a guy getting his ass kicked

The Americans and Israelis have massacred an extraordinarily large number of people, demolished billions in critical infrastructure, and plunged the country into a bleak future of warlordism, poverty, and famine.

It cannot be adequately expressed how nightmarish life will become in Iran in the next few months, without a globally organized relief campaign.

What they’ve accomplished militarily is impressive, but it hasn’t come anywhere close to breaking the genocidal grip of the imperialist powers around their collective throats.

Cuban expats are a popular target for human trafficking. Come down to Houston or Miami and you’ll find Cuban migrants all over the strip club scene.

To paraphrase a famous draft dodger

They’re not war heroes. They were a war heroes because they was killed. I like people who weren’t killed.

Damn. The security (theater) obsessed Far-Right Labour government wouldn’t be kicking the barn door open to a foreign government’s mass surveillance company for any kind of insidious reason, you think?

As long as companies primary purpose is to make value for the shareholders, this will continue.

I’d say its one step worse than that. If you just wanted to return value to shareholders, the 2010s Facebook model of selling a few ads in between pictures of people’s pets and graduation photos would work just fine. They could have churned this for decades unimpeded. And the less they fucked with the model, the more money they’d have made long term.

It isn’t merely shareholder value that these companies crave, but perpetual double-digit growth in valuation. And, to that end, they’re gutting the golden goose for a sudden spike in quarterly profits.

It isn’t enough for Zuckerberg’s company be valued at $100B. They needed to go for that fourth comma. So they started coming up with crazy - apparently impossible - ideas to reinvent themselves into… the Metaverse, where your whole OS is in VR! Diem (formerly Libra), the Killer Stablecoin! Whateverthefuck AI thing they’re doing, to make human labor irrelevant!

Because they’ve bought into a notion of perpetual high speed growth through financialization. They cannot conceive of any kind of economic boundary or closed system. Like a deadly virus that spreads too quickly, they cannot see the edges of their population space or curb their basic impulse to consume.

There seems to always be more customers to replace the ones they lose.

So much of the drive towards AI is an insane quest to create a financial market without human customers. Just a big machine that sucks in investment capital and reports back a higher earnings figure.

It’s increasingly divorced from any kind of material condition. And increasingly predicated on unfettered access to an unlimited pool of natural resources backed by an unchallenged Petrodollar.

Could just stop letting them win altogether

I don’t think this is a question of “letting them win”. Ds and Rs are the two wings of Capital. And like any good capitalist enterprise, the underlings must be made to fight it out to exhaustion in order for the master to maintain control.

If Dems ever actually obtained an FDR-style enduring majority, the capital class would have to bifricate the party in order to keep any populist movements held in check one against the other.

I got sick of explaining this and just left the country

Given what’s been going down in damned near every major city in the country with ICE, I can hardly blame you. America’s going to be drowning in blood before too long if shit keeps up the way it has been going. We’re already treating civilians in Minneapolis like they’re Turks or Egyptians. How long until we start treating them like Iraqis or Afghanis… or Iranians or Gazans?

The United States is absolutely part of NATO.

And Israel functions as a forward operating base, from which European military powers can control the Suez and the Eastern Mediterranean. It’s fundamental to the Western allied control of North Africa and the Middle East, even before you get into its function as a money laundering outfit and testing bed for military technology and policing strategy.

European leadership has a closer relationship with Israeli military than Turkish military, as a point of comparison.

I mean, I see you guys posting from here. And I’ll admit, after my experience with Hexbear, I’d rather be in the shitlib instance heckling my leftism with impunity than in the leftist instance getting yelled at / banned by the admins for defending DSA or whatever.

No terror attacks on USA

You just have to pretend Israel is part of the United States

They won’t push past the line of “normalcy”

It might not be an issue if the sitting party refuses to release the reins of power.

So much of the current political system works because the parties are joined at the hip. But as Trump leads the federal government into increasingly fascist forms, the leadership demonstrates itself significantly less willing to just go-along get-along with the historic Reagan Era neoliberal order.

Why relinquish your Congressional majority if Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries will let you keep it? Why abide by the legislative branch at all if you’ve got Palantir running the Treasury and Google/Microsoft running the Pentagon?

Even in bright blue states like Minnesota, the response to outright fascist takeover at the highest levels of government is to raise your fist in defiance and then… give up on your reelection campaign for governor.

Except these markets were usually more accurate then polls.

What Good Are Prediction Markets If Nobody Can Agree on What Happened? Polymarket’s epistemic trap

(archive.is)

To avoid submitting entirely to the logic of prediction markets (one of the many challenges facing the political media in the coming year, I think), we should be clear that this isn’t really an argument about what happened. Rather, the sheer weirdness of what actually ended up happening — and the haze of uncertainty and mis- and disinformation that surrounded it, including from principal actors — overcame the predictive powers of whoever had written Polymarket’s rules in the first place.

The fundamental problem with any “predictive” system is that once you can generate a financial return on a result, you have a financial incentive to influence the result. Consequently, a betting app that allows you to reap an enormous windfall by betting contrary to the current trend will produce bad-faith actors willing to realize the results in defiance of the democratic system.

Imagine, hypothetically, if everyone participating in the Brooks Brothers Riot had bets outstanding on the way Florida’s EC votes would be awarded. Or, even more sinister, imagine a Supreme Court Justice betting on the results of a SC decision.

UK Labour in a nutshell

More likely than not, they’ll become complicit in much of the Republican criminal enterprise by inertia. Then, their inability to roll back any of the deeply unpopular Republican positions will tank their own popularity. And finally, Republicans will come roaring back into office to be the Enthusiastic Fascist Party rather than the Reluctant Fascist Party.

But hey, DON’T SAY ANY OF THIS TOO LOUDLY. If people hear you casting dispersion on the liberal party, they might become sad. And if they become sad, they might not Vote Blue No Matter Who. And if they don’t Vote Blue, Republicans will win. And then Republican Fascism will be YOUR FAULT!

This is why Republicans get free rein to actively destroy the country every four years.

NATO is not for undocumented wars.

Glances at the last 80 years of NATO history

:-/

How would such a large number of professionals coordinate their efforts?

You’d need some kind of organization, ideally with a leadership to coordinate actions among its major players. And you’d need lines of communication that weren’t compromised by the business interests you were negotiating against. You’d also need a state body willing to enforce the terms reached by the workforce and its employers. And you’d need a public that valued the dignity and prosperity of individual workers above the potential temporary disruption of the treat train.

Does Japan have any of that?

if i rob and kill my elderly neighbor to steal their stuff to help pay rent

It’s rob the neighbor or be the neighbor that gets robbed.

This isn’t a real choice from a material sense. It’s selection bias. You’re mad at a random sampling of people forced into a Sofie’s Choice, rather than the fascists forcing this choice on them.

You’ll always look stupid defending Putin.

Evangelicals have The Devil and Liberals have Vladimir Putin.

The GOP has wanted to bomb Iran since Bush 41. The whole party, and much of the American business community, is fully in his corner.

Hell, even Democrats are throwing in their support.

Israel’s Accomplice

his buddy Putin

American President surrounded by American generals and senators and tech CEOs doing a very American war in the Middle East as Americanly as you please

“Evil Foreigners made him do it”