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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.worldtoMicroblog Memes@lemmy.worldOne Shop
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    19 hours ago

    Gunwalking (Wide Receiver/F&F) is at least allegedly intended to map firearm traffic for the purpose of orchestrating stings.

    I might argue the Republican scandalmongering was about shielding their deep state counterparts from being outed, rather than persecuting CIA linked gun trafficker assets in the ATF.

    But maybe I’m wrong. Maybe everybody is just stepping on one another’s dicks.


  • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.worldtoMicroblog Memes@lemmy.worldOne Shop
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    21 hours ago

    You hardly have to speculate.

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

    Condor was formally created in November 1975, when Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet’s spy chief, Manuel Contreras, invited 50 intelligence officers from Chile, Uruguay, Argentina, Paraguay, Bolivia, and Brazil to the Army War Academy in Santiago, Chile. The operation ended with the fall of the Argentine junta in 1983.

    In 1980, Regional Security Officer James Blystone had met with an Argentine Intelligence Source. In the declassified memo, Blystone had asked about the disappearance for two Montoneros that had plans to travel from Mexico to Brazil to meet with other Montoneros. The Argentine Intelligence Source had explained that they had been taken and interrogated, and later contacted their Mexican and Brazilian counterparts for approval to conduct an operation to capture the other Montoneros that were expecting their arrival. Once they were under custody, they had utilized fake documents to check into their hotel to impersonate their presence and not alert any other Montoneros of their capture. They were imprisoned at Campo de Mayo

    The Mexican Connection of the Iran Contra Affair

    In what newspapers here are calling ‘‘the Mexican connection’’ to the Iran-contra affair, the Mexican political establishment and its right-wing opposition are trading charges that each has maintained improper contacts with American organizations supplying aid to anti-Sandinista forces in Nicaragua.

    Critics of the opposition National Action Party accused the party of treason after it was disclosed last month that a prominent party member met several times in Washington last year with Carl R. (Spitz) Channell, director of the National Endowment for the Preservation of Liberty.

    Mr. Channell recently pleaded guilty to conspiracy to defraud the American Government by raising tax-deductible contributions for a purpose that was not deductible: buying arms for the contras. He was an associate of Lieut. Col. Oliver L. North, who developed the contra arms supply network while working for President Reagan’s National Security Council.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C3%A9rida_Initiative

    Some examples of Mexico’s paramilitary abuses at the time included the sexual assault and rape of dozens of female detainees by police in San Salvador Atenco, and the disappearances of dozens of teachers in the state of Oaxaca in 2006, as well as the killings of seven innocent bystanders, including the American journalist Brad Will by off-duty policemen. Almost half of Mexican police officers examined in 2008 failed background and security tests, a figure that rose to nearly 9 of 10 policemen in the border state of Baja California


  • At least with Trump you know you’re getting a bad deal

    People legit don’t. That’s the unlimited power of the conservative echo chamber. True Conservatives Has Never Really Been Tried is a claim that echoes back to the fucking Nixon Administration. In another eight years, Republicans will be complaining that The Donald was too Woke and insisting Ted Cruz / Ron DeSantis are the only ones brave enough to do Real Conservatism.


  • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.worldtoMicroblog Memes@lemmy.worldNo no no
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    4 days ago

    It’s weird to see billions of dollars and thousands of media-hours invested into a massive industrial scale propaganda engine. And then, after all of that time and money and manpower, we get a “I can’t believe you fell for it”.

    This is regardless of who wins. I remember conservatives smugly insisting their debt-sunk kids and grandkids were idiots for supporting Biden. I remember smug liberals pointing to the shoddy fly-by-night wall building operation on the border and insisting “You fucking idiot border conservatives got what you paid for.” I remember conservatives, in turn, laughing at all the liberals who thought Obama would bring about universal health care and climate change reforms and high speed rail.

    Every fucking cycle we get this smug “Haha, you idiots fell for it.”


  • I genuinely enjoyed the early game. It had a lot of promise, the build up of tension was engaging, the world they laid out was exactly the kind of FF7 techno-magical cyberpunk and sorcery mish mash Final Fantasy does well. I loved the characters as they were introduced and was curious to see whether the wanna-be boy band aesthetic would culminate in an FFX-2 style dance battle motif.

    But its obvious they just ran out of gas after the first major arc. All that world building up front, but the game completely falls apart after you leave the main continent. By then of the game, you’re literally On Rails after giving you this rich open world to explore for a hundred hours upfront. Tons of buildup but very little payoff. Not what you want in an FF title. I was deeply disappointed in FF13’s Big Hallway style of storytelling, but at least the story paid out in the end.




  • you’ve helped elect the orange felon

    I never see liberals say this shit to Obama or Clinton, despite Barry and Hildawg being the two most invigorating force behind the 2016 Trump climb to the top of the GOP Primary. I don’t see them flinging it at the Starmer campaign staff, who popped across the pond to neatly derail Harris’s poll climb with their shitty advice. I certainly don’t see any mention of the DNC, the Dem donor class, or anyone who actually ran for office taking blame.

    But hey, maybe cuddle up closer to your friends the Cheneys next election cycle. Maybe they’ve got the secret sauce that wins elections.


  • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.worldtoMicroblog Memes@lemmy.worldConsent machine
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    7 days ago

    I’m not sure the incessant chorus of 'I told you so’s is really helping the cause.

    I’ve heard so much MSNBC bigotry in the last month.

    “Palestinians cost us the election!”

    “Trans people cost us the election!”

    “Hispanics cost us the election!”

    “Everyone under 40 cost us the election!”

    This is typically followed by some sickeningly smug “I hope they enjoy what they get” from the most vile and repulsive insider slime the party has to offer. And now Dem Leadership is just throwing up its hands, insisting Trump’s just a dictator now and there’s nothing any of them can do.

    Hell, the fucking CIA - the agency that exists to topple foreign governments - seems equally indolent and feckless. So, idk. Maybe saying “I told you so” isn’t impacting the cause one way or another.


  • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.worldtoMicroblog Memes@lemmy.worldConsent machine
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    7 days ago

    It’s the Palestinian Muslim Leftists who have completely overrun our beloved liberal institutions and undermined them. These tankies are the fifth column that brought Harris’s glorious march to office down from the inside.

    We clearly need to purge our companies, our schools, and our political organizations of anyone who resembles, aligns with, or appears to look like a Palestinian or a Leftist sympathizer.

    We absolutely must do this in order to Beat Trump. You do want to Beat Trump, don’t you?


  • There’s truth in that to a degree. But so long as mass media can stir the pot and create public anxiety where none existed before, even a strong egalitarian economic model is insufficient to deter interpersonal violence.

    Americans bombarded by “Shoplifter Alert!” and “Murder Spree!” and “Rape Gangs Terrorizing Your Neighborhood!” news coverage are going to be deeply suspicious of anyone they don’t recognize (and more than a few they do recognize). People will lash out in fits of paranoia and induced terror, then claim self-defense against their victims. And if we’ve instilled a legitimacy to this fear in the general public, they’ll get away with it.


  • Religious figures can, and do, exist without the need for “miracles”. Siddhartha Gautama (the Buddha), Confucius, and Socrates are all venerated for their philosophy rather than any particular supernatural aspects of their existence. Even in Christianity, the back half of The Gospels are just letters distributed among the apostles focused on building up the Catholic Church as an institution. The miraculous Jesus was something religious scholars had to lobby as canonical for centuries before it was officially recognized. And the Gnostic movement - the really whoo-whoo side of Christianity that hinged on some even more esoteric beliefs - never maintained the kind of following that the more secularized “Jesus is a philosopher king we should emulate” attitude of subsequent Christian groups.




  • I think this is less a question of Canada being afraid of America and more a question of the US/Canadian working class being terrified of a bunch of hotheads feeding the rest of us into a military meatgrinder to assuage their bloated egos.

    To paraphrase the legendary boxer Mohammad Ali when he refused enlistment to the Vietnam War, “I Ain’t Got No Quarrel With Them Canadian Mounted Police”.


  • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.worldtoMicroblog Memes@lemmy.worldIt died years ago
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    9 days ago

    a very small percentage of actually intelligent people have carried the rest

    That’s both historically and empirically obviously untrue. The sheer volume of professional labor necessary for our society to function smoothly requires legions of intelligent people showing up every day to solve problems particular to their rarefied areas of expertise. Your cell phone doesn’t work, your car doesn’t start, your pipes don’t carry water, your lights don’t turn on - hell, in more than a few cases your heart doesn’t even beat - without these armies of professionals working, often entirely invisibly, to keep things moving.

    The world does not turn without the strong arm of proletariat labor moving the wheel.

    But individual intelligence isn’t enough on its own merits. Humanity needs a guiding light to function morally and productively. The professionals down at the power plant keeping the lights on don’t know if they’re powering your dishwasher or your electric chair. Their genius is wasted if the surplus they produce is squandered or applied with malicious intent. Attributing their actions to stupidity is naive, as you’re ignoring their professional role in order to indict them for actions they have little meaningful control over. Appealing for their collective punishment only plays into the wickedness that you claim to oppose.

    What we have in our modern moment is a very small percentage of nefarious people controlling our means of communication and observation. Monopolies of print and broadcast media limit what we are allowed to observe. Reams of propaganda, distributed physically and electronically, pollute our ability to understand the material world. Rational impulses are distorted by fearmongering. Prudent decision making is complicated by deceit and fraud. Our homes are enclosed, our labor is commodified, and our ability to organize against it is criminalized thanks to the actions of the few in an effort to predate on the many.

    Believing that we lack a critical mass of “smart” people is a huge mistake, because it demands too much from singular human intelligence and too little from the social structures that perpetuate history, culture, and identity. What we lack in this moment isn’t brilliance. We are thick with geniuses all competing against one another in a zero-sum game. What we lack is a cohesive and durable community. One that sees the virtue of charity and compassion. One that treats the most vulnerable as generously as the most valuable.

    You don’t need a genius to see the merits of a neighborhood full of people you can trust. You don’t need to be a genius in order to survive a world where you love your neighbors more than you fear them.




  • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.worldtoMemes@lemmy.mlI'm a leftist
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    9 days ago

    FDR was a leftist because of the policies he implemented.

    Its hard to argue a politician is something other than his policies.

    you are missing is why he implemented those policies

    The why hardly matters. Only the consequences. You can definitely argue that FDR failed to cement the more progressive programs (fully employment through public agencies, public control of finance and agriculture, a long term peaceful coexistence with the Soviet states). And for that reason, he was a kind-of failure. But I would argue putting the weight of the world on one man’s shoulders is deeply unfair. FDR took US policy as far as he could. Then it was Truman and Eisenhower and their lackeys who fumbled the bag (or capitulated to corporate interests deliberately).

    His strategy to contain the CP was to neuter the party by bringing it into the Democratic party fold, alienating their most militant members, and slowly squashing their agenda.

    The Democratic Party, as a whole, has a vested interest in neutralizing rival movements and harvesting their members. That’s not a strategy FDR invented or pioneered. Neither was the DemSoc liberalism of FDR incompatible with a more Reform Oriented American Communist Movement. The strategy worked in large part because American Communists saw FDR’s outreach to Stalin’s Russia and Mao’s China as a positive turn foreshadowing a real global movement.

    I might argue that Stalin’s “Communism in One Country” and Mao’s failure to open China up until Nixon, thirty years later, that did more damage than FDR’s liberal-washing of Communist organizing efforts. I could easily argue that the Truman/Eisenhower Cold War was what ultimately did in the American Communists. Socialists couldn’t uproot Hoover from the FBI or unseat McCarthy from a strong union state like Wisconsin or keep guys like Nixon or Kennedy from worming their way into the upper echelons of the US government on a wave of mafia money.

    At some point, you have to acknowledge the failures within the leftist organizing movements that happened in the US. Deng and Khrushchev and Ho Chi Mein and Kim Il Sung didn’t collapse in the face of these problems in their home states and they all had it much worse.


  • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.worldtoMemes@lemmy.mlI'm a leftist
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    9 days ago

    He did a lot more than “save capitalism”. Social Security, the Citizens Conservation Corpse, and the full blown WW2-era command economy (complete with ration cards and production quotas and public housing for all the rapidly mobilized industrial workers) had far more in common with Stalinism than Coolidge’s laisse-faire market economy. Hell, FDR even had his share of gulags, when you consider how Japanese Internment Camps were created and administered.

    There is no future for humanity with oligarchs like him and his family

    There’s a sharp line between an oversized land baron clutching a fist full of stock certificates and a popular elected bureaucrat charged with administering the public labor force.

    Oligarchy can’t just be “guy with rich parents” or it quickly descends into austerity fetishism. Oligarchy is fundamentally anti-populist. It requires a strong centralized police force to compel a broad, disorganized public into acting against their own material interests. FDR’s New Deal was a meaningful shift away from oligarchy precisely because he adopted policies from his left-leaning proletarian base in defiance of the Depression-Era economic elites. And he implemented them with the enthusiastic support of the body public. Nobody was getting held up at gunpoint to take a salary from the Parks’ Department or to pile into Keynesian school house construction programs or to patch up wounded soldiers at the VA.

    FDR’s personal wealth gave him a platform upon which to propagandize left-liberal policies on a national stage. But his messages resonated because they had a popular basis not because he simply hammered people with Madison Avenue propaganda.