Jesus christ how long until they just fire up the gas chambers and skip this song and dance of a trial

We past that point ages ago. This is a purely procedural motion to legitimize the de facto summary executions and extrajudicial murders already happening in the field.

IDF thugs have been bombing emergency vehicles, demolishing every source of potable water or edible food, and wounding children in order to lure adults out of hiding with their cries for help going back… straight to the Nakba of 1948 if we’re being honest. But it really took off in 2018, during the first peaceful March of Return. Then it accelerated enormously after Oct 7th.

Anyone Israelis have captured since then has been brutalized solely for military intelligence and propaganda. Executing them is a matter of course. There’s a case of a one-year-old being tortured in order to extract information from his father, for instance. Palestinians who leave Israeli custody have often been so maimed and abused that they die within a few days or weeks of release. This is deliberate. Their executions would have been a formality at best.

America: “We’re going to destroy Iran once and for all”

Creates Iranian Singapore

You don’t even need to go back 81 years. The post-war Germans were also horrifyingly antisemitic for decades. It wasn’t until the late stages of the Cold War that the German Christian Democrats felt the need to clean up their own rotten reputation and rebrand as zealously pro-Zionist. Curiously enough, this was just about the same time anti-Muslim bigotry was coming into vogue, and anti-semitism accusations could be leveraged to denounce Middle Eastern government leaders sitting on large oil reserves.

I guess it’s someone else’s problem then

It’s hard to imagine

People have been called antisemitic for less

How many years ago did you conclude we’re all fucked?

Folks have been waving “The End Is Nigh” placards for a long while. Things change. Systems fail. Societies rise and fall.

This isn’t the end. It isn’t even the beginning of the end. Life will get a lot worse for a lot of people, so long as the engines of industry continue to be piloted by sociopaths. But tell that to someone in Kiev or Myanmar or Gaza, and they’ll wonder where you’ve been for the last five years.

Do the best you can with the information and opportunity you’re afforded. Don’t lose sleep over a problem your great grandchildren will be looking forward to if you’re not actually in a position to do something about it.

It’s the Philippines. You’ve had six families passing a dictatorship back and forth between one another for the last 120 years.

We all knew that electing Trump would be bad

Americans have been fucking with the Middle East since the end of WW2. You can read about US plans for regime change in Iran going back to Truman - some obviously more successful than others. Trump’s a sloppy fuck-up who can’t actually execute a strategy, sure. But this isn’t his strategy. This invasion has been a neoconservative wet dream for nearly 50 years.

The situation in the Philippines isn’t the consequence of Trumpian foreign policy either. The Philippines has been a de facto US colony since McKinley (with brief interruption by the Japanese). We have them slaved to our merchantilist trade policies, trading their labor for pennies while we sell them overpriced utilities and military technologies at an obscene markup. The spike in energy prices wouldn’t be a problem for them if they had a domestically owned and operated energy industry, rather than being naked to the fluctuations in the spot price of Brent Crude.

Really great job, Americans.

The system is functioning exactly as it was intended. Now the only question is how hard we can squeeze Filipino workers before they push back or get crushed into a paste.

Humanity needs to decide what level of barbarism we will collectively tolerate.

Historically, the bar has been set extraordinarily low. But that’s largely based on the question of informed consent. Articles like this aren’t going to show up on FOX or ABC or CBS, so long as the people perpetrating the crimes are Israeli. By contrast, if an Iranian or Russian or Chinese or <insert scary country here> police force engaged in such an act, it would be held up as an excuse for carpet bombing their power plants and assassinating their university professors.

If we allow them

We aren’t in a position to allow or disallow without a large scale mobilization of labor. Even then, a lot of what you’re talking about begins with boring bureaucratic shit like petitions and marches. The violence doesn’t just go away because some pollster can show a broad public disgust (for - again - events the major Western media isn’t interested in covering).

Without assess to mass media, the public remains broadly uninformed and disinterested. Without a mobilized labor movement, there is no organizational support for individual dissent.

Even when such things do exist (Italian and Spanish citizens have been at the forefront of the BDS movement), there are countervailing forces among the plutocracy that obstruct material change.

The belief that you can unilaterally or rapidly affect sweeping international policy changes - that you are some Great Man of History who has volunteered to be apathetic - is going to drive you insane, if you let it.

John Yoo rides again

Cassel: If the President deems that he’s got to torture somebody, including by crushing the testicles of the person’s child, there is no law that can stop him?

Yoo: No treaty.

Cassel: Also no law by Congress. That is what you wrote in the August 2002 memo.

Yoo: I think it depends on why the President thinks he needs to do that.

take a really long time getting to know someone

I mean, I’ve found 2-5 dates is a good measure. I’ve also seen 7 hours of social time, ideally within a week or two of getting to know someone, helps build up the chemistry before getting physical.

Idk about “really long time”, but there’s a dividend in accruing that sexual tension, especially if you can toe the line between flirting and fucking.

Stop making vertical territories. Just stop it. If it’s a long skinny shape on a map, it shouldn’t exist.

And Russia, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia

Which one of these is Israel?

To a prior PM, it would be in extremely bad taste. But this bitch is nakedly fascist.

each ‘incident’ can v easily have been explained

You hear this from serial sexual harassers all the time. Every individual incident has plausible deniability. It’s the trend line that eventually catches up with you.

your type are to tightly wound up

My type being… big budget advertisers on YouTube?

There’s a reason we say we have a “Special Relationship” with the UK and not Spain.

So, one big juxtaposition is between Spain and the UK.

Both have access to natural gas reserves in the Atlantic. Both have enormous wind resources, due to their large coastlines. One of them has a government focused on keeping the retail price of energy low. Another has a government focused on keeping the profit generated by energy providers high.

The UK is seeing a surge in energy prices that has nothing to do with their actual supply of energy. They’re just pegging the retail price to the global spot price, because of decades of deregulation and rent-seeking. And because entrenched private interests hate competition, the roll-out of new energy supplies has been curtailed by a government incentivized to do nothing and allow the private sector to price gouge.

Spain’s real triumph is not simply its investment in domestic energy infrastructure but it’s socialist public policy with regard to energy pricing and distribution. The political rewards in keeping prices low has a knock-on effect of incentivizing the development of rapid new build-out in low-cost infrastructure.

Russian Politician: “We’re going to implement a nationwide psychological health care system [evil]”

Russian Treasury: “That’s going to cost money”

Russian Politician: “Just tell psychologists to do it for free.”

Russian Professional Association: “Now nobody wants to be a psychologist.”

Russian Politician: whispering to state security service

sound of Russian Professional Association getting thrown out a window

Incidentally…

Russia has an estimated population of 146.0 million as of 1 January 2025, down from 147.2 million recorded in the 2021 census. It is the most populous country in Europe, and the ninth-most populous country in the world. Russia has a population density of 8.5 inhabitants per square kilometre (22 inhabitants/mi2), with its overall life expectancy being 73 years (68 years for males and 79 years for females) as of 2023. The total fertility rate across Russia was estimated to be 1.37 children born per woman as of 2025, which is in line with the European average but below the replacement rate of 2.1.

By the end of 2024, the natural decline of the Russian population amounted to 596.2 thousand people, according to published data from Rosstat. Compared to the end of 2023, the indicator increased by 20.4% (from 495.3 thousand). However, this decline is offset by massive immigration, particularly from Central Asia.

This isn’t a real problem, it’s a meme problem. The country is at a historical peak of population, has ample neighboring nations with people eager to immigrate, and is experiencing a slight lull largely driven by the poor wartime economic performance.

And scratch the surface of any of these concerns. What you’ll discover isn’t a fear of population decline, it is a fear of ethnic Caucasian family lines experiencing a decline. Very specifically, the children and grandchildren of the kleptocrats running the country.

hed did a bad thing that one time

Far more than the one time. He had a whole routine about exploiting overseas labor to perform humiliating stunts.