It's way past time that congress reign in those GWOT powers. The idea that a US president is allowed to bomb any person anywhere in the world as long as they said the word "terrorism" was a bad idea even before someone like Trump became president
I come from a family of nobodies and I intend to keep that tradition alive
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It's way past time that congress reign in those GWOT powers. The idea that a US president is allowed to bomb any person anywhere in the world as long as they said the word "terrorism" was a bad idea even before someone like Trump became president
Americans are just very intolerant to people with differing opinions in my experience, way more than in other countries I lived at. People are told since they are kids it's their civic duty to be mean to people with wrong political opinion. I'm not sure it's a good thing, but I'm in a minority.
I prey to god this country doesn't have to go through a wave of human rabies cases before people remember why you do not play around even a tiny bit with that horrific virus.
Not the first time Democrats pulled this exact same maneuver and then just gave up. I honestly think they are doing it to justify their existence to people. That had as much chance of achieving anything as Hakeem Jefferies pretend filibuster stunt.
[rich loser get dunked on by a random small account]: "this website is unusable"
They wouldn't let me schedule a covid vaccine unless I lie and say I'm "high risk". When have we went back to the general population not being eligible for covid vaccines?
This picture is as American as baseball and apple pie, and the fact that Americans immediately go "wow, this is just like in those evil countries we want to go to war against" is no small part of the reason of how we got where we are.
The woman who falsely accused him died in 2023. This is not ancient history, this is barely history at all.
And the crazy thing is that this "activist language" is much closer to corporate consultant speak than the way actual left wing activists talk. But the people who wrote that memo probably never had contact with anyone to the left of DNC liberals
But that's also true for DC right now. Most of the violence and hostility comes from cops and ICE, not the national guard. I still think it's a terrible idea to send the military to occupy an American city, and normalizing this tactic is going to lead this country to some dark dark places.
I am begging you to not think of the military as a moderating force. The military is a machine that is designed to kill people, and if our government keep deploying it on american civilians it's only a question if time until we get another Kent state or something worse
I think any politician that send the military to suppress dissent is advancing to cause of fascism in the US, and there has to be zero tolerance for that. The normalization of sending the military on civilians is big part of why so many people shrug about what going in DC right now
Making excuses for politicians who send the military on civilians is big part of how we got to where we are today. There was zero justification to call the national guard, and any governor who did it should lose their job if you ask me.
Talking is easy, but action speaks louder than words. Those are national guard troops that Tim Walz sent during the George Floyd protests. The fact that doing something like this is normalized and not disqualifying even for Democrats is no small part how we got to where we are today.
"fascism is when the government do bad stuff" seem to be the working definition that most Americans have, and it's probably less than ideal.
It's the kind of choice that make you think you won the Iraq war in 2003 or that victory in Vietnam is just around the corner. American politicians have always rewarded generals that tell them what they want to hear, this is as American as apple pie. Trump is just more vulgar about it.
I have never in my life had a vegan be angry at me for eating meat, not once, and I have lost count of how many times I saw non vegan people seethe and rage over the dietary choices of other people. The hostility on this issue mostly flows from the majority to the minority, as it is usually the case
Yep. Tim Walz sent those soldiers, and the fact that none of those people faced even a tiny bit of consequences for their actions, not even reputational, is no small part of how we got to where we are today. What we're seeing now has been decades int he making.
I live in a non swing state and a non swing district and I have never casted a presidential or congressional vote that mattered in any way, this is true for most Americans. Most people are already alienated and cynical about the process, it's why it's so easy for the GOP to erode it further.
Need this ad but for cheerleading. Look I am not endorsing this type of marketing in general, but you need to meet the people where they are.
Dyson Sphere is one of those scifi ideas that is so comically impractical, like you'll need much more material than the entire mass of planet earth to build something like that and it's also won't be stable. But somehow it has a reputation of "serious thought" with "futurists"
I think it's time we start calling fascism by its name. "authoritarianism" is a term that tried to cover both communism and fascism, I personally don't think it was ever terribly useful, but America is not at a risk of a communist revolution. We're dealing with fascists.
Those rules and norms were never real, it's just excuses why Democrats don't do popular things that their donors don't like.
Yeah, and that party managed to replace the Nixon administration with even worse people. Science didn't think it was possible, but never bet against the GOP.
I'm still pissed how they dismantled the public vaccination infrastructure just so pharmacies could get a cut (and so that people don't get ideas about public healthcare). There was barely any discussion of it either, they just did it and everyone shrugged.
Fun fact about this guy - he's an IDF veteran who got his career start in the US by working on Star Wars. Not the movie, the Reagan shit. Wait, that's not that fun of a fact.
The US is an oil and gas exporter, this is about the profits of American fossil fuel companies, not external enemies. American fossil fuel companies have been bribing the US government for decades to get us here.
He literally did it in his first term and the best the supposed opposition could do is write some stern letters to the papers. Maybe it's time to rethink about a better strategy than saying "BUT HE'S NOT ALLOWED TO DO IT! MODS! MODS!" because it's very clearly not working.
Human rights watch never rethought their enthusiastic support for regime changing Iraq, they aren't the rethinking kind. One of the worst billionaire funded "human rights" orgs out there.
The Nazis for the most part kept the deals they made with the rich and big business. It's why the German ruling class continued to love them after the war. Please read this book.
I saw that on TV yesterday and honestly thought I was imagining the final line there.
It's absolutely disgusting how that blood-soaked monster was rehabilitated.
And they call the US a democracy. It makes a mockery of the term.
The idea that emails from Kamala Harris can mobilize people is so funny to me. But the Democratic party is primally a spam platform hassling people for money at this point, and if all you have is a hammer, every problems looks like a nail (you can fix with more emails begging for money).
Social media has a very well documented right wing bias, but the discourse is endlessly focused around "extremism", like the issue is just how far people are from the (sick) center of American politics. So they'll probably do something that ban one nazi and 1000 Palestinians, like they always do.
matty deleted a whole lot of genocidal takes about Palestine over the years. but I kept receipts.
The main reason people use speakerphone is that they can't hear well enough without it. I think the design of the modern smartphone that isn't even attempting to improve the experience of voice calls is mainly to blame for that phenomenon.
This is LAPD, they work for the city of Los Angeles, not the federal government. And good like trying to sue cops for that type of stuff. We live in a police state and the courts are amazingly friendly for cops.
The US is an amazingly unreliable partner. It's rare that a Republican administration doesn't decide to just walk away from agreements and treaties the US singed on because they don't like them. Countries deal with the US because they don't think they have a choice, not because they like it.
Global Tetrahedron LLC has proven itself to not only be the choice strategic counsel for top human-trafficking enterprises and covert assassination requests. But also a steady publishing hand, assuring none of The Onion's competitors may extend their defective bloodlines.
They were certainly sitting on a lot of Epstein information that they should have released to the public, even if there wasn't a smoking gun that would have benefited the party politically. The coverup of that story has been bipartisan, hopefully it changes, looks like it might.
You can also just not do massive cuts to welfare that will make the lives of most Americans worse. That was an option that was on the table, but Democrats prioritized what their donor class wanted and then insisted that everything is awesome when child poverty doubled under their watch.
It's time we call this what it is - a concentration camp. The US has a long history of coming up with whitewash names for our concentration camps. US media and human rights orgs have no problem using this term when other countries round up people without trial and put them in camps.
I don't think I know you, but I do know the trevor project. I don't do work with them because I don't work with orgs that works the police. If you know them, try to ask them how many people who called their hotline got killed by cops. They don't release that info, but I know it ain't zero.
The trevor project is a pretty shitty hollywood charity/money laundering scheme and it's honestly kinda shameful that it's playing a meaningful roll in suicide prevention in this country. And they call the cops, as a matter of policy.
Always laugh when they do that "this program is made possible by the support of listeners like you (and a generous donation from the Ford and Gates foundation)"
How is any of this "carceral"? Even Foucault would be like "okay okay, not EVERYTHING is a prison".
The Democratic party is more committed to blocking progressives their big donors don't like than winning elections. They are much better at it too. We have seen it play out time and time and time again. It's not incompetence, it's priorities and corruption.
Over a 100 Democrats voted for this garbage. Every Democrat that take money from crypto firms need to be primaried, it's the only way they would learn.
The US plays those shitty visa games with the UN too, and that's even more serious. No international anything should be taken place in the US until this country get a semi sane immigration system and stop abusing visas issuance for political reasons.
When Mark Zuckerberg goes all in on a technology you know it's going to work out great.
Bad democracies lead to fascism, like that's the number 1 problem with a bad democracy. And fascism is way worse than anything. But the western world learned absolutely nothing from the Weimar republic and the rise of Nazism, so we're gonna do it again, only this time the reich gonna have nukes.
Republicans always fire federal workers for political reasons. Those theories that it's impossible to do comes from the excuses Democrats make as to why they got to keep people the GOP appointed at their job like they did with DeJoy. I don't know how people keep buying this.
Our "elite" universities where the rich send their kids were filled with eugenicists. This idea was amazingly normalized in the American ruling class and its institutions. Around late 20th century we decided to stop talking about it in the open, but the philosophy never really went away.
Harvard was always fascism Hogwarts, people like Trump are just too stupid to see it.
There was never serious introspective discussion in the west about the fact that the Nazis got into power in a liberal democracy using liberal democratic tools and institutions. The cold war made such discussions difficult if not outright illegal, and those chickens are coming to roost.
The US government sadly still rely on this pseudoscientific nonsense for a lot of sensitive tasks. It's not only the FBI and it's way past time that we just stop doing this altogether. The only function of those things is to coerce confessions from people.
Americans are in denial about how bad is the state of the education system here. The huge gapes between poor and rich neighborhood schools managed to masks how bad things really are, at least from middle class white people, but the floor is about to fall off, if it hasn't already.
Describing the FBI as a bunch of well meaning lawyers trying to prevent terrorism is beyond absurd. It's a political, violent and criminal secret police, always has been. The way American talk and think about that secret police is terrifying, and played no small part in how we got to ICE.
I live in a city that used to have free buses and got that program axed, and it was 100% because people didn't like the homeless to ride the bus. Those urbanist arguments might be made in good faith, but they are very often used in bad faith by anti poor politicians too.
The way the 911 operator wouldn't tell you that they don't pat you down at the movies and you can really sneak in whatever you want. The US government really doesn't care for its citizens.
The role of the parliamentarian is to give excuses for Democrats as to why they can't do popular things that their rich donors don't want them to. It's not there to protect us from fascism. Don't worry I'm sure it will regain all its powers if Democrats ever get back in power.
The very existence of the NSA was kept secret until the 70s, the NRO until the 90s, no one serious think that we know of the existence of all federal agencies today. I always laugh at those "I can believe a conspiracy, just not a big one" arguments.
Abolishing ICE needs to become a "purity test" for aspiring Democratic politicians, dismantling this gestapo has been treated as an unimportant issue for way too long, and Democrats who supported this secret police were allowed peace. This needs to change.
The constitution of China has similar wording as the American first amendment, though at least anecdotally, Chinese people don't seem to believe like Americans that those words got magic powers.
Considering the lengths that the US government went to lie about this story and cover it up, I am just not gonna take them at their word on these things. I will re-evaluate my levels of skepticism if they ever decide to release even just the documents they admit to have.
It's pretty much a feature of LLM that you can push it to tell you what you want. It's big part of the reason why the most vapid rich people people in the world who surround themselves with nothing by yes men and brown nosers love it so much.
what's important is that we started a conversation
It happened to the newspaper Alexander Hamilton founded. It was always shit don't get me wrong it was founded by a right wing slaveholder to promote their shitty politics, but it used to be respected. I doubt the NYT century of humiliation will ever be as funny as the Post's, but here's hoping.
I don't think enough was written about how the US funded and supported the far right in Croatia in the 90s for very cynical (and predictable) reasons.
A German aristocrat called Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck did a movie about how much communism sucks, science can only speculate why it is beloved in the west
how do you look for an anti american conspiracy theory regarding the Rwandan genocide and instead of landing on the CIA involvement in it ends on "it never happened" instead? www.theguardian.com/news/2017/se...
He's a racist clown, but the mainstream media been writing glow-ups on him like he's some sort of important intellectual leader for years for some reason, so unsurprisingly people who read the New York Times and get their world view from it started to believe it.
I was very surprised as well, it's a very famous image and you'd think this will come up more, considering the AMA is still a very powerful lobbying group. But in general the role of medical doctors in fighting against reforming the US healthcare system is very underpotted.
The AMA is a right wing organization and has been one of the fiercest enemies of fixing the US healthcare system for decades. They are literally the people who paid for this.
This is a town hall by a couple of Democrats, it's so weird to write about it like it's some insurgency against the party. But this is America, a country that believed wrestling is real.
This country was created by rich white slaveholding men for the benefit of rich white slaveholding men and it never really stopped being that.
Biden put 100% tariffs on Chinese EVs. Both parties are owned by the fossil fuel industry, it's why Chinese companies aren't even trying to sell EVs in the US. They'll know they get Huawei style sanctions.
Increasing the funding and powers of ICE rather than axing that cursed agency might go down as the worst thing the Obama administration did, but there is a lot competition there.
Her job is to sell out the trans community, it's why she get paid the big bucks. And she always understood her true assignment very well.
I think Satya is a true believer, he thinks those LLMs are going to be the future of everything. A lot of tech execs think that. And they want to believe, they want to discipline their workforce who they think is overpaid and lazy and replace a lot of them with chatbots.
Satya Nadella is way worse CEO than Balmer ever was, and he's going to really drive that company into the ground. But we measure CEOs mainly by how well the stock price do under them, and he most certainly been good at that. And wall street love mass firing.
Microsoft is trying to push AI very hard, and the push is coming from top management. Teams and people in Microsoft are rewarded directly for how much AI usage they can drive. What we're seeing is the result of that incentive structure.
We failed that test back when 2 Democratic administrations refused to abolish that secret police. Now is just the bill coming due. And it's going to be a real bad one.
The B-2 is designed to bomb poor countries in the developing world, which is all it ever done (outside that one time it bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade "by accident"). Israel don't even have dedicated bombers and they probably won't want to pay up for such overprice nonsense anyway.
It's only Gestapo if it comes from the Gestapo region in Germany, otherwise it's just sparkling secret police.
Nobody works for the US military for free. Most people just wouldn't volunteer for a foreign invader. Think about yourself, think about the president you hated the most, would you have worked with a foreign invader who came to "liberate" the American people from their government? I wouldn't.
You really think you were greeted as liberators there? Every crime the Israel did in Gaza the US did in Afghanistan and on a bigger scale. The US occupation was hared by afghans, it's why the US lost, It's why our collaborators had to run to America when we left
Most Afghan disagree, it's why the US got pushed by a bunch of people with pickup trucks. The people who worked for America in Afghanistan are no better than the Palestinians who collaborate with Israel. I hope someday Americans understand it, but American exceptionalism run very deep still.
The main reason people work for America when we invade their country is because the US pay them, a lot, astronomically high compared to local salaries. And that's why whenever we bring Freedom, Democracy and the American Way to a country there is never a shortage of collaborators.
No Kings got way more favorable coverage than the anti Iraq war protests. But not surprising given that No Kings was organized by the Democratic party and it made no actual real demands, especially not anti war demand.
The US military is a corrupted, bloated death machine, that drain our resources and spread misery all over the world. Maybe seeing all those useless tanks on our neglected streets will wake something up in American. But I donno, the love for war and the military runs very deeps in this country.
And the joke was that it was a very weak report whose main purpose was to sell DHS to dem voters. At the time a lot of people thought this new and terrible agency should and would be abolished. Janet Napolitano was terrible, nothing would have been lost if she was actually was forced to resign.
Look, you can see that it trickled down from rich donors to the professional political class, I am sure it will trickle from kelley robinson to normal trans folks next. I mean surely she ain't an overseer for the ruling class, selling the people she pretend to care about for a paycheck.
Before anything he would make it his life mission to destroy the life of the federal agent that laid a hand on a senator. The entire party would, and he would be fired very quickly, and good chance ends in jail. Dems don't have that juice, it's why the secret police feel comfortable manhandling them
