I thought the Poppy War was pretty bad. Killed my motivation to read anything else from her.

There’s a much better candidate for the comparison: Saruman, the guy whose whole deal was resisting Sauron by adopting all of his means.

Look, everyone is saying Saruman is just as bad as Sauron, but here’s the thing:

Yes he is moving towards Sauron strategically on specific issues, but these issues are important to his base and he has to throw them a bone.

Yes he is illegally killing Rohan civilians, but nobody claimed the defense of the regions west of his Stone Circle system would be painless.

Yes his armies look and foreign policy look eerily similar to Sauron’s, but he promises he’s trying to stop him actually.

You purists in the Shire keep saying it’s not necessary to destroy the whole forest of Fangorn but he got the endorsement of Lurtz, so he clearly knows more about politics than you do.

Anyone serious understands that resisting Sauron means voting for Saruman.

Yeah the optics are shit and hard to massage. You have to make it about protesting being violence and antisemitism because there’s no way to sugarcoat all the dead children in Gaza and the rolling discovery of mass graves.

Yeah I keep having this morbid intrusive thought that maybe soon a horrible crash will happen and a bunch of people’s lives will be ruined, thus offering me an opportunity to get into housing.

Kinda sick how the entire system nudges you into wishing tragedy on everyone else so you can benefit, because nothing else will be done.

Wait your position is that landlords are renting out places in major US cities at a lower cost than the mortgage? Are they billionaire philanthropists?

My favorite Israeli history tidbit is how their terror cells assassinated one of the guys trying to negotiate a peaceful way out of the violence creating the state of Israel caused because they were (wrongly, it turns out) afraid that the official government would try to take a peaceful solution to the conflict which might have jeopardized the creation of the ethnostate.

Bernadotte had previously gained international renown for negotiating the release of thousands of Nazi concentration camp prisoners including hundreds of interred Jewish people.

Even the people pushing this law acknowledge that the threat is purely theoretical, no one is advancing any serious argument that data has been or will be shared or leaked or anything of the sort. It’s just xenophobia, if they wanted to protect American citizens’ data they would do something about the way they allow tech companies to just take your data and turn around and sell it to whoever wants it.

Bonus points because US government officials can punt a great bargain basement blowout sale to former US officials by forcing the sale of a company using said xenophobia.

At least that means they will stop using the “wE can PuSh HiM lEfT” line they kept trotting out last tune around, it’s too incredible for even them to believe. I very much prefer him running with no platform and just shrugging off questions about why anyone should do this again. It’s more honest at least.

It’s extra sad because no matter how transparently they sell out their ostensibly liberal principles the libs will crawl out of the woodwork to scold you for remembering what they used to say and wanting literally ANYTHING from these fucks.

It was less than election cycle ago that Trump saying these exact things and wanting these same policies were reasons to vote for Joe. Because who would allow someone who wants to shut down the border “so we can figure out what the hell is going on” to become president?

Because humans aren’t legal or illegal? Because it’s exclusively applied in a way to people who resemble a certain ethnicity? Because it’s dehumanizing language that works to subconsciously justify treating them as criminals even if they didn’t do anything wrong?

It’s language used to criticize an entire group of people out of hand.

Real kkkracker hours on lemmy today huh.

If you have a criticism of the Democrats you should probably do a bunch of gymnastics to absolve them of any duty to help the public and then vote for them blindly forever.

Homes are more affordably in these cities

Folks I think the news isn’t feeling well. This is a bold subheading in the article. What happened to their editors?

In [bad country] the people have to vote for the regime even when it is abetting genocide or they risk being punished by the state.

oil prices are high because that’s what putin can use as leverage against the developed world after his failed annexation of Ukraine and it’s clear he’d rather die than accept Ukraine is an independent country.

… is this “Putin” in the room with us right now?

No no you don’t understand! Before they hit them with the missiles they told everyone to evacuate to another area! Now granted that area they were told to go to was then bombed, ensuring civilians who were complying with their directives were killed and making it less likely that anyone would follow later warnings, but still!

The whole human shield angle is really stupid if you ever pay attention to how much the Zionists care about civilian casualties. We’re at what, 1.5 War-in-Ukraines of dead Palestinian civilians in 3 months? It seems like civilians don’t function as a deterrent to the IOF.

Love to live in my exploding city because the ground makes things explode.

I like to think about the historical perspective. It’s not much consolation but systems like these can’t maintain themselves forever, cracks are showing and the US really is more vulnerable than people would like to admit.

Once things start changing there will likely be a lot of problems, things will probably get worse in some ways, but I think even if I don’t survive to see what people come up with in the aftermath of the US I can get satisfaction from seeing it burn.

When you read history you learn humans are very resilient, humans will not end when the empire does. Maybe the failure of this place will be good for the world.