I wonder why people might feel compelled to honor Irish immigrants specifically, surely it is just because people are being mean to those poor British people from that tiny backwater island.

Do you know your history about how Britain starved Ireland during the “””””potato famine””””?

History, it makes you understand things!

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The main thing holding us back from getting rid of bad cops is qualified immunity.

The main thing holding us back from getting rid of bad cops is refusing to recognize that the institutions of law enforcement in the US are rotten to their core and we’re designed explicitly in the wake of civil rights and labor movements to enforce socio-economic and racial disparities through violence.

Which isn’t to say that you aren’t making a great point about how qualified immunity is a really important part of the problem though.

Yeah I am getting real tired of centrists acting like the training is the solution not the problem.

The “training” is an indoctrination into an ideological system designed to uphold racial and socio-economic disparities through the use of violent force and to act otherwise is to blatantly ignore the history of policing in the United States.

The cop fired at the acorn because he was an idiot and probably wasn’t well trained, but more importantly the cop fired on the acorn because inside his rotten little mind are vivid images of dangerous black men threatening him at every corner and he was sure like a child walking through the dark that the monster was justttt about to jump out at him. This kind of ideology is fundamental to police culture in the US, it cannot be corrected with retraining because it is a basic worldview and causes an incredible amount of violence towards innocent people.

ACAB

Hey as a US mainstream news anchor that sounds like good enough justification for me, I might use that!

Maybe I can spin it as “advanced military simulations in a security software known as Counter Strike show that just because a military killed its own hostages in the attempt to rescue hostages doesn’t mean it isn’t winning according to complex AI military intelligence analysis, I have on IDF spokesman to comment”. Then I could have the IDF person point at the scoreboard clearly showing the counter terrorists winning even though they murdered all the hostages on the way to getting the bad guys. I just need to find an IDF spokesperson who doesn’t repeatedly look into the camera and say “killing all the Palestinians and taking their land IS LITERALLY THE POINT” because it just doesn’t sell well with US audiences seeing the IDF as the good guys in focus groups.

My boss said it really didn’t matter what I said on air so long as Israel are the good guys and I am finding it really hard and exhausting to manage to find things that makes Israel look like the good guys while committing genocide in Gaza, sigh.

It isn’t a war, you can’t consider this a war when one side utterly controls all of the infrastructure including water, electricity, internet and the ability of aid to reach the other side while ALSO having one of the most advanced militaries in the world and the other side has… tunnels and shitty rockets?

This is genocide, not war, it is frankly absurd to frame this like a war instead of a mass scale societal punishment for a terrorist attack by a small subset of that population and also an attempt to wipe Palestinians off the map so settlers can take their land.

Like seriously, the Israeli hostages got naked and wrote things on their body because they knew how murderous the IDF was and wanted to take every precaution not to get executed on sight and they still got executed on sight.

I don’t think you understand how just because you can’t comprehend a state without a rightwing security apparatus that engages in disastrous manipulation of the sovereignty of other nations with literally zero oversight from voters doesn’t magically justify the incredible amount of suffering and hardship caused by giving those rightwing, ignorant nutjobs the power to wreck and overthrow democratically elected (or not) governments of countries because they felt it was a slippery slope for them to be talking about socializing healthcare or whatever…

I don’t care that you can’t visualize it, that doesn’t justify the awful impact the CIA has had on the world.

What was insanity was the stupidity of the fear of a red communist wave taking over the planet like some kind of cartoon, what was insanity was the Vietnam war that even when it became unpopular the US government basically just refused and colluded to keep us there.

I mean tell that to the countless people murdered or living in countries that had their democratically elected government overthrown for no good reason in favor of violent rightwing nut jobs because the CIA wanted to do it.

I think it would be better if we just didn’t have an intelligence agency in the US given the absolutely incomprehensibly careless way the CIA and other clandestine US agencies have caused massed suffering around the world.

I don’t disagree, but also the existence of the CIA is a mistake of historic proportions so I don’t really care what this guy has to say.

I agree with the spirit of what you are saying but I think there is a real point to make about how Israel can’t really be a terrorist state because it holds such an unequal power over its perceived enemies in Gaza both from the perspective of military might and also from the perspective of control over basic infrastructure like electricity and running water.

So long we see terrorism only through the lens of a morale choice to engage in warfare in a dishonorable way and not also as a form of armed resistance resorted to by actors who literally don’t have the capacity to fight what we nebulously define as a war (which this current conflict is not, it is genocide), than we will always be unintentionally ceding the conversation to authoritarian rightwing hawks who can label anyone a terrorist for resisting a far superior military force.

Hamas are called terrorists primarily as a form of morale condemnation, and while in no way am I condoning terrorism it really has to be understood as first and foremost a military strategy undertaken by political actors without the capacity to fight a traditional war. The second Hamas amassed its troops (as required for any large military operation) Israel would carpet bomb the area. If Hamas rolled out a line of absurdly obsolete tanks with no optics, fire stabilization, night vision, or modern armor and with virtually no ammunition and tried to launch a ground war into Israel, rightwing/pro-Israel talking heads would supposedly find that more honorable than terrorism… but obviously Israel would be able to utterly wipe that force off the face of the earth in minutes with the combined military industrial complex of the US and Israel.

Israel cannot be a terrorist state because its military can mount an armored offensive with some of the most advanced tanks in the world all the way through gaza and back while facing no serious resistance, with air superiority the whole time. When Israel commits violence, it is authoritarian state violence. It is genocide. I think calling it terrorism muddies the point. Terrorism is the attempt to create a political force when an actor does not possess control of a society, Israel possesses full physical control of Gaza.

I agree though, all the negative connotations you attribute to Israel by calling them a terrorist state I agree with!

It’s a western in space and I loved it for that. I don’t really give a shit about all the space wizard plot lines in Star Wars though soo.

Only if you twist your hand all the way around like an owls head before you pet it, otherwise the owl won’t recognize it as a friendly entity and will bite.

Yeah, another straight white male agreeing here. I’m sorry, it’s just not punching down to target my demographic because we are the ones traditionally that have been given all the power to do the punching.

Those “ruined” products handily control huge chunks of the market. So from that perspective, they’re not “ruined” at all. They’re perfect.

They control the market because Google, like most too-big-too-fail massive corporations, buys out any serious competitors and uses its dominant size to destroy the threat of competition before it can actually challenge them to make better products. Yes Google isn’t a monopoly in any of its industries but it doesn’t need to be since most of the large competitors they face are thinking the same way they are, why fight when we can enjoy our cake and do nothing?

Just because google products are widely used doesn’t mean they are good, it means people think they are the best option or can’t be bothered to switch which is a very very different thing.

I understand that, but they aren’t even that functional at doing that. They have ruined their products so much that it is threatening the ad value of the ads they sell I imagine. Google search is awful now and there is a very real chance people will stop using it for the first time in like a decade.

I don’t understand why google is still worth so much money, they are a trash company that really isn’t trying to improve any of its products. It just periodically threatens its workers with job cuts and continues to serve up crap to its customers.

The definition of fascism at the end of the day is “fuck you, I have mine, stop complaining because you are a loser”. Yes, fascism is the extreme end point of that view but ultimately that is what fascism is. Who cares what is fair, the losers are losers and the winners are winners and fascists are 0% interested in examining that any closer no matter how arbitrary or stupid the set of rules that determined the winners or losers are.

I hate the phrase “don’t hate the player, hate the game”. I’ll hate the player too lol. You know what playing a sport where bad behavior is technically possible and in the best interests of a player to do, but a player refuses to do it because of a love of the sport and the desire to be a good opponent? It is called good sportsmanship. Sports/videogames are miserable experiences when it is just ruthlessly competitive people playing who will exploit any advantage, fair or not and have zero interest in sportsmanship. Is there a broken mechanic or rule? These types of people will exploit it over and over and over and over again and just keep saying “don’t hate the player hate the game” even though it is them, the player, actively making a choice to make the experience miserable for everyone else.

Honestly nice to hear some huge good news like this. Both the places mentioned in this article are drop dead gorgeous and we are fools for ever inhibiting the salmon runs and other animal’s uses of it. These places are far more valuable to everyone in the longterm with great healthy gargantuan runs of salmon clogging up the streams every year.