That way of putting it has always belied the sheer amount of propaganda the rich have poured into making people believe they can be the chosen one to get rich. From scam artists selling get rich quick schemes to syrupy news stories about the kid who dropped out and got rich. Financial news regularly runs stories meant to make people think they’re not budgeting hard enough if they can’t make ends meet. (spoiler alert there’s always a tertiary source of income involved, but it’s buried deep in the article.)

And when things are clearly enunciated, like plans to tax people over 400k, there’s suddenly tons of stories about how they’re just normal people who can barely make ends meet. They’re just like Mr. Fast food worker, they might even have to sell their house if you taxed their stocks! (Just never ask which vacation house that is or how many rooms it has)

Rather than “copping out” by pointing all this out, I want a counter narrative. Until we get a strong counter narrative people will continue to succumb to this propaganda.

I almost forgot, the numerous commercials where corporations swear they’re a good corporate citizen and you can trust them to have your best interests in mind. While they put all their wrong doing under legal secrecy so people can’t even see the problem we need to fix. For example did you know Walmart and Pepsi got caught in a massive price fixing scheme? One that likely extends across most Walmart grocery products and could be partially responsible for our high grocery prices? (Pepsi collaborated to make sure no other store could afford to sell Pepsi products for less than Wal-Mart by charging those stores more if they dropped their prices. This effectively let Wal-Mart set the price floor wherever they wanted.)

You don’t get this stuff on CNN. And it’s the stuff that actually impacts our daily lives.

I agree. And the Americans who need help the most do not have the time or energy to put into it. So it’s left to the people who do and very few of them actually care about the working poor.

They aren’t the arbiter of what is and isn’t a war.

Yes, that is technically true. It is also completely legal. For reference it is also legal to shoot an enemy soldier in the back as they run away. It is legal to shoot an enemy soldier in any case except where they are clearly trying to surrender, including if they are just laying there unconscious.

The rules of war allow for far more than people realize. And Again, I’m not trying to let them off the hook. There’s real questions about this entire thing being a war crime and about their targeting of bombs.

I loved reading his definition of a war crime. It’s basically describing himself at this point, a person sick of mind who is powerful and rich with nuclear weapons. No reasonable leader gets on a social media platform and sends, “Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell – JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah.”

No reasonable president threatens to destroy an entire civilization.

It takes a sickness of the mind to justify hitting civilian targets just because they indirectly benefit the military.

Americans are reaching very high levels of political disengagement. Most Americans know it doesn’t matter who they vote for. They haven’t seen real reforms out of either party, except to make the rich a lot richer. Combine that with the hassle it is to vote in many places and people have just stopped caring unless their personal life gets too bad.

It’s exhausting voting for promises that never materialize or seem to always monkey paw into a way for corporations to suck up all the benefits. People are tired.

And yeah, it’s on purpose. The more disengaged people get, the more the elite can legally rob them.

Unfortunately what is allowed in war is still pretty brutal. This was a warship and it would be a legitimate target from the moment the war started, without exception.

Let’s focus on the actual war crimes, like the Pentagon redefining “military target” to include destroying energy, food, and fresh water infrastructure because soldiers need to drink water too… Hitting those targets would still be a war crime, the Pentagon is not the arbiter of what is and isn’t a military target.

Oh Undoubtedly. I look forward to all the explanations as to why it’s Capitalism when we do it and Socialism when Venezuela does it.

They’re gonna nationalize our oil aren’t they? Required sale to the government at a set rate and then government will turn around and sell into the domestic and international markets to balance prices at our pumps.

It’s about the only option other than stop bombing Iran and that’s not happening.

Hold on I got a thing for that around here somewhere… I think is called a DD214 or something? Oh here’s a PT belt that’ll work.

Yup. The US Patent office isn’t very good at it’s job.

I got bad news for you. Gabe is human and barring a miracle in medical science; he will die. He’s 63, the tables on Age Cohort death aren’t kind after 60. (They’re brutal after 70) Only 1/3rd of men reach 80.

This is something we need to be thinking about now. It could easily take 5-10 years to get competitors working.

Monopolies distort markets even when they act in a pro-consumer manner. For example the credit card companies. A basic credit card is really cheap and easy for the average person to use. All of the fees are actually on the business side, which is why you see businesses that still run on cash only or charge a credit card fee. The credit card network operators, (AMEX, Disc, MC, VISA) are the only option for businesses that want to accept credit cards in the US. You don’t see a Debit card fee because it’s actually illegal for them to pass along the Debit card processing fee.

So while the average person with the line of credit is happy about this, the businesses are not. In a normal system you would pay for the service being provided. So the person with the card would be responsible for paying to have that access.

Steam does this by making their product (the storefront) free to the average person and charging the developers money to use it. While they also effectively own your games. In a system with plenty of storefronts it might be much more common to see downloadable installation files. That’s certainly one way in which they’ve distorted the market. That used to be very common. It doesn’t help that EA, GamePass, and some others who’ve tried to start storefronts have repeatedly tripped over their own feet. Epic seems to be doing it but they’re basically using Steam’s business model because there’s no other choice as long as Steam exerts it’s monopoly power.

It’s nearly to $7/gal here.

If you actually look at the reconstruction period it never really happened at all. Which is largely because Lincoln’s successor didn’t believe in it.

Hehe, snuggling job.

The thing about IFF systems is you have to use them for them to work…

So this is why they’re turning VA lawyers into part time prosecutors. Great.

The US military can’t even keep it’s operations properly secret because privates have to tell their AI girlfriend what they’re up to. You really think they could keep shoot downs secret? There’s 5,000 sailors on an Aircraft carrier. This isn’t the CIA.

Trick question. Obviously you should be running a PVS 14 on an elbow mount. If you need a magnifier to shoot it then you’re far enough away to kill it with the radio.