more than

Doing a ton of heavy lifting.

But arresting and deporting parents of US citizens is a national tradition. Goes straight back to Eisenhower and Operation Wetback

I guess it’s someone else’s problem then

It’s hard to imagine

People have been called antisemitic for less

How many years ago did you conclude we’re all fucked?

Folks have been waving “The End Is Nigh” placards for a long while. Things change. Systems fail. Societies rise and fall.

This isn’t the end. It isn’t even the beginning of the end. Life will get a lot worse for a lot of people, so long as the engines of industry continue to be piloted by sociopaths. But tell that to someone in Kiev or Myanmar or Gaza, and they’ll wonder where you’ve been for the last five years.

Do the best you can with the information and opportunity you’re afforded. Don’t lose sleep over a problem your great grandchildren will be looking forward to if you’re not actually in a position to do something about it.

It’s the Philippines. You’ve had six families passing a dictatorship back and forth between one another for the last 120 years.

We all knew that electing Trump would be bad

Americans have been fucking with the Middle East since the end of WW2. You can read about US plans for regime change in Iran going back to Truman - some obviously more successful than others. Trump’s a sloppy fuck-up who can’t actually execute a strategy, sure. But this isn’t his strategy. This invasion has been a neoconservative wet dream for nearly 50 years.

The situation in the Philippines isn’t the consequence of Trumpian foreign policy either. The Philippines has been a de facto US colony since McKinley (with brief interruption by the Japanese). We have them slaved to our merchantilist trade policies, trading their labor for pennies while we sell them overpriced utilities and military technologies at an obscene markup. The spike in energy prices wouldn’t be a problem for them if they had a domestically owned and operated energy industry, rather than being naked to the fluctuations in the spot price of Brent Crude.

Really great job, Americans.

The system is functioning exactly as it was intended. Now the only question is how hard we can squeeze Filipino workers before they push back or get crushed into a paste.

any third partiy that handles the IDs and biometric data that they receive to perform age checks are forced to delete said data within 7 days

With any system such as this, the open question is always “Why would I trust you to do this?” Because we’re asking a large state-affiliated agency with a huge incentive to mine biometric data to abide by an ethical guideline that neither they nor their state-affiliate have an incentive to enforce.

I did read something about Spain fining Yota for mishandling data

Spain’s AEPD fined Yoti Ltd €950,000

The company’s most recent published revenue figures, cited in the resolution as of March 2025, stand at €15,029,907

So, this is well below Yoti’s public revenues, making it look more like a cost of business than a serious deterrent. More importantly, I don’t see anything in the article suggesting Yoti lost contracts or future business opportunities as a result of this fine. Neither were any of Yoti’s executives or lead employees found liable for the infractions.

The violations relate to Yoti’s Digital ID app as operated in Spain. Data processing takes place on servers in the United Kingdom, with manual verification support from Yoti’s Security Centre in India. Transfers from the UK to India are covered by EU standard contractual clauses with a UK addendum.

Is Yoti still operating in Spain? Is their information still taking place on UK servers and processed a continent away in India? If we know the system to be insecure and identities mismanaged, why would Spain continue to do business with a known bad actor? Why are these penalties only civil and not criminal?

Is the Spanish government or private leadership in any way benefiting from these data breaches? And, if so, what incentive does the Spanish national authority have to escalate sanctions in the future?

Humanity needs to decide what level of barbarism we will collectively tolerate.

Historically, the bar has been set extraordinarily low. But that’s largely based on the question of informed consent. Articles like this aren’t going to show up on FOX or ABC or CBS, so long as the people perpetrating the crimes are Israeli. By contrast, if an Iranian or Russian or Chinese or <insert scary country here> police force engaged in such an act, it would be held up as an excuse for carpet bombing their power plants and assassinating their university professors.

If we allow them

We aren’t in a position to allow or disallow without a large scale mobilization of labor. Even then, a lot of what you’re talking about begins with boring bureaucratic shit like petitions and marches. The violence doesn’t just go away because some pollster can show a broad public disgust (for - again - events the major Western media isn’t interested in covering).

Without assess to mass media, the public remains broadly uninformed and disinterested. Without a mobilized labor movement, there is no organizational support for individual dissent.

Even when such things do exist (Italian and Spanish citizens have been at the forefront of the BDS movement), there are countervailing forces among the plutocracy that obstruct material change.

The belief that you can unilaterally or rapidly affect sweeping international policy changes - that you are some Great Man of History who has volunteered to be apathetic - is going to drive you insane, if you let it.

John Yoo rides again

Cassel: If the President deems that he’s got to torture somebody, including by crushing the testicles of the person’s child, there is no law that can stop him?

Yoo: No treaty.

Cassel: Also no law by Congress. That is what you wrote in the August 2002 memo.

Yoo: I think it depends on why the President thinks he needs to do that.

It’s nicer to live in the US than in a country the US has decided to re-colonize

They’ll be blind inside a month trying to work like that.

The trick is how to accomplish that in a country which is actively hostile towards education and working class empowerment.

It’s a real snarl, no doubt.

take a really long time getting to know someone

I mean, I’ve found 2-5 dates is a good measure. I’ve also seen 7 hours of social time, ideally within a week or two of getting to know someone, helps build up the chemistry before getting physical.

Idk about “really long time”, but there’s a dividend in accruing that sexual tension, especially if you can toe the line between flirting and fucking.

the US was trending upward in terms of influence and had no meaningful competitors on the global stage after WWII except the USSR, which collapsed.

The US had the USSR as a direct competitor, but it also had a thousand anti-colonial independence movements that were tearing away the fabric of the old European empires, which the US had intended to inherit.

When the USSR failed, the US moved on to try and pick off all these smaller regional adversaries. And it’s this endless campaign to recolonize the Global South that’s described as “upward influence”.

With the slow death of US dollar dominance and the rise (and much smarter politics) of China, I don’t see how that trend will reverse itself.

Americans can just stop the wars. This won’t end the bleeding, but it can be the beginning of the end.

We can kick out our own despots and return to the bargaining table. We can pay reparations and turn our bad actors over to the ICC.

We can reform if we want to do so.

We don’t want to. But we could.

The threat isn’t a single dramatic crash. It’s a long, slow institutional rot that’s already underway.

You could have made the same critiques under Bush in 2007 or Reagan in 1987 or Nixon in 1971.

These aren’t new problems or new forms of rot. I think you’re underestimating the forces keeping the gears turning. This isn’t our first rodeo with a shit President. Go back and read about Bush 41, LBJ, or Truman. Go read about Cleveland and McKinley and Wilson and Hoover. These people were shit. But they weren’t the end of the nation. They certainly weren’t the end of the system.

Today’s empires are tomorrow’s ashes.

The US goes through recessions roughly every ten years, thanks to credit expansion and contraction. If anything, the next recession has been postponed far longer than expected.

The idea that we’re going to be “ashes” in another ten years… the fucking doomer juice has blasted basic American history out of everyone’s brains. Go back and live through the Great Recession, then talk to me about End Of Empire. Live through 9/11. Countries don’t just stop existing because of a stock market sell-off, ffs.

Stop making vertical territories. Just stop it. If it’s a long skinny shape on a map, it shouldn’t exist.

And Russia, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia

Which one of these is Israel?

To a prior PM, it would be in extremely bad taste. But this bitch is nakedly fascist.