Well, this is all someone’s profit at some point. Killing brown people is just a fringe benefit. Every rocket we fire and bomb we drop is ultimately counted as points on GDP and revenue for the DOW.

In a delightful change of pace, the Nazis are putting themselves in the oven.

It costs $30m to build a drone and another $1-3m to actually send it to a war zone on the other side of the world. Then each mission involves firing a $150k piece of ordinance at targets that may or may not be a valid military target. All that so you can kill a few dozen Houthis, or perhaps the family or friends of those Houthis. Perhaps a parent or an infant child. And what are these people worth? Nothing.

The important thing to remember when doing all this back-of-the-envelop math is to always remember human life - particularly human life in a country as remote and foreign as Yemen - HAS. NO. VALUE. That’s why we’re gleefully obliterating it at every opportunity. We render their limbs from their bodies with some of the most technologically advanced killing machines in existence to prove once and for all that they are not people. They should not exist. They all must die.

Same with Palestine. A country of roughly 5M people, but the lives of these people are worthless. Same with Haiti. Same with Iraq and Afghanistan. Same with Somali and Sudan and Syria and Libya. They are expendable. They are disposable. They are, if anything, a tax on the well-being of the better, brighter, more noble, more fundamentally human population of English-speaking and Western-aligned peoples dedicated to sending us mineral resources at below the market clearing rate.

What we are buying with that $30m drone is a beautiful perfect world expunged of the evil rebellious creatures keeping us from all those wonderful minerals. And they have the fucking nerve to knock seven of our Wunderwaffe from the skies? This only further justifies the genocide.

One of the appeals of Bluesky (for now) is the Followimg feed that presents comments exclusively from people I follow, in chronological order.

Crazy that Facebook can’t deliver this anymore

https://www.pcgamer.com/games/a-week-after-a-major-hack-brought-down-4chan-and-doxxed-all-its-users-it-seems-like-it-may-be-dead-for-good/

wrote one user on X

Any article that quotes an anonymous account on Social Media must be obligated to prove it is not a Bot, beyond a reasonable doubt, before I’m going to take it seriously. FFS, for all we know, the person who wrote that was working for Newsweek at the time.

Similarly, some hardliners

Anyone we’d recognize? No? Just anonymous randos, then?

I swear to god, if 4chan hadn’t imploded last week, we’d be getting Greentext in the headlines.

The US has been a petro-state for over a decade. Can’t imagine what they could bring to the table at this point. Probably the most effective policy towards the US is the same one applied to Iran or Cuba.

the Chinese supported the Trump campaign

The Evil Foreigners Strike Again!

Chinese end goals are one people walking along a path of corpses.

How many genocides does the US have to be involved in before this reads like a punchline?

It’s so funny to see people respond to Kristi Noem’s “Fuck you, you fucking <racial explicate>s” TV ads and think to themselves “It would be just as terrible if the Chinese started running ads where they were friendly and nice.”

The American idea of fairness is bananas. Literally getting mad because the Chinese are being too polite to brown people.

it’s russian bullshit to distract form the fact that crimea was fucking invaded and taken through violence

Who has forgotten about the 2014 invasion? But we’ve had similar referendums in Iraq and Afghanistan under US occupation. We’ve accepted votes in Northern Ireland and Indian Kashmir and under coup governments in Chile, Spain, S. Korea, Panama, and Hawaii at face value. Clearly, violent occupation does not disqualify subsequent democratic referendums.

After that nobody should care about democratic assent.

If violence committed by a state institution disqualifies a democracy from functioning, show me which country qualifies as a democratic institution? Territorial control is predicated on violence. Ukrainian territory was only originally under Russian dominion because it was wrested from the Nazis, who wrested it from the Soviets who wrested it from the Russian Imperialists who wrested it from the Ottomans, etc, etc.

At some point, the violence has to end and democracy has to begin. If human life continues to be less important than property rights, the killing never ends.

That’s obviously untrue. We’ve spent centuries endorsing invasion of other countries and obliteration of their native cultures.

NAFOs are very defensive of Ukraine because its territory that was staked out by Western Europe after the fall of the USSR. No takesies-backsies.

I love how this is getting downvoted, particularly given that “Crimeans don’t want to be a part of Russia!” and “They’d rather die than be occupied!” were big talking points to justify Ukraine’s bombing of the territory.

Networking Effect

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

ARE WE LEARNING HOW “SOCIAL MEDIA” WORKS YET HUMANITY?

Apparently not, because people keep feeling surprised and offended when the Networking Effect happens.

Seriously. How many more fucking times do we need to go around this goddamn merry go round until we just start calling each other on the phone and meeting face to face again

Idk, when are we going to get low-cost public transit and VoIP that’s not like talking over two tin cans connected with string?

I can’t believe the guy who originally administered the creation of Twitter would do all the exact same things that originally made him billions of dollars selling the company to Elon Musk.

There’s no way he’s just speed-running what he did last time in hopes of another $44B buyout.

Glorifying a system can never be the answer.

Systems and institutions are what we rely on to provide a secure future for ourselves and our loved ones. You don’t need to glorify them, but you do need to value them on their merits.

Keeping a critical eye on the status quo is the only way to develop a better future in any system.

There is a huge difference between being critical and being cynical, particularly when it comes to domestic reporting of “enemy” nation-states. What we have in the US rhetoric directed towards China (and Iran and Cuba and North Korea and now increasingly Claudia Sheinbaum in Mexico and Lula in Brazil) is best described by the historical scholar Michael Parenti describing the US attitude towards the USSR.

The anticommunist ideological framework could transform any data about existing communist societies into hostile evidence. If the Soviets refused to negotiate a point, they were intransigent and belligerent; if they appeared willing to make concessions, this was but a skillful ploy to put us off our guard. By opposing arms limitations, they would have demonstrated their aggressive intent; but when in fact they supported most armament treaties, it was because they were mendacious and manipulative. If the churches in the USSR were empty, this demonstrated that religion was suppressed; but if the churches were full, this meant the people were rejecting the regime’s atheistic ideology. If the workers went on strike (as happened on infrequent occasions), this was evidence of their alienation from the collectivist system; if they didn’t go on strike, this was because they were intimidated and lacked freedom. A scarcity of consumer goods demonstrated the failure of the economic system; an improvement in consumer supplies meant only that the leaders were attempting to placate a restive population and so maintain a firmer hold over them.

What we are dealing with is a nonfalsifiable orthodoxy, so assiduously marketed by the ruling interests that it affected people across the entire political spectrum.

Criticism of these foreign - often significantly more stable, free, and prosperous - nations is nonfalsifiable orthodoxy. They are always simultaneously engaged in crushing authoritarianism and riddled with legions of angry insurgents. It somehow manifests all the worst aspects of capitalism because its state orthodoxy is socialist.

Until you actually fucking go there and talk to people and realize this isn’t a nation of Machiavellian lies and Potemkin villages. It’s just a place where a larger number of people have found a better way to live, absent an American telling them how to do it.

Talk to people that live within the system is all I can tell you.

You mean the relatives we were visiting?

China isn’t perfect either.

I’ll never understand the absolute terror Americans have for “imperfect China”

none of this discussion is about nuclear power or thorium and just about people wanting to feel morally correct about something and snarling back and forth at each other

I’m posed to snarl because I’ve seen this so many times before, as a justification to invade and destroy advanced industrial states that don’t bend the knee to the US State Department.

The reason you get thorium reactors out of China and Mars landers out of India comes down to two words “Peace Dividend”.

Our species is so cooked.

There’s a brighter future on the horizon. But you don’t get there by taking Marco Rubio at face value.

The UN inspection committee could not find evidence to support your claims.

Why are you asserting the existence of a genocide in Xinjiang while endorsing the engineered famine across the border in Afghanistan?

You want Iraq 2.0?

After Yemen, Syria, and Libya I think we’re closer to Iraq 6.0