It’s estimated that 30-40 children died on Oct 7th. Consider the reaction most (white) Americans had to that event to the 165 schoolchildren killed in Minab recently. Neither Israel nor Iran are meaningfully “closer” to Americans than the other.
The entire world (other than Yemen) stood by while the US and Israel committed a genocide of hundreds of thousands of people in Gaza. Countries not particularly friendly to either country sent strongly-worded letters but not much more. Allies of the US/Israel actively went along with it and focused on crushing dissent inside their own borders. Then you have other events like trying to literally starve Cuba for no reason other than they looked at us kinda funny… and still the rest of the world does nothing. This is the prior information Trump and Netanyahu are working with. Would it not be entirely rational for the two of them to conclude that they can nuke Tehran and they won’t face any real consequences either domestically or abroad?
The real horror of the future is climate change, which is usually the first thing people cite when questioning if it’s a good idea to bring kids into the world at all.
100% this was a CIA operation.
When George Lucas was filming A New Hope he did not have the notion developed that Vader was actually Luke’s father, and that he only came up with it after the movie was released. There is no actual foreshadowing of this, no hints, and really nothing in A New Hope would even point to this possibility. To say Vader “killed your father” but to really mean “uhhhh I meant the ‘Vader’ persona metaphorically ‘killed’ the person your father was” is such a ridiculous stretch I just don’t get why more people don’t ever call this out. The much more straightforward explanation is that Lucas came up with the idea as a way to build up drama in the movies that followed, after A New Hope was already out.
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Because once the news broke of the Ellisons buying US TikTok (and their transparent reasons for doing so), it became clear to me that for the free and open internet, “winter is coming”.
Oct 7th and the global outpouring of support for Palestinians (and trashing of the reputation of Israel) was a huge wake-up call to the ruling classes. I think until then, they were largely content with controlling the narratives via traditional media spaces. The aftermath of Oct 7 taught them that social media and the internet cannot be ignored and in fact must controlled. It’s not like anyone under 65 is watching Fox News or CNN, and not many reading the NYT. All of the actions we have seen in the last 2 years - making sure Facebook / Google / Twitter / Reddit and now TikTok have tightly controlled messaging, requiring IDs and verification, etc - are pointing towards a future where free expression online is severely limited. I don’t want to be a part of that.
And I do believe that it’s important to get out there and discuss things that are important to me with others (Palestinian and indigenous liberation, communism, online privacy). I’m not happy to just retreat into my own bubble. That is ultimately the reason I joined (I was of course already included to using the fediverse as I’ve long appreciated FOSS and decentralized systems and non-commercialized things in general).
They know just how bad it will look and how unpopular it will be if they just take Greenland by force. They’re trying to convince the Danes to sell it under duress to give it a veneer of legitimacy.
Whenever I see those crazy, deranged Israeli settlers in the West Bank, I can’t help but think about how the people who colonized North America were just as horrible. Cut from the exact same cloth.
The fraud is the cover, racism is the real angle.
There was similar fraud uncovered in New York state I believe earlier this year, which was significantly larger in scope, and that story hasn’t even cracked the news. Pointing out the racism here, while correct, isn’t at the core of the issue IMO.
To actual Stormfront-posting capital W capital N White Nationalists, years ago they made the “issue” of Somali immigration into Minnesota and other places across the northern US stretching from the Cascades to the Great Lakes one of the causes they got the most worked up over. I have yet to see a White Nationalist envision a takeover of the entire USA. What they do advocate for, amongst themselves, is creating a white ethnostate in the Pacific Northwest, possibly reaching eastward across Minnesota and Wisconsin. The reason for this is, take a look at a map of counties in the US with >95% white concentration. If you do you will notice just how white that part of the country is (and how conservative it is, if you overlap it with a voting map). They see that area as “theirs” and the home of a future white homeland.
White Nationalists perceive the immigration of Somalis into Minnesota as the tip of the spear of their great replacement theory. They think Soros et al specifically target the whitest areas of the US and mark them for “replacement”. While this is all obviously ridiculous and gross, these people see it in terms of a life-or-death struggle.
Just like other issues that were only in the realm of furthest edges of the right have been mainstreamed into the GOP and conservative media ecosystem before, this topic and broken containment. It’s a deeply racist idea that no doubt has a ardent champion in Stephen Miller (who I am 100% is a White Nationalist based on pretty much every word out of his weasel mouth) and likely others in conservative leadership. That’s the real story behind this.
The massive cuts to Medicaid that were in the Big Beautiful Bill passed by Trump and the GOP aren’t supposed to go into effect until after the 2026 midterms IIRC. When that does happen I think finding a job in the healthcare sector will be very difficult if not impossible.
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When my dad was a kid, my grandparents did absolutely nothing for Christmas - no decorations, no tree, etc - until Christmas Eve, then they went all out. Then they’d pack it all up the day after Christmas. I feel like if the Christmas “season” was only a few days, I’d hate it much less.
I genuinely hate the aesthetics of it. I can’t stand Christmas music or Christmas movies (the music especially is just so bad). The “Christmas episodes” TV shows run are so incredibly corny. I find the decorations to be tacky and ugly. I feel like I’m suffocated by so much cheap plastic crap that will be thrown away after the holidays.
I suppose that all wouldn’t be so bad if the “Christmas season” didn’t stretch out for so long. It’s now well underway before Thanksgiving, and I’m being conservative with that. That means at least 10% of the year - so 10% of my life, too - is spent under the Christmas regime.
But on a deeper level, I think it points to a real sickness in society. Capitalism has so thoroughly destroyed our real social connections to each other. It breaks those human bonds and creates atomized individuals who are only supposed to care about themselves. But that’s not who we are as a species - we are social creatures who have a couple hundred thousand years of cooperation with each other in order to survive.
On some level, capital “knows” ripping us away from our social being is not only unnatural, but atomizing us so thoroughly harms social reproduction. Christmas has become a way of resolving this problem. BUT, it’s capitalism… so the solution can’t be something like “give workers the month of December off so people can spend real quality time with each other”.
So capitalism has created this artificial holiday structure where “family”, “giving back”, and “what really matters” is centered, but it’s all done in the most superficial way possible. It’s all kabuki. Capital creates an imitation of social connection and still manages to make it about accumulating more capital. Spend money on presents. Don’t like the commercialism around presents? That’s ok, spend money on airfare or gas to see your family. Use up your meager PTO at the end of the year when it’s slow and costs your boss less. But I think getting workers to spend money is still just the secondary objective of Christmas. It’s much more about getting people to forget how deeply separated we are from each other. To pretend for at least 10% of the year that everything is normal, capitalism is normal and being disconnected from each other is normal so long as you watch a couple movies once a year that are supposed to remind you that “what really matters is family” - the feeling though, not the reality.
That’s what Christmas is all about, Charlie Brown.
(Copying what I said on the lemmy.ml cross post because I’ve been thinking about this for a while and want to get it out).
I genuinely hate the aesthetics of it. I can’t stand Christmas music or Christmas movies. The “Christmas episodes” TV shows run are so incredibly corny. I find the decorations to be tacky and ugly. I feel like I’m suffocated by so much cheap plastic crap that will be thrown away after the holidays.
I suppose that all wouldn’t be so bad if the “Christmas season” didn’t stretch out for so long. It’s now well underway before Thanksgiving, and I’m being conservative with that. That means at least 10% of the year - so 10% of my life, too - is spent under the Christmas regime.
But on a deeper level, I think it points to a real sickness in society. Capitalism has so thoroughly destroyed our real social connections to each other. It breaks those human bonds and creates atomized individuals who are only supposed to care about themselves. But that’s not who we are as a species - we are social creatures who have a couple hundred thousand years of cooperation with each other in order to survive.
On some level, capital “knows” ripping us away from our social being is not only unnatural, but atomizing us so thoroughly harms social reproduction. Christmas has become a way of resolving this problem. BUT, it’s capitalism… so the solution can’t be something like “give workers the month of December off so people can spend real quality time with each other”.
So capitalism has created this artificial holiday structure where “family”, “giving back”, and “what really matters” is centered, but it’s all done in the most superficial way possible. It’s all kabuki. Capital creates an imitation of social connection and still manages to make it about accumulating more capital. Spend money on presents. Don’t like the commercialism around presents? That’s ok, spend money on airfare or gas to see your family. Use up your meager PTO at the end of the year when it’s slow and costs your boss less. But I think getting workers to spend money is still just the secondary objective of Christmas. It’s much more about getting people to forget how deeply separated we are from each other. To pretend for at least 10% of the year that everything is normal, capitalism is normal and being disconnected from each other is normal so long as you watch a couple movies once a year that are supposed to remind you that “what really matters is family” - the feeling though, not the reality.
That’s what Christmas is all about, Charlie Brown.
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There numerous solutions to addressing child safety online that do not violate personal privacy. This is one example, there are others. Solving the problem when you want to address this specific problem isn’t difficult. But the reality is that all of these measures being pushed are not meant to provide real safety to children, but rather to be able to de-anonymize the internet, so governments can better identify “dissenters” (i.e. people who criticize Israel) and provide higher quality information to AI and online marketing firms.