I do not want to live in a world where this becomes normalized.
Cynic watching the world burn with popcorn and whisky. Living sci-fi is always going to be worse than reading it.
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I do not want to live in a world where this becomes normalized.
The GOP needs to be a "normal" party that competes with the Dems on governance again. If there's no way for that to happen and this weird cycle is baked in, then the GOP has to be politically marginalized to the point where the "FAFO cycle" occurs purely within the Dems
Literally everything about the Syrian Civil War shows the histrionics over Gaza is a lie. It's nice that people suddenly noticed brutal dictatorships in the region kill people for the fun of it, but they didn't care when Assad did it, why's Netanyahu different?
Obama's Syria war was literally genocidal, a lot of children died from regular and chemical weapons, and nobody did a fraction of what they've done over 'arms supplies' in Syria when US soldiers let Russians kill Arabs with impunity. Spare me. www.npr.org/2013/05/10/1...
this is probably a good thing, if it pans out. More balkanization, less conflict. I'm not sure it will over time. Aggregation effects are a constant in communication history
Bud, we literally fought an air and land war in Syria for years under Obama with actual troops, not just arms deals. Nobody shut down a single street or university for the dead children of the Syrian Civil War. Do they bleed differently than Gazans? What makes Palestinians unlike all other nations?
"We demand rigid protection of our borders and the right to send guerrillas to shoot up yours, which you cannot reply to because it embarrasses us when you can shoot and we can't" is not a realistic way to fight a war. Nobody's made the Arab world accept that even when it should.
The Arab world has been doing this since the 1940s and Iran since the 1980s. I think international law *is* good, which is why I refuse to accept that the Middle Eastern conflict should remain frozen in a lopsided adherence to it only for some.
No country can plead and snivel to be treated at peace that has multiple Condotierri it can gin up to shoot at a state allowed only to be shot at and not to shoot back while pleading for laws to protect but not bind it, and to bind but not protect Israel.
At the end of the day if international law is good enough for Tel Aviv, Tehran, Riyadh, Damascus, and Khartoum can suck it up and cope with not being able to do genocide for sport whenever they have domestic problems like a normal society. Let Tehran dismantle its private militias, too.
“Mr. Nadler has been sharply critical of Hamas, still believes in a two-state solution for the region and does not agree with those who say Israel is carrying out genocide in Gaza. But he said [that under Netanyahu] Israel was committing mass murder and war crimes in Gaza ‘without question.’”
Explain to me if 'US arms' are really the deal where all this we've seen since October 2023 was in the Obama era when the USA was fighting the Syrian Civil War in a way that was genocidal and enabling genocide. Why was that different?
Oh, so in other words it's not about human rights or the idea that countries should be civilized and not using the Genghis Khan approach to social problems, it's about 'US arms' except when the USA had ground troops in a country it let burn and die for Obama's Iran deal and got nothing in return.
I would say that you're a lying piece of shit given how people ignored the USA having boots on the ground and forward air observers literally fighting a Syrian war and watching Russia halve the country's population without a single street shut down in protest.
If someone told Iraqis and Syrians and Lebanese and Sudanese 'sit down and stop doing genocide for a national sport' they'd sit in the bloodsoaked ashes they made holding the dripping skulls of their victims bewailing evil bigotry. Laws expected to be adhered to by but one country are not laws.
In fact, noting this and making those demands becomes 'bigotry' in the eyes of a certain crowd who are very firm to insist that calling out genocidal thuggery by over-medaled General XYZ is much worse than the genocidal thuggery.
Israel does nothing to Palestinians that the Arab world didn't do to 64% of Israel's Jewish population when they expelled it, that it doesn't continue to do to Kurds, Black Africans, or religious minorities. Nobody ever demands Iraqis, Egyptians, Sudanese, or Lebanese not kill people for fun.
It's not symbolic, it's a literal call for the extermination and/or enslavement of the entire Israeli population and the denial that a state with a nuclear triad and a history of winning big wars, re-confirmed in the recent clash with Iran, exists. It's pure copium.
If you're a dem pol and you are openly agreeing with sean trende on anything, you need to a) resign immediately b) publicly list your entire staff so they can be blackballed from any future employment in dem politics c) commit seppuku
Ever since we gave him the vaccine my dog has been non-verbal
The Pro-Palestine crowd still won't accept that Israel *does* exist, they call it 'the Zionist Entity' or pretend that it's somehow fake where its use of the same claim that every other Middle Eastern state then and now has becomes illegitimate when Jews do it and only for Jews.
COVID literally rotted Silver's brain and public persona. He became a hard antivaxxer and he's never going to be able to walk that back, so it made his fash turn very, very easy.
Good question. I don't know who he is either but the idea still needs emphatic rejection due to being stated at all.
We absolutely do not need to let the fash frame the discussion. The Hell with that and the Hell with the ones that say it.
you cannot fix a crime problem that does not exist except in the right wing fever swamps crime is at all time lows all over the place - reality simply does not matter in the face of relentless messaging to the contrary the jackbooted thug problem, however, is very real
At the moment if Trump kicked the bucket Vance would be widely accepted by MAGA and is actually quite popular among them. He is currently on track to walk into the 2028 nomination. But people should also know Kristi Noem is using tax dollars to run for President as well. www.dhs.gov/news/2025/02...
Covid just broke that man's brain cells, all remaining two of them.
Critics of Andrew Bailey, Trump's pick to help run the FBI, say the Missouri AG got the attention of the White House by following Trump’s tactic of targeting political opponents. “What better way to show loyalty than to do exactly what Trump wants,” one said. By @jeremykohler.bsky.social
Despite the AP framing, President Trump didn’t say anything. Someone operating the president’s Truth Social account typed out that statement. He’s still in hiding
Unions are doing what they did in the Victorian era, and you could say reverting to their roots of 'up with the white man, kick all the REDACTED out, by bayonet if necessary.' This is exactly how the Chinese and Japanese Exclusion Acts happened, after all.
Honestly, I think a lot of politicians on both sides of the Atlantic got psyoped into viewing salt of the earth bigots as more authentic and worthy than them and thinking therefore they must ritually cleanse their sin of education by rolling in the gutter.
Voters will literally bring back polio before learning who is on the local zoning commission.
Enormous impoundment-related changes in Trump/Vought's Circular A-11 update from Friday, which is OMB's guidance to agencies They: -removed the definition of impoundment -said GAO's impoundment determinations don't matter -claimed pocket rescission authority -claimed profound deferral authority 🧵
anyway, it's good that it turns out it was entirely and 100% the stroke because otherwise the people loudly championing him might have to reconsider some priors and learn lessons for other candidates too, but now that doesn't have to happen!
Case in point, the whole 'chased down a random Black dude as a fucking vigilante' thing.
None of that horrid makeup, either. I admit it, without it he looks like Koschei the Deathless post phylactery.
They replaced him with the Games Workshop version, tiny head, no neck, swollen and bloated from unholy substances poured into a grim mockery of the human form....
Just basking once again in the wonder and glory of this one.
This shouldn't qualify as a hot take but it nonetheless is: Magneto would be a rabid Zionist.
Taylor Lorenz is getting defended for boosting a Nazi by an awful lot of covid conscious accounts, so yeah, looks like she's become the entry point for introducing that crowd into the fash pipeline.
Why is reactionary politics equally or more prominent in the UK, France, Germany, Brazil, etc, though
the internet did deliver on its promise to connect people and spread ideas around the world and unfortunately the ideas that it is best at spreading are conspiratorial and fascist
The reason for this is that in the 21st century, air power remains king, and a country that is capable of designing and manufacturing its own fighter jet engines has the design talent and industrial base to do the same for any other key military component, and can achieve total self-sufficiency.
Wild how poorly they’re handling this, like they could just post a generic photo, instead they’re pouring fuel on the fire
Along similar lines, I really do not want to end up in a position of having to defend Big Pharma, because it is for so many reasons a deeply malign force in the world today. But the leading critics of Big Pharma in the US right now are somehow even worse than what they're criticizing.
And at the very least you should have the extremely good sense on a public platform you know is being watched to act as if you believe in elections and to do your all to win them through all legitimate channels instead of volunteering for the hangman to swing the noose.
The quality of the technology should not affect the discussion, really. They should be banned and policed aggressively.
No they've done this really cool thing in academics where they've defined police as specifically only cops as we know them today, & the thing that makes them cops are the bad parts like the thuggery & the fealty to propertied interest, so to get rid of the bad parts you have to abolish the cops
No amount of political power can change the great leveler, where all, small and big, dance in the danse macabre.
I honestly think that the man in the White House really is seriously ill but that in all probability he finally ran out of cliff after living right on the edge of one with an unhealthy lifestyle in that 'life comes at you fast' way. Not fatal, not the kind of life even a POTUS would want to live.
A comprehensive list of dangerous books that need to be banned in Alberta and the rest of Canada: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. Please feel free to copy my list and distribute widely.
In all probability he's 79 and all that unhealthy lifestyle he's had for decades is finally abruptly catching up with him because the bills eventually do come due, so to speak.
"You people" means what? You're the one insisting that Islamic civilizations that glory in Ghazi wars against the infidel are legitimate but acting just like that in Hebrew is illegitimate. That's how they've ruled the Middle East for 6,000 years. They like it there.
If Abdulhamid II was a legitimate ruler because his distant ancestor butchered an army reliant on the triumph of the will against Mr. Artillery Barrage, Israel is legitimate on the same basis. If he was not legitimate, neither is Israel but you just invalidated the entire region for legitimacy.
Here's the answer to that question, BTW. The previous 400 years of Ottoman rule in the Vilayet of Syria were won by slaughtering Mamluks with swords with cannons and muskets at Marj Dabiq. The exact same basis as the state of Israel now. www.historynet.com/the-battle-o...
And if we start extending it to the broader Islamic world, what in the modern history of the Arab world justifies the view that its rulers should be entrusted to look after plastic plants, let alone human life? If genocide disqualifies people for statehood, no Arabs have been worthy since 1949.
I mean if we want to extend it to the Al-Qassam brigade shooting infants in the brain in 1929 in Hebron you're free to do that but I don't think you actually want to have that discussion about how Palestinians have waged their wars and how that's worked out for them.
Since 1967. Here's a quick question: how did the Ottoman Empire gain Palestine in the first place? What's the difference between that and 1948 except a passage of centuries, legitimacy wise? Do you even know what the Ottoman Empire is?
We are not, in fact, obligated to import people who want to make their holy wars our problems, nor should we be. If they want to fight for Jerusalem, let them to do so in Jerusalem, not the streets of the United States.
How is it missing the point? If Muslims *want* to endorse the Muslim Brotherhood's Palestinian chapter they're free to do it. And they can endorse rape, murder, and strapping bombs to infants and calling them martyrs and stay right in their desert and rot.
Nobody says the genocidal thuggery that's SOP across the Arab world for generations, at this point, is proof that Arabs should revert to hewing wood and drawing water for Turks and Iranians as they can't govern themselves, though.
I mean if Muslims want to endorse a suicide bombing addicted death cult dedicate to the complete slaughter of 2 billion Christians and every single Jew in the world as their ideal of Islam they're welcome to do so and to stay in the Islamic world and rot.
Yeah, they should emulate the diversity, equity, and inclusion policies of Iraq and Syria and Sud-oh.
So why are Palestinians entitled to an ethnostate then on that basis?
Antisemitism is explicitly not a moral reaction to anything Israel does now any more than it was when the Roman Emperors unleashed pogroms in the pagan era. It's an irrational murderous superstitious hatred.
I mean we saw what you people think of that difference on October 7th when you decided mass murder and rape were good and blessed as long as the victims were Jews.
It's self-indulgent and an easy way to lead yourself into stupid mistakes, or into despair. There are a LOT of Bluesky poasters. for example, who doompoast nonstop because they seem to think Trump and his supporters are all mindless demons with perfect instinctive cooperation.
Utmost contempt, yes. But please, let's stop this dehumanization. We're dealing with entirely human enemies, who are committing entirely human acts of evil and making entirely human mistakes. Let's understand the threat as it actually is, not as it appeals most sweetly to our outrage and horror.
I know this has come up before, but it still boggles my mind that there's an account out here that labels itself as the "official" resistance account for the National Park Service and there are a ton of people who buy that and get mad if you question it. Like what the hell makes you "official"??
They made the Bimbo's Initiation Cartoon place real, didn't they?
coming home to this house from the bar and immediately dying as i fall through a trapdoor and land on my head
why yes i do believe i will use this as an opportunity to take a dig at george r.r. martin who had basically a 19th century police force armed with swords in his books vs tolkien's laws and enforcement, while often not explicitly detailed, understood this well
@LePapillonBlu2 Maya We are living in the dumbest timeline in human history. 😳
NEW: Judge Sooknanan now orders the govt to explain why it has failed to meet her 4 p.m. ET deadline to give a status update on the Guatemalan children who are supposed to be removed from planes and returned to Office of Refugee Resettlement custody.
OK, so if you're a long-term abolitionists for cops and jails, Donald Trump evading jail shouldn't be a problem as that means all the actual crooks will evade actual jailtime or accountability, right? And you're perfectly fine with that. And the Brock Turners, too.
Extremely funny that the Horus Heresy novels had, in two novels mind you, a pair of lesbians who as civilians got to live through both of the novels pretty much unscathed while the named Astartes characters died and died hilariously lopsided deaths. Black dude protagonist also lived, too.
They weren't jailed then, they were brutally executed for public sport and the bodies left for the dogs and hogs to eat.
Not really, one of the primary roles armies used to serve was being the police of either first or last resort in a time of crisis. And this is without factoring in how those military castes like Western knights and Samurai worked in reality.
Except that if your solution includes 'still having cops' you're as much an abolitionist as a vegan is a barbecuer.
It really isn't, though. Formally codified controlled organizations instead of proto-Gestapo or vigilance committees is new, but the idea of policing society is as old as society.
“Agent of the government empowered to use violence in its name to enforce its laws” is a pretty old invention, actually. This is what I’m talking about, this is just like magical thinking: you need *someone* to maintain and exercise the state’s monopoly on force. It’s literally unavoidable, sorry!
I was lucky enough to find and read a biography of him and yeah, dude's a legend. Mexico suffered a gruesomely high price for that legend but he was, in fact, very much one of the 19th Century men of all time.
This would be one of the most monstrous and foolhardy things the US has ever done, on a par with Indian Removal. www.washingtonpost.com/national-sec...
The only thing I know about Erin Reed is she presented her girlfriend or w/e speaking out against a trans bill in the Montana congress as the only reason it went down and got a whole bunch of Montana politics types going "o rly?" And then backtracked.
Between her and Parker 'Dictatorship is based actually' Molloy and Alejandra 'three quarters of you will die and that is a sacrifice I am perfectly happy to make' Carabollo trans people are very badly represented by our supposed online voices.
There's a reason he's my favorite historical Mexican. A warts and all biography of him would make Game of Thrones look like amateur hour.
Santa Anna was one hell of a magnificent bastard when he wanted to be.
I think the US government putting out plans to ethnically cleanse Gaza is really bad. I recognize that some Americans like it, while some others think it isn't a relevant change and makes no difference, but I disagree. I think it's bad, worse than what came before.
Law Enforcement being a culturally chud profession is actually a huge problem in the near (surviving this admin & reasserting rule of law after) & long term (the actual governance problem of enforcing liberal laws) & solutions that aren’t “we should simply not have cops” are in pretty short supply
These two cases are really about the same thing: The Trump Administration wants to find as many ways as possible to just grab and deport people without any checks, due process, or judges of any kind.
the vague silver lining if they really do send troops to Chicago too is that it might get people to start paying attention to Pritzker outside of this website
This is incredible. The DoJ has burned all credibility with the courts.
Holographic images of Trump have gone up in Los Angeles and it’s pretty cool.
luv to modify my body to alleviate dysphoria while aggressively lashing out due to daddy issues and putting my gene seed in dudes
This is Bluesky Illiteracy in action again. I am saying specifically that they are national figures who act like glorified New York political bosses and that this is why they're failing to do their national job. Just because reading English is too hard for you....