davel

joined 1 year ago
[–] [email protected] 8 points 49 minutes ago (2 children)

The Sun will eventually fry all life on Earth and boil off the water & atmosphere. Eventually the Sun will die out completely, leaving you on a cold, dark rock.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 hours ago (1 children)

Judging by the downvotes, a lot of Lemmitors have no idea how the world works. Just living in the Marvel Cinematic Universe—must be nice.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 hours ago

It means NastyNative is misogynistic.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 hours ago (2 children)

If you’ve been following this war through the war propaganda of Western governments and Western corporate media, you might think those things about Russia, but they’re about as reality-based as the Ghost of Kyiv.

This is also ignoring the strained ties between Russia and China lately

This couldn’t be further from the truth. Where are you getting this from? The latest BRICS summit was held in Russia last week, with little Western coverage, because it doesn’t bode well for imperial core hegemony.

 

We have entered a strange, late-stage Empire era, comparable to the Soviet Union’s Glasnost, in which elements of the US imperial braintrust can see with blinding clarity Washington’s entire hegemonic global project is stumbling rapidly and irreversibly towards extinction, and announce so publicly - but their insight does not translate into evasive governmental action at home. The RAND Commission report elicited no mainstream coverage or comment whatsoever, proof positive there isn’t a concomitant effort to manufacture consent for its radical, far-reaching prescriptions.

Were the Commission’s recommendations remotely plausible, a multipronged PR campaign would’ve immediately ensued to convince Americans of the righteousness of the Empire’s mission, and the necessity of investing in US “defense” to the tune of trillions. The media’s silence on the report’s damning findings definitionally reflects an omertà among the US political class. They well-know American reindustrialisation can’t happen. So, the fatal “disconnect” between Pentagon operational and industrial planning identified by RAND will endure, and with it ever-intensifying US military impotence. We’re spectating the Empire’s final acts in real-time.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 hours ago

Why would it need to be monitored? I can’t think of a reason that an instance would not want to honor them, and if they were to, someone would eventually notice and complain. I don’t see a value in monitoring/policing it.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 21 hours ago (1 children)

Musk is a constituent part of the US military-intelligence-propaganda-industrial complex, as many US oligarchs are. Just thinking of tech oligarchs alone, off the top of my head, other such members are Andreessen, Bezos, Brin, Ellison, Schmidt, Thiel, and Zuckerberg.

The oligarchs and the government aren’t separate things, they’re an integrated system.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 21 hours ago* (last edited 21 hours ago)

Practically no one bases choices off newspaper endorsements, so we don’t have to pretend they matter. Newspaper owners and their editors want us to care, because they want to feel relevant, important, and venerated. The reason this is big news is that the media love to talk about themselves.

But this is a good reminder that corporate media don’t work for us, they work for oligarchs and advertisers.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 22 hours ago

Yes, you are off here. Firstly because the US never has been and never will be much of a democracy, and secondly because shaming the constituency into voting has never and will never result in more votes.

Fewer people voting is not the cause of less democracy, it is a symptom of it. Some people have been losing faith in it, and why wouldn’t they, when grinding neoliberalism has slowly worsened their lives over the last ~45 years?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 23 hours ago (2 children)

Possibly this was me yesterday.

While such requests could be intentionally ignored, I’m not of aware of a case where any actually have been. I can’t see why anyone would, and going rogue like that is liable to get your instance defederated.

 

I hope you go over there, get your little brain all scrambled up with PTSD, and then come back here and see how much the United States cares about you, pookie.

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submitted 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
 

Interview with Gabriel Rockhill about his article, Capitalism’s Court Jester: Slavoj Žižek.

The interviewer doesn’t have much interesting to say IMO. I would skip over most of his segments.

[The cultural imperialist project] polices the left border of critique, but it does it at an objective vs subjective level. And what I mean by that is that there are coordinates for what the dominant discourse is, and what people need to know if they want to be in these conversations. And it creates a reality, which was very much my reality coming up, where I was interested in radical theory, because I grew up as a farm kid working construction. I knew what exploitation was. I knew what oppression was. I knew a lot of horrible things about the world because I was living them in the capitalist empire. And I gravitated toward what I thought were the most radical things, but I was not aware of the objective conditions that structured that radical discourse in such a way that all of the real discourses—which were anti-imperialist and liberatory—were actually largely excluded from those debates. And so I read a bunch of Negri and Žižek and Badiou and all of these people, and eventually realized, well, I’m looking in the wrong place. I’m looking in the place that the empire tells me I should look for radical theory.

 

PATO: The Pacific and Atlantic Treaty Organization

Their cooperation is forcing NATO to build closer ties with like-minded countries in the Indo-Pacific. For the first time, senior officials from Australia, New Zealand, South Korea and Japan took part in a meeting with NATO defense ministers in Brussels on Thursday.

They baddies are “forcing” NATO into this. The poor imperial core, being dragged around again. #AlwaysTheSameMap

Citations Needed podcast: The Always Stumbling US Empire: "Stumbling", "sliding", "drawn into" war––the media frequently assumes the US is bumbling its way around the world. The idea that the United States operates in “good faith” is taken for granted for most of the American press while war is always portrayed as something that happens to the US, not something it seeks out.

Also, doesn’t “CRINK” already have a name, the Axis of Resistance?

Anyway, death to POTATO.

 

John Mearsheimer is a realist who’s still and always faithful to the liberal international order, unlike the also liberal Jeffery Sachs. All-In Summit 2024: John Mearsheimer and Jeffrey Sachs

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submitted 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
 

Philosophy professor Hans-Georg Moeller, author of A Moral Fool: A Case for Amorality

For [Harris] the two things are the same: on the one hand objective moral truth (universal morality), and on the other hand scientific facts about what increases wellbeing and what doesn’t. […] I think the two things are very different from one another.

Just as religion is not something that depends on the existence of god, but is a specific social practice, a specific form of communication that relates to a certain unrealistic assumption; likewise morality is a specific discourse, a specific way of acting, that relates to and derives from making unrealistic assumptions about something that doesn’t exist.

Follow-up video: If Morality Exists Everything Is Permitted.

 

If I didn’t know any better, I’d say Democrats were the most gullible 😐

 
 

But even the whole debate about how to solve the Nord Stream mystery (or thriller) — which reminiscent of a James Bond film, with all its military and technical details — perhaps draws too much attention away from the underlying field of interest. Storytelling, and especially the construction of a crime thriller, is very much about directing sympathy (preferably towards the real culprit and away from the false leads, so that the reader doesn’t get to the solution for as long as possible). Another very important point is to draw attention to the irrelevant aspects and away from the crucial information and analyses. As seen above, the extensive and detailed “yacht story” could serve to divert attention away from a completely different action, in which professional military actors used warships or submarines, for example, to plant the explosives.

And perhaps even the war, with all its horror and violence, is not the main story at all, but its tragedy, dynamism and violence only conceal the “hidden story”, the underlying structure of economic and financial interests and the geopolitical tug-of-war over energy markets and infrastructure.

Some geopolitical analysts argue that the Nord Stream blast and even the war in Ukraine and the preceding change of power in 2014 only served to displace Russia as a gas and oil supplier and to enable US and British companies and investors to take over the European energy market. In other words, the thesis is that the end of Russia’s role as the main energy supplier for Germany and Europe is not the result of the war in Ukraine, but rather its cause; or in other words: “It’s the energy market, stupid!”.

Of course, you could also look at the story in this [materialist] way. I generally have the impression that these realities and cold economic interests are often obscured by stories of cultural struggle (open society vs. traditional family/man-woman images) and political stories (democracies vs. autocracies) in order to keep the public busy with emotional discussions and distract them from what is really going on: a ruthless game of chess for money, power and, above all, resources.

 

Israel’s decision to assassinate Nasrallah, using some of the enormous bunker-busting bombs the United States has been arming it with, is beyond foolhardy. It is outright deranged. Israel has removed – and knows it has removed – a moderating influence on Hezbollah.

Israel’s action will achieve nothing apart from teaching his successor, and leaders of other groups and countries labelled as terrorist by western governments, several lessons:

  • That Israel, and the West standing squarely behind it, do not play by any known rules of engagement, and that their opponents must do likewise. The current restraint from Hezbollah that has been so baffling western pundits will become a thing of the past.

  • That Israel is not interested in compromise, only escalation, and that this is a fight to death – not just against Israel but against the West that sponsors Israel.

  • That Israel's ideological extremism – its Jewish supremacism, and its endless craving for Lebensraum – must be met with even greater Shia-inspired extremism.

Decades of western terrorism in the Middle East unleashed a Sunni nihilism embodied first in al-Qaeda and then in ISIS. Now, the West, via Israel, is fomenting for the Shia resistance its own ISIS moment. The moderates in what the West dubs “terrorist organisations” have once again lost the argument. Why? Because the US imperial project known as “the West” has once again demonstrated it will not compromise. It demands full-spectrum, global dominance – nothing less.

Israel may make very short tactical gains in killing Nasrallah. But we will all soon feel the whirlwind.

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