the current administration is using the war name, it doesn't matter what it technically is because they are using it to plainly state their ambitions for it
We grow a lot of human-edible food for the sole purpose to feed it to livestock, who then spend most of those calories on existing and put a small portion into body mass that we eventually eat.
Sure, that stuff isn't of the same quality as food grown for human consumption, but putting livestock on a diet and diverting some of their food to human consumption would more than cover any shortfall from the missing meat
we don't have the distribution systems for it, I promise you it could not be reconfigured overnight (which is the specific thought exercise we were given)
People underestimate how radical JD Vance is. He wrote an endorsement for the skull book, and not a "my buddy wrote a book that I totally read and you should too" endorsement, but one that restated the core argument: Democrats are secretly communists who want to communist genocide you and we should invoke the Iron Law of Reciprocity to preemptively ... them.
During the election I thought this was mostly rhetoric, but now that the administration has turned ICE fully paramilitary and tried to get its base excited about murdering their political opposition, I'm not so sure.
> Democrats are secretly communists who want to communist genocide you
Isn't this just how politics looks now? The Republicans say that, the Democrats say the Republicans are secretly nazis who want to nazi genocide you, both parties contain millions of people so both can point to some extremists on the other side saying something shocking and then they both go back to trying to get 51% of the votes so they can be the ones picking your pocket this year.
edit: It's beautiful how the two immediate replies to this post are, respectively, "it's not both sides because only the Democrats are actually Marxists" and "it's not both sides because only the Republicans are actually Fascists".
When things are this lopsided, both-sidesing is indistinguishable from sweeping for the bad one.
Want to prove me wrong? Show me the last time Kamala Harris engaged in guillotine rhetoric (which is the left-coded equivalent). Point me to what you think the Democratic equivalent of the ICE killings are. Show me dead protestors and stifling of legal proceedings to hold them accountable. Show me Democratic fraud on the scale of the $40B swap line to Argentina, pumping and dumping the American economy by announcing on-again-off-again war, creating a board of peace / putting yourself in charge / giving it $10B, and shitcoin rugpulls.
> both-sidesing is indistinguishable from sweeping for the bad one.
That implies there is a good one. The lesser of two evils is still evil, and even how to measure lesser is extremely subjective.
> Show me the last time Kamala Harris engaged in guillotine rhetoric
Harris campaigned on saying as little as possible. Several Democrats have called for Trump's assassination. Some (like Stacey Plaskett) quite directly, others (including Harris) have implied or joked about it. Someone worked the nutters into a sufficient frenzy to attempt it with Trump and to murder Charlie Kirk.
> Point me to what you think the Democratic equivalent of the ICE killings are.
Around 3 million people die in the US per year, on the order of 6000 of those are in prisons, ICE was on the order of 30.
The media focuses on that because Trump campaigns on immigration, not because it's a significant proportion of the people the government kills. Significantly more people die when Democrats get paid off by the AMA to limit the number of medical residency slots, or impede housing construction even in states their party fully controls resulting in homelessness and poverty-inducing high rents.
> Show me dead protestors
Are you referring to the unarmed woman killed by the capitol police in 2021?
> stifling of legal proceedings to hold them accountable
Biden pardoned a lot of people in his own party.
The government failing to hold itself accountable is the default. Most of the time they don't even initiate proceedings against themselves when they're committing a crime, and hide behind qualified immunity etc. if someone wants to sue them.
> Show me Democratic fraud on the scale of the $40B swap line to Argentina, pumping and dumping the American economy by announcing on-again-off-again war, creating a board of peace / putting yourself in charge / giving it $10B, and shitcoin rugpulls.
The Inflation Reduction Act was a trillion dollars. The federal budget is multiple trillions every year and a double digit percentage of it is corruption every year, regardless of which party is in office.
In general it seems like you want to point to specific things that represent a fractional percentage of the overall problem and ignore the systemic bipartisan corruption and government unaccountability that has been the status quo for generations.
Oh, so you can't find equivalents from Harris and Walz! That's what I thought. You aren't an enlightened centrist, you're a partisan hack posing as one.
> residency slots, NIMBY
Who put forward the last bill addressing the residency slot issue? Which party has the bigger YIMBY faction?
> Ashli Babbitt
She was storming the capitol! The officer who shot her was investigated and cleared because the courts agree: cops are allowed to shoot if you are trying to breach the inner defensive perimeter of the US capitol. Where are the investigations for Rene Good and Alex Pretti?
> state investigators were denied access to the shooting scene by the federal government
Oh. This isn't even "we've investigated ourselves," it's just "we kill you, you die." That's new in US politics.
> IRA was a trillion dollars
Spending that you do not like is not fraud. That's not what the word means. I'd love to call the trillions spent on Iraq and Afghanistan and (soon) Iran fraud, but I can't, because that's not what the word means.
> you want to point to specific things that represent a fractional percentage
The reason why you can't come up with equivalents for the Trump fraud is because they don't exist, so you have to pretend that congressional appropriations that you don't like are somehow equivalent. But they aren't. They made Jimmy Carter sell his peanut farm, but Trump can just pocket billions and Republicans say "both sides." No, it's not both sides, it's not normal outside of shithole countries, and despite Trump's best efforts to turn the US into a shithole country we can still decide to enforce our laws and turn back the clock on that.
I can't help but feel you're leaving out some key details here...
was she perhaps trespassing after walking through broken barriers, past security guards that told people to leave, and through broken windows? was she also warned to stop multiple times while climbing through a broken window to circumvent a barricaded door at the time of being shot?
If those things happened to be true, it would seem that you're attempting to deceive us as readers to make a point in poor faith. Probably no need to do that, right?
The Democrats have a very similar platform to the Republicans (especially around ICE and Israel, both of which Harris vowed to continue supporting). Trump is uniquely incompetent though, which if you believe in accelerationism may or may not be a good thing. For instance Democrats have long yearned to go to war with Iran, now Trump did it, but he did it in such an incompetent and rushed manner that it's led to US bases throughout the Middle East being destroyed and abandoned. That's a good thing that came out of a bad situation.
I'm not trying to be combative, just honest. Here is Harris saying Iran is our greatest adversary (sorry for the Zionist source). Chuck Schumer and Hillary Clinton have also been very vocal about wanting to attack Iran. Clinton actually recently praised Trump!
Oh, Harris called Iran an adversary! Wow! I'm glad we didn't elect her or the party that negotiated the last deal with Iran! The party that tore up the Iran deal and kept joking about bombing them into the stone age and started 2 out of 2 of the last middle eastern forever wars is the much better bet.
What? They bombed Iran and started forever war 3 of 3? Who could have seen this coming?!
No, Harris failing to push back hard enough on Gaza is not in the same galaxy of culpability or catastrophe as Trump starting a war with Iran on Israel's behalf. And endorsing their actions in Gaza, lest we forget.
And let's not forget who is actually in office and started the war, and how it's currently going. We can wring our hands about what democrats might have done but we have active proof of what republicans are currently doing and it isn't pretty. There's a vast gulf between "hawkish" and "actively bombing." I'd be willing to give pretty much anyone else a shot at it right now.
I simply do not vote for Zionists of either party. They can keep swapping seats and lose every time. If you support Israel, you cannot have my vote. I'll just sit out the election if I have to (and did last time).
Oh, that's why you can't acknowledge the simple fact that Kamala was better on Gaza, because if you do you acknowledge your own culpability in making the genocide worse.
More people in Gaza were murdered under Biden/Harris than Trump. I’ll never understand neo-liberal extreme parasocial behavior. These people are not your friends, they are the scum of the earth. Treat them as such.
What Biden did in Gaza (and Trump continued) is way worse than what has happened in Iran. It's a vile crime against humanity to attack Iran and kill civilians but Gaza is a straight up US fueled genocide.
All five actual Marxist-Leninists in the US appreciate your attention. Now let's list the actual fascists. Symmetry is beautiful but sometimes it's just not there.
Exactly: the tear-down-the-system left barely exists outside twitch and college campuses, while the far right has the presidency and majority control of the Republican party. These are not the same.
> edit: It's beautiful how the two immediate replies to this post are, respectively, "it's not both sides because only the Democrats are actually Marxists" and "it's not both sides because only the Republicans are actually Fascists".
I don't think we should pat ourselves on the back too hard for milquetoast takes devoid of any specifics.
(also I think you misread the responses to your post)
> All five actual Marxist-Leninists in the US appreciate your attention. Now let's list the actual fascists. Symmetry is beautiful but sometimes it's just not there.
"There are five actual Marxist-Leninists you need to be paying attention to in the US but we can't even name one relevant actual fascist, so the symmetry isn't there."
That was my initial reading, and it's because I've encountered numerous people who sincerely believe that. Using sarcasm in posts subject to Poe's Law is a good way to be ambiguous.
Lets start: you. Followed by Stephen Miller. Trump, per the assessment of his own former chief of staff. Josh Hawley. Leonard Leo. All the "Dark Enlightenment." Your initial reading is tendentious and of little value. Are you seriously going to challenge the notion that American politics has a spectrum from center right to fascists-would-blush ideological crackpots like the dark enlightenment?
Yeah JD Vance is a questionable politician who has not won that many election and those he did win he had massive sport behind him that was ideological.
Its not even remotely clear at all that JD Vance has anywhere near the 'skill' of Trump on unifying so many wildly different groups. And JD Vance is a bottom feeder who attached himself to Trump in the right moment and was put as Vice president because some of the Hardcore Trump people didn't want a non-100% Trump Vice President. He didn't win an election to be Vice president.
Thiel and friends can dream up anything, just like they dreamed of Orban winning in Hungary. But just because they were lucky in the last couple years, with a bunch of things, doesn't mean all their plans will work.
Vance's political instincts are highly questionable.
It appears he's reached the first seat in the line of succession without demonstrating any particular skills at all, so I take little comfort in the idea that this is maybe the end of his puppeted rise to power. With an 80 year old in office with nearly 3 years left of presidency, he may very well find himself in the highest office without the need of unifying anyone.
> “The goal for the families we represent has always been to prevent Alex Jones from being able to cause harm at scale, the way he did against them,” said Chris Mattei, the lawyer who argued the Connecticut families’ case in court. The deal with The Onion promises “to significantly degrade his power to do that.”
> The Onion also plans to sell merchandise and share the proceeds with the Sandy Hook families.
I reallyyyyy want a gay frogs t-shirt, I would wear the hell out of that. That entire rant and meme it spawned is the only good thing to come out of that man
I think this one was high because alex jones harassed parents of murdered children to the point where they had to move out of the town their children were buried in. These people were harassed to the point of being afraid to visit the graves of their children. Sometimes examples need to be set in egregious cases.
>Sometimes examples need to be set in egregious cases.
And if he had been fined $35 million dollars, the example would have been set, they'd have been paid, and he'd have spent the next 20 years figuring out how much that award fucked him when he couldn't be insured for anything, when no one would touch him for any sort of gig worth having. He might have ended up destitute. But if you do the Dr. Evil "1 billion dollars!" thing, which he could never actually pay, the plaintiffs get nothing for all their misery, and the money he does hide in offshore accounts is there for him to loaf around on forever. Why is this so counterintuitive for everyone?
> He might have ended up destitute. But if you do the Dr. Evil "1 billion dollars!" thing, which he could never actually pay, the plaintiffs get nothing for all their misery, and the money he does hide in offshore accounts is there for him to loaf around on forever. Why is this so counterintuitive for everyone?
He was busy hiding millions of dollars in assets well before the judgements were handed down [0]. He fraudulently declared bankruptcy in multiple shell companies to try and delay the proceedings [1]. He made no secret of the fact that he was going to do everything in his power to avoid giving a single dime to the Sandy Hook families, regardless of the outcome. He had known for years that he was lying, his own staff had repeatedly raised objections to his behavior in writing, and if the award was $35 million, that's only a few year's profits for him to sacrifice. For reference, his personal expenses are $100k/mo [2] and his previous salary was $1.4 million/yr [3]. On Infowars' best days, they would rake in $800k in profit [4]. Sure, those $800k days weren't super often, but they are still a cartoonishly profitable business by every measure. $35m would not be a real punishment.
It should also be noted that $1.4b is the combined amount for all of the plaintiffs, not just one person. And this isn't an isolated incident; he's been defaming people his entire career, and every time he got a small judgement or was only required to apologize, he just went on to defame other people [5], and all the times he didn't get sued he never even apologized. He only cares about money, so that's how you send a message to him.
Edit: I completely forgot to mention that the Sandy Hook families did offer to settle: $85 million paid over 10 years [6]. Jones countered with $55 million [7]. If Jones and his companies could afford $5.5m/yr, that says a lot about the profitability of the operation and the inadequacy of $35m.
Alex Jones did not, as far as the evidence we have seen, harass the parents. Alex Jones did not direct anyone to harass the parents.
Some of his viewers used Jones' statements as justification for harassments.
Interestingly, as far as I know, nothing was pursued against the people harassing the parents. They went after the rich guy saying lies they didn't like, then depended on the fact no one besides the defense wants to side with someone who says such shockingly vicious lies about the facts surrounding dead kids.
That's understating things rather substantially. He ignored court orders. He continued to defame the plaintiffs during the trial, including a statement on air that one of the plaintiff's death by suicide was actually a murder and part of the conspiracy.
If you were sued and your objective was to lose as badly as possible and get as harsh a judgment as possible, it would look a lot like what Jones did here.
That might have been his objective really. All that talk about the govt being after us for years, and now he can point to them forcing him to sell everything off, while he still maintains the same fanbase. But what can they do, he really deserved the judgement.
I would actually be impressed with the administration if they strategically decided to use aliens as a PR move specifically to distract from the topics listed.
IMO the “why” is far simpler, not a complicated ploy to distract people’s attention.
it's not complicated they're just flailing around, why do you think we're in a completely ineffective war with iran that has opposed pretty much all strategic advice
if the press is leaning towards a bad story, they release some other thing... they've been doing it all year
homeowners have nothing on farms, acres and acres of pesticides and monocultures
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