Bumbling trigger happy halfwit goons are a feature, not a bug. The police, as an organization, exist to guard private property not human life. They are supposed to be a source of social terror and stochastic violence. They are supposed to horrify people they patrol, not help them.

A lot of people I know have a strict “Never call the police” personal policy for reasons adjacent to this.

The Super Adventure Club episode exploded into my brain halfway through One Battle After Another when they drop “The Christmas Adventurers Club” on me like a nuclear warhead.

The Adam Friedland Show hitting new levels of Super Sayan off this shit.

Nevermind TrueAnon

I could understand 2016.

Donald Trump placed advertisements in several prominent newspapers, including Newsday, in 1989 calling for the reinstatement of the death penalty so that the Central Park Five could be executed for their alleged crimes.

SNL just did a skit on this.

We already have a ton of names. Nobody is getting burned.

Love to give a President the Nobel Prize inside the first six weeks on the job.

Remember how well that worked out for Obama?

The largely clandestine effort, profiled in a New York Times report and a forthcoming book by Newsweek’s Daniel Klaidman, highlights a remarkable transformation for a man who campaigned four years ago as an anti-war Senator, former law professor and defender of Constitutional due process. He pushed for an end to the use of torture on terror suspects, the closure of the Guantanamo Bay military prison, and for trying detainees in federal courts. For those efforts he won the Nobel Peace Prize.

Yet over the past three and a half years, Obama has sat quietly “at the helm of a top secret ‘nominations’ process to designate terrorists for kill or capture, of which the capture part has become largely theoretical,” according to the Times. He personally vetted names on a “kill list” of targets, authorizing dozens of drone strikes even in cases with only vague and inconclusive evidence about who’s really on the ground, according to the report. Neither the evidence against the suspects nor the suspects’ identities is available for public scrutiny.

So he’s going to win the Nobel?

Okay, but they’re going to depose him, so that’ll balance the scales.

Hell, Obama let the Bush crime family walk back in '09. Clinton turned a blind eye to Reagan/Bush. Carter refused to prosecute Nixon.

Etc, etc.

If after all of that they aren’t calling for a civil war

I’m trying to imagine how turning the current situation into a shooting war improves things.

Iraq War Veteran

Ironic, given how we treated upstart labor movements during the occupation.

American liberals spent YEARS fighting anyone who suggested racism was still alive in america.

The standard line was that racism was a Southern trait, while Northern and Western liberals had somehow expunged themselves of the habit. At the same time, you had liberals from the Carter era onward bemoaning failures within the African American and Latin American communities to integrate properly. It was always the minority’s fault for failing to conform. It was never racism among liberals that widened the divide.

Even to this day they won’t attribute racism in explaining ice’s actions. In fact most didn’t care how many people died at ice’s hands until white people got shot in the face.

You can run this all the way back to the LA Riots, easily enough. Nevermind the anti-Muslim racism of the post-9/11 era, the Obama-era backlash to civil rights movements during Occupy and then again during BLM. It’s always and forever the minority’s fault for objecting to oppression. People of Color are never sufficiently civil. They don’t respect the norms. They want special favors. They can’t be trusted to argue in good faith. They’ve got dual loyalties. They’re not real Americans.

Even when you have Obama or Harris on the fucking ballot, you need them or their proxies effectively apologizing for their blackness and denouncing anyone of color who doesn’t agree with their neoliberal politics.

In summary, americans, and yes american liberals are deeply racist, selfish and uneducated people.

I don’t think they’re uneducated. All too often, I’ve seen racism taught - implicitly or explicitly - as justification for the modern social order. They’re educated in bigotry. They’re trained to think like this.

TIL, my grandparents were white.

Imagine a T.Rex but its a giant parrot with teeth instead.

US power stems directly from its dollar position.

Soft power stems from its ability to cut individual nation-states off from global trade. But if you take a hard look at, say, North Korea or Cuba or Venezuela or Iran, you’ll notice that it’s not simply access to legal international markets that causes their poverty. These countries are physically encircled by US military. Cuba, in particular, is ringed in by US warships with an entrenched beach head at Guantanamo Bay.

And it goes without saying that these countries are constantly under threat of espionage, plagued by disinformation, and periodically sabotaged by US special forces.

The dollar position is a consequence of these interventions, dating back to the Cold War Era.

The longer this goes on, the more systems decouple from the USA and correspondingly the less power and influence they have.

It’s been going on since Truman. Arguably back to McKinley. The US has been a fountain of militant white nationalism for centuries.

Meanwhile, European corporate media seems vastly more paranoid and fearful of infiltration by Eastern adversaries. Muslims coming up through Turkiye or crossing north of the Mediterranean. Russians driving tanks all the way from Moscow to Berlin. Chinese businessmen stealing European jobs, Orientalizing markets, and corrupting the fragile innocent young minds of the liberal intelligentsia.

I just don’t see decoupling happening (in my lifetime). Trump will lose his grip on power, US neoliberals will retake the federal government, and we’ll have another wave of “normalization” that settles anxious Europeans just long enough for Palantir and News Corp and JP Morgan and Microsoft to secure their hooks a bit deeper.

EV and renewables are no brainers; but legacy firms in the fossil fuel industries are spending millions to prevent change and would rather see the world burn.

When you see reports come out from fossil fuel companies, they quite literally describe “$X trillion of hydrocarbons in the ground”.

Many European energy utilities have mostly diversified away from fossil fuels.

Europe only really has the Baltic as a reserve. They’ve been cut off from much of the Middle East by decades of war.

So, unlike the US, which has become an oil exporter for the last twenty years, Europeans either went woke or went broke.

Question is what they’re going to do about it, though.

The EU is just about as integrated with the US economy as any two continents can be. Nevermind the US military presence.

Is that going to change? Or will Europeans just feel grumpy into the foreseeable future?