I’m not sure Norm’s happy today (unless he’s on a cloud watching Artie getting r*ped by the devil) but I can say with certainty that he isn’t pissed off.

Yes.

Who knows what other reasons various people in and around the government at that time had for invading Iraq, but what does seem to have been established is that it wasn’t WMD’s or anything to do with 9/11, which iirc, is what the Americans and us (well Tony Blair, who was paid handsomely for his service) said it was.

The US (Nixon) made an agreement with the Saudis that the world buy their oil in dollars in exchange for the US providing protection - thus extending the dollar’s period as global reserve currency beyond the time the US unpegged the dollar from gold. Known as the petrodollar agreement, this extended the period the US gained an unearned portion of global wealth beyond the 70’s.

America was, Americans were paid handsomely for its agreement with the Saudis. [Edit - this is a little bit reductive, but] Bretton Woods then this is why boomers were able to buy a house and live well on one wage.

I understand not every American benefited from this, and that from Reagan, and neo-liberalism onwards, all the wealth went to capital. In fact I think American capitalist ideology largely squandered this period of wealth enriching the likes Tump, Musk, Bezos, and Zuckerberg etc. I guess ‘a rising tide raises all boats’ and ‘trickle down economics’ turned out to be big lies after all, whouldathoughtit.

Probably sacrifice some road kill.

The red tories are in substance worse than the blue tories for the poor and former working class. This betrayal can only result in the rise of Reform, just as Blair and ‘New Labour’s’ failure to protect its former constituency led to brexit. In the future brexit very well might be viewed as the warning shot that was ignored.

If capital, which ultimately directs British society, gave a shit one way or the other, it would prefer fascism over any kind of socialism, so it is happy. This isn’t managed decline, it is simply that the plight of poor people (or almost anyone almost all of the time) is irrelevant to capital. We have printed our own currency for more than fifty years and yet we still borrow from, and thus are beholden to some degree to, the city of London. They deploy the vast majority of the GBP’s in existence for their profit, the rest of us just live in the detritus.

And how would most people on here characterise your political position?

Well you have to wait until Trump is out of office, then Musk only has to string out the legal process until a Republican gets into office, so, yeah, the US is fucked.

They admitted they were using remote operators.

If it isn’t conservative and religious people, it’s political murderers they all hate on around here. Fucking brainwashed liberals.

Have you got some sort of Bill Gates bondage kink?

The ‘smart’ phones in everybody’s pockets already are. Kind of, more or less.

Well perhaps the intention wasn’t to wiretap everybody, but it has ended up that way.

The chain going for £1 is obviously the story here.

If you have been trained to follow orders under extreme pressure, in an organisation that has done exactly this stuff for decades overseas to ‘other people’. And if actually you consider immigrants ‘other people’, how big a leap is it really?

No. He definitely was aligning himself with Trump.

He was aligning himself with Trump last week wesn’t he?

Most news sites ask me to consent to google tracking or pay, neither of which am I prepared to do in almost all cases. I am sure I am not alone in this. Their decision to align with google in this way is more than a turn off, it is an indication of their untrustworthiness.

I shouldn’t need to explain why I do everything I can to avoid being tracked by the likes of google. The idea that I will pay to be subject to propaganda died with the 20th century. If news outlets want my eyes on their pages they need to come up with a way to make it worth my time.

We need new search. Really we need a new web.

Blockchain’s immutability might serve a public record of ‘news’, even moreso if combined with certificate verified identity on information disseminating ‘social’ media. The blockchain could actually be useful in this case. You don’t have to link your irl identity to your internet identity everywhere, but it might not be a bad idea in the areas of information disseminating social media. These are just idle thoughts.

Edit - I saw a post today purporting to be a twitter screen grab of a James Woods post with a reply. The James Woods post was a screengrab of a video, supposedly of the current LA riots, with a comment along the lines of: Democrats can’t talk about peaceful protest and support this. Following this was a reply saying ‘this video is from 2020’.

I have no idea if either or both of these tweets happened, if the video was from 2020, or if either person were who they said they were! With the blockchain’s immutability you could verify all of this automatically, and algorithmically reduce the reach of repeat offenders’ posts.

There is a lot of value in this in terms of public discourse.

Similar processes could happen with both scientific/academic papers and government policy v. outcomes.

It might change the nature of the public debate.

Peter Thiel already has it.

Hijacking this post to say: there are too many Americans in this thread arguing about the second world war, somehow apparently suggesting the US is not an untrustable former ally, now ally of Russian oligarchs and strongmen, rather than the important story itself.

Why not shut the fuck up if you don’t have anything relevant to say?

You are wrong. ‘We have to take care when it comes to genocide’. No you don’t. You have a right to be angry and a right to shout about it. You are engaging in genocidal apologism.

To tolerate intolerance creates an intolerant society. To tolerate genocide is fucking disgusting.

This certainly appears to be true.

My government, and Israel, have made it clear that my opposition to the genocide in Gaza makes me an antisemite. I have maybe only once read of a Jewish person or group opposing this view.

So be it, I know which side of history I want to tell my young nieces and nephews I was on, so I have no problem whatsoever with any of legal issues this might cause me.

Of course, the price for Israel (and silent Jewish people) making the judgement that I and most socially liberal people are antisemites, is Jewish people are on their own, other than the far right/nazi aligned groups who support their actions in Gaza, in terms of international support from people not governments.

Edit - and as an aside, I think this new alignment indicates that a lot of the 20th century Western notions of political ‘left’ and ‘right’ are dead, ‘liberalism’ is a political double-speak (do you mean economic or social liberalism? Because they are at odds), and it isn’t Russia v. the USA, because American oligarchs and wannabe strongmen are in perfect alignment with their Russian counterparts.