Adding to all other comments, a lot of the suspicious Bush administration’s immediate reaction (i.e. PATRIOT act) can be understood as them being always ready for whatever calamity in order to justify either invasion or neoliberal “reforms”.

Naomi Klein (liberal) goes into detail in her book (Shock Doctrine) about what she calls “Disaster Capitalism” and how a lot of effort is put into laying down the groundwork, both legally and ideologically, for whenever crises make them possible, besides constantly agitating for chaos which can lead to said crises.

She has a documentary which summarises her book, if you want a peek. You can easily draw parallels between the events she describes and what’s happening now in Argentina, Ukraine and Ecuador, among others.

Now, with regards to what motivates this conspiracy theory: it’s a patriotic distraction. As US citizen lives are treated by US society as inherently more important, portraying Bush as a traitor is an attractive pitfall to fall into, whitewashing the constant crimes of the US, internally and abroad, as the acts of “a bad president”. Even if Bush had personally pushed a button to launch missiles at the WTC, it would not be even remotely close to the social murder caused by his administration, or any other admin before or after.

Gotta remember to come back in 8 hours lol. This might be a fun experiment, since basically every corporate social media wants to be tiktok already.

Perfection!

Now, hear me out, this might sound crazy, but what if Europe gave historic reparations to Latin American countries for their colonialism and imperialism, therefore reducing the need for further deforestation? Though in all honesty a large portion of the current day deforestation is for soy plantations, which is used to make livestock rations that then go on to feed European and Yankee livestock for the profit of the local latifundiarios and nobody else. Despite what it may seem, most Brazilians (and the other countries) don’t really want more deforestation nor are they benefited by it.

And that’s not even counting all the indigenous people who are actively fighting the destruction and takeover of their lands, including a recent vote over legislation that could’ve legally barred them from claiming a lot of it.

whoops, my bad! Somehow I got that one mixed around lol.

Brazilian leftists at home: 🔥🇧🇷🔥

Brazilian leftists when they remember estadunidenses don’t even have public healthcare: É PENTA!

Putting them in their historical context might help. The 60s were a time of social upheaval in the US, with the BPP (and its sibling the White Panther Party), anti-war movement, AIM, Young Lords and a lot of trade unions and other groups all stacked on one side against the KKK, CIA, COINTELPRO, HCUA, Indian Termination and both parties, as well as the general climate of a possible world ending war anytime now, including the Turkish Missile Crisis. There were also coups happening all over the US international holdings as part of the red scare, though I’m not sure if Yankees ever heard about those.

This also manifested in the music of the time, with disco, rap, hip-hop and jazz flourishing, as well as some genres that didn’t survive as well like punk, folk and psychedelic rock. The time of both Dead Kennedy’s and Yoko Ono’s participation in The Beatles.

It was also the time of what’s called the “sexual revolution,” caused partly by the sudden increase in the access to contraception such as latex condoms and birth control pills, in which both men and women (but specially women) could now date and have sexual relationships outside of marriage with less of the biological constraint of pregnancy, while pushing back at the US’s weird social views on sexuality.

So putting those into that historical perspective, I see the “Hippies” as a particularly white, “libertarian” and idealist “movement,” surrounded by much stronger and more motivated forces. There were lots of people that might be called that who actually stood up for something, for example the riot at the 1968 DNC, but as usual the ones we get to hear the most about in the media are the overly arrogant pacifist drug addicts. There are better lines one can draw the other user pointed out about the Yippies, but I’m just reinforcing how very important it is to demystify this very turbulent and fascinating period of Yankee history.

Often the propaganda is so deeply rooted that you might as well just throw out your entire understanding of history and start over. And in the case of the “Hippies,” they serve as the “pathetic and degenerate” side of the eternal fascist equations of “all-powerful and destructive but also pathetic and degenerate,” while the non-white groups served as the other side. Meanwhile both got regularly infiltrated by informants and wreckers, making sure to single out and eliminate all effective leaders that got a hold, like Seale, Hampton, Peltier, and to a lesser extent Hayden.

There was also a lot of overlap and (dare I say it) contraditcion between all of those aforementioned groups. Some “Hippies” destroyed military research facilities with arson and explosives (Sterling Hall), BPP members generally were also part of the broader anti-war movement, AIM is often forgotten despite being the most dedicated fighters in all of these causes. I’m no US specialist, so if you are a Statesian, I’d really recommend you doing some research on those times as I think they’re possibly the closest the US got to an actual revolution.

My preferred way of thinking about these chatbots is that they’re effectively just on-demand peers with quick Google skills to chat. Just like humans they can be confidently wrong a lot or have incomplete information or presentation, but also just like humans they can help you explore your ideas and give you quck insight.

Besides all the technical cons (blatant disregard for copyright law and it being randomly racist sometimes), I don’t think they’re particularly bad. You just have to keep in mind that they’re about as trustworthy as your local arrogant lab intern. Usually you’re already required to source your claims on higher education work anyways.

Main issue right now is that the current favourite implementation seems to be specifically trained to almost never admit to not knowing something.

This needs to be an emoji, it fits perfectly here.

Free Hawaii

Free Puerto Rico

Free Falklands

Is this a bit? It reads like sarcasm, but the post history doesn’t match.

No, there’ll not be any deportation, but I guess Yankees will have their own gusanos.

Red Nation (indigenous socialist podcast) talks a lot about the landback movement, and they have one episode specifically on it that I haven’t listened to yet. Here.

The best people to look at on how decolonisation and landback will look like is usually those very same nations’ activists. And some references on how it could work out in practice are China’s autonomous regions and some southern countries like Bolivia (heck, maybe even Ireland).

Sadly no country in America is a perfect reference on this, but the demands tend to point in similar directions. Things like autonomous government, language recognition and restoration, banning racist practices, access to basic life-sustaining services within their own borders.

It’s still up right now, they plan to kill it by 2024 and YTMP will supposedly be online by then. I suppose this has to do with reallocating their developers and avoiding redundant apps. Not that they’re consistent with the latter.

It’s not like podcast players are particularly complex to build and maintain, so they don’t require that much cashflow. Podbean sustains itself quite well with the odd image ad and AntennaPod is FOSS. I think the problem is more the opposite, since competition is so easy and monetising it would suck interest out of it, Google has no interest in actually competing. Which is why they’re trying to build their own walled garden with uploading your podcasts only directly to YouTube, RSS feeds be damned.

But if they blow up every house, there’ll plenty of housing to be built later on by EU companies. That’s basically the same thing, right? That’s what the citizens want, right?

Superhero comics are weird.

I also like this one:

Edit: this is Iron Musk’s token black friend, not Captain Napalm’s.

People keep trying to say that this time capitalism is so extra bad that it’s actually something different. Crony capitalism, maniacal capitalism, feudalism. This couldn’t be the exactly the same system that produced all the monopolies of the last century in which every source of food was (and is) owned by a small cartel of supermarket monopsonies. These people could really use a read or two of Lenin’s Imperialism. Capitalism is when market, feudalism is when rent.

I’m still gonna read it when it comes out because data is cool, but what a lib title, and a worse interview.

It might just be my lack of knowledge of the smaller European countries, but this is such a niche thing on a community that is technically not supposed to be an explicit anticommunist thing, that I feel this might be fedposting.

It’s a neat trick, post something that confirms previously enforced biases, but not interesting or topical enough that many people will know about it and push back, or actually bother to research it.

I recently got it and only stopped halfway through due to life circumstances, but it was a fantastic book as far as I got and echoed a lot of my own criticisms for traditional Roman historiography.

I have no idea how one can read a single line by Cicero and somehow sympathise with that one instead of all the populares, urban Romans or the provincial non-citizens. “The Storm before the Storm” is also a neat deconstruction of the Social War that addresses the inequality in Rome.

For socialism, it was crazy homeless people. I’m what’s usually considered “crazy” and I’m a person, so we’re only different in that one temporary and easily revoked material condition. Taking Christianity literally also helped out a lot to question our modern “Christian” society.

But for communism it only took reading history in more depth and trying to form my own opinions. Even ancient Rome already has a ton of bad-faith or poorly researched shit being parroted around, so it’d take a lot of naïveté to trust the pop history narratives of things that actually matter within living memory.

I randomly had this thought when watching the speech, Lula’s international geopolitics might be the standard social-democrat playbook of only taking the smallest risks with the lowest chance of winning, but making them seem like their biggest fights. Kinda like the US democrats on abortion, for reference.

Although Brazil has a very large economy, the government has no fangs and will hardly ever threaten imperialist countries to get what it wants. There’s basically no internal mobilisation for, for example, bigger partnership with Cuba (i.e. the new Mais Médicos program is now directed at Brazilian doctors) or other strong actions. Besides a bit of buzz and a slight mounting of the already gigantic pressure, I doubt that this will bother the USA much.

And this isn’t even a change in opinion. PT has always had moderate support and cooperation with Cuba and IIRC they had the official position that the bloqueo is criminal during their other 3.5 presidencies.

Cool? Yes, actually pretty neat. But without coordinated action by CELAC for something impactful it’s just words in the wind. Friendly reminder that the UN has a vote every year where 170+ countries vote demanding an end to the embargo, and only the USA and their middle-eastern military base vote to keep it.