The Dead Milkmen would undoubtedly approve.
WatDabney
joined 11 months ago
No surprise there.
After Knesset members actually got up and angrily defended the supposed right to rape Palestinians and the finance minister lamented the fact that the rest of the world would condemn arranging for the death by starvation of 2 million Palestinians, there's pretty much no low left that's too low for the Israeli government.
I wonder how the plutocrats and the christofascists will try to carry out their plan of destroying US democracy and imposing autocracy after the stinky old weirdo they've pinned all their hopes on has a screeching public meltdown.
Altruistic? ALTRUISTIC?!
Just who in the fuck does he think he is?!
The only altruists on Reddit are the users who freely provided the content that this fucking parasite feeds off of.
I'm so glad I left that awful shithole of a site.
No surprise there.
More precisely, undoubtedly, the people and corporations that have given him big piles of money want to gut consumer protections.
It's really very simple - the billionaires and the corporations want to take the US back to at least the 1950s, and preferably the 1880s. Their goal is to institutionalize a plutocratic autocracy under which they'll be free to strip mine the mountains and clearcut the forests and drill baby drill and spew pollution everywhere with no expectation of social responsibility, so they'll be entirely free to keep all of the profits to pay for their lives of grotesque privilege while we'll be reduced to just being additional resources for them to exploit, with no liberties, no freedoms and no say in anything.
That's why they bankrolled Project 2025, why they bought the Supreme Court and why they're backing Trump and Vance (and the MAGA Republicans broadly). Each one of them is intended to play a role in destroying democracy and implementing autocracy, all toward the same goal - the plutocratic dream world in which everything is bent toward enriching the few at the expense of the many - of elevating the few on the backs of the many, and not just essentially by happenstance, as is the case already, but officially and by design.
Class war isn't coming - it's already here. The rich are already fighting it, and they're winning.
I suspect that's more or less right.
It struck me a while back that it's likely not so much that Trump lies per se as that his brain is broken in such a way that he just doesn't distinguish between truth and falsehood. To him, that's a meaningless concept. He just says, and means, whatever he says at the moment, based entirely on how it might serve his interests to say it.
He measures value in other people differently - primarily based on their loyalty to him. But again, the part of his brain that distinguishes between truth and falsehood is broken, so all that takes is a profession of loyalty. And as far as that goes, Vance is particularly notable, since he has in the past criticized Trump, but is now sucking up to him. I think that to Trump, in his narcissism, that's especially appealing because it means that he won him over.
So then it's not so much that he expects Vance to lie as that he expects Vance to remain loyal. It's not so much that he sees integrity as an obstacle and the lack thereof as an advantage as that he sees it as a threat to loyalty and its absence as an aid to loyalty.
All of that also explains how it is that Trump - an inveterate liar and back-stabber - is so willing to trust people and so bitter and petulant when they turn against him. Since he doesn't distinguish between truth and falsehood, he doesn't see the expectation that they lie on his behalf as anything unusual, nor does he recognize the likelihood that they'll one day want to or be coerced to stop lying and tell the truth instead. To him, it's just a simple question of whether they'll remain loyal to him by saying what he wants them to say (with no understanding of the relevance of the fact that it's a lie) or betray him by saying what his opponents want them to say (similarly with no understanding of the relevance of the fact that it's the truth).
So in Vance, he sees someone that he won over to his side, and his lack of integrity as a lack of that misplaced loyalty that's led others (Pence, for example) to, as he sees it, betray him.
Even with my deservedly low expectations for Republicans, it's astonishing how little integrity Vance has.
Right, but it's not really a matter of what did they expect from just standing idly by as Israel brazenly tried to provoke military responses fron Lebanon, Syria, Yemen and Iran, since we're in this bizarre post-truth timeline in which governments and corporate media just blithely pretend that none of that happened at all
All of the versions of this story that I've seen so far either pass over Israel's provocations entirely, or try to bury them by just mentioning them in passing, in passive voice, and with no assignment of responsibility.
The stock phrase is "Iran vows retaliation after the killing of..."
The mid-phrase shift from active to passive voice is propaganda 101.
Virtually all of the focus has been on the racists and misogynists and christofascists and all the other reactionary fuckwads who are supporting and promoting Trump and who contributed to Project 2025 and so on.
But they don't really matter. They're just tools. The people who matter are the ones who are funding it all. Aside from some personal quirks (like Musk's weirdly aggressive pronatalist thing) the people who are funding Trump and Project 2025 and such really don't give a shit about all of that. Those are just emotive issues to make a lot of noise about to win over the base and provide cover forbthe real goal. The real goal - the exact and only reason that they're funding all of that - is quite simply to destroy US democracy and institute an autocracy, so that they can have a system in which their rule and our submission are codified and absolute.
This isn't a culture war. That's just cover for the real war, which is a class war. And it's not a war that might happen - it's a war that already is happening. The rich are already fighting it, and have been for quite some time now. And if we don't do something, we're going to lose it by forfeit.
So what was his answer?
This is a prime example of a political anslysis that completely fails by presuming the wrong premises.
Mr. Biden contended that the assassination of Mr. Haniyeh was poorly timed, coming right at what the Americans hoped would be the endgame of the process...
From Netanyahu's perspective, it was perfectly timed, and for exactly that reason. The key is that Netanyahu doesn't want a cease-fire under any circumstances.
Moreover, Mr. Biden expressed concern that carrying out the operation in Tehran could trigger the wider regional war that he has been trying to avert.
And again, from Netanyahu's perspective, it could trigger the wider regional war that he has deliberately been trying to trigger. Just like the harm it's done to the peace process, that's not an unwanted side effect - it is, to Netanyahu, the exact goal.
Those two things are not mutually exclusive.
A great many people in the US, Trump supporters certainly included, are experiencing uncertainty living in an economy in which the lifestyle earlier generations took for granted gets further out of reach every day - in which they find themselves ever further in debt with less all the time to show for it, and in which they're one catastrophic illness away from destitution.
Trump has cynically exploited that uncertainty by beating the racist, and especially anti-immigrant drum. People are primed to find somebody to blame for their misfortunes, and he's provided them with somebody.
And yes - to the degree that they've responded to his rhetoric, it's because they were already racist enough that when he led them in that direction, they willingly followed. So as far as that goes, yes - racism really is a driving force. But their racism isn't just some atbitrary thing that appeared out of thin air - for a great many, it's a specific reaction to a specific set of circumstances, and those specific circumstances are largely economic uncertainty.
It's sort of akin to people with chronic respiratory problems ending up hospitalized during a period of high air pollution, then other people arguing about whether to blame their respiratory conditions or the air pollution. Rather obviously, "or" is the wrong conjunction - it should be "and."
And by the bye - that whole dynamic is a good part of the reason that Musk and Thiel and many other billionaires are supporting Trump - because they and their actions comprise the lion's share of the real reason that that economic uncertainty exists, and Trump is not only determined to hide that fact, but to self-servingly make it so that they'll be free to cause even more harm.