We simply cannot support this decision.
Then why didn't you fucking veto it!?!? There's no more good boy favor to be curried with the west. Ukraine is the final proof they want to destroy you!
Edit: at the very least you could play hard-ball with Trump and force him to make a concession to you on Ukraine before standing aside. Doing this gets you NOTHING.
On lemmygrad they were seriously talking about whether Gaben is a socialist.
This can only be described as false slander.
A single person asked a question, not a crime, not a problem. People responded. No one argued he was a socialist. They were talking seriously. They usually talk in a serious tone. They were not seriously suggesting (made it the fuck up) that he was a socialist. There was analysis of for example private vs public companies, shitting on valve, discussion of Huawei and the larger economic picture.
You were there I think misunderstanding some things but anyways your description of it is false: (Ref: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/9744686/7297089)
I mean it's important to understand the anti-abortion proponents themselves exist as wild conspiracy theorists. Anti-abortionism is predicated on wild claims that have no basis in science and go back to bronze age superstition, mythology, and patriarchal norms. They dress it up in bad science, wild accusations, moving the goal posts, etc.
Internet control. Putting a name and ID to every single action people take online. Ending online anonymity. Making the internet, a safe, advertiser friendly, sanitized space. And of course more importantly than that control of the masses as capitalism's cracks grow wider. They must not be allowed to organize, they must not be allowed to cheer CEO's getting shot without being identified and immediately publicly punished.
Every other push failed. Yes at the very bottom of it is the Evangelical Christians and that whole thing but it's not actually succeeding because of them. It's succeeding because it's useful to various other groups. To the intelligence community, to control of the public and the interests of the national security state, and finally this time it's of interest to the tech companies who have long resisted this because it adds more value to ads shown to people if you know who they are and everything they do and because there's no more room for growth so more blood must be squeezed from the same stone. The big porn companies like Pornhub are for ID for porn because they can afford to do it cheaply at scale and it gives them insight into habits data they can sell and more importantly it imposes burdens on small start-ups and threatens their profitability or ability to operate. Rule one of monopoly capitalism is pull up the ladder behind you and impose as many barriers as you can on smaller upstart competitors through regulation.
Loss of narrative control is key to why now. Luigi, but more importantly the widespread support for Palestine, the complete loss of control of the narrative for the zionist side among the young people. The realization that CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, ABC, NBC, CBS news and control of them to repeat the hasbara is no longer enough because young people don't watch or pay attention to that. They're worried that the next narrative they lose control of is a much more important one.
Empire's chickens are coming home to roost, the fear of a gen-z rebellion over economic problems means total control and an even more powerful police and surveillance state must be established. Make no mistake, they'll ban anonymous no-log VPNs as soon as they finish mandating ID across the country for porn with the excuse kids are using them to get around their ban by appearing to access sites from Canada, Mexico, etc.
I once said I wondered if Zelensky was doing this because some part of him understood the fact the west was depopulating the country and he wanted after all this is over to say to the people (including the very angry nazis) that he tried to save their demographics/future with moves like this.
But now I wonder if maybe it wasn't just a cynical ploy to lean on Europe. He does this, demands Europe give them more money and weapons in order to get his full commitment and tighten the rules again.
[cw - CSA] The Onion: Trump Denies Writing 36-Volume Comic Titled ‘Don And Jeff: Time Pedophiles’
The whole thing is incredible. Very dark humor. I felt guilty the whole way through and kept wondering how long this will stay up before someone makes them yank it as being "in bad taste".
Still 10/10.
No you're definitely right among the Evangelicals. These are people who would and do make a young teenage girl apologize to grown man for "seducing HIM" because he groomed her and SA'ed her but it's her fault for "tempting" him and not "just saying no". They go on and on about how men are both dumb brutish beasts who cannot resist the sight of a bare thigh on a 14 year old girl (and are sent into a lust-frenzy as a result for some reason) but also the intellectual and moral leaders of society who must be in control of women who are too emotional to be rational or leadership material.
Among the non-religious and less affiliated I think there would be some amount of outrage but the thing about reactionaries is they are very much about in-groups and out-groups and those in the group generally can be excused of anything if they're male patriarchs, especially if doing so can be used to shift blame onto women/girls who can be put into the out group. Any victimization of the in-group by the out-group is inflated wildly into persecution and victimization narratives while any victimization of the out-group by the in-group is downplayed as JUST, natural, the ordained order, caused by the behavior of the out-group, or at worst a temporary excusable lapse in judgement or character which you cannot use to define the rest of their life by, etc, etc.
While this is scandalous and revolting enough that I think if undeniable proof emerged some portion of his base would be disgusted by him I don't think it would be a large part and I think even of those who do they'd say he's a horrible man, did evil things, BUT they like and support his politics so will continue to support him carrying out THEIR political will of racism, reactionary culture war revanchism, etc and just want him kept away from teen girls from now on as some sort of compromise.
I think we can look to the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal where Democrats, liberal feminists, etc closed ranks and did 180s on positions to make excuses for why this was okay by their guy as instructive. I'm just not sure anything can overcome that tendency to see this as a political attack because it is the Democrats doing it for cynical political reasons after dismissing it when they were in power. You'd need to have Republicans be the ones leading the charge on doing this for their base to accept it and not treat it as an external cynical politically motivated attack meant to derail implementation of the Republican political program and put them on the defensive. In that sense they're right because it's not about justice, some liberals may have illusions that Trump will be jailed but we all know that isn't going to happen and that Dems have no interest in actually exposing the entire depth of the Epstein operation including the likely ties to "israel", academia, etc.
Of course Americans are the most propagandized people on Earth, but it's been that way for generations
It's been getting better for generations too though.
Also surveillance is better and the police more militarized. Also the civil religion. Also the regular religion. It has more distractions and relief valves than ever as well. Even many unhoused people can access the internet on a smartphone and distract themselves with memes so your average bottom of the rung person with a roof over their head has at least that much and usually more. Social media is not just a slop machine it's an attention sapping machine, a machine for social control. Pornography flows freely to build and sate lust. There's every distraction imaginable at your fingertips. And atomization and alienation have reached staggering heights thanks to digital technology as well so those who do act out are more often just lone wolf nihilists.
There's some emails talking about Finkelstein apparently, but nothing that implicates him in anything concrete AFAIK.
Reminder for the love of grob that Epstein fancied himself an intellectual statesman on top of a pedophile child dealer. He thought he was smart and wanted to hob-nob with intellectuals and have his "genius" validated. Finkelstein is an intellectual, a controversial one and would be a great topic to yap on about to his high society pals. He interacted with TONS of people, many of whom had no idea about or access to the pedophilia and child abuse.
What's most suspicious are those people he repeatedly interacted with on his own properties. Who visited his island not once as part of large group social parties but as small groups with Epstein and 3 others going there probably to abuse kids. Those who spent days/weeks in his house for example, and so on.
He probably had a mission to get blackmail on many intellectuals if he could and if he was Mossad they would have LOVED to have gotten blackmail on Finkelstein and would definitely be the types to go as far as saying "drug him with this stuff then put him in a room with one of your child slaves after telling them what to do, send us the video immediately".
As a spy his mission was to build networks so the more people he could reference, who he could say he knew the stronger his abilities to reel in fish to record for blackmail purposes.
Eh, old hat. They're just muscling into the luxury bag market where other luxury brands get the bourgeoisie and "influencers" to shell out $5k for a $200 handbag with a brand name metal plate on it. I mean if even "middle class" women can be convinced to shell out $500 for a Steve Madden bag then Apple can find some profit here. I have to say these do seem tailor made in many ways for teenagers who want to appear well off to their peers and who might scrape together enough birthday and Christmas money for these.
I don't know, if this and other ways of soaking the rich and posers who need to waste money on luxury branding for appearances keeps iPhone prices and such steady and lets Apple make line go up I'm for it out of self-interest as someone who doesn't want to spend more on smart devices (and if Apple raises prices Google and Samsung will happily follow). Because the alternative is either cost increases for the products which hit normal people trying to get by or more privacy invasion and monetizing data to make money.
Fact is in late stage capitalism we're already at the point where a majority of profit in consumer spending comes from a minority of bourgeoisie, PMC, etc types while the rest struggle so things like this should become even more common.
"jUsT bUy An AnDrOiD"
Either are valid choices. But let me point out some things:
Not any cheaper for any decent flagship phone, often more in fact for Samsung. Don't last any longer, used to last a lot shorter with fewer years of support but better now. Out of the box less privacy and the only way you get real privacy is by installing alt OSes which only work decent on a couple of flagship series and are likely to drop support for those anyways in the near term because of Google locking things down even more and taking away the last crumbs of alleged freedom compared to iPhones because there's no more market share to grab and no point in not doing so at the behest of the NSA/CIA/Five-eyes and their own monetizing of data and preventing app piracy. With Graphene set to launch their own phone maybe they'll be a real competitor but probably not on price as you'll probably pay $200-$400 more for the base model compared to the base model for a non-pro iPhone. I also think while Apple is certainly NSL compelled and probably has backdoors Google is the devil itself, funded with NSA/In-Q-Tel money from the very start, in bed with western natsec state from the very start, directly abets and profits off of the zionist genocide, buys and maintains facilities and divisions in pissrael, etc. No ethical consumption under capitalism obviously but Apple looks somewhat less evil than Google from where I am and at least slightly less of a threat especially on the AI privacy front. Their real rip-offs are things like this, accessories, dongles, and higher specced versions of their computers where they charge you an extra $1600 for $500 more of RAM to get to 128GB on a system while Windows system builders charge only $900.
I think Rubio wants to overthrow the Venezuelan government by force, and he might be powerful enough to push through some kind of stupid decapitation operation that just devolves into a complete mess.
One must remember in chaos there is profit for the US. The US also plays the long game. It took them 10 years but they did succeed in getting rid of Assad and achieving their goals in Syria. Even if decapitating the government in Venezuela doesn't lead to immediate installing of a comprador regime it opens up the field for the US to maneuver in the succession space and chaos and fear that follows and set up dominoes to orchestrate a plot 5 years later that plunges the country into a civil war and with US support leads to some sort of dictatorship. For example if they could merely kill Maduro and top people and push incompetent people, people who are liberal-roaders, who are neo-liberal economically to make bad decisions they could divorce the people from the party and movement and sap them with apathy that creates opportunity for further moves and in-roads down the line. I of course am thinking of Bolivia and what happened there.
Only one explanation and that is that Russia has gundam technology and used a flying gundam with a giant sword weapon to slice those parts off.
They keep trying to bribe Russian pilots and the Russians keep faking them out and trying to use it to root out Ukrainian/CIA assets within Russia with the Russians triumphantly trumpeting each time this happens. I suspect if the Russians are smart all their pilots are at this point under heavy state surveillance in case any of them might actually be tempted by these things.
Meanwhile in Amerikkka: Bridge just collapses with cars and people on it. This is normal. We know our infrastructure is failing but no money for it because no invest in things, only profit now.
I get that a lot of people are referencing Vietnam and such, even Maduro said so. But back in Vietnam the technology gap was big but it could be closed, after all, the MiG-19s and MiG-21s weren't all that inferior to the Phantoms. The vietnamese AD systems were very good and claimed a lot of kills. In the ground the equipment was comparable. Despite a US advantage on firepower and technology, the vietnamese could close the gap with their own high tech systems (althrough available in limited numbes), sheer resilience and appropiate doctrines. Today I think the technology gap gives one side a tremendous firepower advantage over the other, so much so that "normal countries" have no way of closing it right now.
Not just that. Sadly the surveillance capabilities have absolutely advanced in leaps and bounds.
Back in Vietnam the resistance could dig tunnels in the jungle and at night the US generally couldn't have anything approaching total visibility. These days with modern satellites, high altitude and low altitude surveillance via drones and manned planes they US can have just incredible visibility of movements even in jungle using things like IR sensors and motion detection. So if they say plan to fight a protracted battle against a direct US invasion it's going to be hard if they haven't extensively prepared before now because the US is going to spot and know where any new major construction on bunkers, underground tunnels, facilities, etc are and can see assaults heading towards cities ahead of time with way more warning than in Vietnam. Frankly there is huge gulf in US capabilities then and now and the relative levels of support the two countries could expect. Vietnam was getting direct military aid from the USSR and China who was just over the border, Venezuela has no nearby superpowers that aren't across an ocean or two to supply them and Russia is currently quite occupied dedicating its production capacity to Ukraine while China is unlikely to want to get involved and certainly won't be likely to go into smuggling or blockade running over a wide ocean to do so.
Frankly I do think the US could succeed in seizing the capital city, turning it into a green-zone and pacifying the area around it long enough to set up a comprador government that's recognized internationally and arming and training the local reactionaries. They'd face years of insurgency obviously but with US air cover they could perhaps manage to seize the oil producing regions or at least deny their ability to export (perhaps through US led interdiction, declaring all the oil belongs to the US set up comprador regime and leading to the US blockading and stealing anything sent out at sea).
But as I think about this I think it's about many things and given how many are very important it doesn't look good:
Best hope for Venezuela is that they try to decapitate and kill Maduro and those closest to him (preferable obviously for us that they don't totally succeed), take out some of their military but then quickly get bored, declare mission accomplished and leave and either a still living Maduro or whoever succeeds him and declare they've dealt with the "drug trafficking". They may yet still think they can just use special forces to achieve a coup and comprador government being put in place after decapitation of the civil government and military as well as degrading of most military capabilities and not want to commit to boots on the ground. As long as local reactionaries can be foiled, prevented from receiving weapons and acting the US can be frustrated into giving up. Though the US will likely turn to economic weapons to try and turn up the heat on Venezuela and get the people angry and amenable to regime change or at least apathetic to the US forcing it.
It would be very funny if the EU starts some shit with China for purely ideological reasons and the US just stays neutral.
Would actually be pretty ideal as it would further crush the EU as a competitor to the US, do some damage to China and leave the US with the power to go to China and say basically either give us some concessions or maybe we join them, but play your cards right and we won't stop your retaliation either. Maybe they try and force the EU to decouple from China first. It destroys the EU but the demand of the EU combined market eventually creates just enough impetus for friend-shoring some large amount of stuff to India, the US, Asian vassals (Japan, occupied Korea, etc). Meanwhile the US is spared the pain, reaps a mightly profit and can do its own decoupling much more softly because the EU already took the gut-punch to make it viable for them. Would really accomplish a lot of US goals and leave EU in such dire straits the US could poach their top minds and talent, force their NATO vassals into wars abroad with China over resources in the 2030s to seize as much of the world as possible, and build up climate fortress USA for the coming climate change hell that awaits us all as we plunge into 4-degrees C warming and beyond.
It's like Russia which was possibly a test for this. They made the EU decouple hardest from everything but energy they absolutely couldn't do without while the US stepped in to sell them alternatives, force them to buy US weapons, and drew them closer and deeper into NATO subjugation under the US while harming Russia and the EU maximally with the US profiting from the sidelines. Russia is also best seen as a practice for modern combat against China, to learn what it will look like, and to whip up demand and impetus for re-arming NATO and creating the production capacity needed to stay in a prolonged fight with China.
Funding the government through the end of January in exchange for a vote that won't pass...
Ah but have you considered that this will let them get Republicans on RECORD as voting against it which they will use in attack ads come 2026 mid-terms? Oh yes, their master plan is all coming together thanks to the consultants. Of course those same consultants will tell them in July 2026 that actually that doesn't play and you shouldn't harp on those votes and why people's Obamacare is now $2000/month and instead advise that they triangulate for "moderate anti-abortion centrist voters" and other fairy-tales so they tack right.
I read this as "head anarchist of the US" and had a
moment.Anyways, pure idealism. Not surprising. Just a lib wearing a che shirt type.
Worn and old cope too. I remember a chud relative mentioning at least once (so probably more than once over the years) that the east German/Soviet Russian women's olympics teams were all secretly men and that's how they kept on winning during the cold war.
This is going to be used to detect wrong-think in the very near future if not immediately and classify people for the upcoming purge. The government need only pass a law or send them a NSL with a gag order demanding data-sets on certain types of people based on AI classification of interests such as commie memes, lefty memes, atheist memes, anti-imperialist memes, etc.