I’m against the death penalty in general, but I also acknowledge that in terms of tangible damage to humanity, any billionaire walking the Earth makes any serial killer who has ever walked the Earth seem positively quaint by scale.

I also recognize that we are living under class occupation. The owner class handily won the class war by convincing most of the developed world not to fight it half a century ago.

The peasants don’t have the luxury of taking prisoners. We are the losers of a war, in spite of the fact that many have come to worship their occupying oppressors.

Keeping the most destructive humans locked away and well fed until they die of natural causes is a peacetime luxury for those in charge, and unless you’re holding a reprehensible amount of capital, that isn’t us. You might believe we are in peacetime, but if we refuse to stop them, and it looks that way, they will force our shared, communal habitat to stop us all through their insatiable, sociopathic avarice.

We love to think we’re not, but we’re still subjects wholly dependant on this world, even the owners activily attacking us and it simultaneously.

We’re no less corrupt in the US, merely more expensive.

Our cheats just hire lobbyists to make their corrupt practices legal, shout out to Citizens United, and/or hire enough lawyers to make the consequences meaningless, like fining a company that makes billions a year thousands for profitable criminal activity.

Our “solution” to corruption is simply to make it legal for the right price. Donald Trump should have lost his empire and gone to jail for his business practices long before he was a game show host, let alone POTUS, but he learned and inherited enough from daddy to understand how to wield American style corruption, and he’s still free.

Since there’s no rational hope of addressing the other 3k or so billionaire parasites on Earth without building a really big Titanic wreckage tour sub and making little paths of stock certificates leading to it like reese’s pieces in ET, I’ll take whatever incidental vicarious revenge against humanity’s oppressors I can get.

There’s no good argument in allowing mergers of companies that are already large enough to be publicly traded at all.

Honestly the whole private shareholder parasite that produces nothing, aside from the chips from their last trip to the exploitation casino, and demands and gets almost every net cent of profit produced is the root cause of most of humanity’s great crises. Value/capital earned/made should be tied largely to the quantity/quality/expertise of contributed LABOR, not passive speculative investment, aka gambling, often with loaded market pressure dice and marked insider information cards.

There’s a damned good reason, prior to the Reaganomics/Jack Welch giveaway, that the normal business model was customers first, employees second, investors third: because without the first two no one makes anything, and the third only consumes and demands like petulant infants demanding a baba.

Now it’s investors first and only, which is not sustainable, just look around at all the mergers enshittifying every economic sector’s ability to produce the goods and services they existed to provide in the first place.

Honestly I have more respect for the literalists than the ones that recognize the crazy, but pick and choose which beliefs within their religion they’re willing to swallow the crazy of rather than walking away.

If you’re going to choose to be a nutter, at least fucking commit.

I wonder how many US Presidents actually were believers and how many were just going through the motions because until recently in our history not identifying as one made you a pariah in the US, unwelcome in all the little clubs that could lead to the Presidency.

Obama seemed way too logical and analytical to actually buy into such irrational things. Trump clearly doesn’t, purely out of narcissistic self-importance making himself his own deity/object of worship.

Nah, everything seems right to them, they just plop the knife on the corpse after.

You’re incorrect. He said it in interviews constantly, and in one of his books (which he narrated the audio book for so he said it there too).

“Don’t confuse me with those who cling to hope. I enjoy describing how things are, I have no interest in how they ‘ought to be.’ And I certainly have no interest in fixing them. I sincerely believe that if you think there’s a solution, you’re part of the problem. My motto: Fuck Hope!”

-George Carlin, excerpt from his book Brain Droppings

The NYT Strikes me as an organization that would rather attempt to continue to exist under Trump than try to fight the rising fascist tide he’s riding.

They’ve always been that high on themselves, and they’ve always been pragmatists to the point of standing for nothing except their own gravitas.

“But sir! We still all need to breathe the Earth’s air!”

Then build me a climate change bunker in New Zealand with its own ventilation system! You can’t come. Line must go up!

Embracer joins TimeWarnerHBODiscoveryParamountSoonblahblahblah in confirming capitalism is in its terminal stage.

No unexploited markets in which to further to grow/metastasize, and entire economic sectors eating their own tails to be gutted of their ability to actually make the products/services their sector existed to provide in the first place for a short term stock bump celebrating cruelty.

This is a fire sale, and the capitalists know it. The worst bit is, it’s happening in every economic sector, even the life and death ones.

When’s the last time you’ve heard of a pizza delivery person going to the wrong house and killing someone?

Doesn’t happen.

The GOP establishment, which the Federalist Society that now controls the SCOTUS represents, never liked Trump.

They spent decades turning their base into conspiratorial, counterfactual nitwits through the media they own because then they could easily tell them “climate change isnt real! Give rich people all the money! Poor people made bad decisions!” etc, and rob everyone blind to thunderous applause and their nitwits defending the owner’s grift from the rest of us.

Then one day a notorious opportunist got up on stage, said the quiet parts out loud, co-opted that engineered willfull ignorance, and stole their nitwit brigade right out from under them. Remember, the turning point for Trump was the day he told the crowd he’d like to take protesters out back and “beat the shit” out of them. Prior to that he was hiring extras to attend his rallies.

The Machiavellian Mitch McConnells and John Roberts have been quietly seething ever since. Trump makes them feel dirty because he embodies the crassness of the con they’ve been leading their nitwit voters around by from a sterile distance. Their crass nitwits aren’t supposed to bleed into their halls of power! Their careful, coordinated long game grift compromised by a 2 bit snake oil song and dance grifter.

AGI confirmed.

They’ve already surpassed our wildest imaginations.

My dad cooked steak like this.

I thought I hated steak until I became an adult and tried a properly prepared one.

I miss r/scarysigns

In my experience as a sysadmin, corporate structure almost always sees workers as liabilities that must be micromanaged, prodded, and scrutinized in regards to productivity, regardless of profits.

A good manager who wants happy, productive workers that don’t quietly work against their employer knows when NOT to enforce the standard corporate HR patronizing infantilizing bullshit.

It sounds like you’ve either worked for small organizations or had good managers that recognize the reality that skillled workers like you are more competent and important to keeping the paychecks flowing than the connected narcissistic idiots on the top floor that get off on flexing power and barking irrational dictates just to hear themselves bark.

Remember, the workers make and do everything that keeps the world running. The scientists and engineers do the inventing and discovering. The capitalist owners just take all the money and the social credit, they don’t actually do or know anything that benefits anyone but themselves. Even their supposed “charity” is usually used as an excuse to get praise while robbing the commons of owed tax revenue by writing it off, which makes it a transaction, not charity at all. Charity is giving and expecting nothing in return, save a warm fuzzy feeling inside. And they often “donate” to arts and political causes, while the victims of the society they bleed dry and leave to crumble die of exposure to the elements in tent cities.

Steve Jobs, who made like he was prometheus bringing the iPhone down from Olympus, couldn’t have repaired a broken iPhone with access to every lab, component, and schematic in Silicon valley, a month, and a gun to his head. He wasn’t even smart enough to go to real doctors and take real medicine when he was dying.

This is way too uplifting for C&H

Positively wholesome.

If civilians are civilians…

"Amongst Israelis, 69% of those killed were civilians and 31% members of the IDF. The number of Israeli civilians killed, from attacks by Palestinian armed groups or individuals, has declined steadily, peaking in 2002 at an average of 22 deaths per month, and dropping markedly to an average of one civilian per month in 2007. 6/

In contrast to Israeli figures, however, Palestinian civilian fatalities have remained high. Palestinian civilians, killed by Israeli security forces, peaked with an average of 35 deaths per month in 2002, and again in 2004. In 2007 they dropped slightly to an average of ten civilian deaths per month."

https://www.un.org/unispal/document/auto-insert-208380/

Both sides kill civilians with abandon, and Israel is markedly better at it. Major media doesn’t seem to care very much about Palestinian civilians though.