Bernie Sanders gets fact checked

To fact check the fact check: There doesn't seem to be a list of "dictatorships" on the Freedom house website. Interesting that they're missing a link to that source isn't it? Their point hinges on a listing from some website I've never heard of and they don't link to it? A little sus.
Freedom house does have a listing of countries that are "free", "not free", and "partly free" here: https://freedomhouse.org/countries/freedom-world/scores
Note that Israel is considered a free country, and Gaza and the West Bank are listed as "not free". So the methodology of used by the fact checker would consider providing aid to countries like Egypt, Jordan, and Turkey would count against the US while giving aid to Israel would be a positive. Providing aid to Palestine would be a double negative as the West Bank and Gaza are counted separately.
Also note that Ukraine is listed as "Partly Free" so I'm not sure whether the fact-checker is labeling Ukraine as a "dicatorship". Trump called Zelenskyy a dictator, so who knows?
Seems to me the fact checker was just cooking the books to promote a narrative that what Trump is doing is the status quo. Trump is surrendering to a dictatorship that's a threat to a great many democracies. It's not at all comparable to providing aid to a country that has shitty leaders, but shitty leaders that will fight against ISIS and/or al Qadea. If those groups were successful it would not increase freedom in they countries they exist in.
And who knows who the fact-checker is? Elon Musk controls everything on that site.

He just said it supported democracy, not that it didn't ALSO support dictatorships!

"Technically, the United States didn't get bad, it's always been bad! It only got worse!" isn't the flex a lot of leftists think it is.
- What's wrong with the message "We should be doing better, not worse"?
  Seems preferable to the "hurt people who also want the things I have" that seems the core of conservatism.
  
  What's wrong with it is it's normalizing Donald Trump. Like, actually pointing at Trump and saying "this is normal." US democracy is on life support, and calling this business-as-usual is like telling people there's nothing to see here while he yanks and tugs on the plug.
- What has this to do with "lefties"?
  A dictatorship and dismantling everything inside the country and destroying relationships with allies can't be good either way
  Or do I miss something?
- Left doesn’t push this, right (or fake left ML) pushes this to same-sides left.
  
  https://lemmy.ml/post/26685482/17035018 Since your neonazi friends at #politics have blocked me from responding to comments of my own post here it is:
  More cheap talk and no action.
  Action without the "talk" means very authoritarian military like structure, where commander decides and everyone down the ladder/pyramid execute the decisions.
  Talk must precede agreement and agreement must precede action for collective action. Individualist decision and action is a fascist wet dream of that something ever was done. Society has no interest in what an individual does, unless it is one in a high position of a hierarchy affecting society.
- Hm. I think we can agree that "flexing" and "ooooh, we told you so" and "look at our superior moral high ground, isn't it moral and amazing" isn't exactly material to make friends in a political debate.
  The problem is to formulate a political common ground position that so many people can agree on, that it's trivial to support it. And it should be very clear that "they nazi, don't pay attention to our goals btw" isn't good enough. Even if it's bernie saying it.
  The problem with formulating that position is also, that it's hard to even bring the attention and time investment that is required for listening to people or to read an argument, if you don't trust the person making the argument. So a "hold on, we're going to get to the good point in 20 minutes" isn't good enough either.
  Starting with something is obviously wrong like "we have always been the good guys" will destroy what little benefit of the doubt people may bring to the table. And it's not material to build that common ground.
  So, try to read the "we told you so" not as a petty attempt to rub something in, but as a "this situation being wrong has been our position from the start, let's get to the real argument, please".
  And that actual real argument can't be an appeal to the long, honorable, just and democratic history and patriotism, because that kind of rhetoric is what got us into this mess in the first place.
  There is this mental pattern, that people look for the weakest argument and "destroy" their opponent and "win". We're not interested in the destruction, but we're also not going to support bad arguments. It takes effort to overcome, because doing that is fun.
  tl;dr Bernie made a bad point here. Let's acknowledge that it was bad and move on.
- The point is it isn't really worse. Yet, anyway. He's only been president for a few weeks so obviously it can get worse.
  But right now, Trump is about as bad as every other president. Bad in different ways, of course, but they all belong in prison.
  
  I disagree. No president has ever abandoned a democratic ally to invasion by an imperialist dictator for such petty, malicious reasons.
  They might all belong in prison, but that's like saying a shoplifter is just as bad as a serial killer.

Who needs the CIA when we have useful idiots that sink any working class movement with shit like this
- If a working class movement needs to lie and gaslight people into American exceptionalism it is not a working class movement.
  
  Unfortunately sanders is one of our better actors within the institution. Many leftists would have been happy and welcoming of a sanders administration for 2 terms. FDR was also partially aligned with fascists but as far as presidential administrations go he did the most for the working class that anyone ever did(thankfully he was elected for 4 terms) sanders however flawed he may be would have been as close to a new age fdr as we were ever going tk get and this is why the dnc shot themselves in the foot and disgraced their electorate. The democratic party is a center right party so yes bernie sanders is a little too close to center to be a real leftist and he compromises too much with centrists and conservatives but this is the only way to get things done within a partisan class dictatorship we have.
  But since the dnc made it clear they would rather move to the right and attempt to court conservative voters rather than move even a centimeter to the left they made it crystal clear the only way to remedy the rot and corruption of corporatist control in our political system is a full on revolution/ class war which has been waged against the working class for the last 5-6 decades at least.
  
  Anyone that meets the working class where they are to build class consciousness in terms they understand are building the working class movement.
  But I guess we can nitpick and siphon the air out of any sort of potential for progress by doing the work of fascist apologists. Jailing and killing socialists will really bring about the perfect revolution we need
- Parroting nationalistic myths is an occupation of Fascists, not of those in working class movements.
  Nationalistic delusions of grandeurs are part of the foundation for guys like Trump ending up winning elections.
  Sanders should know better.

This is not fact checking. This is gaslighting. The fact that the USA has been supporting dictators for decades does not change or alter what Bernie is saying.
- Yes it does. Supporting countries that happen to be democracies as well as supporting countries that happen to be dictatorships according to your national interests is far different from supporting democracy as a goal.
- ...Bernie said the US supported democracy. This is, in every conceivable way, a complete and total lie.
  It's such a ridiculous lie that you wouldn't be able to say just those words after the year 1805.
- Supporting manufacturing war against Russia without regards to their security concerns, or talking to them, may have been a necessity in loyalty to Biden. Keeping up the charade is definitely not progressive.
  
  Stop drinking the Russian kool aid. This has literally been the Russian gameplan since they knew they couldn't beat us in a hot war. Psy-ops to turn us anti-globalist is almost literally verbatim the whole plan.
  You can accept that the US has done some shady shit that needs to be criticized and not forgotten about, without totally dumping liberal democracy and spewing straight Russian propaganda

Except one does not contradict the other. The United States has supported democracy, it's just that that support is razor thin.
- If we are playing silly semantics then Russia is a "democracy" as well and Trump is supporting "democracy".
  
  When you say Russia is more of a democracy than the US, I think that's more of having no standards than playing semantics. They are both oligarchies, and you are basically living up to the lack of standards that is your namesake, the mockery of geneva conventions. ml users be ml users.
  
  Nothing silly here. “Fact checker” twisting Bernie’s words. Sad to be corrected yourself?

It’s obviously unclear who actually fact checked Sanders here, but assuming it is indeed in good faith, this is why it’s so hard to mount a resistance to the fascism the US now has in power. There’s countless examples, but more or less they all revolve around (insert name) not being left enough or not being good enough, or in this case, not being honest enough. I don’t even disagree with the countless replies here that are rightfully pointing out that the US has propped up many non-democratic governments all over the world for its own moneyed and geopolitical interests - no shit. And I for one don’t defend it. But as an American myself who’s on the left, I’d gladly take Sanders for all his flaws compared to the bullshit fascist regime my country now has. I just don’t see how shitting on Sanders in this way is truly constructive in any capacity. I should add the caveat- by all means critique him, correct anything false he says- but to totally disregard him as this negative force? To my mind though, this is the so-called Internet left’s favorite pastime- shit talk people actually doing stuff, all while offering zero concrete proposals or actions themselves to make the country better. It’s very easy to sit and post to Lemmy about your self proclaimed radical leftist views, but your views mean fuck all if they never get implemented. Perhaps just sitting in your online echo chamber is all you really want though, so you can feel good about your personal political and social beliefs.
- Yes, the difference being that the fascists want to use the counter-arguments to do even shittier things. “We’re a shitty country, so you libs don’t get to tell us we do good things sometimes, we’re the greatest country ever! Get out of the way so we can do objectively shittier things!”
- I should add the caveat- by all means critique him, correct anything false he says
  Great, that's what we're doing here, so no problem.
  
  You did leave out the part connected to that where I added, “but to totally disregard him…”. A number of comments here are just essentially “Bernie sucks and is a Dem shill” in so many words. If that’s a genuine opinion of Bernie, so be it, and I know I won’t sway any opinions on Lemmy. But my sincere ask is, how can we channel our general leftist / progressive agreements into something tangible rather than political philosophy debates online? Again, be it Bernie or DSA or Working Families Party or whatever- you name it- there’s always voices on the farther left who want to tear them all down, claiming they’re not good enough, but these same critics typically don’t present real world alternatives or proposals. And if this wasn’t obvious enough, as a person who respects Bernie and appreciates him, I find it frustrating that people can so easily throw away all of his positives and focus only on his negatives.

Yea, it’s true we suck. We should probably stop sucking so bad.

The same people would assert that we shouldn't be meddling in other countries affairs to promote democracy.
I'm not defending our history here - some of it is pretty reprehensible.
- A lot of it is pretty reprehensible. That being said, in the last 150 years, every single time that the US goes isolationist, we've had a world war.....

Another nit-pick by the circular firing squad of so-called progressives.
True American Patriots like Bernie understand that the USA was mearly subverted away from the Light of Democracy by malign actors.
- Gaslighting from fascist twitter users more than circling firing squad. Definitely took an opportunity to try to dig at the GOAT.
  
  Yeah, I also seen a lot of fascists making fake progressive accounts to boost "cancel culture" against the left, that also regularly drop a lot of dogwhistles, especially after each successful campaigns.
  
  Solid theory. The right does love to trawl through history looking for failed authoritarian regimes to soy over.

The good thing about all this is that once Trump is done, and one day he will be done, the next guy who follows can finally build something good from the ground up
Chabging how American elections work, for example, has always been impossible. After this shit show, the pieces that are left will be broken enough to rebuild something good
- The good thing about all this is that once Trump is done, and one day he will be done, the next guy who follows can finally build something good from the ground up
  Will they though? Maybe, but I wouldn't hold my breath.
- Americans will NEVER accept more than two parties.
  Sadly it’s what you need so that the whole country won’t flip-flop every 4 years. One 10-15 congressman party who the major parties need to make concessions to
  
  With ranked choice voting, they would.

You can do both. Saying they've supported dictatorships doesn't mean they haven't also supported democracy. It's bordering on being a non sequitur.
- If the US ever supports democracy, it is purely by accident.
  
  Where we read "democracy", they read "economic benefit" or "geopolitical benefit". As far as I'm aware, any "democratic movement" that the US has ever supported has been either to get rid of a not sufficiently capitalist regime (whether or not they were democratic), or for some other geopolitical strategic reason.
  I haven't heard of a single example of the US supporting a democracy purely for democracy's sake. Sometimes it just so happens that the goals of supporting democracy and getting rid of pesky regimes that pose an economic or strategic obstacle align.
  Not to mention that the US has been involved in regime change of many democracies over the last 80 years because they weren't sufficiently friendly to American companies or didn't support American strategic goals strongly enough. This is open, well-documented history. The CIA admits to many of the ones which were done at least 50 years ago.
  Here is a list to get started: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_regime_change
  
  It is to own the winner.
- No you can't. You cannot say you support racial equality while holding a BLM sign one day and attending a KKK rally the next.
  
  If I give you a dollar and I give Steve a dollar, I've supported you both.
  Your example is also wrong. BLM and KKK are organizations. You absolutely can support both organizations by giving them money. It makes you a hypocrite and means you don't believe in equality. But when has anyone claimed the United States isn't hypocritical?

Bernie: 250 years the US has supported democracies
Net-a-yahoo: #whatAbout when they supported bad people?
World: uh, them too? You didn't actually refute Bernie's statement.

Peak what-about-ism
- its whataboutism to point out a flaw in ones argument?
  
  Whataboutism is: "You said x but what about y?" Which doesn't make x any less valid or problematic.
- Peak virtue signalling.
  
  Even if you disagree with what that guy wrote it’s not in any way virtue signaling. Like brother what?

Of course they provide for the dictatorships, who do you think put them there in the first place? It's called responsible parenting sweaty 💅

arewethebaddies.gif

Freedom House doesn't label places as "dictatorships." So this is suspect right off the bat. They use a "freedom index."
No doubt the figure from 2015 includes significant support and training to Afghanistan, labeled with a score of 6 out of 100. Does that count as supporting a dictatorship? No.
If we sell weapons to the Saudis to fight Iranian creep, is that supporting dictatorship? Maybe a little. No question of Iran and Saudi, Iran is a much less free and much worse dictatorship. Sometimes that's just how progress looks.
This "fact check" is at best highly misleading, bordering on false.
- There are tons of other sources where you can know the US is a big sponsor of dictatorships.
  Anyone that has been on this planet for a few decades would know that from his own experience and lifetime.
  Afghanistan is a great example of the US bringing 'democracy'.
  Create and massively fund parties, have 'free' elections and see the Taliban win.
  OC they had to do it over until theur puppet won.
  When he finally grew a consciense and became too vocal about the US and their mass murdering he was replaced by another even more obvious puppet, Ghani. Who has been a US citizen for most of his life, was made to wear traditional clothes and grow a beard. (even then he was hated and it took a lot of shennanigans to get him 'elected'.
  He also fled in the middle of the night (like the US cowards) and stole more than $160 million from the empoverished country.
  Wich is nothing compared to the US regime that stole billions from them out of spite.
  No headchopping Saudi has ever fought Iran.
  They used their US weapons to invade Yemen and terrorise their great and brave people, with Iran the only ones to help the Palestinians.
  Iran is in no way comparable to that awful SA.
  BTW didn't the US say they where going to make them a pariah state?
  That went out of the window when they could do the biggest arms deal in history of 350 billion right?
  And still lost the war against the Houthis😂
  To summarise, you're full of shit.
  
  Try reading my post again. To summarize, you're a child and live world that you're too simple to understand. Someday perhaps you will grow up.
- Iran is fighting Israel. They are the best country in the Middle East.
  Fun to see Democrats simping for Saudi to placate Israel now.
  
  What a simplistic worldview
  
  LOL look at the downvotes.
  americans truely are clueless
  
  If you can't make an argument without a political scape goat being attached to it, then it's a bad argument.
  Trumps son took 2 billion from the Saudis against the financial advice and suggestions of every expert they hired. It was, by all accounts, the largest in plain sight bribe ever witnessed.
  Your argument is only a Dem problem if you cherry pick their name to attach to it.

Bless this old man's heart, I only wish it were true

Dictators are good when they steal resources from the people and share them with us.

Whether technically correct or not (as I don't know anything about this topic), what's going on right now is insane, and if weapons were being sold to baddies under Obama, that also sounds shitty. So seems like any time is a good time to reflect upon how much power USA's militarily-industrial complex possesses.

In any case, you guys need to do better.

Why is anyone on Xitter??

Well this thread is ample proof on why you can't trust American "leftists"/"progressives"/etc.
The jingoism runs deep and there is no low they want drop to to defend their country and their golden idols.
You could just admit that Sanders can be wrong, but so many just chose to go "actually, he is not wrong, the US sometimes supports democracies instead of dictators."

This kind of rhetoric is why peDon won. americans are useless, don't count on any of them to stop fascism.

Yes let's shit on fascist resistance with "uhm actually"

Congress had to lift a ban on arming neo-Nazis in order to send weapons to Ukraine. And Bernie, a supposed progressive, is arguing the US should continue a brutal proxy war by continuing to arm extremists.
This country has lost its fucking mind.
- It's the natural result of a century of anti Russia and anti Chinese propaganda. The entire western world lost its damn mind and is likely to go full nuclear warfare before realizing they've been manipulated by a few wealthy people.
  
  We definitely had some kind of anti-war movement during the GWB administration. But under Obama, they completely obliterated it.
  The DNC primaried every anti-war representative they had, and are running literal, self-identified CIA agents for seats (including Elissa Slotkin who just delivered the Dem response to the state of the union, praising Reagan). They also helped the police and intelligence agencies coordinate a crackdown of protest across the entire country to protect Israel. And they’re working with the GOP to build cop cities across the country.
  At this point, I consider the Democratic Party to be a branch of the CIA.

That feel when my phone only rendered “geneva_convenience@le…” but I still knew it was .ml before checking

The world’s dictators aren’t always opposed by people proposing democracy. For example we armed Syria’s dictator at that time because his opponent was DAESH/ISIL/ISIS/IS.
- ISIS exists because America destroyed functional governments in order to steal their oil.
  
  There were proto-groups that eventually conglomerated to form DAESH starting just after the USS Cole was bombed in Yemen in 1999. If you studied terrorism at the time or knew people involved in counter-terrorism you might have heard about those groups earlier.
  That’s not to say the Invasion of Iraq in 2003 didn’t push these groups to prominence only that a version kind of existed before 3/2003.

Obama's human rights record is abysmal. Sure he did a lot of good things too, but not closing Guantanamo, ramping up drone strikes etc negate all of that good. I've written him a couple of letters with all of this in detail to which he has yet to respond (no surprise). Instead he's doing voice over work for shitty documentaries on Netflix.
- Yeah Obama hasn't written me back either!
  wtf
- When trying to hold your leaders to a higher standard gets you downvotes. Classic.
  
  The downvotes are for the whataboutism
- Obama hasn't been president for nearly a decade.
  And there are a lot of things to criticize him about, but he legitimately tried to close Guantanamo, and was blocked by Republicans (and possibly some Democrats?) over and over.
  
  Bernie Sanders voted against Obama's attempt to "close Guantanamo," because all he wanted to do was close the specific location while keeping the prisoners and practices going in other locations, possibly on US soil which would've provided firmer legal precedent for it.
- Sounds like you are on crack, and happy about it.
  For the modlog, the comment is made by a user named crackhappy. Also, hi, downvote brigade.
  
  Lol.
- You must be so happy that your sitting president is such a humanitarian.
  
  This may come as a surprise for you but you can be against something or someone without being for something or someone else.
  
  When a cheap shot is so bad it doesn't even have a connection.
  "Some facts about Obama."
  "You must like Trump!"