The only way this gig is ethically justifiable is if the support act is a guillotine.

Obviously there’s a proxy war between russia and the west in ukraine, but I don’t think the US wants a long attritional war.

They could have done more to not end up in one, but I think escalation management really is driving a lot of decisions in washington.

Bauxite is the obvious one. Bringing bauxite to Australia. How could you forget about bauxite?

That headline really is a thing of beauty. It’s like finding out that your trash is piling up because the city retasked all the sanitation workers to lie in fields of filth and create a heavenly host of garbage angels.

Being angry at voters and calling them idiots over choices the democratic party made doesn’t help defeat trump.

Anyone not voting for Biden because of Gaza is a fucking idiot.

The democracts insist on maintaining this position despite the mountain of evidence that it’s driving down turn out in their base, and does not represent the wishes of the electorate.

Why is it that voters have to swallow genocide, and not that democrats have to stop perpetuating electorally unpopular genocide?

Of course trump will be worse and i’ll be holding my nose and voting for biden but it makes no sense to blame voters for the inevitable and foreseeable consequences of the imperial cowardice of the democratic party.

I generally recoil from comparing biden to putin but this really requires russian levels of post-truth politics.

Israel is committing war crimes like trump commits all his crimes - openly, in public and shielded by US elites.

I can’t not read that in a garbled south african accent.

Uber is a bad faith actor, their business model is entirely monopoly-seeking. If they’re trying to expand into bus routes, the goal will be to reduce the choices available to just Uber.

But Hamas won, they completely control the ‘unity’ government and Fatah have vastly less power. If divide and conquer was the goal Netanyahu would have been funneling resources to Fatah and not Hamas. But he has consistently empowered Hamas because the international community can’t accept a Hamas-led state.

That ended over 15 years ago.

I am guessing their calculation is that losing support of Israel lobby is 100% loss?

Yeah, I’ve been presuming that’s a significant part of it. That and the importance of a dependent and dependable ally to help anchor US security architecture in a vital region. Israel needs US imperial presence in the region. Saudi just benefits from it.

US support for Israel continuing the current conflict or US support for Israel in general? If really forced into it, maybe the Democrats can withdraw their blessing for the current conflict, but I don’t see how they could end support for Israel. If Putin wins the US election who knows what could happen but short of that Israel is just too important to the US empire and they know it. I mostly believe the official line from Washington that they don’t have that much leverage against Israel - in the sense that Bibi&co have enough counter levers to make acting against them more costly than it’s worth for the Democrats.

Hence the bullshit antisemitism law, the brutalizing of campus protests, etc. Democrats are even willing to drive down turn out among their base in one of the most important elections in US history over this - I just don’t see them doing that if they had a better card to play.

I doubt it will change even if the US withdraws support, but I’m a cynical depressive type.

Our fundamentally inhuman treatment of the Palestinian people led to October 7.

There are only two ways to prevent it happening again. We could stop the unconscionable deprivations we inflict on the Palestinian people or we could speed up the genocide we’ve been engaged in.

No surprises that the government compromised of war criminals and people the Israeli courts have deemed to be terrorists are going for the later. The far right are in charge and they’re pretty open that this is the goal.

It’s not divide and conquer, that implies keeping multiple groups at parity and fighting each other. Israel intentionally kept the crazies in charge to undermine the viability of a Palestinian state.

Quick check of the post history shows nothing but vitriol and unrealistically black and white thinking. Classic signs of depression.

I hope things get better for you, but in the meantime you’re an easy block.

the operation is highly organised, technically savvy

Of course an operation this sophisticated targets people looking to buying luxury brands for cheap, that sounds like an ideal mark.

It’s very naive to think that a weapons dealer who also kills it’s commercial airline passengers for profit isn’t also killing whistleblowers.

Google was accused of enacting a policy instructing employees to turn chat history off by default when discussing sensitive topics

According to the DOJ, Google destroyed potentially hundreds of thousands of chat sessions not just during their investigation but also during litigation. Google only stopped the practice after the DOJ discovered the policy. DOJ’s attorney Kenneth Dintzer told Mehta Friday that the DOJ believed the court should "conclude that communicating with history off shows anti-competitive intent to hide information because they knew they were violating antitrust law.

It’s perfectly reasonable to see this practice of avoiding the creation of evidence of their wrongdoing as evidence of wrongdoing, which is 100% what it is.

It’s not the same as a person using TOR, it’s a company hiding evidence.