WatDabney @ WatDabney @sopuli.xyz

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2

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580

Joined

2 yr. ago

Passive genocide, according to plan and right on schedule.

The Dead Milkmen would undoubtedly approve.

I don't believe that my approval or anyone else's is at all relevant.

My position is that there's only one person who has the right to decide whether or not it's acceptable to trade sex for money, and that's the person entering into the trade. Assuming that all other contractual requirements are met - they're of legal age and acting of their own free will and so on - it's just as much their right to trade sex for money as to trade ditch digging or code writing or coffee brewing or meeting taking for money.

(edited for clarity)

If "the blending of opinion with news and the promotion of... propaganda" was actually considered just cause for a low credibility rating, the Jerusalem Post would have one too.

Curiously enough though, it doesn't.

One would suspect then that MBFC somehow fails to recognize Jerusalem Post's brazen bias, but in fact they do recognize it, and point it out on their page, though they do notably only sort of mention it in passing, as if it's not all that important. They also note two failed fact checks, yet still rate it High Credibility and Mostly Factual.

Mondoweiss, meanwhile, receives on its page a highly emotive and hectoring account of what only really amounts to the same bias as the Jerusalem Post but in the opposite direction - pro-Palestinian and anti-zionist instead of anti-Palestinian and pro-zionist - and in spite of no failed fact checks, is ranked as Low Credibility and Mixed Factual.

The only reasonable conclusion is that MBFC is itself biased. Which is, of course, the exact risk one invites when one entrusts a third party to purportedly rate bias.

I can of course block it and likely will, but that doesn't really go far enough. A purported bias watchdog that is itself biased is rather obviously an abuse of the bot system, and should therefore be banned.

Who said anything about the Steele Dossier? That's just a bit of oft-regurgitated headlining intended to serve the exact purpose it serves here - providing the deluded base with an excuse to ignore the plain truth.

All anyone with any sliver of integrity has to do to see the truth of the charge that Trump is Putin's lap dog is look at him and listen to him and see how he behaves whenever the subject of Putin comes up. He's somewhere between a cringing courtier and a schoolgirl with a crush, and it's so obvious and blatant that it's creepy. And as with so many things regarding Trump, all anyone has to do is open their eyes to see it and their minds to accept it.

That's not a bug - it's a feature.

The ultimate goal is to bring back Victorian workhouses, updated for the modern age of privatized prisons and officially sanctioned corporate slave labor.

AIPAC is done.

The campaigns against Bowman and Bush were desperation moves, and unless Israel pretty much instantly rights course and earns back some respect (which is certainly not going to happen at least as long as Netanyahu remains in office, or out of prison, for that matter), Israel's reputation is entirely deservedly going to continue to collapse, and more and more voters, and thus more and more politicians, are going to oppose them.

That would imply that AIPAC would have to work even harder and spend even more money, but I don't think that will work no matter what. Their crusades against Bowman and Bush have already left a bad taste in people's mouths, and rightly so, and it's near certain that in the not very distant future, it's going to flip, and the knowledge that AIPAC is funding opposition to a candidate will actually benefit that candidate - people will actually be more likely to vote for them because AIPAC opposes them. And that'll be the end of AIPAC.

And good riddance to bad rubbish.

Altruistic? ALTRUISTIC?!

Just who in the fuck does he think he is?!

The only altruists on Reddit are the users who freely provided the content that this fucking parasite feeds off of.

I'm so glad I left that awful shithole of a site.

Nah - not buying that one for a second.

There's absolutely no reason Iran would want Trump dead. They can certainly see, as everyone else (other than his deluded cultists) can see, that he's Putin's lap dog.

No surprise there.

More precisely, undoubtedly, the people and corporations that have given him big piles of money want to gut consumer protections.

It's really very simple - the billionaires and the corporations want to take the US back to at least the 1950s, and preferably the 1880s. Their goal is to institutionalize a plutocratic autocracy under which they'll be free to strip mine the mountains and clearcut the forests and drill baby drill and spew pollution everywhere with no expectation of social responsibility, so they'll be entirely free to keep all of the profits to pay for their lives of grotesque privilege while we'll be reduced to just being additional resources for them to exploit, with no liberties, no freedoms and no say in anything.

That's why they bankrolled Project 2025, why they bought the Supreme Court and why they're backing Trump and Vance (and the MAGA Republicans broadly). Each one of them is intended to play a role in destroying democracy and implementing autocracy, all toward the same goal - the plutocratic dream world in which everything is bent toward enriching the few at the expense of the many - of elevating the few on the backs of the many, and not just essentially by happenstance, as is the case already, but officially and by design.

Class war isn't coming - it's already here. The rich are already fighting it, and they're winning.

I suspect that's more or less right.

It struck me a while back that it's likely not so much that Trump lies per se as that his brain is broken in such a way that he just doesn't distinguish between truth and falsehood. To him, that's a meaningless concept. He just says, and means, whatever he says at the moment, based entirely on how it might serve his interests to say it.

He measures value in other people differently - primarily based on their loyalty to him. But again, the part of his brain that distinguishes between truth and falsehood is broken, so all that takes is a profession of loyalty. And as far as that goes, Vance is particularly notable, since he has in the past criticized Trump, but is now sucking up to him. I think that to Trump, in his narcissism, that's especially appealing because it means that he won him over.

So then it's not so much that he expects Vance to lie as that he expects Vance to remain loyal. It's not so much that he sees integrity as an obstacle and the lack thereof as an advantage as that he sees it as a threat to loyalty and its absence as an aid to loyalty.

All of that also explains how it is that Trump - an inveterate liar and back-stabber - is so willing to trust people and so bitter and petulant when they turn against him. Since he doesn't distinguish between truth and falsehood, he doesn't see the expectation that they lie on his behalf as anything unusual, nor does he recognize the likelihood that they'll one day want to or be coerced to stop lying and tell the truth instead. To him, it's just a simple question of whether they'll remain loyal to him by saying what he wants them to say (with no understanding of the relevance of the fact that it's a lie) or betray him by saying what his opponents want them to say (similarly with no understanding of the relevance of the fact that it's the truth).

So in Vance, he sees someone that he won over to his side, and his lack of integrity as a lack of that misplaced loyalty that's led others (Pence, for example) to, as he sees it, betray him.

Even with my deservedly low expectations for Republicans, it's astonishing how little integrity Vance has.

Right, but it's not really a matter of what did they expect from just standing idly by as Israel brazenly tried to provoke military responses fron Lebanon, Syria, Yemen and Iran, since we're in this bizarre post-truth timeline in which governments and corporate media just blithely pretend that none of that happened at all

All of the versions of this story that I've seen so far either pass over Israel's provocations entirely, or try to bury them by just mentioning them in passing, in passive voice, and with no assignment of responsibility.

The stock phrase is "Iran vows retaliation after the killing of..."

The mid-phrase shift from active to passive voice is propaganda 101.

Virtually all of the focus has been on the racists and misogynists and christofascists and all the other reactionary fuckwads who are supporting and promoting Trump and who contributed to Project 2025 and so on.

But they don't really matter. They're just tools. The people who matter are the ones who are funding it all. Aside from some personal quirks (like Musk's weirdly aggressive pronatalist thing) the people who are funding Trump and Project 2025 and such really don't give a shit about all of that. Those are just emotive issues to make a lot of noise about to win over the base and provide cover forbthe real goal. The real goal - the exact and only reason that they're funding all of that - is quite simply to destroy US democracy and institute an autocracy, so that they can have a system in which their rule and our submission are codified and absolute.

This isn't a culture war. That's just cover for the real war, which is a class war. And it's not a war that might happen - it's a war that already is happening. The rich are already fighting it, and have been for quite some time now. And if we don't do something, we're going to lose it by forfeit.

So what was his answer?

This is a prime example of a political anslysis that completely fails by presuming the wrong premises.

Mr. Biden contended that the assassination of Mr. Haniyeh was poorly timed, coming right at what the Americans hoped would be the endgame of the process...

From Netanyahu's perspective, it was perfectly timed, and for exactly that reason. The key is that Netanyahu doesn't want a cease-fire under any circumstances.

Moreover, Mr. Biden expressed concern that carrying out the operation in Tehran could trigger the wider regional war that he has been trying to avert.

And again, from Netanyahu's perspective, it could trigger the wider regional war that he has deliberately been trying to trigger. Just like the harm it's done to the peace process, that's not an unwanted side effect - it is, to Netanyahu, the exact goal.

Is there a dictator Trump hasnt publicly fellated?

I can't think of one...

Good for them.

It becomes more obvious every day that many western governments, and most obviously the US, don't have the courage or the integrity to stand against the Israeli government's ever-more-brazen evil.

So it falls to the people to make the stand their governments won't or can't make.

Amusing that the rather obvious counter to the threat of merely being a "smooth brained political shill" is self-reflection and ongoing reanalysis of ones positions, which is something of which one who would characterize all who disagree as "smooth brained political shills" is self-evidently entirely incapable.

On brand.

It's oddly appropriate that those who are most focused on the supposed inherent moral imperative to have children are so often such awful parents.