest.

I’m not sure how that’s connected to Syria, tbh.

How so?

Pretty much every country was a member.

“Every country was responsible for the invasion of Korea because everyone was in the UN.”

“Finland has no influence over the UN because we’re not on the security council.”

Choose one.

“Don’t start wars” is a lesson we’ll hardly need opportunities to learn about, no matter how many there are people are still going to start them again and again.

“Don’t start wars” is not the only lesson to learn, also, “Avoid getting involved in wars unless you have a very good reason, even if you didn’t start it.”

Not members of the Securit Council though who made the decision or the United Nations Command

Which returns to my previous point that “the UN” at the time was essentially just the US, the UK (whose support was bought with the coup in Iran), and France (who got US support in Vietnam in exchange).

But it also happened before I was born, so my possibilities on affecting the outcome are pretty limited.

Then why are we even talking about it? Because it provides an opportunity to learn from mistakes and avoid repeating them.

Well, your country is part of the UN and as you’ve emphasized it was a UN intervention so I’d say it’s pretty clear which side of the war you have a greater ability to influence and therefore a greater responsibility to critique.

In that case I return to my original statement. “Damn, maybe we should stop doing them then.” I don’t have any control over what North Korea does or did, but I do, at least theoretically, have influence as a voter and a citizen over what the US does, so I’m going to focus on the things within my ability to influence. And your response that “North Korea started the war” seems largely irrelevant.

The root problem of Trumpism isn’t going anywhere, these people were largely “like that” before Trump and they’ll be like that after Trump.

At best, we may find that the right is directionless after Trump, unable to unify behind a single face. There are other right-wing figures just as bad or worse than Trump, but many of them are ideologues who don’t have the same kind of broad appeal. But this will only be a temporary setback. Even if the Democrats win, we’ll just get more neoliberalism, and we’ll get a situation like with Kier Stamer in the UK, where people got sick of the Tory clownshow enough to give Labour a chance, but then one of the first things Labour did was to cut Winter fuel subsidies and their popularity plummeted. Democrats likewise can always be relied on to drop the ball and alienate the working class.

There may not even be an offramp on the path towards fascism at this point but if there is it involves the left putting forward a bold vision that offers a plausible alternative to both neoliberalism and fascism. Otherwise, if the choice is between neoliberalism and fascism, then it’s only a question of how long it takes for neoliberalism to decline to the point that people will gamble on fascism, which is what brought us here in the first place.

Don’t treat Trump as some sort of anomaly or fluke, don’t think that the US will stop being Trumpian once Trump is no longer president.

How marketable would you say your illness was?

Your options would be: begging strangers on the internet for money and going viral, being rich enough to pay out the ass for really good insurance when you were healthy, declaring bankruptcy, and playing Luigi’s Mansion.

Can I just get a straight answer? Do you or do you not support UN intervention in the Korean War? Yes or no, no more evasion, no more word games.

You said that the Koreans “benefitted” from UN involvement, now you’re saying you don’t support UN involvement? Would you deprive Koreans of the benefit of being infected with smallpox?

Or is this another one of your word games, where I correctly understood your position, but because you didn’t technically explicitly say it it doesn’t count? The classic “motte and bailey” tactic?

You support UN/US intervention. UN/US intervention included infecting children with smallpox. You know this, I’ve told you repeatedly and you have neither denied nor condemned it, you haven’t even acknowledged it. Because you support it. In the same way someone who defends Nazi Germany and goes mysteriously silent whenever the Holocaust is brought up supports the Holocaust. You are fascist scum.

“I only support infecting children with smallpox, and this crazy leftist called me a fascist over it!”

Maybe try not supporting biological warfare if you don’t want to get called a fascist, fascist.

Right. You “”“oppose”“” the war in the sense that you oppose the North, in the sense that you support sending troops in. So when you say you “”“oppose”“” the war, what you’re actually saying is that you support it.

Why do you fascists always play these word games? We both understand that your position of “giving kids smallpox is good, actually” is completely abhorrent and indefensible, but that’s not going to change just because you twist some words around.

Oh, am I getting emotional? Over the dropping of chemical and biological weapons on civilians? Oh dear!

Maybe you should get more fucking emotional. Like what the fuck is wrong with you? You know the US literally recruited Unit 731 to help them commit atrocities, right? Maybe dropping the fucking plague and smallpox onto civilians shouldn’t be treated with fucking “poise and rationality!”

Anyone who defends that shit is too far gone to be reeducated.

War reparations after the following Continuation War helped us industrialize

Maybe the US should pay the DPRK war reparations, then.

Maybe they should’ve just done that without dropping chemical and biological weapons on innocent civilians first.

If only the Soviets had won, maybe monsters like you wouldn’t exist. No wonder you take the side of the Korean fascists, fascist collaborators gotta stick together, huh?

Well then, I hope you get to experience the same kind of “help” that the Korean people received. Maybe if someone drops chemical and biological weapons on you and your family, it’ll cause people to be wealthier 70 years from now. Sound good?

The UN at that time was a fairly new institution, and China’s seat was denied to it and given to Taiwan, leading to the USSR to boycott it. The UN that invaded Korea was mostly just the US and Western Europe, it doesn’t provide the moral cover you want it too. Hell, the only reason the UK supported it was because in exchange the US agreed to overthrow Iran’s democratic government that stood in the way of BP’s profits.

Ideally, neither the US nor the USSR and China would have been involved. But if you’re justifying US imperialism by arguing that the USSR and China were being imperialistic, then I see no reason why their positions wouldn’t be justified on the same logic by pointing to the US. It’s nonsense. Two wrongs don’t make a right.

Again, it’s a simple question, so go ahead and answer it. Who actually benefitted from the US bombing the hell out of Korea and deploying chemical and biological weapons on its people? And if no one benefitted, then why the hell do you support it?

And yes, for the record, I am “specifically angry at the US” because of the whole “chemical and biological weapons on civilians” thing in this instance and the “global campaign of bourgeois world domination and systematic overthrow of democratic governments” thing more broadly. I don’t understand why you people act like I’m not allowed to hate America.

If Koreans wanted the South Korean government, they could’ve fought for it. On their own. Without Americans coming in and dropping bombs and chemicals and slaughtering civilians in pursuit of their own interests, in defense of their propped up comprador regime.

Again, it was an internal matter for Koreans to settle among themselves. I have yet to see you provide any reason for the US to get involved. And even if they did have a valid reason, it certainly doesn’t justify the way they conducted the war.

The only thing close to resembling a justification that you’ve said is “the North attacked first.” But that doesn’t really matter to me. Revolution is inherently aggressive and revolution is not always bad, therefore, being the aggressor doesn’t always make a side bad. But even if I did consider the North to be in the wrong, we’re not the fucking world police. We had no business getting involved there. Why on earth should we send soldiers, ordinary people, to go off and fight and die on a completely different continent just to further the geopolitical influence of the US government, and the billionaires that control it?

Tell me, who were the beneficiaries of our intervention in Korea? Ordinary Koreans? The ones we dropped chemical weapons on even if they weren’t involved in the war? Ordinary Americans? What the hell did we get out of it? No, the beneficiaries were the Korean bourgeoisie and fascist collaborators and the American bourgeoisie, and no one else. Just like every other military conflict the US has ever been involved in, post WWII.