Yes I oversimplified because the post was getting so long and the topic is American imperialism specifically, but of course there are exceptions. South Africa being an obvious example, where you had white rule and the oppression of apartheid up until not long ago. Point is, Europe is where it all stems from. Before you come back with exceptions from ancient history I’ll say that I’m talking about modern history (which is the post middle ages period).

Here’s my view:

The North American colonies of the European imperialists had one very significant difference from the other colonies of the European imperialists: when the European imperialists came over here and proceeded to brutally colonize this continent, and brought their slaves from Africa over here to work for them and send the products back to Europe, it was the European imperialists over here who rebelled against the European imperialists over there, and won.

So IOW when America/USA got its independence from the European imperialists, it was really just another group of European imperialists owning and running the new country. They still had the slaves so they just kept on going with the slavery along with continuing the genocide of the original inhabitants. The European imperialists in Europe lost their slaves and land to the American group of imperialists.

Whereas when the other colonies of the European imperialists in South America, Africa, etc. got their independence, it was the original inhabitants of those places who got their own countries, not just another group of European imperialists taking over from the previous group.

So Europe’s age of imperialism finally petered out and they moved on. Now they can sniff and tut-tut and pretend they are definitely not racist and would never, ever act like those horrible American imperialists. But it’s been Europeans and their descendants who have been in charge over here the whole time. This democracy was only ever intended to be a democracy by, of and for those white males (at first only white male landowners).

The reason things are falling apart now is that in their view, non-white males have gotten way too close to having too much power, and they can’t have that – that would be real democracy for all instead of the white-males-only democracy they want. Barack Obama winning the presidency totally freaked them out, inspiring the Tea Party movement which grew to become the maga movement and eventually took over the entire republican party. So now trump and the oligarchs are back in control. Phew!, they’re so relieved. But we outnumber them (which is why they want to purge non-whites and make white women have more babies). Who will win?

I occasionally get wrong numbers and text messages. Happened a lot on my old number which had a string of 2’s in the middle. Got a lot of calls for numbers with one more or one less 2 than mine. Nowadays it’s more likely to be a text. On my new phone number I keep getting texts from a bail bondsman reminding a certain person of their next hearing date. I can’t get them to remove my number from their database. Hopefully that person isn’t depending on getting a reminder.

I got my desktop computer from https://www.currentbuild.com/

That’s my point and why I say they didn’t do the cartoon right. If they wanted to say what you explained, we’d have to see the first person answering “no”. As it is, the cartoon implies that anyone who says violence isn’t the answer is lying/hypocritical.

I understand what the cartoonist is trying to imply–that there are no true pacifists and people who say they’re against violence are hypocrites who actually like violence when it’s used to protect their privileged position. They just didn’t do it right.

First, true pacifists do exist, who would answer “yes” to the first two questions–and which would make the last question ridiculous. So if the cartoonist’s goal was to criticize the hypocrites, they just needed to show the first person answering the first two questions with an unqualified “no” to show they didn’t really mean what they said in the first panel.

First panel: I agree with the aspiration to avoid violence but allow for circumstances like self-defense or defense of a vulnerable party.

Second panel: I do agree we shouldn’t give them weapons, at the least not lethal weapons, certainly not military-grade weapons.

Third panel: If you want to be capable of preserving your national sovereignty, having a military is required, therefore justified in that context.

Fourth panel: While the two previous questions logically follow from the position stated in the first panel, the last question makes no sense and is a complete non-sequitur from the stated position. [i.e. “Violence is never a solution” --> “oh, so do you mean it’s a solution in this one case? !? !” <–non-sequitur]

I’m watching Freetube right now, still working. v0.23.3

The 25th can be used for any reason, not just mental decay. We already know the magats are fine with the mental decay.

That’s why they can’t go with the obvious route of saying he has dementia issues–the cult wouldn’t hear of that. But he can conveniently have a debilitating event or illness. Sure, the cult will have conspiracy theories, which is why they have to be sure to make it look plausible. But even if they have to resort to him having an “unfortunate accident”, there’s nothing the cult can really do about it, he’ll be gone. He’s just too unpredictable and uncontrollable for them to let him keep going rogue so much. Destroying the global economy and causing a worldwide depression is not part of their plans.

Gotta also consider the odds that he’s not there for much longer anyway. The Project 2025/Heritage Foundation people got JD Vance in as VP as they wanted–he’s one of them.

So I’ve been predicting since he won that the 25th Amendment will be used (if something else doesn’t happen to him), probably not until after the midterms so Vance can still run for 2 more terms. They need to set up the right conditions before ousting him, which will be making him look physically incapable of continuing, like saying he’s had a stroke or something. Congress/Senate has to believe it so they’ll go along with it.

We’ve already had a shooter with a near miss. … Probably a conservative who feels betrayed or person who is truly far left, (not just a progressive).

That person had been searching for info on the schedules of both Biden and trump. That along with some of the other info we learned about him makes me think it wasn’t so much a partisan political motivation as the desire to become famous and/or take someone famous down on his way off the planet.

I was just saying to use the which command to make sure you had installed the scan key tool in addition to installing the driver. Looks like you did, but it’s not detecting the device (otherwise the -l option would have listed it).

I have a Brother printer/scanner and have looked at their website for the drivers, but never bothered to download or install them since I haven’t needed them (so far).

If you got no output from those commands, maybe they did not get installed? Try entering the command

which brscan-skey

and it should tell you the path to where it is installed, or return no output if it is not installed.

I see on the page you linked there is the link to the scanner driver and there is also a link to the Scan Key Tool that it says allows scanning by pressing the button. Did you also install that?

They just forgot to mention the last step which is to put the result into plastic bags and put in the freezer.

The external player thing has never worked for me, at least when I set it to VLC, which just displays an error. I must be missing something.

Edit: thanks for the replies, next time I’ll try mpv and/or haruna

It’s happening to me, too. No VPN. They always fix issues like this pretty quickly (couple days or so). It’s always a constant battle to handle youtube’s ongoing attempts to block them.

The damage included “deep scratches and punctured tires.”

That’s it? Y’all Canadians are so polite.

Teslas are not real cars

I’ll check and see if I can do that with this one!