Bumbling trigger happy halfwit goons are a feature, not a bug. The police, as an organization, exist to guard private property not human life. They are supposed to be a source of social terror and stochastic violence. They are supposed to horrify people they patrol, not help them.

A lot of people I know have a strict “Never call the police” personal policy for reasons adjacent to this.

The Super Adventure Club episode exploded into my brain halfway through One Battle After Another when they drop “The Christmas Adventurers Club” on me like a nuclear warhead.

The Adam Friedland Show hitting new levels of Super Sayan off this shit.

Nevermind TrueAnon

Love to give a President the Nobel Prize inside the first six weeks on the job.

Remember how well that worked out for Obama?

The largely clandestine effort, profiled in a New York Times report and a forthcoming book by Newsweek’s Daniel Klaidman, highlights a remarkable transformation for a man who campaigned four years ago as an anti-war Senator, former law professor and defender of Constitutional due process. He pushed for an end to the use of torture on terror suspects, the closure of the Guantanamo Bay military prison, and for trying detainees in federal courts. For those efforts he won the Nobel Peace Prize.

Yet over the past three and a half years, Obama has sat quietly “at the helm of a top secret ‘nominations’ process to designate terrorists for kill or capture, of which the capture part has become largely theoretical,” according to the Times. He personally vetted names on a “kill list” of targets, authorizing dozens of drone strikes even in cases with only vague and inconclusive evidence about who’s really on the ground, according to the report. Neither the evidence against the suspects nor the suspects’ identities is available for public scrutiny.

So he’s going to win the Nobel?

Okay, but they’re going to depose him, so that’ll balance the scales.

Hell, Obama let the Bush crime family walk back in '09. Clinton turned a blind eye to Reagan/Bush. Carter refused to prosecute Nixon.

Etc, etc.

If after all of that they aren’t calling for a civil war

I’m trying to imagine how turning the current situation into a shooting war improves things.

Iraq War Veteran

Ironic, given how we treated upstart labor movements during the occupation.

Imagine a T.Rex but its a giant parrot with teeth instead.

US power stems directly from its dollar position.

Soft power stems from its ability to cut individual nation-states off from global trade. But if you take a hard look at, say, North Korea or Cuba or Venezuela or Iran, you’ll notice that it’s not simply access to legal international markets that causes their poverty. These countries are physically encircled by US military. Cuba, in particular, is ringed in by US warships with an entrenched beach head at Guantanamo Bay.

And it goes without saying that these countries are constantly under threat of espionage, plagued by disinformation, and periodically sabotaged by US special forces.

The dollar position is a consequence of these interventions, dating back to the Cold War Era.

The longer this goes on, the more systems decouple from the USA and correspondingly the less power and influence they have.

It’s been going on since Truman. Arguably back to McKinley. The US has been a fountain of militant white nationalism for centuries.

Meanwhile, European corporate media seems vastly more paranoid and fearful of infiltration by Eastern adversaries. Muslims coming up through Turkiye or crossing north of the Mediterranean. Russians driving tanks all the way from Moscow to Berlin. Chinese businessmen stealing European jobs, Orientalizing markets, and corrupting the fragile innocent young minds of the liberal intelligentsia.

I just don’t see decoupling happening (in my lifetime). Trump will lose his grip on power, US neoliberals will retake the federal government, and we’ll have another wave of “normalization” that settles anxious Europeans just long enough for Palantir and News Corp and JP Morgan and Microsoft to secure their hooks a bit deeper.

Question is what they’re going to do about it, though.

The EU is just about as integrated with the US economy as any two continents can be. Nevermind the US military presence.

Is that going to change? Or will Europeans just feel grumpy into the foreseeable future?

I mean, there’s RedNote, which has a much larger audience and absolutely is controlled by the Chinese government.

The problem with these smaller services is that there’s very little content, relatively speaking. Outsiders want to know about the genocide but they don’t want it to be their exclusive fixation.

California lawmakers introduce a bill

Nobel Peace Laureate

Wish that brand wasn’t covered in the slime of the last recipient.

Belling the Cat

reignite concerns

Either you found another journal of record ten years ago or you kept eating that slop until yesterday. Idk what reignited concerns are supposed to get us. Be concerned. Don’t be concerned. He’s still going to gut the paper and fill it in with gooey reactionary fluff.

The two options always seem to be:

• Option 1: Do the thing that expands the hyper-surveillance police state.

• Option 2: Do nothing and wait for the problem to get worse, until you’re compelling to accept Option 1.