• 125 Posts
  • 10.2K Comments
Joined 2 年前
cake
Cake day: 2023年6月14日

help-circle



  • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.worldtoLemmy Shitpost@lemmy.worldWhite House Faith Office
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    7
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    edit-2
    1 小时前

    We talking Iran, the secular democracy prior to 1953? Or Iran, the US backed military dictatorship that lasted until 1979? Or Iran, the Revolutionary Socialist Government that imploded in the run up to the US instigated Iran-Iraq War?

    Oh oh oh. I gotcha. We’re talking about the modern theocratically controlled Kingdom of Saud uh… Hinduvista Federal government of India um… Revanchist Anti-Communist Christian Cult of the Park/Yoon government er… Apartheid State of Israel oh, here it is, Ayatollah’s Iran.

    Damn, can’t believe America would end up like Evil Foreign Country, instead of a model liberal secular government we traditionally support.


  • how the heck did the money still end up in the hands of terror organizations, corruptors and countries hostile to the US?

    Because the US is the world’s largest sponsor of terrorism as a deliberate tool of foreign policy.

    We aren’t doing an “Oopsie!” This is an explicit Strategy of Tension.

    Why only now they’re being exposed?

    They’ve been exposed for centuries. We were arming hostile insurgents straight back to the French and Indian Wars. Operation Cyclone. Operation GLADIO. Iran-Conta. The Phoenix Program. The FBI’s COINTELPRO. The Abraham Lincoln Brigade of the Spanish Civil War. Support for anti-Spanish insurgents in Cuba during the 1890s. Emancipation of slaves during the 1860s. Polk’s aid to Texas Revolutionaries that included a former US congressperson turned filibusterer.

    None of this is a secret. It’s in high school history books.





  • “Black Friday” was just a day well-established as a popular shopping day, due to it being a day off industrial and office workers had in the run-up to Christmas.

    The “Black Friday / Cyber Monday Sale” was always a clearance sale. The stuff you were getting “for cheap” was inevitably products that the store needed off the shelves before they pulled out the next line of high-demand kitche. So you could get clothes a year out of fashion or electronics a step behind the curve. But the store wouldn’t restock this stuff because it was inevitably the last bits they still had in inventory.

    This - combined with hypersensational news coverage of “Incredible Unbelievable DEALS!” - sparked a slew of deadly crowd crushes that created the impression of sales so amazing people would die for them. But it was always just clearance sales, with the occasional scam or flim-flam thrown in. Once savvy consumers started to notice the degraded state of the merchandise and more conservative retail shoppers saw the crowd crush as a scary hazard rather than a bandwagon to climb aboard, the sensationalist news coverage dimmed and the marketing strategies changed.

    But the rise and fall of “Black Friday” was never actually about it going to shit. It was always shit. It just took time for retail shoppers to notice.


  • At least with Trump you know you’re getting a bad deal

    People legit don’t. That’s the unlimited power of the conservative echo chamber. True Conservatives Has Never Really Been Tried is a claim that echoes back to the fucking Nixon Administration. In another eight years, Republicans will be complaining that The Donald was too Woke and insisting Ted Cruz / Ron DeSantis are the only ones brave enough to do Real Conservatism.


  • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.worldtoMicroblog Memes@lemmy.worldNo no no
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    14
    arrow-down
    2
    ·
    18 小时前

    It’s weird to see billions of dollars and thousands of media-hours invested into a massive industrial scale propaganda engine. And then, after all of that time and money and manpower, we get a “I can’t believe you fell for it”.

    This is regardless of who wins. I remember conservatives smugly insisting their debt-sunk kids and grandkids were idiots for supporting Biden. I remember smug liberals pointing to the shoddy fly-by-night wall building operation on the border and insisting “You fucking idiot border conservatives got what you paid for.” I remember conservatives, in turn, laughing at all the liberals who thought Obama would bring about universal health care and climate change reforms and high speed rail.

    Every fucking cycle we get this smug “Haha, you idiots fell for it.”



  • Putin himself is a CIA asset

    That’s not exactly a new or particularly radical view. Going back to Yeltsin’s soft coup in the 90s, combined with Putin’s rapid adoption of Shock Doctrine economic policies in Saint Petersburg and then across the country through United Russia… I mean, when the son of your old arch rival’s CIA Director looks you in the eyes and says “This guy’s got a good soul”, come on. That’s gotta throw at least a couple of red flags.

    So, if Putin owns Trump, and CIA owns Putin, and Trump owns CIA, then who’s controlling who in this crazy world?

    The “X is a puppet of Y” line has always been the jangling keys of international policy. You don’t have to look that hard to find the hands of international finance behind both leaders. The Mercers and the Kochs and Thiel/Musk/Zuck Silicon Valley cartel on one end. The industrial billionaires who took over Russian heavy industry - Mikhelson and Mordashov and Prokhorov - on the other. But they’re the untouchables. Trump and Putin are the ones you’re supposed to take aim at.

    What’s bleaker than that is the recognition that there isn’t some shadowy singular evil hand moving all the pieces on the board. Nobody is actually in control. Trump is lashing out at people purely out of a sense of petty revenge, and the conservative allies already in the federal government are willing to help him get it. Putin’s fumbling grasp at a revanchist Slavic Ethno-Superstate is the result of him drinking too much of his own koolaid. The techbros and the old oil money are all burnt out from cocaine and ketamine, chasing the ideological fantasies laid out by their parents and grandparents, most of whom are long dead.

    A lot of this is purely opportunistic greed and petty backbiting. Trump hating “liberals in the media” for embarrassing him ten years ago. Putin resenting his country’s fall from grace and lashing out at every neighbor in shelling range. Both seeing a kindred spirit in the other, as they’re set on megalomaniac revenge sprees.


  • It’s crazy to even talk about the EU in the face the deep contradictions racking the continent since the '08 crash. Like, Italy’s already outright Fash. Macron is playing footsie with LePen on immigration to keep the demsuccs at bay. Hungary and Poland are reactionary wastelands. Greece is staring down the barrel of an increasingly militant Turkyie in between earthquakes and droughts rocking their domestic economy. Germany and the Nords are beating back their own fascist resurgence.

    None of these states seem particularly aligned as the EU parliament just becomes a dumping ground for idiots and assholes. This isn’t a glorious Rebel Alliance, its a clown car with the Check Engine light burnt out.



  • We don’t really have evidence of Jesus’ historicity.

    We have multiple written testimonials, period artwork, and documentation of the resulting mass movement.

    Almost nothing that would point to historicity in the gospels is corroborated by archeology… like was Pilot a person who existed? Yes, very likely he was. Is there biographies of him? Yes, there are contemporaneous sources showing him to be real. Is there anything, outside of the gospels, recount him meeting Jesus in any capacity let alone a whole trial and execution? No, there’s nothing like that.

    You could play the same game with Socrates. Dismiss the fragmented reproductions of - periodically contradictory and occasionally fantastical - accounts of the pupils of his pupils and he doesn’t exist either. Indeed, there Socratic problem tackles the root challenge of reconstructing the veracity of a 2000 year old figure’s existence. To complicate things, some of the earliest writings on Socrates known to exist are Gnostic Gospels (which contains fragments of a transcribed copy of Plato’s Republic).

    You disabuse yourself of historical Christian accounts at the peril of ignoring the accumulated history of the ancient world.

    just because New York exists it doesn’t mean Spiderman is real.

    We have real life video accounts of people in costumes identical to that of the cartoon character climbing buildings. What’s the line here? Are we saying nobody’s ever gained superpowers from a radioactive spider? Or that nobody’s ever dressed up in a costume like that to chase after petty criminals? Or that nobody’s ever climbed a building in that iconic outfit?

    If, two-thousand years from now, we discovered a written account of one of these performers along with a handful of comic book fragments discovered in a book case buried in a cave in the deserted island of Manhattan… what kind of conversation would you have?

    If we then somehow managed to resurrect a snippet of footage what would be concluding, then?

    You can dispute Magical Jesus with the same cavalier attitude as Spiderman. But this is more akin to disputing the existence of Eliot Ness by pointing to a stack of Dick Tracey cartoons and saying “Unbelievable!”


  • Anyway, cool for AOC to be honest, but unfortunately her views (specifically support of MMT) are a certain way to nuke the economy of the USA.

    The US economy gets nuked every 8-12 years thanks to private equity and boom-bust capital trends. MMT just moves the ball out of the hands of a cartel of hedge funds and into the hands of the US Treasury. I’ll happily agree that its not sufficient to solving the problem of malinvestment and industrial waste. But that’s precisely because its an extension of Keynesian-cum-Friedmanite monetary theory of economics. At some point, you have to take account of real assets, not just float around fictitious capital.

    if USD as a currency takes a 10000x inflation in a year

    You don’t get inflation like that under Eisenhower/Carter era tax laws. MMT, in practice, is still predicated on some degree of currency recapture. You’re just replacing credit elasticity through private lenders with spending elasticity through public spenders. “Here’s a $500k loan, build a house and pay me back at 6% APY” isn’t meaningfully different than “Here’s a $500k grant, built a house and your builders are going to pay me back 6% VAT”.

    Except that’s not the way people like AOC promise.

    AOC promises a large public investment in value-adding infrastructure. She’s just proposing direct payment rather than tax-incentivized private investment.