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.
each ‘incident’ can v easily have been explained
You hear this from serial sexual harassers all the time. Every individual incident has plausible deniability. It’s the trend line that eventually catches up with you.
your type are to tightly wound up
My type being… big budget advertisers on YouTube?
A good example is Fetterman.
I think the problem isn’t Fetterman so much as it is The Senate. Six year terms, expensive high stakes statewide elections, comically disproportionate representation by population size, and the smaller house giving a single bad actor disproportionate power to fuck with legislation.
You could point to Rand Paul or Joe Manchin or Ted Cruz just as easily. They all have a reputation for fucking with the popular consensus through arcane procedures and toxic personal ideologies.
A recall has the potential to remove a single bad actor in a single state and replace them with… what? Another bad actor? If you flipped out Fetterman for Memet Oz, would you be any happier? Meanwhile, the problem of the Senate is still embedded in the national political structure.
What we really need is an Article Five convention, to restructure a centuries-outdated and anti-democratic federal system in its entirety.
There’s a reason we say we have a “Special Relationship” with the UK and not Spain.
So, one big juxtaposition is between Spain and the UK.
Both have access to natural gas reserves in the Atlantic. Both have enormous wind resources, due to their large coastlines. One of them has a government focused on keeping the retail price of energy low. Another has a government focused on keeping the profit generated by energy providers high.
The UK is seeing a surge in energy prices that has nothing to do with their actual supply of energy. They’re just pegging the retail price to the global spot price, because of decades of deregulation and rent-seeking. And because entrenched private interests hate competition, the roll-out of new energy supplies has been curtailed by a government incentivized to do nothing and allow the private sector to price gouge.
Spain’s real triumph is not simply its investment in domestic energy infrastructure but it’s socialist public policy with regard to energy pricing and distribution. The political rewards in keeping prices low has a knock-on effect of incentivizing the development of rapid new build-out in low-cost infrastructure.
Minimum wage earners don’t pay federal taxes.
They’re definitely paying federal tariffs.
Russian Politician: “We’re going to implement a nationwide psychological health care system [evil]”
Russian Treasury: “That’s going to cost money”
Russian Politician: “Just tell psychologists to do it for free.”
Russian Professional Association: “Now nobody wants to be a psychologist.”
Russian Politician: whispering to state security service
sound of Russian Professional Association getting thrown out a window
Russia has an estimated population of 146.0 million as of 1 January 2025, down from 147.2 million recorded in the 2021 census. It is the most populous country in Europe, and the ninth-most populous country in the world. Russia has a population density of 8.5 inhabitants per square kilometre (22 inhabitants/mi2), with its overall life expectancy being 73 years (68 years for males and 79 years for females) as of 2023. The total fertility rate across Russia was estimated to be 1.37 children born per woman as of 2025, which is in line with the European average but below the replacement rate of 2.1.
By the end of 2024, the natural decline of the Russian population amounted to 596.2 thousand people, according to published data from Rosstat. Compared to the end of 2023, the indicator increased by 20.4% (from 495.3 thousand). However, this decline is offset by massive immigration, particularly from Central Asia.
This isn’t a real problem, it’s a meme problem. The country is at a historical peak of population, has ample neighboring nations with people eager to immigrate, and is experiencing a slight lull largely driven by the poor wartime economic performance.
And scratch the surface of any of these concerns. What you’ll discover isn’t a fear of population decline, it is a fear of ethnic Caucasian family lines experiencing a decline. Very specifically, the children and grandchildren of the kleptocrats running the country.
hed did a bad thing that one time
Far more than the one time. He had a whole routine about exploiting overseas labor to perform humiliating stunts.
It’s the same picture. Just ask anyone in Istanbul
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.
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.