Political Discussion and Commentary

that's what money flow should look like.

community (town, city) donates money to people, who then use it to buy goods and services from companies (which make a profit that way) that are then taxed by the community.

share your opinion

It occurred to me after seeing a video about England's low GDP per capita, that Income per capita is the amount workers receive (before taxes), so the difference I think, is the amount taken by companies as profit. Am I missing something? Seems right to me

according to maslow's pyramid, physiological needs are more fundamental than performing labor, and should therefore be taken care of first.

in other words, we should be housed and well-fed before we can be expected to work, and while work output depends on the fulfillment of physiological needs, the reverse cannot be true: our physical wellbeing cannot depend on whether we work or not.

It's well known that politicians promise 1 thing and then do the exact opposite. It happens over and over again. This leads many people to say "you just can't trust politicians" and give up.

I think, we can't trust their words, but we can trust their history. If they have consistently voted (in parlament) in a specific way, then we can believe that they will continue to do so. So, they can build trust by doing politics a certain way for some years. This is probably a much more relevant way to look at politicians than to look at what they say.

][Pope] Leo wears the shoes of the fisherman, not the black Florsheim models that Trump insists his underlings wear…

…The most despised American in the world cannot bear the judgments of the most admired American in the world.

1. Silicon Valley owes a moral debt to the country that made its rise possible. The engineering elite of Silicon Valley has an affirmative obligation to participate in the defense of the nation.

Translation: Silicon Valley has an enormous opportunity to extract as much money from federal government defense contracts as possible. To do this, we will bring back a draft for engineers. We’re really into bringing back the draft. Deepfaked teenagers, low-paid gig workers, and victims of the Rohingya genocide need not apply.

2. We must rebel against the tyranny of the apps. Is the iPhone our greatest creative if not crowning achievement as a civilization? The object has changed our lives, but it may also now be limiting and constraining our sense of the possible.

Translation: We can’t say “we wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters” anymore because Elon Musk lets you write essays on Twitter now. Though if you thought the apps were tyrannical, wait until you get a load of us.

3. Free email is not enough. The decadence of a culture or civilization, and indeed its ruling class, will be forgiven only if that culture is capable of delivering economic growth and security for the public.

Translation: People are mad at tech billionaires for their obscene wealth and arrogance. Instead of winning them over by providing free access to a useful everyday service, we’re gonna sell a lot of software that will let the government spy on them while demanding tax cuts.

4. The limits of soft power, of soaring rhetoric alone, have been exposed. The ability of free and democratic societies to prevail requires something more than moral appeal. It requires hard power, and hard power in this century will be built on software.

Translation: Words and feelings are free, which is why we want to sell weapons. Nobody got rich suing for peace.

Trust in a CEO who studied the blade:

5. The question is not whether A.I. weapons will be built; it is who will build them and for what purpose. Our adversaries will not pause to indulge in theatrical debates about the merits of developing technologies with critical military and national security applications. They will proceed.

Translation: “Soft power” and “ethics” are beta shit for Broadway shows Amodei. Hear that, Pete Hegseth? We’re warriors — pay up.

But seriously. If our enemies have no oversight then why should we? The future is an AI battlefield and we need rules of engagement that let us cook. Which is to say: Forget the rules of engagement. The government is not coming to save you — we are. The world is too dangerous for us to be governed by the law of armed conflict. Welcome to the 21st century: safety not guaranteed.

6. National service should be a universal duty. We should, as a society, seriously consider moving away from an all-volunteer force and only fight the next war if everyone shares in the risk and the cost.

Translation: We’re going to bring back the draft. Our vision of permanent war only works if we courageously volunteer people 40 years younger than us to die for oil.

7. If a U.S. Marine asks for a better rifle, we should build it; and the same goes for software. We should as a country be capable of continuing a debate about the appropriateness of military action abroad while remaining unflinching in our commitment to those we have asked to step into harm’s way.

Translation: Sure, those wimps at Anthropic are selling an AI system they claim has spotted cybersecurity vulnerabilities in “every major operating system and web browser.” But Pete, seriously: We will kill anybody you want with our software guns.

8. Public servants need not be our priests. Any business that compensated its employees in the way that the federal government compensates public servants would struggle to survive.

Translation: We care about wages – which is why we think Washington’s revolving door of lobbying and office-holding should be way more lucrative for everyone. There are mountains of cash for people who will look the other way.

And if you’re not on board? Well, all those pesky bureaucrats who do things like “investigate fraud” and “enforce safety standards” and “administer the social safety net” are holier-than-thou myrmidons who should be fed into the DOGE wood chipper.

9. We should show far more grace towards those who have subjected themselves to public life. The eradication of any space for forgiveness—a jettisoning of any tolerance for the complexities and contradictions of the human psyche—may leave us with a cast of characters at the helm we will grow to regret.

Translation: If you made fun of that video where our CEO looks like he’s on cocaine, you’re responsible for the rise of fascism. Also, we’re going to be conveniently vague about what “those who have subjected themselves to public life” means, because “be nicer to multimillionaires who go on podcasts” doesn’t have the same ring. Oh, and if you complain about the IT Renfields of DOGE, you’re anti American.

10. The psychologization of modern politics is leading us astray. Those who look to the political arena to nourish their soul and sense of self, who rely too heavily on their internal life finding expression in people they may never meet, will be left disappointed.

Translation: Society must stop centering sensitive crybabies who want to feel personally validated by elected officials and filter their politics through emotional reactions. Also, I feel strongly that Zohran Mamdani is a pagan who is going to Wicker Man me.

11. Our society has grown too eager to hasten, and is often gleeful at, the demise of its enemies. The vanquishing of an opponent is a moment to pause, not rejoice.

Translation: Your quote-dunking on that video of our CEO yelling “I’m sure you’re enjoying this as much as I am!” while bragging about how Palantir must “scare our enemies and, on occasion, kill them’” was snide, uncalled for, and frankly crass.

12. The atomic age is ending. One age of deterrence, the atomic age, is ending, and a new era of deterrence built on A.I. is set to begin.

Translation: History has rendered absolutely no complex or ambivalent judgments upon the nuclear arms race, so let’s go ahead and repeat it. Why spend money making sure nukes don’t explode by accident when you can fund AI instead? The atomic bomb is so last century.

13. No other country in the history of the world has advanced progressive values more than this one. The United States is far from perfect. But it is easy to forget how much more opportunity exists in this country for those who are not hereditary elites than in any other nation on the planet.

Translation: We canceled our internal DEI programs but we’re fully prepared to steal valor from everyone in US history who fought to make it a more perfect union.

14. American power has made possible an extraordinarily long peace. Too many have forgotten or perhaps take for granted that nearly a century of some version of peace has prevailed in the world without a great power military conflict. At least three generations — billions of people and their children and now grandchildren — have never known a world war.

Translation: Si vis pacem, para bellum, baby! We’ll conveniently leave out all of the regional and secret wars the US has engaged in over the years or the fact that Trump recently derailed the world economy by launching a war of aggression after campaigning on a promise of no new wars. We will not elaborate on what “next war” Point Six was talking about.

15. The postwar neutering of Germany and Japan must be undone. The defanging of Germany was an overcorrection for which Europe is now paying a heavy price. A similar and highly theatrical commitment to Japanese pacifism will, if maintained, also threaten to shift the balance of power in Asia.

Translation: We can definitely sell software to a militarized Germany and Japan too!

16. We should applaud those who attempt to build where the market has failed to act. The culture almost snickers at Musk’s interest in grand narrative, as if billionaires ought to simply stay in their lane of enriching themselves . . . . Any curiosity or genuine interest in the value of what he has created is essentially dismissed, or perhaps lurks from beneath a thinly veiled scorn.

Translation: Elon Musk is our sin eater but I’ll be damned if I let a fellow billionaire loser get dunked on so much for his posts on main. Also, if you raise too many doubts about his IPO, my friends and I are going to lose a lot of money.

17. Silicon Valley must play a role in addressing violent crime. Many politicians across the United States have essentially shrugged when it comes to violent crime, abandoning any serious efforts to address the problem or take on any risk with their constituencies or donors in coming up with solutions and experiments in what should be a desperate bid to save lives.

Translation: Federal government money is nice, but are we tapping state and local? Sure, politicians talk constantly about violent crime and it’s been on a huge downswing statistically over the past decade, but that’s not what we’ve been seeing in our local “VC lives matter” group chats. No further questions about the violent crime these days, please. Get those Also, we’re still mad about Ring cameras installed. who’s doing New Orleans killing our secret pre-crime detection program back in 2018.

18. The ruthless exposure of the private lives of public figures drives far too much talent away from government service. The public arena—and the shallow and petty assaults against those who dare to do something other than enrich themselves—has become so unforgiving that the republic is left with a significant roster of ineffectual, empty vessels whose ambition one would forgive if there were any genuine belief structure lurking within.

Translation: The most corrupt people we’ve ever seen in government who stand to make us the most money ever are getting exposed for their on-the-job intoxication, shady deals, sexual harassment allegations, and outright lying. How dare you not give these ghouls grace when they keep buying our shit? Truly great men — and we do mean men — are beyond question. A random woman at a government agency 99 percent of Americans have never heard of, however, is fair game.

19. The caution in public life that we unwittingly encourage is corrosive. Those who say nothing wrong often say nothing much at all.

Translation: People are unfairly using the public communications platforms that we mine for mass surveillance purposes to complain about our open bloodthirstiness and crypto-fascism.

20. The pervasive intolerance of religious belief in certain circles must be resisted. The elite’s intolerance of religious belief is perhaps one of the most telling signs that its political project constitutes a less open intellectual movement than many within it would claim.

Translation: We’re sick of people saying our cofounder is weird for believing that regulating AI will spawn the antichrist, and if we mention the “War on Christmas” we’ll make more money. We’re undecided about whether any of this applies to tolerating the pope.

21. Some cultures have produced vital advances; others remain dysfunctional and regressive. All cultures are now equal. Criticism and value judgments are forbidden. Yet this new dogma glosses over the fact that certain cultures andindeed subcultures . . . have produced wonders. Others have proven middling, and worse, regressive and harmful.

Translation: Which cultures? Oh, you know the ones.

22. We must resist the shallow temptation of a vacant and hollow pluralism. We, in America and more broadly the West, have for the past half century resisted defining national cultures in the name of inclusivity. But inclusion into what?

Translation: Are you still with us after 21 points? Great. Welcome to the great mystery. It cost you way less to get here than joining Scientology. Here’s the final thesis: Immigration? Bad. Canceling billionaires? Bad. Giving us money to fight (((globalism)))? Good. Just hit us up on cashapp.

At an appointment yesterday.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/67452832

The TACO Tracker

A running ledger of Trump Always Chickens Out moments.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/45636717

IDF soldier confesses happily killing Palestinian babies, claiming they’re “future threats.” An MSAD agent boasts that the world “belongs to the Jews,” declares Jewish superiority, and justifies the atrocities.

When the Democratic party’s governing body adjourned its meeting on Saturday in New Orleans, supporters of Palestine and an end of the genocide in Gaza had few reasons to celebrate. The Democratic National Committee had refused to give any ground to the large majority of the party’s voters with distinctly negative views of Israel…

…But the DNC continues to operate as if fully sealed off from the party’s voters on such matters. When the national meeting got under way on Thursday, the party’s resolutions committee proceeded to quickly discard a pair of resolutions critical of Israel…

..,The Democratic National Committee is a powerful model of what ails the party leadership at a time when the US-Israel alliance has been rampaging through the Middle East, terrorizing millions of people while leaving deaths and injuries and colossal destruction in its wake.

i said that what my grandpa said, "wouldn't you run away if you saw someone covered in scabs and sores or if they looked sickly and contagious? animals tend to stay away from a sick member of their herd. that's how others feel about the gays and autistic people, they know something is different about them and stay away. it's human and animal's nature", was a good explanation as to how they are. that is not true, i didn't mean it as in that it was justified or anything, i meant i understand how they think now, viewing gay and autistic people as sick and it is truly a gross thing to think. there's something wrong with conservatives, not gay or autistic people such as myself.

all the ones i know are either homophobic AND racist, for example, or one or the other. if they aren’t racist, they hate gays and if they aren’t homophobic, they hate people of color.

that’s the only people i know of. i knew a bi girl who was/is conservative but she doesn’t talk much about politics so idk what she is now. anyway, she loved trump and HATED immigrants of any kind but she wasn’t at all homophobic.

meanwhile, my ex-gf called gays the “alphabet community” said she was one of the good sapphic girls and said that latinos and haitians are animals who eat dogs and they’re evil, coming to kill all the americans. she’s also blasian so idk how she’s so racist, her grandma was an immigrant from vietnam.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/45256582

With brutality.. Occupation soldiers take turns in savagely assaulting a young man, near the "Qalandia" camp north of occupied Jerusalem.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/45217727

When faced with domestic/personal political problems, an easy method to sideline & slowly solve them, is to start or escalate #war.

It shifts the public conversation, changes the legal & political environment /interests, eases expanded military action at home, & creates opportunities to reward & align with certain factions (oligarchs, corporations, #military leaders).

Here are my thoughts and analysis on the subject in the shape of a table.

What do you think?

Took me a while to make this :)

Please share if you think this makes sense!

*Focusing on recent / ongoing conflicts!

🖼️ #CC0 #PublicDomain madeindex.org as always, use as you like friends <3

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/45153339

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/45153338

Incident from Feb, 2024: https://xcancel.com/MiddleEastEye/status/1754696557373649200

97 per cent of Gaza’s animal wealth has been destroyed by Israeli bombing, starvation, and looting: https://euromedmonitor.org/en/article/6811/

Isn't it common sense that people breaking the law should get deported and go back to where they came from? For Pete's sake, I wish people were more conservative about this!

If you found yourself transported to early 1788 Philadelphia, say about a year before the U.S. Constitution was signed, an if the Founding Fathers were all willing to hear you out, what would be some of the first things you'd say specifically to warn them and try to prevent some of the bad things that have happened in the real-world timeline since then? Basically, what differences would you want to see made to the U.S. Constitution from the beginning and how would you impress specifically on the Founding Fathers the necessity of diverging from their instincts in specifically those ways?

And keep in mind the Founding Fathers' beliefs on things like slavery, "the free market", guns, LGBTQIA+, etc.

Nina Turner: Dems need to fight more.

Dems Fight More

Nina Turner: How dare Dems fight more!

I continue to think people are overcomplicating Donald Trump's relationship with murderous Russian dictator Vladimir Putin. It's certainly possible that Putin has "leverage" over Trump, in the same way that twenty other foreign governments likely have leverage; Trump is a simple man, even simpler than simple, and all it takes to have leverage over the man is to have something that he wants.

But the dynamic between Trump and Putin comes from the simpleness of the man, not the leverage. Trump is, unquestionably, a malignant narcissist. There's simply no argument to be made about that; he's a textbook example of the condition. He is me-obsessed to the point of social dysfunction, incapable of empathy, sociopathic in his every relationship.

I can't imagine there's any adult American who has not, at one time or another, been obliged to deal with a similarly toxic coworker or boss. These are not rare traits, and the only thing that sets Trump apart from the others is that he pegs the needle in the severity of the conditions and yet grew up too rich and too privileged to suffer from any of the usual consequences.

The world exists for Donald Trump. That is the conceit that lies at the center of the man's brain; every other neuron is tied to that one, and every decision made is made by that one, and the photons his eyes see and the sounds his ears hear and the smells he smells are all filtered and re-interpreted so that they either match the conceit or, if that is not possible, shoved off into the great bin of Things That Are Probably Conspiracies.

I know this sounds ridiculous, and I have no way to convince you it is true. But I am quite certain that Trump believes himself to be the only real person in a world populated, Truman Show-style, solely with props and actors there to provide ambiance as he glides from hobby to impulse to whim to compulsion. Put him in a situation where he is not the sole agent—one where other individuals have power to bend the plot themselves, regardless of what he himself might want—and he struggles to function.

That is when he breaks. He breaks, and since he cannot comprehend what is going on his brain has to spend a great deal of time circuitously re-re-interpreting what happened until it can settle on a new version where he is again the main character and everyone else is living their lives to either support him or obstruct him.

To Trump, those are the only two sorts of people. He sorts the world according to who likes him and who does not, defined solely as "willing to do what I want" and "refusing to do what I want."

And, as Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, Lindsey Graham, and nearly every Republican officeholder of note can tell you, the distinctions are purely situational. There's nothing you might have done to him in the past that you can't fix by groveling in the present. There's no level of past sycophancy that will save you if you refuse to do something he wants now.

Think back to past toxic relationships you yourself have endured—that one positively malevolent co-worker or boss, the one you will remember forever. Most individuals who fit under the umbrella of "toxic" have very, very distinct social patterns.

They tend to be horribly abusive to people they either have power over (subordinates) or who have no power over them (service workers, for example.)

They tend to bow and scrape meticulously, and often ostentatiously, to people who have power over them (supervisors) or who they are seeking favors from (coworkers of equal rank.)

. . . The goal of the malignant narcissist is to climb the ranks. They do not see their jobs or relationships as jobs or relationships, but as stepping stones to the next "rank" of job or relationship, repetitively, forever. They crave the attention of the more powerful, and claw towards it, and the moment they get it they harm everyone who got them there while aiming to be more powerful than that.

Malignant narcissists are simple, simple people. All of their cleverness is used up calculating who they need to be nice to and who they can be cruel to, every day, all the time, to the point where they have very little brain left when it comes to understanding things like how tariffs work or who started which wars. Donald Trump is even simpler than that, and his fetish with Putin has always boiled down to a simple calculation.

Putin, a dictator, oligarch, and international crime boss, is in a position to do favors for Trump. Putin has authority that Trump himself envies—no, that Trump has been obsessed with.

Putin is richer than Trump. To Trump, who is obsessed with wealth as the only score by which success can be measured, that makes him better than Trump, and Trump wants desperately to climb to the rank where he, too, is not just scoreboard-toppingly rich but has full authority over laws, life, and death.

Those are the world figures that Trump, even as ostensible U.S. president, invariably fawns over. The North Korean dictator who has both ample beachfront property and the power to brutally murder anyone who offers the slightest insult. Putin, who controls what the press says about him and who regularly kills off those that oppose him either politically or financially. He praised Chinese leader Xi Jinping for his "iron fist," and we have all heard him hump the leg of Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte, infamous for an extrajudicial killing spree against "suspected" drug dealers.

All of these people have what Trump himself thinks he ought to have, as the main character of the world: The right to fire, disappear, or murder any human whose presence conflicts with the vision Trump has of his world. They have the thing that Trump's brain has always told him he would have too, if it weren't for the meddling of all the bastards who have refused to give him Emmys, and Oscars, and Nobel Peace Prizes.

What do the leaders of Europe have, in comparison? Regulations that keep him from committing crimes. Bank accounts of hardly any note. Limited power, with parliamentary systems that curb their whims and national press corps that remain both critical and unmurdered.

Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy is, in Trump's eyes, hardly a person worth mentioning, much less supporting. And this has not a damn thing to do with the war; if Zelenskyy was the president of France, Trump would treat him no better and no worse. Trump does not show contempt for U.S. allies because he has some contorted political reason for loathing them; he treats allied countries with contempt because they have nothing to offer him, personally, and that is as far as his fractured brain ever gets.

But he can't stop slobbering over Putin for the same reason: Putin has engineered what Trump considers to be his own perfect world, Putin has arguably much more power than Trump himself, in that he can commit crimes and murder enemies. Putin is the CEO that Trump has always wanted to be, and like the shittiest coworker you've ever known, Trump doesn't mind setting everything around him on fire if it might help him achieve that.

There are no hidden motives here. There's no secret cleverness on Trump's part. The man is too stupid to be effectively blackmailed, because there's very little evil Trump does that he hasn't himself boasted of at one point or another. If you presume that every waking moment of the man's life is devoted to self-satisfaction and self-aggrandizement no matter how horrific the consequences might be to everyone who is not him, you will never go wrong.

He is not bright. He has no hidden dimensions. He quite obviously has dementia. His family has all but abandoned him for their own self-preservation; now that Ivanka is a billionaire in her own right, thanks to Saudi generosity, she has no particular need to be the interventionist keeping daddy's worst delusions from being acted on.

Trump wants an end to Russia's invasion of Ukraine because he believes people will praise him for achieving it, and by "people" he means the ones he sees on Fox News, not the ones dying in trenches or to Russian bombs. He wanted a military parade because that is what the people he admires have; he wants the military to confront protesters because that is what his favorite dictators would do and he thinks, not without reason, that the power to mold the world entirely to his liking can be reached by following the steps that Putin and others have mapped out for him.

But there is no grand conspiracy behind any of it. He is just a stupid and venal man, one who has risen to power because stupid and venal men have been all the rage in American power circles for some time now.

crroks and lars (sorry)

xcancel forbids, so twitter

Maybe Epstein is the one who set up the hookup for Trump that Putin video taped. Not saying one way or the other if Epstein planned for that, but that would actually make sense as a reason for Trump to be pissed. Unlike the other reasons that have been given.