Cuban expats are a popular target for human trafficking. Come down to Houston or Miami and you’ll find Cuban migrants all over the strip club scene.

To paraphrase a famous draft dodger

They’re not war heroes. They were a war heroes because they was killed. I like people who weren’t killed.

Have you seen the housing costs in Canada recently?

Damn. The security (theater) obsessed Far-Right Labour government wouldn’t be kicking the barn door open to a foreign government’s mass surveillance company for any kind of insidious reason, you think?

That’s very cool.

But… you know. There’s another place where you can get anime for free.

nyaa.si

Problem with gritty post-apocalyptic grim-dark games is that not enough people have Mar-a-Lago face and stage lighting.

How do you plan on getting back, though?

Powerful

The irony of this image is that, on the one hand, you absolutely have the Blue Collar and the White Collar snearing it out at one another over who suffered more and earned the most.

On the other hand, you’ve got the Blue Collar guy doing 12-hour shifts to guarantee Mr. White Collar gets cheap energy and fancy techno-widgets and fresh food. Meanwhile, you’ve got the White Collar guy doing 12-hour shifts to make sure Mr. Blue Collar pays the highest price for gasoline and can’t afford a cell phone plan and shops at Dented Canned Goods Store.

Like, you want to talk about class solidarity. But White Collar Guy gets paid extra precisely because he makes Blue Collar Guy’s life worse. Then he pays Tophat Guy a hefty vig for the privilege.

Meanwhile, Blue Collar Guy is so sheep-dipped in the cultural propaganda that he thinks its some kind of privilege to pay a four-figure monthly truck note to commute to his flop house on a $40k salary. The only reason he wants that $50/hr job is to stack a bunch of mortgage debt on top of the car debt and the credit card debt. At no point does he stop and ask whether these consumerist babbles are benefiting him in a material way.

And neither of them seem to realize working harder is making their lives worse.

The US war machine is expending itself like a senior citizen at a strip club.

It’s awful to witness and truly miserable for everyone involved. But give Americans a week and they’ll stumble back in clutching another fist full of Social Security cash to do it again.

You want to call these goons out as bad at strategy or wasteful of precious natural resources. But neither the US nor Russia seem to have a shortage of blood or treasure they’re willing to throw away for another cheap thrill. This is it. The twilight of empire. What happens if they don’t finish all over Central Europe and the Middle East, like they’ve been lusting after for 40 years?

You think Trump or Putin care what happens to their kids? Their grandkids? Nevermind all the young people their explosions of pent up unrealized empire ruin in the process.

This is what all those decades of Cold Warring was meant for. The grim harvest we’ve been growing since Truman dropped the bomb on Hiroshima and kicked off 70 years of intercontinental hate.

As long as companies primary purpose is to make value for the shareholders, this will continue.

I’d say its one step worse than that. If you just wanted to return value to shareholders, the 2010s Facebook model of selling a few ads in between pictures of people’s pets and graduation photos would work just fine. They could have churned this for decades unimpeded. And the less they fucked with the model, the more money they’d have made long term.

It isn’t merely shareholder value that these companies crave, but perpetual double-digit growth in valuation. And, to that end, they’re gutting the golden goose for a sudden spike in quarterly profits.

It isn’t enough for Zuckerberg’s company be valued at $100B. They needed to go for that fourth comma. So they started coming up with crazy - apparently impossible - ideas to reinvent themselves into… the Metaverse, where your whole OS is in VR! Diem (formerly Libra), the Killer Stablecoin! Whateverthefuck AI thing they’re doing, to make human labor irrelevant!

Because they’ve bought into a notion of perpetual high speed growth through financialization. They cannot conceive of any kind of economic boundary or closed system. Like a deadly virus that spreads too quickly, they cannot see the edges of their population space or curb their basic impulse to consume.

There seems to always be more customers to replace the ones they lose.

So much of the drive towards AI is an insane quest to create a financial market without human customers. Just a big machine that sucks in investment capital and reports back a higher earnings figure.

It’s increasingly divorced from any kind of material condition. And increasingly predicated on unfettered access to an unlimited pool of natural resources backed by an unchallenged Petrodollar.

Could just stop letting them win altogether

I don’t think this is a question of “letting them win”. Ds and Rs are the two wings of Capital. And like any good capitalist enterprise, the underlings must be made to fight it out to exhaustion in order for the master to maintain control.

If Dems ever actually obtained an FDR-style enduring majority, the capital class would have to bifricate the party in order to keep any populist movements held in check one against the other.

I got sick of explaining this and just left the country

Given what’s been going down in damned near every major city in the country with ICE, I can hardly blame you. America’s going to be drowning in blood before too long if shit keeps up the way it has been going. We’re already treating civilians in Minneapolis like they’re Turks or Egyptians. How long until we start treating them like Iraqis or Afghanis… or Iranians or Gazans?

The United States is absolutely part of NATO.

And Israel functions as a forward operating base, from which European military powers can control the Suez and the Eastern Mediterranean. It’s fundamental to the Western allied control of North Africa and the Middle East, even before you get into its function as a money laundering outfit and testing bed for military technology and policing strategy.

European leadership has a closer relationship with Israeli military than Turkish military, as a point of comparison.

“The last battle humans fight on all of Earth will be at a big hill called Tel Megiddo just west of Afula” is one hell of a bold claim, though.

I mean, I see you guys posting from here. And I’ll admit, after my experience with Hexbear, I’d rather be in the shitlib instance heckling my leftism with impunity than in the leftist instance getting yelled at / banned by the admins for defending DSA or whatever.

No terror attacks on USA

You just have to pretend Israel is part of the United States

Ceramics mostly

They won’t push past the line of “normalcy”

It might not be an issue if the sitting party refuses to release the reins of power.

So much of the current political system works because the parties are joined at the hip. But as Trump leads the federal government into increasingly fascist forms, the leadership demonstrates itself significantly less willing to just go-along get-along with the historic Reagan Era neoliberal order.

Why relinquish your Congressional majority if Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries will let you keep it? Why abide by the legislative branch at all if you’ve got Palantir running the Treasury and Google/Microsoft running the Pentagon?

Even in bright blue states like Minnesota, the response to outright fascist takeover at the highest levels of government is to raise your fist in defiance and then… give up on your reelection campaign for governor.

UK Labour in a nutshell