Democrats always have great policies.
Glances at Gaza
Glances at Afghanistan
Glances at Vietnam
Glances at NYC under Mayor Eric Adams
Glances at Dianne Feinstein raising a Confederate Flag over the San Fransisco Mayor’s Office
Like, seriously, do you not realize that politics is primarily about heart? The ancient Greeks, Caesar, or Napoleon could have told you that.
All famously democratic leaders.
Bullying Works
Loyal Citizens of Pyongyang in Seoul
It is a difficult task to find news and videos that see and present North Korea, as a country. An actual place where people live and North Koreans as a people, not as a herd of complacent sheep under the thumb of a “despot”.
The film “Loyal Citizens of Pyongyang in Seoul” addresses the common view of North Korea head-on and asks a very simple question, is any of it true?
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“Loyal Citizens of Pyongyang in Seoul” or “LCPIS” gives insight into how the war has affected those in the South and those in the North. What’s more important is that the narratives of the two “former” North Korean Citizens is completely alien to what is commonly said about North Korea.
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South Korean human rights lawyer Jang Kyong-ook, is the first testimonial of the film and speaks to a variety of abuses that the South Korean government has committed and continues to commit. His explanation of the National Security Act, or NSA for short shows South Korea in a much different light than the West presents it.
Often the South is said to be the good half of Korea, it was the one to embrace democracy and economic liberalism after all. The reality is, the South was ruled by numerous dictators, committed dozens if not hundreds of war crimes in the Korean War, and as mercenaries during the Vietnam War is an often “forgotten” fact.
Mr. Jang, speaks to the creation of “spies” by the NSA where they coerce false confessions and testimonials from defectors to continue the narrative of the North being a proverbial hell on earth.
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After Mr. Jang, the North Korean “defectors” are given time to speak. The most notable thing about both of them is that they both wish to return to the North. With the South so often being portrayed as a land of milk and honey when compared to the North the fact that the “defectors” wish to return, expeditiously, does again speak to the narratives about the North not being wholly accurate.
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It has become a bit of an open secret that defector testimonials are dubious at best. As reported by the Guardian, many of the stories about the North fall apart with a bit of scrutiny. Many stories about the North come from Radio Free Asia which receives funding from the U.S. government and often publishes the most outlandish stories from the North with little to no pushback in the media landscape. And that’s the big thing about the film.
It speaks to the nature of truth in the face of a machine, an empire, that wants the world to believe one thing. It’s a bit bittersweet upon viewing LCPIS. A common notion in the West is the truth will come out. It may be slow but when it arrives it will win. But the nature of propaganda, especially when it has strong financial backing, shows that truth in the modern age is as valuable as the screens it’s read on.
The B-plot in Ender’s Game tells a compelling story of a couple of young adults nefariously posting their way straight into the Presidency. People want to believe this is how real life works so badly. They’ll watch a plutocrat elevated by other plutocrats into an office historically held by plutocrats and conclude “Shitposters on the internet did this”.
Spoken like a guy who isn’t currently furloughed due to the budget fight.
Some hackers exploited two factor authentication recently by playing on this exact impulse.
Sent a message that looked identical to the two-factor notice and got people to reflexively turn over their private keys.
Me, the idiot who clicked the link: “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I get four hundred of these a day and I hit the wrong button. I’m sorry.”
You, the cybersecurity officer who just gives the Everyone group full administrative access to the entire network: “Fucking asshole, I hope you’ve learned your lesson”
Our Boss, who just asked his shareholders to pay him a $1T bonus: “That’s it, I’ve had enough of all this human idiocy, I’m replacing everyone at this company with AI”
The Board: “The company is run by geniuses. We’re all bidding up the price of the stock by another $100B in market cap.”
Strictly interrupting the Constitution to mean “Heads I Win, Tails You Lose”
When you underfund your health care system, people who experience chronic pain or anxiety will turn to the gray/black market for short term pain relief.
Many of the substances on the gray/black market are habit forming, have ugly side-effects, and are prohibitively expensive. Without a doctor’s oversight, people routinely overdose or otherwise misuse these medical alternatives.
The chronic pain, combined with the side-effects and OD risks, render people unfit for daily working and living habits. These people become their own kind of chronic social burden - high rates of vagrancy, poor impulse control, malnutrition, vectors for contagious disease (particularly STDs and other need-born illnesses), higher rates of violent crimes, high rates of pregnancy and miscarriage, danger to others while operating motor vehicles, etc, etc, etc.
The “drug use” is seen as the proximate cause of all these social ills, in large part because pursuing pain/anxiety relief becomes a central motivation for chronic users. And because they’re habit forming, it is far more difficult and expensive to discourage future drug use after full adoption than via early intervention.
On top of all this, the increase in the size and the higher economic position of people operating in a national security state sets off a self-replicating cycle. Cops are seen as fundamentally more useful than nurses or social workers. Cops operate as large unionized labor blocks and criminal cartels. Cops receive oodles of positive press coverage and are routinely valorized for performing a hazardous and undesirable job.
So, on the one hand, you have a civilian population that craves health care and falls back on toxic substitutes, which transform them into public nuisances and real criminal hazards. On the other, you have a large, well-organized, media-savvy cartel of goons who make up a steadily larger share of the economic “middle class”. Villainizing drug users and valorizing drug enforcement officers wins elections. Meanwhile, medicalizing drug abuse and defunding the police is electoral poison.
The lesson appears to be clear.
Less health care. More cops. Politicians win.
720
1080
1080 with a half gainer
The people need to be confident that they can stand up to rogue and criminal federal officials, knowing that state and local officials will have their back. The public need to know that critical shortfalls in health care and education and emergency services are going to be backfilled by state and local governments while the shutdown persists.
What I’m seeing now is a bunch of city/state chuds working hand-in-glove with the Feds, while mayors and governors just throw up their hands and insist they can’t act. Merkley’s filibuster is fine on its face, but this isn’t a fight any given Senator is in a position to win.
If Trump is pulling the plug on the CDC, we should see every blue state in the country stepping in to hire up all those officials that got let go and continuing the work regionally. If Trump is letting crypto-bros run rampant over the money supply, we should see state AGs hounding down Silicon Valley scammers and prosecuting crooks and criminals under local prohibitions on fraud, embezzlement, and corruption. If Trump’s ICE agents are breaking into people’s homes without a fucking warrant, the local Sheriffs and State Troopers need to find and arrest those agents and prosecute them for their crimes.
I don’t see any of this. I see Dems making speeches and blustering, but backing down as soon as a Fed shows up with a mask and a gun to do highway robbery. If that’s how the country is going to operate going forward, the very concept of law and order is dead and we’re consigning ourselves to military dictatorship.
Easy to forget that 2008 was just three Democrats running for a book deal and twelve Republicans running to be Pope
We should run Mamdani in 2028
I’m going to need to see if he can hang on to NYC while Trump overruns it with ICE agents first.
Also, kinda waiting to see if 2026 happens at all, or if we get a SCOTUS ruling that says elections are dumb and nothing in the Constitution says a President can’t be dictator for life
The US electorate is still pissed about the Iraq War
The joke is that you had Dems defending the war all through the '00s and even the '10s. It got so bad that Republicans were able to outflank them by mouthing even the most menial anti-war rhetoric.
if anything the Palestinian Genocide has cemented in the minds of people here that they cannot trust politicians who will not openly speak about the Palestinian Genocide as a Genocide
You have a cohort of Americans who are genuinely horrified at our participation in a genocide. But they’ve been systematically marginalized, stripped of their political autonomy, and silenced in public and private media. Meanwhile, you have a very wealthy, very influential, and very fascist corporate oligarchs with both a material interest (harvesting natural resources through slave labor) and an ideological interest (rebuilding the temple in Jerusalem because it’ll bring about a magical utopia) in waging these wars.
They’re buying up major media outlets, orchestrating police raids on protest groups, and monopolizing every elected office through a buyout of the party system.
No, this is not an issue people in the US are going to budge on or soften on
We spent 23 years in Afghanistan. And the primary reason we withdrew wasn’t domestic opposition to the occupation. It was our soured relationship with Pakistan, which provided the primary inroad to resupply our main base in Kabul. At the same time, we were escalating conflicts in Libya, Syria, Somalia, and Yemen, which had stretched our - extensive but not unlimited - resources to their limit.
And since we left, the US media has bombarded the public with “The Taliban is eating babies!” scare stories in an effort to poison the notion of a future retreat from a primarily Muslim country. US voters don’t need to budge. Nobody currently in contention for office appears interested in ratcheting back the national security state. Nobody is talking about “Defund ICE” anymore, much less defunding the police. The anti-war marches of the '00s/'10s are fully extinguished. Even the Gaza Genocide protests are just shooting galleries for Canary Mission and other reactionary groups, looking to get people arrested, fired, or deported.
Palestine is just one more horror story in a multi-generational bloodbath. Americans continue to be the sheep arguing over which wolf to invite to dinner.
Buttigieg told Favreau, “I think that we, as Israel’s strongest ally and friend, you put your arm around your friend when there’s something like this going on, and talk about what we’re prepared to do together.” It was an odd choice, to say the least, to call an apartheid state a friend and talk of genocide as somethig akin to self-harm.
This is standard American foreign policy, whether we’re defending Pinochet in Chile or Park in Korea or Milei in Argentina or Marcos in the Philippines or Modi in India.
There’s no limit to the atrocities you can commit, so long as you operate as a forward base for the American military.
Adapt or get the fuck out of the way, stop acting like the flood waters hurtling at you are something your wealthy friends can magically make go away and then being genuinely shocked when you are consumed by a rush of public backlash.
Public backlash comes and goes. But the oligarchy endures. Better for American liberals to stay friendly with Israel until they can sweep this genocide under the rug and refocus angry American voters on China or Iran or Mexico again.
We call him Frank’s Monster, for short
Shockingly accurate depiction of what bloggers think they’re doing