Exactly. His relationship with the US is just as cynical as it is with Russia, and as it is with any country or people (including his own). He will do or say anything that gets him more power. That means he’ll be a solid US ally as long as the US is completely stable and functional, and he will take advantage of any weakness (like he did with Trump letting him murder Kurds in Syria).

I think we’re in violent agreement about the overall with perhaps subtle difference in the details.

Erdogan has been close to Putin for a long time. He’s one of the most extreme authoritarians in the NATO alliance. The US has armed it’s enemies in the past, and I don’t think it’s short sightedness has changed.

I don’t believe that Erdogan will help Palestinians, but he very well may materially support Hamas as long as he doesn’t do it openly enough to cause problems. I mean, Netanyahu propped up Hamas for years in order to forward his interests. No one would care if Erdogan helped justify continuing the genocide by making Hamas more dangerous to Israelis, as long as he didn’t send any American weapons to them.

But perhaps I’m just extremely cynical.

It would have been more accurate for me to say that he’s not really aligned with anyone. He works with Israel and the US when it benefits him, he works with Russia and Hamas when it benefits him. He does whatever will get him more regional power.

Erdogan is a fascist who’s responsible for genocide in Northern Syria. He doesn’t give a fuck about Palestinians or the genocide Israel is carrying out against them. He is aligned with Hamas and terrorism because disrupts regional power and gives him opportunities. This is an opportunity for him, and nothing more. His government backed Isis before. This is the same.

It has nothing to do with the very real need to end the genocide of Palestinians or the legitimate desire of Palestinians to resist their oppression. He aligns himself with horrible people because he is himself horrible.

Capitalism is a pyramid scheme.

But this is really more a product of capitalism than anything else. Under capitalism you just have to keep moving even if you’re just making garbage and debt. There’s no reason to stop and think, because that is seen as a cost (even though it costs more to move without thinking).

Even the best companies that do factor in planning (at least in concept if not actually in practice most of the time) end up with the other problem of “resume driven development” where things that are totally fine and actually working get replaced with things that don’t work because someone needs a new project to get their promotion.

Capitalism produces garbage and puts the people who are least qualified in decision making roles. This still happens in natural systems, but much less. In (healthy) anticapitalist organizing, the people who know the most are generally asked to lead and when they don’t know what to do they stop and figure it out before moving forward.

Aimless wondering can still be a problem, but it’s not forced by the system to continue it’s just people who are learning.

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The political compass is literally a propaganda tool created by right wing “libertarians.” It’s complete bullshit.

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If you ever drive through rural America, you’ll usually at least see one or two crosses, often on telephone poles, on rural roads. People, often teenagers, die pretty regularly in rural America because of drunk driving.

Some people like it. Some people are just numb to it. It’s just insane to expect people not to when bars are the only social space in a lot of these towns, and those bars are not accessible by anything but car. There is no such thing as a taxi for most of the US (space wise, not population wise).

Not directly, but they have an indirect effect. The more one aligns with the state, especially in a fascist state like Israel, the less likely they are to experience violence. The less trauma they have. The more access they have to good and stable jobs.

So oppositional groups tend to be more fragmented (so more subcultures) and have less money. So, no, not directly but there’s definitely an indirect relationship.

Governments and their people rarely agree. Those that do agree are a vocal minority that’s always amplified. While I don’t believe Israel should exist, a county isn’t it’s government and its dominant group.

There are Israelis risking prison and possibly their lives trying to stop what their government is doing.

A lot of people grew up being used to a safe county. The idea that the government didn’t actually keep people safe, and that leaders could be so insanely incompetent, was so shocking it was easier to believe in crazy conspiracy theories.

It’s pretty easy to believe in an incompetent government after 9/11, but W came after Clinton and Bush Sr. The first Bush was the head of the CIA. He was evil, but highly competent. Clinton was clearly a world leader, also highly competent. Before that you had Reagan, who was Machiavellian as fuck running secret wars around the world. You had decades of these people looking like they were playing geopolitical 4d chess, then you had this clown who was playing checkers with pidgins. Then you had this incredible shock of the biggest attack on the US since Perl Harbor. It broke a lot of people’s brains.

Cars are absolutely going somewhere. Cars won’t exist in 100 years (or will be so rare they will be basically negligible) because either we will have phased them out or they will have brought about the collapse of the complex society needed to support them.

The problem is not just Internal combustion, but a myriad of issues with the most fundamental and intractable being that the fact that geometry hates cars. Car based society has been an experiment that’s only been going for less than 100 years, and it’s already failed. Even with essentially infinite cheap energy, cities like Detroit and Flint, early adopters of car-centric design, are showing us what the future looks like for any city that doesn’t radically change course.

There will be massive suffering, reguarless of the course we take. People will lose massive amounts of wealth. Lots of people will die as the collapse of car infrastructure displaces massive numbers of people. The question is only if we aggressively mitigate the impact of the collapse of car culture, or keep pretending that cars aren’t going away and allow the humanitarian crisis to grow beyond the ability of society to absorb, manage, and recover from it.

Robotaxis are a bad idea. They are the flying car of this generation. They fulfill no function not already better fulfilled by already existing technologies, while having numerous, tremendous, and probably intractable problems.

https://youtu.be/GcKUYbChE3A

Oskar Barnack ∞ Oscar Grant -Blue Scholars

Bonus in Dutch - Bent Je Bang - Hang Youth

What the fuck are you talking about? Likud undermined the peace process repeatedly and basically drove Hamas to attack, which is exactly what these folks are saying. Likud is also pushing this party line. The actual Holocaust wasn’t in response to years of oppression. Using the “holocaust” language is antisemetic because it compares a horrific act of oppression to a horrific act in response to horrific oppression. These two should never be compared.

It seems like Israelis who disagree with Likud are completely in the propaganda. The “Holocaust” language seems to be their propaganda. To be fair, it was a massive attack that impacted pretty much every Israeli. With something that personal, it’s easy to turn around and use the language of the people who are ultimately responsible for this attack in the first place.

Employees aren’t afraid anymore so companies are trying to reinstate fear.