UnderpantsWeevil @ UnderpantsWeevil @lemmy.world

Posts

142

Comments

13,343

Joined

2 yr. ago

"I warned you, bro! Didn't I warn you? Your soul is bound within the confines of perceived reality, dude. The mind is a cage, my guy! You have to free yourselves from the cave and search for meaning beyond the simulacrum of the senses, man!"

Chasing the small fry while the big fish swims away?

Some might argue it would have been more beneficial to flip defendants into witnesses and use them to prosecute the media organizers and financiers, not unlike how the FBI (finally, after decades of dragging their feet) broke up the East Coast mafia gangs.

PayPal made Valve remove them

You can buy games outside of the Steam store.

• Delivered a Rambling Speech
• Falsely asserted some random trivia that's easily disproven with even cursory background research
• Completely forgot the names / positions of key staffers in his administration
• Concerns about senility

Truly, imagine if Biden had fallen victim to any of these. Doubt he would have survived re-election.

Republican: "We're going to double size of the national security state and abolish the national weather service."

Democrat: "I disapprove of this because it is not budget neutral. Also, I'm worried about whether it could be detrimental to Israel."

J Street

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J_Street

I fat fingered K-Street

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K_Street_(Washington,_D.C.)

But it still works

That’s not a contradiction to them being independent.

If they're beholden to private banking interests, they're explicitly not independent.

Garland was more than happy to prosecute all the goofy little J6ers, along with the traditional list of migrants and smugglers and foreign adversaries.

He just steered clear of anyone with power.

Aw... they did poor Curtis Silwa dirty.

Like, Mamdani all the way. But if I've got to pick between those last three, Silwa's clearly the least awful choice.

In all honesty I think they do more harm than good. It gets it into the morons heads “oh, he’s going to win, I can stay home”.

I keep seeing this line printed over and over again, in every election cycle, by people who seem to think there really is this enormous body of people who are enthusiastic about a candidate but unenthusiastic about voting.

Hell, Cuomo complained about it shortly after the election. He lost because too many people liked him too much and thought his win was assured. I heard this after Brexit. I heard it after Hillary lost in 2016 and after Trump lost in 2020 and after Harris lost in 2024. We can have historic high turnouts and historic low turnouts. We can have sea changes in the composition and ideology of the voters. We can have scandals flood the papers a day before the election that throw polls into chaos and candidates who coast to victory on double-digit margins. (Incidentally, Mamdani won by 12% in an election he was projected to lose by more than that a month earlier). The "I was secretly so popular that people forgot to vote for me" myth endures.

I've got an alternative hypothesis. Maybe people turned out for Mamdani because they liked him a lot and people stayed home for Cuomo because he was a creepy sex-pest POS. It had nothing to do with their projected odds of winning and everything to do with their appeal as political leaders.

The DOJ has always been a kind-of weapon, intended to legitimize the use of force against enemies of the state. This is, incidentally, why incoming Presidents are loathe to use it against their corrupt predecessors. And why DOJs tend to fixate on people with virtually no political capital (minority political leadership, black market traffickers, migrants, foreign business interests, and domestic low-level con-artists) while steering well clear of sitting politicians, large cap business executives, large church leaders, and dignitaries from wealthy allied nations.

Trump's pogrom on migrants and minorities is spilling over into targeting people who aren't traditionally on the DOJ's shit list, because he's far more concerned with the raw metrics of his department (the volume of individuals arrested and deported) than the consequences of his policies (deteriorating trade relations, impact to domestic trade and travel, long term market stability, long term labor prices, etc). And his pardons and case dismissals are a more vulgar effort at self-enrichment than has historically been seen (although hardly without precedent)

What has shifted isn't the DOJ's purpose but the individuals that are now considered "fair game" in the eyes of Department leadership. One could argue that this is partially Biden's fault - he "shot at the king and missed" when the Southern District indicted Trump a few years ago. But you can go back to the Bush Era USA firing or the Nixon Saturday Night Massacre to see similar instances of Presidents using their stranglehold on the Justice Department to shape prosecutorial action.

This has been a fundamental flaw in the US political system for ages. We claim to have an independent judiciary (a joke under any extended scrutiny) but what does that mean without an independent prosecutorial agency?

British news journal doing the most British kind of journalism imaginable.

not an argument for of against anything

Right. It's a system of economic exchange, not a moral position. There are ways around this system, but they're time consuming and annoying to accomplish. So the vendors tend to take the path of least resistance when setting their internal policies. You were taught about Free Markets as this perfect, frictionless vacuum of interactions between buyers and sellers, but it doesn't work that way and never did.

For some reason, people seem to confuse being naive and gullible with being moral and upstanding.

A Magazine Made Up The Pledge of Allegiance To Sell US Flags

In 1891, the magazine The Youth's Companion invited readers to write and ask for cards bearing the following message: "This Certificate, representing a 10 cent contribution, entitles the holder to One Share in the patriotic influence of the School Flag." When the enterprising tyke had sold 100 of these 19th-century NFTs, they'd send the proceeds to The Youth's Companion and receive a flag in return. That's about $300 per flag, in 2021 dollars.

And why were young readers so willing to put in unpaid hours as salespeople raising money to buy flags? Because of the campaign started by The Youth's Companion called the "Flag Over Every Schoolhouse" movement. They advertised this movement to schools directly as well as in their publication, and to really give schools a reason to want flags, the magazine created the Pledge of Allegiance.

The magazines' marketing department came up with the pledge, and had an on-staff minister to do the wording (though not the "under God" clause, which was added decades later). They got Congress's support, aiming to get the whole country reciting the pledge by the 400th anniversary of Columbus' birth. It seems like the magazine also did care about instilling national pride, but it was the subscriptions department who were behind these campaigns; the editorial department wanted no part in it. They sold hundreds of thousands of flags at what sounds like significantly above cost.

Silicon Valley, Wall Street, J Street, and Israel are getting exactly what they asked for.

I don't see what the problem is.

I mean, that's exactly how third party payment systems have always worked. 🙄

I guess you can always try buying your porn game with Bitcoin or something.

This reads like stand up from the 80s

One of the things that had kept America’s economy stable and which invited foreign investment in the dollar had been the independent fed.

The Fed isn't independent. Volcker and Greenspan should have disabused us of this notion 50 years ago. The central bank exists to benefit Capital and grow domestic profit.

What we have is a split within the bourgeois on what policy should be. Trump's backers wants credit expansion at the expense of inflation after half a century of presidents demanding the opposite.

cut to small rodent slapping an alarm clock and burying itself in bedsheets

The democracy +capitalism combo is just the least worst setup we figured out so far.

That's what the state propagandists tell us, anyway.