*Death Metal/Progressive Metal, not Black Metal. (Sorry for being pedantic.)

He's talking about the person who tweeted and complains about Jon Stewart.

"losses based on data from rural towns"

What does this mean and how would someone be able to verify these numbers?

I recently read an interview with the Serbain president, in which he said that he fears for world war III, because this conflict might feel "existential" to both sides very quickly. Reading this, I can only think that's a correct assesment.

protesting over something so insignificant and inconsequential

Yes and no. The thing itself is small and inconsequential, but the subtext is a protest in favour of joining the EU and joining Schengen. The fact that relatively important EU-politicians are there to speech to the protesters makes that all the more clear.

(Imagine the opposite: like the head of the foreign affairs committe of Belarus talking to anti-governement-protsters in a EU-country. They'd be kicked out of the country immediatly and Belarus got themselves some extra sanctions.)

This makes me so incredibly sad. How did opposition to an apartheid state which is enacting a collective punishment on a population which it has locked up in an open air prison for decades become so controversial? There's really not even the slightest form of humanity in our elite, nothing at all.

Michael Hudson talked about how he was approached by the State Department to work with them after Super-imperialism was published, and at first he was a bit worried because of his Marxist background. He said that once they learned about his actual family history (his father was a Trotskyist labor leader in Minneapolis and he himself is the godson of Trotsky) they were like, “ok, good, not a threat to us.”

No fucking way. That's incredible. Do you still have that interview lying around?

Unlike the Houthis, they're away from home with few creature comforts.

Those Houti´s really have all the comforts, unlike American soldiers

The current elite in Indonesia came to power by desposing the left-wing nationalist Sukarno and by murdering 2 million people suspected of being members of the Communist Party. It had 1 million members at that time. To this day, the perpetrators of that genocide walk around freely, and are celebrated as heroes for "saving the nation" from the "communist traitors". There's a museum which celebrates the genocide of the communists and the purpetrators are often on TV talking about how they murdered the inhabitants of village X or Y because it was a hotbed of communism.

For those who want to learn more about this forgotten history, read The Jakarta Method, a book about the Indonesian Genocide and how it functioned as a model for anti-communists all over the Globe (Guatemala, Chile...) and watch the film The Act of Killing, in this film a couple of participants are asked to reenact their killing of communists for a documentary (which they happely do, and in painstaking detail, because the only feedback they're accustomed to is praise for their acts) which provides a horryfying insight into the way the killing of our comrades is looked at. It's basically impossible to watch the film in Indonesia, to quote wikipedia.

it is highly risky to submit The Act of Killing, titled Jagal in Indonesian, to the Film Censorship Board, since the probability of it being banned would mean Indonesians can face charges for watching the film, and allowing paramilitary groups to heckle screenings

It's scary how little debate this entails. Our countries are in war in Yemen, and I'd say 80% of the public doesn't even know it.

I translated the reaction of the general-secretary of the Belgian Workers Party to the Dutch election results. I think it makes a lot of sense.

"The election results in the Netherlands are tough but not unexpected.

The cocktail of decades of blind austerity, bureaucracy and frantic marketization had already exploded on March 15 this year (when the BBB [= right-wing farmers party] won the election).

No lessons were learned from that. On the contrary. The centre-right parties copied the rethoric of the extreme right that keeps on kicking downward, to the people who have the least. Perhaps it is better to look at those at the top?

Public utilities were privatized; public services stripped; education and health care came into the hands of professional managers; child care became a haven for private equity funds; the social rental sector became a shadow of what it had once been; and the Dutch labor market became the most flexible in the entire European Union: one in three workers has a flexible employment contract.

Wages remained static and profits went through the roof. Harrowing poverty increasingly came alongside obscene wealth. Over a million Dutch people sank below the poverty line. According to the latest counts, there are 32 thousand registered homeless people. Food banks that still had a meager six thousand clients in 2008 have seen that number increase to 120 thousand fourteen years later. Meanwhile, the number of millionaires reaches a record high: as many as 317 thousand citizens own assets of more than a million euros.

That is the policy of the last two decades. And those policies were pursued by the centrist parties, all of them. If we want to stop the extreme right, it can only be in breaking with those neoliberal policies, rather than now preaching headlong more of the same centrist policies.

And yes, it can be done. If we dare to look upwards instead of downwards."

To add one thing to this analysis: the collective profit of all non-financial companies in the Netherlands was higher than all the wages combined. Total wages were 330 bilion euros, total profits of non-financial corporations were 344 billion, and profits of financial corporations were 190 billion. That means 534 billion euros in profits for 330 billion in wages.

these maggots

Agree with everything you say, but let's not do that.