jwiggler

The top comment on this thread contains a conversation (argument) about Chomsky’s view on the term “genocide,” as well as his verbiage discussing Serbian-run concentration camps.

I listened to Understanding Power fairly recently and it definitely changed my outlook and broke me out of the lull of neoliberal self-satisfaction, and helped introduce me to other leftist writers. So I’m a fan of Chomsky’s, but it doesn’t sound like he had that good of a take on the Bosnian genocide. He seems to only reserve the word genocide for the Holocaust so as to keep its significance, and despite supporting a UN fact-finding commission that did find Serbia was running concentration camps, he refers to said camps as “refugee camps,” instead, and seems to infer people had the freedom to stay or leave as they please (even if this was technically true, I doubt it was practically true).

So, not a good look for him, even though he had other viewpoints that I’ve been strongly influenced by.

Have you happened to read the book? He has a chapter dedicated to his decision to call it technofeudalism rather than capitalism, hypercapitalism, technocapitalism, etc. Basically he’s saying profits have been decoupled from a company’s value, and that it’s no longer about creating a product to exchange for profit (which, in his words, are beholden to market competition) but instead about extracting rent (which is not beholden to competition – his example is while a landowner’s neighbors increase the values of their properties, the landowner’s property value also increases).

Anyways he describes Amazon, Apple store, Google Play, cloud service providers, as fiefdoms that collect rent from actual producers of products (physical goods, but also applications), and don’t actually produce anything, themselves, besides access to customers, while also extracting value from users of their technologies through personal information. They’re effectively leasing consumer attention in the same way landowners leased their lands to workers.

It sounds pretty accurate to me, but I haven’t had much time to chew on it. What’s your take on that idea?

Actually, you’re not being clear, at all. The article you linked, yourself, notes that the 37 murdered political candidates were local government candidates murdered between September and May, not national candidates. Far cry from your insinuation that 37 of Claudia Sheinbaum’s political opponents were murdered so she could win by the hands of the cartels.

Sorry, buy-it-for-life

I kinda like the idea of a phone that is usually small, but I can make big by unfolding it if I want to. But I do agree that the fewer moving parts, the sturdier and more BIFL. It’s just that BIFL is not really attainable anyways in the current state of the phone market due to software support obsoletion.

I’d like to see a small eink phone or the tiny matchbook from Her.

“You are shredding the UN charter…with your own hands.”

As he shreds the UN charter…with his own hands.

I don’t know, unfortunately. GF watched it on Netflix while she was in Portugal. Then we watched it together in the States, by means of the high seas. Matey.

My GF recently introduced my to a show called Please Like Me. It’s out of Australia from a comedian named Josh Thomas.

Don’t look at the IMDB score or anything like that – this show is pure art. It’s got a lot of heart and the cinematography is better than it has any right to be.

Please Like Me is honestly better than Fleabag in that it is a dramedy that covers real issues, but it resolves more satisfyingly and feels more grounded in reality. It is so good and nobody has heard of it.

I love Ted Lasso season 1, and season 2 to an extent is also very good, but it kinda lost its footing in season 3, IMO.

The longer episodes are not as tight, writing-wise, and the story suffers a quite a bit because of it. Still a good show, but it went from “This might be one of the best shows I’ve ever seen,” to “Yeah it’s not bad, but…”

Hey! I’m not on the toilet.

right now…

US colleges after 10,000 Palestinian children are killed: “We need to stop antisemitism on campuses at all costs!”

There are a lot of weird cringey exchanges in this show similar to this that end up being stylized writing to trick or subvert the viewer. You should continue watching

Problem is usually wars are justified by money or lies or politics, not by things like “defending democracy” or “stopping a genocide”

Those justifications are usually made up at the time it becomes convenient or politically necessary to enter a war.

Obviously this article is meant to cast the Pope in a bad light, but honestly I’m not going to fault the dude for invoking historical figures who proved to be beneficial to his own order.

I mean, how many times do people invoke the image of Teddy Roosevelt in the US? Dude was hot for war, all the time. Or Abe Lincoln, who, prior to freeing the slaves, would claim that whites were still superior to blacks (depending on his political audience), and would advocate for the relocation of blacks to another country, similar to the US government’s efforts made against Native Americans.

Invoking historical figures is so often a bad move, but how can you fault a person for not knowing these things? Roosevelt and Lincoln are gods in the US. Andrew Jackson was the king of the free man, a paragon of libertarianism, rose straight up from the ground to the presidency. But I’m sure the Native Americans felt otherwise.

As for the Pope thinking the attack was provoked by NATO and not wanting to condemn Russia, well that’s kinda horseshit. Because Russia deserves condemnation for preemptive war in the same way that NATO deserves blame for outfitting more bases along the Russian border, and the US deserves blame for their interference in Ukrainian politics in 2014.

I live in a small city about an hour away from a major city. I’m also an hour away from what I would call the boonies – rural, remote areas where owning guns and open carrying is normal. In fact, I’ve seen open carry around here, in the city, quite a bit. It’s pretty normal around here.

I heard a shooting happen in the suburbs near my house when I was a kid. It’s what’s considered the “nice” part of town. An old woman walking her dog was killed. I heard the shot through my bedroom window. Only til I moved into the inner part of the city did I witness guns being shot in the city more often. Most of the times you hear pops, it’s fireworks. A couple times, it’s been guns. Those couple times are pretty freaky.

Every once in awhile I’ll walk past a crime scene downtown, usually something happened like a stabbing the night before. One day I scrolled through reddit and saw a video – a point-blank execution had occured outside the club down the road. That one was disturbing. I think the kid is going to jail for a long time.

The inner part of this particular city is not as safe as the suburbs, but for the most part you should be okay, as long as you’re not looking to start trouble. When I’m walking around town, especially the immediate area I live, my eyes are open. At night, they’re wide open.

Its just a lack of consistency, I don’t know what to tell you. You can’t tell me the US sends military aid to Ukraine in order to “defend democracy,” when in numerous other cases of sovereign countries being occupied, we do nothing, or we even support the occupiers, in Palestine’s case.

This lack of consistency lends itself to the idea that there are further interests besides “defending democracy” for which we send Ukraine weapons. I’m not sure how else to put it. If it were about the moral imperative of defending occupied people’s, you can pick out numerous similar examples where we have not acted, and you just have to conclude that there are other factors behind the US sending aid to Ukraine. One is the perceived threat the country feels from Russia, which I think is probably exacerbated by the press. One is the perpetuation of the constant war economy we have, and one is the increased political unity that war brings.

But I’m curious about your position, you’re dismissing my arguments as “whataboutism,” but what exactly would you assert instead? Do you think that Ukraine deserves our aid more than Palestine does? Is it that Russia is a grave threat to the United States? I’m genuinely curious

I don’t think they should be condemned to genocide, but I don’t think we should be sending them weapons. I think Biden should be talking to Putin in some capacity, which he is not. Radio silence. I think that exacerbates the war.

I don’t think this weird moral imperative is real, like we’re America so we ought to do something. I don’t think that it’s real because, just like in Russia, where you’ve got an active conflict and you’ve got some Russian propaganda calling for the denazification (what you’ve correctly referred to as genocidal) you also have, in Israel, active conflict of genocidal nature between Israel against Palestinians, but we do nothing.

So you’re saying, we, America should condemn Palestine to genocide? Or how about the Uhygur peoples? Should we engage in a proxy war with China? Certainly, according to your claims that otherwise we are dooming them to genocide by their occupying country.

That moral imperative you’re talking about is fabricated, because if the US government actually cared about these people – Ukrainians, Palestinians, or Uhygur – we’d be sending military aid to all of them, or else we’d be “condemning them to genocide,” as you say.

This aid is not going to Ukraine to help them endure genocidal forces. It’s going there to perpetuate our constant war economy that is reliant on conflict. It’s going there to unite the political party against an outside evil and to further the US geopolitical and global free-market goals.

I never claimed the revolt itself was a result of their actions, I claimed that we were actively involved in installing their new government, which we were.

Well, I actually didn’t say any of that, but thanks for stripping any nuance from what I said, creating a strawman, and then attacking that, instead.

Thank you for the insults, I guess the point of my effort dump is moreso that I dont think it’s really as black and white as people make it, I think it deserves some nuance. Which is a little ironic because you summed the whole thing up in six words! Haha

But no, I don’t think it’s very unreasonable to be against a war. You do? I do not support Russia. But I don’t think the US should be sending military aid to Ukraine.

Edit: or, I mean against this war