The first time I had a large amount of marijuana, I had sensations that could only be described as the feeling of my internal organs, as if they had skin-like sensory perception. It was extremely uncomfortable!
I thought about getting into real estate like this, but my experience being a poor renter made it feel too parasitic. Does it bother you being a landlord who sucks money out of the situation while adding essentially no value to the people from whom you are taking regular income?
We as a society actually have the means to provide that, strictly speaking. It is, in the end, the original aspiration of the internet to provide these things in the name of bettering humanity. The problem is that having the tech doesn’t change the antequated and oppresive socio-political and economic system in which we currently bathe. Without a more forceful revolution—of whatever type—the promise of the internet revolution will be perpetually subsumed by the underlying impossibility of the systems it requires to flourish. Go figure, free flow of information requires all sorts of other human freedoms.
The world did crash in 2008, and people did die and starve. The surveillance regime and the consolidation of media together are being used to trick normals into saying exactly what you said in your comment, even as our environment crashes before our eyes and our governments pursue war all over the world, and as finance and corporatism continue to dismantle and exostentially threaten the global economy.
Just because it isn’t in your backyard doesn’t mean it isn’t happening. The networks of power are diverse and enormous, and the surveillance regime is only in its infancy. It’s role has increased dramatically in only the last five years and that will only continue, particularly as we see the consolidation of power on the internet(behemoths like google and amazon who have sidestepped all reasonable notions of antitrust will continue to grow and their gravity only gains strength).
The “Russian interference campaign” is a farce blown up by the same people spying on everyone, to try and manipulate people just like during the McCarthy era. It is the perfect example of old school mass media manipulation the world has been suffering under since tv became the town square. Taking that as an example, we have only begun to see how powerful the mass surveillance networks we all seem to love will become as the decades pass.
Exactly, leveraging his ability to damage fb into more money is certainly more consistent with his past activities than the idea that he now has an angelic conscience and cares about the world’s minds.
If by some oil you mean the largest supply of sweet crude in Africa and within very short shipping distance to the west, then yes they had some oil. And there is ample evidence the US was spearheading the ‘civil war’ using armed mercenary armies like ISIS much in the same fashion we have been seeing in Syria, both of which were outlined in the neoliberal imperialist war plan that Wesley Clarke outlined and which began full fledged after 9/11.
Russia was them finding a way to cover their asses while continuing to push for war and intelligence funding.
They lost because Hillary was even worse than Trump. She represented the utter moral bankruptcy of the Democratic party. She and Trump together represent the bankruptcy pf the entire electoral system. The continued full court press against free speech (as though media owned by six corporations should have a monopoly on myth-making) is truly fascistic and deeply disturbing, but I have hope that the disgust they continually generate with their delusional hubris will spawn fairer,more decentralized media. Our problem here is not right wing myths, it is capitalism and the emergent effects of the consolidation of power.
Does it have to be so binary? It's well short of the kind of problem someone suffering directly in poverty feels,and should not be conflated with that experience, but certainly is personal. Also, the personal and the political are not somehow exclusive of each other in the slightest.
The problem is not that they are trivializing the holocaust by comparing Republicans to Nazis, but that they are not also conparing Democrats and our globalized mercenary capitalism writ large to Nazism (in fact the number of dead due to post war military intervention really adds up when you closely follow the aftermaths of western intervention projects).
All too often those who hyperbolically compare others to Nazis actually do a disservice to valid systemic comparisons.