Oh, you’re a socialist?

I’m a historian.

If all you care about is winning, your best odds are siding with the American imperialists. Liberals rule the world, one way or another, and have for centuries.

If you want an enduring experiment in left politics, you’d be safer with Lenin, Mao, Kim, Castro, Chavez, or Mandela.

But anarchism is far more radical of a political theory. It isn’t stable. It hasn’t produced a long track record of success. It doesn’t have a formula you can apply with any degree of confidence.

Maybe it can work. Maybe we’re just not forward thinking enough. But we’re not there yet.

Trying to argue for anarchism based on Spain in '36 is like pointing to the Branch Davidians in Waco as proof of the success of theocracy.

Nothing I’ve seen about this party suggests it’s more than a Pro-EU rebrand.

Socially conservative, business focused, steeped in white nationalism. But they hate Moscow more than Berlin.

Liberalism is collapsing into fascism right now. It always has, and it always will. It is inevitable.

No shortage of historical touchstones to support this theory.

If we want to resist the rise of fascism, it would be good to learn from an example which was more successful at doing so than every other nation in mainland Europe, no?

Tito’s Yugoslavia?

Data isn’t very valuable if you can’t transmit it.

At some point you need to trust someone

Anarchism can work for three years in the urban centers of a small backwards European economy, before collapsing into a dictatorship that drags on for the next 40 years.

Check and Mate, liberals.

He had twelve years to loot the country while running it into the ground.

What will be the consequences for his crimes?

In Communist China, this women would have been afforded a pension, full health benefits, and housing five years earlier.

Which, I have heard, is also horrible

Hehe. Of course not.

Strap in, boys. It’s going to be a bumpy ride.

acts like an asshole

gets banned

“I’m a serious person!”

She did. Took them for all they were worth

For clarity, how exactly would you define “retail” American politics?

Local campaigning for individual elected offices. The process of raising money, building up staff, getting yourself on the ballot, building name recognition, and GOTV.

I think of a physical location of a business in which a consumer goes to buy a physical product.

Campaigns work similarly. You need offices to coordinate staff. You need to balance budgets. And you need to sell the product by getting voters to show up at election stations.

CIA handles foreign shit. FBI handles domestic shit.

The DHS makes this distinction moot. We’ve been crossing the streams publicly since it was officially instantiated via Bush through the creation of the OHS and then the HSA Act of 2002. The two agencies have been operating hand-in-glove behind the scenes since the CIA’s precursor - the OSS - was incorporated during WW2. Even then, much of the modern CIA is merely an extension of the functions of the FBI on an international scale. They employ all the same strategies, employ the same leadership structure, and serve the same socio-economic purpose.

John Brennan and Robert Mueller / James Comey even filled the same political role under Obama. They promoted reactionary political views from within the liberal government, distributed misinformation to undermine peaceful coexistence with historic geopolitical adversaries, and continued the Bush Era practice of illegal arrests, extraditions, torture, and assassination while draping themselves in liberal language to justify it.

Brennan and Comey both publicly advanced accusations against the Obama administration that gave Donald Trump a path to the presidency.

Not corruption, per say. This is a fatal flaw of any democratic institution. You need to be seen doing your job or people will assume it isn’t getting done. So more and more of the job of an executive level official is marketing yourself.

Everyone who isn’t running around cutting their own promos is setting themselves up for defeat against someone who does.

A kernel of truth to this, if you recognize that both Republican and Democrats have wanted the Iranian government overthrown and replaced with American loyalists for nearly fifty years.

The Obama/Biden strategy was to let the State Department polarize the rest of the region against Iran and squeeze them until they capitulated. The Bush/Trump strategy has been to outright assassinate Iranian officials, seize Iranian assets abroad, and plot an invasion of the sovereign territory.

We have a bipartisan consensus on wiping the IRGC and the Muslim-led anti-American government off the map. The question was never of policy, only of strategy.

Will be curious to see where the case is tried. If the warehouse is deeply unpopular in the local community, they may file for a change of venue.

Because it is such a high profile case, every level of the bureaucracy wants a bite at the apple. Everyone wants to get in front of a camera and say “We’re doing something about it!” to a gaggle of social media influencers and party apparatchiks with press badges.

Edit: I can’t believe a warehouse that big didn’t seem to have sprinkler systems.

You want fireproofing? In this economy? How am I supposed to return 30% YoY profits to my investors?!

how do we break that?

I don’t think this is something you can (or should be expected to) break. I think part of any successful project is encouraged adoption. Marketing - in a benign form - is about informing people of the project’s utility and the mechanism for obtaining it. There are numerous examples of beneficial marketing campaigns - the annual flu shot campaign, union drives, public notifications for new amenities and works. We periodically have billboards across the city notifying residents of performances at Miller Outdoor Theater - a free public theater that puts on shows every couple of weeks.

I think there’s a problem with deceptive marketing. And you can address that will quality journalism, civil litigation (particularly class action lawsuits), and government regulation.

That kind of sounds like our current systems favor investment into advertisement over substance

There’s a huge yield in networking effect thanks to the size of corporate enterprises and the reach of their distribution.

I might argue a wide-scale anti-trust campaign to break up entrenched monopolies would force private businesses to return to quality of product over quantity of marketing. But Kickstarter reveals this isn’t a problem unique to bigger business ventures.

I might try regulating Kickstarter such that the platform itself faces penalties for excessive marketing of products - particularly ones that never release in full.

I might also consider public financing for local clubs and independent non-profit business ventures. Because a lot of this hype happens in a kind-of social media vacuum. People get suckered into MLM scams and other duplicitous ventures because they’re bored, alienated, and idle. Set up more public events and public areas for gathering and entertainment. Fewer people will be so terminally online that they are waiting around to get baited.

John Brennan served as Obama’s CIA Director for four years. During that time - I’ve been told - foreign governments infiltrated our media and party establishment and legislature, corrupted our democratic process, and handed a known agent of a foreign government the position of Chief Executive.

This known agent was a co-conspirator of another well-known blackmailer and professional pedophile, serving as an agent of a foreign intelligence service within the United States for over four decades.

The CIA response to this infiltration was to… do nothing.

Meanwhile, agents within the CIA have manufactured consent for wars against Iran, Venezuela, Cuba, and North Korea for as long as our current president has been a known fence for the Russian mob. They have collaborated with the known blackmailer/pedophile for just as long. And - upon taking office - they faithfully continued to fulfill their duty as agents of a corrupt and despotic president, including through illegal arrests, extraditions, torture, arms sales, drug trafficking, and sabotage.

Why the fuck does the CIA still exist again?