Next level?

Ooooooh nooooo!

https://x.com/RnaudBertrand/status/1786968298636423210

Every time China visits we get a hospital, every time Britain visits we get a lecture

BUT.

AT.

WHAT.

COST!

You’re also blind if you just say “America bad” at every opportunity.

It’s shooting fish in a barrel. You don’t need to aim to carefully when you’ve got a target rich environment.

No, many of the things he’s doing are absolutely not in the interest of the billionaire class

Its not in the best long term interests of the country. But then neither is having a billionaire class to begin with. Trump’s looting various cash-rich institutions and easily extorted organizations and individuals for the benefit of his cronies. That’s necessarily bad for the targets of exploitation and good for his in-group, however you might project their futures over the long term.

And yes, he’s serving some of them, particularly Peter Thiel. But he’s mostly serving Putin and himself.

Nobody in Russia, least of all Vladimir Putin, is well-served by the US continuing to arm and instigate conflicts between Russia and Ukraine. And yet that’s exactly what our foreign services continue to do. You can trace this right back to 2018, when Trump shoveled out a bunch of anti-aircraft missile systems and anti-tank weapons to Ukrainian Nationalists.

Trump’s firmly in the pocket of the Military Industrial Complex. And that occasionally breaks for or against Russia, depending on who is buying. But it is always and forever a policy that favors more international conflicts and more arms sales because US exports of weapons is a GOP moneymaker.

And even Hillary isn’t the devil incarnate you think she is.

Hillary and Trump were friends. They’ve been political allies and social circle buddies since the 1990s. She egged him on to run in 2016 because she thought he’d be her cat’s paw.

If you hate Trump, you should despise Hillary.

Hey now, if you hand everyone a “Hitler” card in Secret Hitler, it plays very strangely but in the end everyone wins.

Idk about “useless”. But the way the article doesn’t seem to want to mention the read/write speed is definitely indicative of some drawbacks to the medium. They repeatedly stress “cold storage” which could mean its a useful form of long term archive or backup for static data. Plenty of demand for that kind of information, especially in an era when real time overwriting by malicious actors and artificial engines has been fucking with historical data retention.

But its not going to replace your hard drive any time soon.

Anyone get the IO on this device? Cause I’m guessing its going to be less good than magnetic storage.

I assumed the Ghost of Christmas Imperative would just be shouting “CELEBRATE CHRISTMAS!” over and over again, while blowing an air horn that plays carols.

Because his brand of “politics” is dumb, destabilizing shit that’s bad for America and Americans.

We’ve had dumb, destabilizing policies in this country since its founding. That’s got nothing to do with the politics of the civil services. Plenty of civil servants are full-on MAGA adherents (and have been even before his first election in '16). Plenty more are die-hard Hillarycrat Libs who have dragged the country in another direction. Trump’s game is to stack his MAGA cronies above the Hillarycrats withint compromising the function of the civil service entirely, rendering it useless.

Trump only serves himself, Putin, and indirectly, Xi.

Jesus fuck dude. Have you really been watching US politics for this long and still not seen Trump acting in the explicit interests of the American billionaire class? Why do you think the Chinese President is closer to his heart than the people he pulled into his own cabinet - Lutnick, McMahon, Vought, and Loeffler? Nevermind Peter Thiel, a man who has become the nation’s premiere military contractor over the last year.

Nevermind fucking Israel.

How are you liberals this fucking blind? Trump’s CIA is systematically picking apart what’s left of Russian industry. His Pentagon is fixated on purging Chinese businesses from the Western Hemisphere. His Treasury has made cryptocurrency speculation a central tenant of fiscal policy. But y’all can’t stop saying “Foreign Men Did This” every time you look at your own decayed socio-economic system.

Also, did you just link me Trump admin propaganda

Go Lib Out to the WaPo if that’s your poison of choice.

Or reference Congress.gov for an official definition.

Or just bury your head in the sand for another four years.

was there ever a platform that didn’t went to shit?

I guess you can argue that 4chan started out as shit and had nowhere better to go.

I might also note that platforms are, at their heart, reflections of the people who run them. And people get older, they leave certain platforms and join others, their tastes and interests change over time.

I think Reddit was doomed the day Aaron Swartz left way back in 2007. And I tend to see platforms and websites fumble the bag at the transition. No idea what’s going to happen to Wikipedia once Jimmy Wales is gone, for instance.

But new stuff comes in to fill the gaps. Its hard to see in hindsight, but there’s always green shoots on the horizon. You often simply don’t realize how nice a thing is until its gone.

Trump complained that a secret inner cabal of career bureaucrats would oppose him. And he wasn’t wrong. The various federal agencies are a seven layer dip of careerist holdovers from prior administrations, many of who were hostile to his brand of politics for one reason or another.

Trump’s framing of the existence and internal opposition by career bureaucrats was that of some insidious anti-American cabal. But the fundamental problem is one every new President faces. Namely, the Burrowing In of political appointees to civil service career roles.

This isn’t a new problem, either. Thomas Jefferson was complaining about the problem hires left behind under the Adams administration. Burrowed-in Democrats plagued Lincoln for much of his tenure and were behind many of the smears aimed at Kennedy after the failed Bay of Pigs Invasion (an Eisenhower-era plot that cost Allen Dulles his job when it humiliated JFK).

How presidents deal with recalcitrant career staffers and opposition party moles can define their administrations. This isn’t a problem Trump just made up. It’s one he doesn’t know how to deal with gracefully.

So to ignore class and imperialism in your advocacy for trans rights means to effectively throw the majority of trans people under the bus.

I mean… this is literally what the liberals have said they want to do, re: 2024

Democrats Lost Voters on Transgender Rights. Winning Them Back Won’t Be Easy.

The number of policies liberals seem willing to support shrinks with every election cycle as reactionaries in national media flog them for speaking out. Police Brutality in 2014. Health care in 2016. Climate Change in 2018. Student Debt in 2020. Opposition to Genocide in 2022. It seems 2024 was the year we had to stop caring about LGBTQ.

I wonder what we’ll be asked to give up next in our quest to win that “Moderate” voter.

That’s Future Ms Juan Guaidó to you

From what I’m reading, this became a cycle of “I’m going to report you to the Admins for being mean” / “I’m going to be even meaner because you reported me to the Admins” hate that culminated in the internet-standard doxing and revenge-porn-ing before it went legal.

For some reason, the practice of reposting people’s OnlyFans material outside the paywall in an effort to humiliate them is… fine? But getting lawyers involved over the release is over the line?

I’ve seen her comic pop up here and there regularly. They’re pretty basic and uncontroversial. The art is… fine. Family Circus tier material.

Didn’t even know she had an onlyfans. I can’t imagine people are flocking to “Reddit is run by assholes” content because she flashed her tits online. You don’t really need one to get the other.

Reddit Admins hate user interactions. User interactions cost more money to oversee than passive readers.

Much of Reddit policy boils down to “get unsponsored users off our platform”. They don’t want your comments. They don’t want your posts. They don’t want your drama. They don’t want your input. They want you to show up, look at the sponsored links, maybe click a few, validate the advertisers’ spending on media influence, then keep fucking scrolling.

If you’re doing anything other than that, you’re a net lose to the company and you are uninvited from the platform.

Its a bit like going into a casino and winning money. Casinos don’t exist to pay you. Social Media doesn’t exist to platform you. You’re supposed to be a revenue generator, not a cost center. If you behave otherwise, the business will cut you just like they try to cut every other net-negative expense.

I was gonna say, only now?

We love to play the “Obama/Biden were the good ones, they knew how to bomb people and sanction countries ethically” game.

For all Trump’s poison, he was dead to rights on the idea of the Deep State - the core bureaucracy of the US government that demands global hegemony and just can’t decide how to achieve it.

Trump’s been miserable at executing hegemony the liberal way. And we’re expected to believe this will make his administration a failure.

But then you look at fascist Middle Eastern states expanding their territory, South American dictatorships sprouting like weeds, and far-right parties gaining ground all over Europe. Hard to ignore that Palantir is doing just fine. White Nationalists are having a heyday from Texas to Tel Aviv.

Clearly, US hegemony is expanding, just not in the way the Clinton/Cheney neocons imagined it.

Corporate Media can’t seem to decided whether we’re undergoing a fascist takeover or finally Making America Great Again.

I dread to read what the history books say about our country in another ten years, knowing what kind of fucked up AI is writing them today.

Chile swings between extreme reactionary and soggy liberal, much like most countries trapped within the US sphere of influence.

Boric’s been caught in the same South American dragnet of economic pressure as every other non-US aligned country on the continent. And the heavily privatized economy - vulnerable to market manipulations and outsider financed media influence - is ripe for these kinds of faux-populist shifts, precisely because Boric couldn’t make actual socialization of the economy a part of his platform.

Now we’ve got another Milei running a South American economy. And the US knocking hard on the door of Venezuela, ready to install Maria Corina Machado if they can oust Maduro before Trump/Hegseth get distracted by another spot on the map. Get ready for predictable results.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medical_diplomacy

Curiously, the three other global leaders in Medical Diplomacy are Cuba, China, and Taiwan. One of the biggest critiques of Trump’s cuts to USAID has been “you’re opening up inroads for evil foreign influence peddling campaigns”.

And there’s been a certain confirmation of this, from the African side of the conversation.

Every time China visits we get a hospital, every time Britain visits we get a lecture.

~ Dr Lubinda Haabazoka, Director of the University of Zambia Graduate School of Business and former President of the Economics Association of Zambia

In South Sudan, specifically, Chinese diplomats have been aggressively peddling direct aid and coordinating international aid.

Meanwhile, the American administrations have persisted in its campaign of economic sanction as a tool to pressure players in the region