I hadn’t put it together before, but Israel is sort of an international case of affluenza - a spoiled, indulged rich kid who ends up a psychopath because daddy’s money has always given them whatever they want and shielded them from ever having to face the consequences of whatever they do.
It’s long past time to cut off their allowance.
And Netanyahu’s obvious provocation strategy is playing out exactly as intended.
Let’s not kid ourselves - Israel will target whatever and whoever the fuck it wants to, entirely regardless of possible consequences, and the US won’t do anything meaningful about it, ever.
Right. The country in which officials insist that soldiers should be entirely free to sexually abuse Palestinians can investigate itself.
Israel is a rogue state.
Israel is a rogue state.
It’s become obvious over time that one of Trump’s primary strategies in life is assigning his failures and faults to other people. He lives in a sort of permanent fog of projection.
I wonder who he’s trying to fool though. It’s so constant and seemingly effortless that I suspect that it’s really mostly for his own benefit - that it’s not just the story he’s telling other people, but the story he’s telling himself.
Well… yeah. Brazil’s the B in BRICS and Russia’s the R, so Brazil is officially pro-Russia.
And by the bye - China’s the C.
Love the responses from the influencers. They’re all silent about it until Johnson claims that he’s a “victim,” then there’s this sudden rush of “Yeah… yeah - that’s it. Me too! I’m a victim too!”
Uh huh…
So… Meta’s “plan” is to dodge responsibility?
Gee whiz… I sure never saw that coming…
The part that really gets me is the news media taking him seriously.
I keep waiting for a moment when some reporter is going to start talking about Trump’s latest, then just stop in the middle and say, “You know? That’s it. I just cant do it any more. This guy is a blithering lunatic and I’m done pretending he’s not.”
Not like I actually expect that - I’m much more cynical than that. Still though…
This is an example of a thing I’ve said repeatedly about Trump - I’m willing to bet that he’s 100% sincere about this. He’s not dissembling or diverting - he actually, sincerely believes that he had every right to interfere in whatever ways he wanted.
Why?
Because he’s a near-total sociopath. I don’t think that concepts of truth and falsehood or right and wrong are even coherent to him. I think his entire measure of everything is wholly personal - if he wants it, then it’s right and if he doesn’t, then it’s wrong, and if he believes it, then it’s true, and if he doesn’t, then it’s false. And it really is that simple. It’s not that he lies, but that he lives in a fantasy world in which whatever he believes is true and whatever he wants is right.
If he’s trying to say “Biden wanted this but Trump already started it”
Which “he?”
Zuckerberg blames it exclusively and entirely on the Biden administration.
that tells me BOTH parties requested it. Hence, if you don’t like Biden because of this, you don’t want Trump either. And of course, vice versa. In short, this policy is not unique to either party or administration.
Exactly, but that’s explicitly not what Zuckerberg is saying. He’s saying that it was entirely and exclusively Biden, which is a lie.
Why did Zuckerberg choose now to make this announcement and publicly reveal the inside play?
There’s actually a tidbit that the author notes that points at the obvious reason for it.
In his letter to Congressional investigators, he flat-out said what everyone else has been saying for years now.
In 2021, senior officials from the Biden Administration, including the White House, repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor certain COVID-19 content…
The author then goes on to say though:
A few clarifications. The censorship began much earlier than that, from March 2020 at the very least if not earlier.
What’s significant about that? Trump was president then.
So Zuckerberg is rather obviously trying to pin entirely on the Biden administration a set of policies that were already in place under Trump.
To what end? Obviously to do the same thing he did in 2016 and 2020 - to overtly promote Trump.
This particular one certainly not coincidentally plays into the whole Republican narrative that the Democrats are oppressive and dishonest, which in turn is meant to provide a context for their intention to dispute the election results when Trump loses. Zuckerberg is simply doing his part to further that narrative.
Why do you people RANDOMLY scatter ALL caps words through EVERYTHING you write?
Is it SOME sort of Pavlovian THING? Like you see a SENTENCE with a random assortment OF all caps words, and THAT says to you that IT’S the kind of FAKE truth you PREFER?
Airbnb is a fine example of a sort of variation on enshittification.
The way it works is a new company with a new and notably cost-effective way of doing things comes along and is unsurprisingly wildly successful. And then, inevitably, that leads to them hiring a whole raft of executive parasites who all have to be paid obscene salaries for doing nothing of any real value, which means the company needs to raise prices and cut back on services in order to generate more profit to pay those salaries. And meanwhile, the new executives, with nothing of any note that they actually need to or even can do, but with a need to create some illusion that they’re necessary, have pointless meetings in which they propose and wrangle about and eventually approve and implement new policies and new plans that are generally awful.
And pretty quickly and not coincidentally the new company ends up at least as bloated, mismanaged, overpriced and under-performing as the companies they so recently replaced.
See also: Uber, DoorDash and the entire streaming industry.
And by imposing the partition plan instead of holding a plebiscite, the UN overtly violated its own charter.
It strikes me that what we have here is basically the plot of Frankenstein, played out over 80 years of world history…
Amusingly ironic that the UN is the entire reason that Israel exists in the first place…
I’m entirely unsurprised.
D and D got a lot of heat for the last season of Game of Thrones, but I’ve never thought they were entirely, or even chiefly, to blame. Most of the problem really is that GRRM obviously desperately needed an editor to rein him in as the series went along, but for whatever reason, that didn’t happen. So now he has this huge, sprawling mess of a story that’s going in eighteen different directions at once, and just as D and D couldn’t manage to tie it all together, neither can he.
Very much so (and there’s at least one patient gamers community around, because I’ve posted to one).
The only advantage I can see to playing a game on release is taking part in that first rush of interest, but I’m antisocial enough that that doesn’t appeal to me anyway, so I’m not missing anything there.
Beyond that, I think playing a game at least a year or so after release has all of the advantages. The initial flurry of absolute love vs. absolute hate has died down so it’s easier to get a broad view of the quality, the game is more stable, the price is better, dlc and expansions are out and generally packaged with the game, and best of all, in this current era, I can most likely buy it from GOG and actually have the full game, DRM-free, on my system.
And there are a bajillion good games out there, just waiting for me to discover them.