the end of the fall will be imminent
We’ve got so much farther left to go. Go check out how Argentina is handling its Trump-style President, and even they’ve got a ways to go. Check out the Philippines under Duterte and Marcos. They’re getting closer, but still plunging.
Now Haiti? Libya? Ukraine? Sudan? That’s your rock bottom.
Getting all my aerospace technology on Temu.
I’m not saying that the persecution against Falung Gong is fake, actually I believe is true, violence against minorities is another Wednesday for the CCP
The Falun Gong was originally an ally of the CCP as recently as 1993. They had a falling out when some of their chief leadership got caught in a string of financial scandals and abuse allegations. Attempts by the state to begin prosecuting church leaders triggered an outcry from the membership, which prompted more arrests and more efforts hide the organizations money, and finally a wholesale exodus from the country by its most devoted members.
Falun Gong leadership arrived in the US and immediately began churning out anti-China spin, with the help of the Epoch Times - an originally Chinese-only paper primarily distributed in Chinese ex-pat communities by church refugees. If you get into the history of the Epoch Times, you should very quickly discover that it is not a reliable source of information.
Which isn’t to say China’s been great wrt religious freedom or free association. But the modern incarnation of Falun Gong has more in common with Scientology than, say, Mormonism or Baháʼí. You’re going to fall down some really QAnon-themed rabbit holes if you take everything their community is saying at face value.
These projects tend to bring a bunch of economic development along with it. Would be like Floridians rejecting Cape Canaveral or Texans trying to shut down SpaceX. Locals might not be thrilled, but developers and business leaders are ready for the rest of you to take the risk.
If you want to get a bit more cynical, you could very easily describe the deaths of Fred Hampton and the Freedom Summer murders as presidential assassinations. If you want to take the extra step down the rabbit hole, there’s very real reason to suspect MLK was assassinated by the FBI.
bombing countries they’re not at war with
Fun fact. We haven’t officially declared war since 1941.
Korea, Vietnam, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Libya, and now Ukraine? All NATO led military interventions or AUMF policing actions. No articles of war required.
trafficking drugs to enrich the war machine
One of the craziest “America just be like that” stories I’ve ever heard was the time Bush Sr set up a drug buy right outside the White House, by having the DEA extort a teenager picked up for selling crack on the opposite side of town to show up on Pennsylvania Avenue the night of a State of the Union Address and do a straw sale to another agent, just so he could talk about it on national TV an hour later like it happened organically.
Bush dangling a bag of crack on national TV and saying in his Father-Knows-Best voice that we need to go full-on Phoenix Program across every major American city, because of his little kabuki crack sale, is one of those “burned into my conscience” factoids that really changed how I saw our country operating.
Without getting rid of the framework
The framework has a lot of fat on it. Tens of thousands of bureaucrats and lobbyists and party cronies exist to facilitate the corporate-financed bipartisan system. To change the framework, you’ve got to fight with all the folks who profit off their positions in that framework.
The parties have too much power over the pick because what are the voters going to do
Parties have enormous amounts of money and manpower at their disposal. The money comes from business interests exchanging cash for political favors (a thing which SCOTUS now recognizes as perfectly legal). The labor comes from armies of paid workers, complemented by even larger seasonally sourced pools of local volunteers, who have been whipped up into a panic by mass media.
That’s what gives party leadership the influence it commands. There are huge carrots for folks who play ball with the sitting administration and huge sticks waved over the heads of party-splitters and indie candidates.
we would LITERALLY not have to deal with Trump if Newsmax, OANN, Fox, and their like weren’t allowed to just lie
Okay, but while we’re rounding them up for the gulags, can we sweep through and pick out all the fuckwits at NYT, WaPo, WSJ, and The Economist that were insisting Joe Biden was our Last Best Hope To Save Democracy and Actually Whip Smart And Totally Ready To Lead? Hell, even NPR gets in on this shit, and its supposed to be the nice polite republican media rather than the frothing bomb-everyone-that-criticizes-Israel news outlet.
The reason Trump exists in the form that he does, with the support that he does is 110% at the feet of the fucking propaganda that gives him cover.
Trump is the direct result of Republican rhetoric outrunning its own policy. For the last 40 years, we’ve been told that immigration is the root of every problem in the country - from bloated budgets to housing crises to drug use to violent crime to COVID. And as things keep getting worse, and immigration keeps getting blamed, the only conclusion Americans are allowed to make is that they’re not hard enough on migrants.
The celebrity candidacy of Trump was made possible by a news media fixated on the opulence of rich white guys, a conservative leadership that saw enormous profits in using migrant laborers to supplant labor unions, and an aging American public with a Pavlovian hatred of brown people. (And also, Hilary Clinton backing him in the GOP primary because she thought he’d be easy to beat).
But the real root of the problem is our national fixation on scapegoating. If Trump hadn’t won in 2016, it could just as easily have been Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio, both of whom are perfectly happy with our home grown brand of fascist tendency. They’re riding the same Hate Wave as Trump, he just did it better.
Europe has an enormous surveillance state, increasingly modeled (and managed) by Israeli surveillance systems used in Palestine.
Germany, France, the UK, and Spain already have some of the most advanced facial recognition imagine in the world deployed in their surveillance networks.
And the EU just expanded their legal use
Maybe you’re safer from an American tech company. But not from the local police.
The worst that my country wants to do with my data is attempt to sell me shit I don’t want.
Facial recognition technology and the growing power of artificial intelligence
In some other countries, drawing parallels with certain emperors and certain A.A.Milne characters could cost me my freedom and possibly my life.
Of course. Always in other countries. Never in mine.
Calling back to the We Surround Them attempted grassroots movement by Glenn Beck that flopped face first into the mud after the 2009 Presidential election.
The DNC can rewrite the rules before the convention and nominate anyone they want.
The DNC is an organization stacked with Joe Biden loyalists. And that’s before discussing the fucked vibes of an 11th hour rules rewrite on the eve of what was supposed to be a lay-up nomination. Weeks of people arguing over who gets handed the Prez nod without a single primary vote cast in their name would be an absolute disaster.
The thing that makes folks pull their hair out is that we’ve known Biden has been sundowning for years. But in the run up to the 2024 primaries, we got this endless bullshit gaslighting of “Actually I think he’s at the top of his game, never better!” articles coming out of the Dem establishment and Dem-friendly media.
So he ran virtually uncontested. And then he spent three months doing photo-ops with Dark Brandon laser eyes, trying to get people pumped up for November. And then he explicitly demanded a debate with Trump before the conventions were even held. And then this shit happened.
Now there’s no normal democratic mechanism to pick a replacement candidate. So we’re either stuck with Biden or we get some smoke-filled room full of superdelegates and mega-donors to make the decision. And that’s what will fuck up the Dems’ chances in November. You’re talking about putting a guy on the ballot who never even went through the primary. Someone whose sole qualification was Biggest Insider Suck-Up. Someone who will have to square off against a legitimately popular candidate in a year when “Democracy is on the line!” is a thing the Democrats are asserting.
It’s actually a great strategy.
Its a fucked strategy, because the easiest line of attack on this new person is “Who the fuck is this asshole and why didn’t they compete in a primary back in January?”
I’m sure the DNC and the party elders will never attempt something so obviously effective since they are terrible at politics
Holding a coronation rather than a primary was the DNC’s big mistake. Now its too late. There are no savvy brilliant moves left to play. You’re stuck with this lame duck through November.
I’m convinced Americans have the same level of propagandist ignorance as North Koreans.
Given the budgets they have to work with, I imagine Americans have it much worse off. An hour on Facebook deluges you with more advertisement than any given NKer probably sees in a weak.
Nonsense. The only problem my country has is the problem created by the evil foreigners who threaten my liberty and security from the other side of the border. We need to be protected from those evil outsiders. Therefore, I will endorse and participate in an even more invasive degree of surveillance and a more draconian degree of policing.
That’s the only way to keep the foreign bodies from infecting me and taking over. And the idea of the foreigners having any amount of power over me is significantly more frightening than the prospect of a domestic administration having unlimited authority to protect me.
Do you realize we are allowed to discuss and criticize things around the world whether or not America is guilty of something similar right?
It becomes tiresome to read “Foreign Country is doing the EVIL THING! Rally around the burn pit and lets talk about how intrinsically bad their are!” when they learned this shit by watching every other western country do it first. Just feels like another edition of American Exceptionalism and hysterical far-right xenophobia.
The CCP are actively engaging in genocide
It always gets me to see how Americans treated Afghanistan for 23 years, only to find religion when they see China doing the same Radical Islamic Extremism crack downs the Ted Cruz masterbates to in the middle of the night.
Literally right on the other side of the border! Practically the same dudes. And we outright applauded China for helping us with the genocide under Bush, when we were applauding Russia for the same shit in Chechnya no less.
But now we’re out of there, and in between kicking off massive famines and looting their Treasury, we’ve decided to care about Uyghurs now.
But it is still night and day in terms of horror.
More black and white.
It’s not called The China Man’s Burden, ffs. Who do they even think they are?
Anyway, back to explaining to Houthis why we don’t have health care by blowing up another elementary school in Yemen.
At some point, its just tiring to see folks slam their fists in their palms and declare whole-heartedly “I will NEVER visit China for ANY REASON!” when half our country is broke as shit and our planes occasionally just have the doors fall off mid-flight.
As if you were booking a vacation to Macau ten minutes ago, but now you’ve suddenly changed your mind. Come the fuck on, dude.
Cape Canaveral is directly east of Orlando, with a bunch of vacation resort spots hugging the shore. The Florida coastline isn’t exactly lightly developed.