halfpipe

well, whatever absolute ghoul is going to be parachuted in as her running mate, they can't be worse than genocide joe

the lathe turns

Well, violence was already normalized in every other sphere of American life, I guess it was only a matter of time. Look at the Trump shooter, by American standards, the only weird thing about him is that he went after someone important instead of just shooting up his local school or walmart.

It's not like anyone is actually voting for him. No one is Biden or bust. People are just voting against Trump, same as last time. Nothing is actually gained by keeping the 81 year dementia patient on the ballot.

why are they trying to sell branded merchandise? He's the establishment candidate, he's not leading a fucking movement.

Yeah, people did start to figure this out two years ago, once Russia pulled back and settled in for a long war. NATO governments spent billions more to procure shells and artillery pieces, and on incentives to get the arms industry to build more factory lines and supply lines.

But decades of neoliberalism have gutted the states ability to do anything itself, or to compel a corporation to do anything, even something as simple as build an artillery shell that was designed in the 1870s. The end result is that the incentive money was used to streamline and automate the existing, privately owned, factories, allowing them to fire workers and run more cheaply , but not to actually expand production. And with billions more dollars chasing the same supply of shells, the cost of an artillery shell has now skyrocketed to ~$9,000 a shell.

I still think that Trump fatigue and the repeal of Roe give him enough of a floor that there's no chance of a complete electoral teeth kicking, but if I still gave a shit about the Democrats I'd be worried.

Yeah, turns out all of this high tech satellite guided shit can be easily defeated by electronic warfare if its used against an enemy that has the time and resources to adapt to it. This is the first time anyone had a chance to figure that out though, because the US has only ever used it against unarmed farmers and goat herders.

Well, at least it's not as bad as the F-35, the multi trillion dollar jet that fails to both electronic warfare and rain.

If anyone is wondering why the POW/MIA flag is a thing in U.S. politics, you should really read up on it because its a fascinating example of boomer brainworms.

After the Vietnamese got good at shooting down U.S. aircraft, the U.S. tried to massage casualty figures by reporting the dead aircrews as missing. Except their families took the Pentagon at its word and believed they were truly prisoners, and began agitating to get a political deal to bring them home. As the war dragged on into the 70s the Pentagon started using the families as propaganda for a lost war, acting like they needed to prolong the war to save the thousands of imprisoned airmen. Subsequently, grifters started selling all kinds of POW merchandise to draw attention to the thousands of U.S. soldiers that Nixon claimed were still imprisoned in Vietnam.

Then the war ended, and the five hundred or so guys that really were prisoners came home, and you'd think the gravy train would end there as the truth came out, but no, Americans believed it was all a hoax. The government was covering something up, and there must really be more than a thousand US soldiers still held in Vietnam. More POW merchandise was sold than ever before, there were blockbuster movies about going back to Vietnam to free the prisoners, there were flyovers for the POWs at football stadiums. Ronald Reagan himself believed it and made threats to resume bombing if the soldiers weren't returned. Americans started traveling to Vietnam to buy information about the POWs and try to bribe people to secure their release, and a lot of Vietnamese people got free money selling bogus rumors and scraps of old US uniforms. This shit continued well into the 90s, with every president giving a big speech for the POW families every year, and the US being unable to normalize relations with Vietnam until almost the 2000s because of it.

pre-covid, It used to be a fairly chill place for people who had reached the "acceptance" stage of grief to look at graphs of ice sheet coverage and talk about maybe learning to grow potatoes.

I hadn't checked it in years, but it looks like the depressed climate scientists have been replaced by full blown survivalists and scared normies who think that collapse will be something fast, like a disaster movie, instead of the ongoing grind of people watching prices going up as wages stay the same, needing to hang on to clothing longer, no longer being able to see a doctor, or knowing their children will probably be unable to buy homes and start their own families.

25k NGO's for 3.7 million people is closer to 1 NGO for every 150 people.

How much of the Georgian economy is just NGO money at this point?

We were saying 6 months ago that there would be a crackdown, simply because the US can't support a genocidal colonial project if the victims can livestream their suffering to the world.

But what's really weird here, and I think no one could have predicted, is the mass suppression and arrest of Ivy League student protestors. They're protesting peacefully, which they've been told is the only moral and acceptable way. They're not making any material demands, and they're not tied into a workers movement that could strike and threaten capital. Anyone with knowledge of previous college protests and the academic year could have told them that this is harmless, and that it would fizzle out as summer started, but instead they've violently cracked down in a way that's causing the protests to spread, while also radicalizing and blackballing the children of privilege , the people that are supposed to carry on the ideological future of liberalism and sign up to be the next generation of the imperial bureaucracy and the NGOs.

It's going to try, but it's not 1992 anymore, there are other centers of power and financing in the world.