Stick your head in the sand, I’m sure they won’t sneak up on you while you’re hiding away from reality.

Prove me wrong. Show me literally any mechanism that can constrain the Courts that hasn’t already been ruled out by Democrats and doesn’t require Republicans to vote for it. They can accept bribes and overturn any law they want and openly support insurrectionists and there’s jack shit anyone can do about it.

Well to start, everything that’s included in this sugar tax. Does anyone really need this garbage?

But really, it’s more important to give people lives that are good so they don’t get sucked in to unhealthy behaviors.

Give people something to live for any they won’t kill themselves.

SCOTUS can do literally anything it wants, they’re not constrained by any actual rules or laws or anything.

The problem isn’t that AI is going to catch up.

It doesn’t need to.

As long as it’s “good enough” then it’ll replace us because it’ll save the owners 0.01% in operational costs.

That’s why I favor outright banning added sugars, or even better, improve their lives so much that they don’t want to fill the void with sugar.

The one wildcard I am uncertain about are the nukes, both Israel’s nukes and the US’s

If the US really believed Israel was in serious danger I don’t know how it would respond. As it is, I think we might see troop deployment if Israel comes under serious threat from its neighbors. That would totally upend everything and make all my predictions worthless lol

Your… face doesn’t need sunscreen? That’s the opposite of my experience!

The US can strong-arm multiple states in the region because Israel is its unsinkable aircraft carrier. Without Israel, other states become unruly.

Also, as you say, it would require a complacent world order - one which does not exist because China is ascendant. If Israel were gone, China could suddenly leverage the Belt and Road to become the dominant player in both West Asia and North Africa. That makes Israel so utterly critical as to be irreplaceable.

I still maintain they’re partners, rather than a superior-subordinate arrangement.

The inflation is coming from the sanctions and dedollatization. That’s the biggest material reason I could see the internal contradictions boiling over as paychecks and savings don’t go far enough to keep people housed.

Then there’s the Supreme Court’s war on the administrative state, looking to gut everything from the NLRB to the DoE to the EPA. Those institutions are one of the ways superprofits are redistributed to the labor aristocracy; my pet theory is they’re going to be debourgeoisified by the one-two punch of declining superprofit and declining distribution of superprofit.

And then, of course, there’s climate change and ageing infrastructure. The way those will interact in the US, combined with a weaker dollar and no administrative state, could lead to cities becoming nearly ungovernable.

Things are going to get rough.

I prefer the theory that he was a radical centrist.

It’s critical to US interests and its a keystone in the US’s power over oil, trade, and migration in the region. It’s necessary for the control of North Africa and the Middle East and the suppression of pan-Arab/pan-African nationalisms within the actual neocolonies in the region. Without Israel the US’s ability to control the periphery of its empire would crumble.

If Israel did not exist the United States would have to create it to serve her interests in the region.

When Israel falls, the US will soon follow.

How do you think quickly if you need to say everything in your mind? Is the voice very quick?

Pretty quick, yeah. It’s basically my voice, but also, I don’t need to breathe or move my mouth or anything. Ever heard the term “stream of consciousness”? Also, grammar and punctuation aren’t necessary, I can just talktalktalktalktalk and I understand myself because I always know what I’m saying.

I’m sure if you could listen to my thoughts it would sound like a fucking mess tho lol

But also, there’s a difference between when I’m just thinking about stuff to myself and when I’m busy doing something. If I’m in a flow state or “in the zone”, I don’t necessarily monologue everything I’m doing. I just do it, y’know? It’s only when I slow down to think that my thoughts actually become dialogue again.

It’s also unfathomable to me how people can think of what they need to do tomorrow and not see it.

I can’t imagine why you need to see it! I know I need to lay some mulch on my garden tomorrow, I don’t need to visualize that? I can just make a mental note of it and keep that thought stored away as part of a to-do list. What would I even use pictures for when I can just tell myself “I need to do X, Y, and Z”?

I just think we don’t understand our own internal processes very well. The conscious part may come long after we had the thought and if you say it or see it doesn’t matter.

Well yeah, consciousness is an illusion. I think they’ve demonstrated with active brain scans that our conscious thoughts come after we’ve already made subconscious decisions. We make up our minds before we know it, consciousness is more like a way we convince ourselves to do the things we’ve already decided we want to do.

I think my real contention is that Israel is hardly subjected to US imperialism. It’s an equal partner in their relationship, as such, Israel is not a US colony. Israel is a settler-colony that has no mother country. It relies on the US, for sure, but their relationship is codependent and they rely on each other. Portraying Israel as just a US vassal is wrong.

The theory about neocolonialism was created to explain the hands-off approach the colonial powers were taking to the world. They weren’t settling the world anymore, they were just setting up local colonial managers to control their holdings from afar with no intention of actually annexing the territory. It was distinct from settler-colonialism, that was the entire point.

This isn’t distinct from settler-colonialism.

The West Bank has compradores, yes, but it also has settlers and that’s distinct from neocolonialism.

Hence, settler-colonialism.

The US can’t survive without superprofits and the Zionist entity is a crucial component for their extraction and distribution.

It’s how the world’s oil supply is secured for Western interests, trade through the Red Sea is secured for Western interests (which makes the attacks in the Red Sea an extremely powerful tool!), and the movement of people from Africa into Asia and eventually Europe is heavily restricted to maximize the availability of superexploitable labor in Africa for Western interests.

Israel is so critical to the US, and the West as a whole, that I really don’t think it could survive without it. “Were there not for Israel, the United States of America would have to invent an Israel to protect her interest in the region.” This puts them into a strong position and makes them into an equal partner, because if Israel falls the West will fall soon after. _Inshallah

It would suddenly find itself paying through the nose for oil; unable to control commerce through the Red Sea and thus crippling its ability to extract resources from East Africa, the Indian subcontinent, and South East Asia; unable to control the movement of people out of the underdeveloped African regions necessary for extracting superprofit; without Israel, the whole imperial project implodes.

I don’t think Israel could survive without the US, but I don’t think the US could survive long without Israel either.

The US has a lot of leverage, but I think Israel is an equal partner in their relationship. They rely on each other rather than Israel just being a client of the US. Also, should we call Australia or New Zealand neocolonies? Their relationship is basically the same.

Honestly if so-called AI didn’t burn down a kilometer of rain forest every time it generated a picture of an ape I’d be 100% okay with it. I do not care about intellectual property or petty bouj concerns about artists losing their ability to profit from their labor.

Get proletarianized lol 🤷‍♀️

Are Zionists neocolonists? Neocolonialism is marked by the use of compradores and the disuse of settlers from the mother country, as I understand that’s basically the entirety of what separates it from colonialism that came before. Zionists are just settler-colonists.

Meanwhile, Democrats are humiliating themselves by giving respect to Trump in the aftermath of this shooting. Pathetic 🙄