Is there an article about this with some more detail?

The most succinct, easily defensible retort I have is “you can become a billionaire in China, but billionaires in China can’t buy the government.”

It makes far more sense that the US would convince Ukraine to do the attack and then use it as an excuse to drop them by pointing to how unhinged they are.

It’s a microcosm of the whole war from the U.S. perspective: it’s best if Ukraine succeeds, but fine if they fail, too.

The U.S. is currently making a show of blowing up random boats it claims are carrying drugs. I think it would blow up troop boats or shoot down troop planes.

If it’s at all feasible, I could see the U.S. attacking any boat that approaches Cuba and doesn’t submit to a search.

How would they get troops to Cuba?

Another thing electoral movements can do is improve conditions enough to where change that previously wasn’t possible becomes possible. Think of a mild reform like forcing police to use body-worn cameras. It certainly didn’t solve all problems with policing in capitalist societies, but it did open up a lot of avenues for changing cop behavior and agitating for further improvements.

More broadly, I think we have to be somewhat agnostic about what electoral movements can and cannot do. No one has ever brought socialism to a bourgeois democracy, or to an economy as developed as that of the modern imperial core. The closest examples to accomplishing that come from Latin America – Chile under Allende, the pink tide early in the 21st century – and were done through elections. There are no historical successes in anything close to the conditions of, say, the modern U.S. No one really knows what will or won’t work.

Democrats: Damn, someone responsible really should have put some serious measures in place to handle this situation. Why are you looking at me like that?

Could have been someone else (not Trump) allowing an attempt on Trump’s life, figuring:

1. If they stop it early, they’re heroes and Trump gets a boost. Could have planned to not let him get shots off and fucked up that part.
2. If Trump actually dies, it’s a tossup election at worst and Trump is more self-interested than ideologically conservative anyway.

Possible, definitely not a sure thing.

Close. The internet was never leftist – as in opposing capitalism. It was at its best the ACLU wing of liberal, and at its worst the age of consent wing of libertarian.

When social media exploded, the internet condensed to just a few aggregator platforms. You now had all this traffic and attention that could be more easily monetized than a million small websites and forums, and that’s what happened. Your few companies that own these aggregator platforms now have an enormous financial interest in (1) keeping content palatable to advertisers and (2) keeping regulation and taxes at bay. They accomplish the second in part by cooperating with the U.S. intelligence community, to the point of becoming one of the many industries with a revolving door between their corporate governance and the parts of the actual government that deal with the industry.

Of course any significant leftist communities on these platforms get snuffed out: big business and the American government hate the left. Your ACLU-type liberals get pushed right or out as the impetus to make money drives every decision, with their free speech language selectively co-opted to protect the right. Then your most right-wing party starts to become openly fascist around the time a fascist buys one of the major platforms and removes even the nominal guardrails against the most egregious fascists.

Now we’re here: with a few small non-fascist corners of the internet populated by a mix of leftists and liberals.

There is nothing Hamas could have done on October 7 that would justify committing genocide against Palestine.

This is a good counterpoint – there’s a real career risk here, which is part of what makes it such a meaningful statement – but Kaepernick was in a very different employment situation. For him, taking substandard offers (whatever non-NFL pro league was active at the time) wasn’t worth it because of injury risk. So he had only 32 possible employers (realistically, fewer had QB needs) and they actively collude all the time. Extremely easy to get blackballed in that environment.

Bob Vylan will lose money off this, but they can find smaller venues to play and doing so can’t jeopardize their career the same way a knee injury in the USFL could for Kaepernick. It’s not a career ender.

“Purposefully” is debatable, but whether intentional or by happenstance, damn it really is odd that so many descendants of Nazis are all over the my imperial core countries that backed tons of fascist coups over thr past 75 years.

His campaign’s equivocations around the question of Israel’s “right to exist,”

This is such an obviously loaded question. If he were asked “when did you stop beating your wife,” would we hem and haw over the semantics of his answer, or would we recognize the question is bullshit and look at the guy’s more substantive statements on whatever issue we want to know about?

He’s said Israel is indiscriminately killing civilians, that they have to follow international law, that Palestinians deserve equal rights, and he’s defended the slogan “globalize the intifada.” If you think he’s some closet zionist, you’re overthinking it.

The enforced silences are cracking—not with revolutionary rupture, but with the slow, grinding attrition of imperial consensus. What once had to be hidden can now be tentatively named, even if symbolic concessions are also made. What once marked the outer edge of the acceptable is now folded—awkwardly, cautiously, but definitively—into the domain of the political.

Can’t argue with any of this. It’s also notable how despite being a mayoral race, this is a big election – NYC has a larger population than all but about a dozen states.

There are three types of conspiracy theories:

1. Lizard people live in the hollow earth and mind control world leaders
2. The CIA admitted it on the Congressional record 40 years ago
3. The Enemy of the State zone, where it’s plausible but unconfirmed

This is a good take. The best response here is “I need to see a credible source before I believe this,” not “this is a bad source so there is absolutely no way this can be true.”

Propaganda isn’t necessarily false just because it is being curated and published with the intent to support a narrative. The best propaganda (really the only good propaganda) is true.

What people are asking you is to be more discerning with what you consider shareworthy. Had you posted a tabloid article about Bat Boy sightings you would have received the same response.

Who said that I should defend the article?

So you posted something even you think isn’t very credible?

“It’s the voters who are wrong, not my genocidal policies”

“Hey why aren’t people voting for me, wait, come back”

I have extreme anxiety talking to people I find attractive and have a very hard time reading people’s body language as to when they’re sexually interested, the only time I’ve ever managed to pick up a random person has been basically when I acted like a pick up artist.

Just ask them, word for word, “do you want to go on a date sometime?” It’s no more anxiety-inducing than anything else, and you don’t have to do any weird pick up artist stuff.

If they are actually interested in you, they’ll say yes.

My point was that China ordered the army to do what they did.

What’s your source for this? Had they been ordered to shoot a bunch of protesters, why would they have let protesters in the square leave peacefully?

The much more likely scenario is soldiers were met with deadly violence at some point and – as most armed people who face deadly violence will do – opened fire.

I’m not making an argument about what violence was justified and what wasn’t. I’m pointing out that the facts we agree on contradict your claim that there was some top-down order to massacre people, and that you haven’t provided any support for that claim in the first place.