That second one doesn’t make sense unless Leia owned a ton of slaves

The FBI is not on Trump’s side.

The director of the FBI is absolutely on Trump’s side. And anyone downstream of him who isn’t is getting weeded out.

without showing a warrant

I’m so tired of the legalist caveat, implying a Trump judge rubber stamping warrants for these gestapo shits would have made kidnapping and torturing a woman and her infant child acceptable.

That’s what Trump wants.

It’s win-win. Either Dems don’t sign a blank check, and Trump uses this as an excuse to hand more power to the DHS. Or Dems do sign a blank check, and Trump uses it to fund an FBI dedicated to further dismantling the democratic state.

President Xi, I am sending you Trump’s golf schedule by way of TikTok coded message.

Please, President Pooh-Bear, you’re our only hope.

Mendacity.

He knew. He didn’t care. He just put out his hand and dared the Senate not to give him a blank check.

And he’s going to get that check, because Democrats more are terrified of looking obstructionist than of looking like they can govern.

authoritarianism

I see the term kicked around. But it tends to be interpreted as “authority I disagree with” which can mean just about anything depending on the listener.

Conservatives have gleefully used the term in their crusade to dissolve consumer protections, to wage war on civil groups, and to persecute minorities under the banner of “anti-DEI”.

if we only cared about what succeeds we’d all be deliriously happy with capitalism

Capitalist growth drive contains the seeds of its own destruction. We’re seeing that play out with Trump’s tariffs, Boeing’s bankruptcies, and the failure of a slew of liberal institutions throughout the NATO block.

But its naive to conclude the failure of capitalism - or “authoritarianism” generally speaking - is just bureaucracy writ large. At some point, you need a new orthodoxy to organize around. It can’t just be vibes based individualism that we’re all gambling on spontaneously congeling around a better system of interaction.

Legally the business cannot say anything whatsoever about job performance or any reason behind hiring in terms of employment verification

Saying “no eligible for rehire” is enough to poison your reference.

anarchism is a bit different than breaking things…

If you go back to the Spanish Civil War or the French Revolution, or you look to modern anarchist movements in capitalist states in the Americas and the Pacific Rim?

Anarchist resistance efforts are most successful at spontaneous work stoppages and radical efforts at sabotage. But they’re awful at coordinating across wide areas, resisting infiltration, or leveraging economies of scale to expand industrial operations.

Anarchists aren’t allows just breaking things. I regularly work with a mix of groups in my local Food Not Bombs chapter. But raising funds, organizing a reliable workforce, and expanding the enterprise is extraordinarily difficult when its just spontaneous organization.

Seems like the system is working exactly as intended.

• Guy who wants everything labeled and documented, because it will be easier to do sweeping economic reforms later

VS

• Guy who is into good vibes and not rocking the boat, but if you harsh his mellow he’ll start breaking anything that looks expensive

Who would win?

can you not get xenophobic and racist about it?

They can’t, no.

This is the root of the problem. Liberals are just as xenophobic and anti-Islam as their conservative peers. They are ultimately fine with Trump’s policies and more than willing to go along with them, when the policies target brown people.

That’s why you’ve got Gavin Newsom, Kathy Hochul, and even Gretchen Whitmer opening their state bureaucracies up to Trump’s DHS gestapo.

The “you stupid Arabs deserve what you get” rhetoric is justification for policy Democrats wanted, but were too squeemish to impose directly.

Republicans are the sword and Democrats are the shield in this Holy War on non-Christians.

Lesser of Two Holocausts

it’s all a magical story about a dude who didn’t exist at all probably

No shortage of self-proclaimed messiahs and apocalyptic prophets running around Jerusalem 2,000 years ago. Less a question of whether Jesus existed than which one you’re talking about.

American Christian resists the message but embraces the magic.

That’s hardly an American thing. All the Abrahamic religions and the pagan ones, too, were obsessed with the magical realism of their personal mythologies.

Neither were people blind, deaf, and dumb to the social message of the gospels. But people do lose sight of them as you become less like a 1st century apostle and more like a 1st century Pharasise.

There’s a link in the second paragraph to the technical details

I’m reminded of this mindset from the crypto scam surge.

Points at technical documents

“Well, it says it’s secure so quit arguing that it’s not secure”

Typically followed by

“If someone traced you/robbed you, then you were just doing it wrong”

Like, we’ve got high level white house officials feeding national security secrets to the Israelis because they just blindly implemented a “secure” Signal extension. So I guess I shouldn’t be surprised people don’t look past the cover.

But come on. “You can just buy some tokens and then you’re secure” is painfully naive.

The magic of modern social media is that you can ensconce yourself in a made-up AM Talk Radio / AI-generated reality. CJ’s experiencing a bit of propaganda lag between experiencing the consequences of the policy and being told who to blame as the scapegoat. But that’s just due to us living in an in-between time with no elections on the immediate horizon.

Talk to CJ in the run up to the midterms and ask her why her husband is laid off and her kids credit scores are shit. I’m sure she’ll be able to explain in great detail how Illegal Gay ISIS Woke Feminazis are to blame.

I mean, we’re getting for it regardless of who we voted for. That’s the magic of singular senior executive in a three-branch government where the executive branch has functional dictatorship of the bureaucracy.

If Harris had won (perhaps by not pissing off big chunks of the Midwestern Arab population by repeatedly endorsing the genocide of their families) then she’d have been spared the indignity of getting what she asked for. But the wind was with the Republicans, so now we all get to hang out in the crumbling dystopian hell-hole together.

‘It’s digital colonialism’: how Facebook’s free internet service has failed its users

Free Basics, built for developing markets, focuses on ‘western corporate content’ and violates net neutrality principles, researchers say

…

“Facebook is not introducing people to open internet where you can learn, create and build things,” said Ellery Biddle, advocacy director of Global Voices. “It’s building this little web that turns the user into a mostly passive consumer of mostly western corporate content. That’s digital colonialism.”

To deliver the service, which is now active in 65 countries, Facebook partners with local mobile operators. Mobile operators agree to “zero-rate” the data consumed by the app, making it free, while Facebook does the technical heavy lifting to ensure that they can do this as cheaply as possible. Each version is localized, offering a slightly different set of up to 150 sites and services. But many of the services with the most prominent placement – on the app’s homepage - are created by private US companies, regardless of the market. These include AccuWeather, Johnson & Johnson-owned BabyCenter, BBC News, ESPN and the search engine Bing. There are no other social networking sites apart from Facebook and no email provider.

Incidentally, “Free Basics” and its derivatives are some of the biggest drivers of new Facebook user activity. The walled garden of internet access forces people to choose between open internet rates they are too poor to afford and being guinea pigs in Mark Zuckerberg’s AI maze of misinformation and saturation advertisement. Zuck can go to investors and insist “Our growth in these emerging markets is enormous!” and then go to the national governments of these poor countries and say “If you don’t legislate favorably, we’re going to flood your populations’ media feeds with advertisements by the political opposition.”

Can’t stop. Won’t stop.

Mitochondria are the powerhouses of the cell.

You’re thinking of The Moops.