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Joined 8 months ago
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Cake day: November 6th, 2023

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  • Lobbying groups. One of which advocates for a Palestinian state alongside Israel, which is essentially opposed to Likud policy.

    lobbying, any attempt by individuals or private interest groups to influence the decisions of government; in its original meaning it referred to efforts to influence the votes of legislators, generally in the lobby outside the legislative chamber.

    Again, that hardly meets the “controls British politics” argument. An unwarranted and potentially scandalous level of quid-pro-quo/ influence sure - but the Russian money and rot is more important to root out of British politics imo





  • Unfortunately Boeing genuinely has become “too big to fail” and we’re all going to suffer through this until it becomes untenable like Union Carbide/Exxon or it gets ignored and quietly resolved without address the core issue

    • Significant stock market presence in investment funds and retirement portfolios
    • Prime contractor for US and global civic and military aviation
    • Military angle cannot be ignored here, both for geopolitics, force readiness, and domestic politics, with production purposefully scattered across Senate & Congressional districts
    • Major ‘banner’ exporter of airframes globally, which in turn locks in lifecycle purchases and repeat business to the US vs foreign firms like Airbus/BAE/Rostec

    Having it be privatized/hostile government takeover would be chaos not just administratively speaking, Boeing has achieved integration throughout the economy and political machinery



  • …population death spiral which will cause increased social and economic pressures. Which witless politicians will see, and refuse to make the hard choice today by making families and life affordable (at the expense of ‘the market’) and either;

    1. Refuse to do anything
    2. Abuse the ‘economic steroids’ that is immigration. Low and high skill migrants both grant economic benefit, but this usually leads to racist/xenophobic reactionary popular sentiment and politics
    3. Address the reasons why raising a family is increasingly becoming a financial death sentence, or a choice between having kids or being able to retire.

    Almost everyone chooses option #2 because for politicians it’s easy, they get to show off “economy stronk, line goe up” and self congratulate on how they ‘solved’ economics by offsetting all developmental costs for an entire generation of their workforce. And then the next round of witless politicians see that short term success, and instead of actually solving the problem they…







  • You mean the operation that targeted Iranian offshore platforms? That illegal use of retaliation?

    The ICJ also rejected, by 15 votes to one, the U.S. counterclaim seeking a finding of Iran’s liability for interfering with the freedoms of commerce and navigation in the Gulf by attacking ships through missiles and mines.

    The Court concluded, however, that the US had not submitted convincing evidence that the missile attack on the Sea Isle City in 1987 could be attributed to Iran. In view of all the circumstances and the evidence submitted by the US, the Court found that… the mining of the USS Samuel B. Roberts was insufficient in itself to amount to an “armed attack” on the US…[and] that the evidence of Iran’s responsibility for mining the USS Samuel B. Roberts was inconclusive.

    If the US had destroyed an offshore rig/Iranian vessel that was actively firing on neutral/US flagged shipping, that would be justified. Thwacking offshore installations because “they shady af, trust me bro” is not a legitimate use of force


  • I’ll bite, just in case you’re not a troll here to poison discourse.

    Flipping the script, Israel has a population of a little over 7.1 million Jewish people, per Israeli census data.

    Taking the semi-firm death tally from Oct7, at under 1,200, statistically speaking, those 1,139 deaths are a ‘rounding error’ (0.00016028708134%) of the Jewish population in Israel, let alone Jews all over the world.

    But here’s the important part that you missed/willingly ignored - each one of those killed on Oct7 are individual tragedies, just as each of the tens of thousands of civilians deaths afterwards in Gaza are. And nearly all of this death and misery is preventable.





  • If NK was smart in making the deal with Russia, they likely got technology transfer and/or embargoed supplies of things they aren’t good at making like electro-optics, guidance systems, raw titanium, oil, missile software, avionics, etc instead of just money. Money they can counterfeit or blackmail the west for, the rest are verboten via sanctions.

    THATS what has South Korea’s jimmies rustled - the big list of potential trade items NK could get, that’d help NK be much more effective if the DMZ gets ‘kinetic’ again. At the very least NK gets battlefield feedback on the supplied hardware.