Victim of Communism
It’s trivial to go to a country and find people who are unhappy with the local government.
It is comparatively quite difficult to find people who are enthusiastically in favor of a foreign military providing air support in a hostile takeover of the capital.
US Media loves to conflate the former with the later as justification for the next round of imperial incursions.
Americans are routinely terrorized by the very thought of moving to a foreign country. Every other place on Earth is wracked with crime, plagued with poverty, ruined by pollution, and obliterated by war. Fortress America is the only Safe Space for white people. And even within Fortress America, you need to be holed up in some exurban Walled Garden that’s surrounded by battalions of the most heavily armed police imaginable.
My father-in-law traveled to Zhuhai, China (just outside Macau) a few years ago. He was flabbergasted at how clean and safe and easy to get around a foreign country could be. He’d been prepared to hike ten miles a day between shitty bus stops. He’d left everything personally valuable to him behind, because he was convinced it would all get confiscated or stolen. He dressed almost entirely in flannel, because he was afraid looking to affluent would get him mugged. He even packed a bunch of dried food, for fear he wouldn’t find anything to eat for days at a time. Ended up in a city that could have doubled as San Francisco. The worst experience he had was people insisting they let him take a picture together (he’s a tall round guy with a white beard and people kept calling him “Santa”).
I’ve had this experience so frequently with folks who have traveled. We go to Mexico City. We go to Seoul, South Korea. We go to Turkiye and Greece. We go to Moracco. We go to Buenos Aires. Even London and Paris. Everyone thinks we’re going to die. We send them pictures. We tell stories. Nobody in the states believes it, until they get dragged out of their hidey holes to see it for themselves.
The American Brain is absolutely cooked.
LOL, what is the U.S. going to really do to Israel if they don’t listen? Cut their funds? Bomb them? Whatevs.
Biden went through the same game. “I called up Mr. Netanyahu and was very firm when I said this is the line in the sand and not to cross it. And if he crosses the next line, I will be even more firm in my next phone call.” You could say the same of Trump 1, Obama, Bush, Clinton…
The last president to do anything resembling opposition to Israel was Ronald fucking Reagan, ffs. Everyone else has been some combination of impotent or apathetic.
I’m not sure it’s even a large percentage of the elitists’ interests to have us paired with someone like Netanyahu.
Israel functions as an enormous money laundering operation. When we look back on the country in another hundred years, I suspect we’ll count it similar to Cuba when it was under the yoke of the US Mafia or South Africa during Apartheid or The Philippines under US imperial occupation. It’s a place for the rich to hide their money, a place for the industrialists to ruthlessly exploit the working class, and a place for nativist freaks to live out their genocidal fantasies.
Add in that Israel has a special place in the hearts of the religious grifters and their zealot marks, and you can see how the country works to launder fascist ideology into liberal moderate talking points. Theocracy gets whitewashed as Democracy. Settler colonialism becomes a kind-of Land Back for white nationalists. Police brutality that would make an LASD deputy wince is massaged into liberal self-defense.
Elites have interest in the Israeli state both as a fortress of imperialists abroad and a model for conquering native peoples around the globe.
California laws freeze property taxes for residents over the age of 55. The end result is that new homebuyers can pay multiples of what their senior neighbors cough up, because the housing value has been locked in to the pre-'00s price booms. They’re not the only state with these very elderly-friendly property tax rules.
It’s why you’ll see some Chinese guy with dogshit taste paying an $80k premium to bring in a Cadillac SUV or Mercedes. Literally just conspicuous consumption on steroids for some folks.
But you have to balance this out with the realization that half the population of China doesn’t even own a car, much less some gawdy Americanized abomination. These sales figures are still just a drop in the bucket compared to 4.8B rail trips taken in the country last year. If you’ve got the spare coin and the extra real estate and you live out far enough that owning a car makes sense, then why not own a Tesla Y over a BYD? But 28k units sold in a year represent a rounding error on a rounding error compared to the total transportation budget of the country at large.
Just 40M more triangles, dawg. I just need an extra 40M more triangles and then the game will look good.
Please, bro. I’m begging you. This is the last time. Then the game will look SO SMOOTH. I just need those 40M extra triangles and then it’ll look absolutely fantastic, I promise. Games are literally unplayable without the extra 40M triangles. I won’t have any fun unless I get them. I will pay literally any price. Please, this is the last time. I swear.
More than that, the “wealth” Boomers possess is largely tied up in their homes (inflated assets benefiting from artificially low property taxes) and their 401ks (just riding the wave of inflated equities post-COVID). It’s not like they’re stealing your salaries or your health care benefits or larding you up with college debt, as all of these are functions of corporate finance profiteering not personal retirement accounts.
What we’re really seeing is an inflationary wave created by corporate excess consumption that Boomers are able to ride a little easier than their Millennial and GenA peers.
Kill the ultra rich, save the poor.
We have such enormous surpluses, but we insist on squandering them to… build another data center nobody wants? Finance another round of bombing runs on Tehran and Caracas? Shove a few thousand more migrants into concentration camps?
That said, we’ve got a lot of Boomers with brainworms who are convinced this is good public policy. We’ve also got a bunch of Joe Rogan Millennials and Alphas who feel the same way. I don’t know how to change that. Certainly not while billionaires own and operate the national media.
Bible be like “You’re going to experience hunger, illness, war, and death.”
2000 years later, every single fucking generation in history thinks they’re living in the End Times.
Don’t worry, socialist country. A totally organic and fully domestic Color Revolution is here to save you.
Surely my corporate overlords will respect me if I couch my objection in paleoconservative language.
Oh, what’s that? I’m still being shoved into the trash compactor and squeezed for all my surplus labor value, even though I’ve dangled this nifty religious icon in their face? Oh well… I guess my office is just Woke.
“God is angry because we elected the wrong dude” is just a mantra the losing party repeats following every defeat.
On the flip side, “God’s light shines on our candidate!” is the mantra the winning party repeats following every victory.
Almost as though it’s just hollow partisan superstition used to distract the gullible types from policy.
Isn’t the primary like, today?
Yeah, but Janet Mills dropped out in April. She was the only significant contender against Platner for the nomination.
A lot of people have seemed hellbent on absolutely not supporting anyone but Platner
Mills is currently the most unpopular Governor in the country, with a 29% approval rating (worse than Trump). I don’t think it’s quite so much hellbent on Platner as it is hellbent on not electing another Schumercrat. The only other candidate on the ballot - David Costello - has no budget or constituency. He spent the bulk of his career in Maryland, doing work as a mid-level staffer for the governor.
Trolling all my friends who were born after 9/11 by showing them clips from “Love, Actually” and talking about how easy it was to get through airport security.
Me, a Scandinavian Glasses Guy, shuffling his feet nervously.
Absolutely mind-melting to hear reps from a company that salvaged the concept of GE’s EV-1 and turned it into the wildly popular Prius turn around and bemoan battery powered cars.
What causes executives in the automotive industry to commit these acts of self-harm so consistently?
Technically, The Cure would be applied to someone Down With the Sickness. Meanwhile, you’d want The Vaccines to shore up The Head and the Heart as well as to protect your Nodes of Ravnier, prior to contracting Anthrax.
and who eats sea weed daily?
Honestly, it’s one of my favorite snacks
The congressman they voted for was actively fighting screwworm
More recently it hasn’t happened. Iran’s had a much better track record in targeting and knocking out American military equipment and killing personal than Saddam’s Iraq (both in '91 and again in '03) or Mohammad Omar’s Afghanistan or Milosevic’s Serbia or Noriega’s Panama.
Hegseth is doing a far worse job than Powell or Rumsfeld. And that’s not merely because he’s a shit-ass military leader. Iran is simply a harder nut to crack, what with the huge ring of mountains around the border, it’s seasoned military and advanced industry, and the loose alliance Iran enjoys with neighboring Pakistan, Russia, and China.
What we’re seeing is more akin to the US intervention in Vietnam and Korea. The failures of our mechanized infantry and navy to combat an advanced guerrilla force with long range artillery at its back is right in line with what we’d seen during the Cold War.
The US plan for Iran was always based on leveraging a domestic insurgency to destabilize the national government. We were not in a position to take the country by force any more than we could have taken Cuba or Venezuela. That’s why we’ve steered clear of these countries in an outright shooting war and leaned on economic pressure points… up until 2025.