Rail lives in that weird category like rural mail or power service (or, for that matter, highways) -- you need to provide it if you want your country to be a civilized place, but it's real real hard to make it available at a reasonable price and still turn a profit.
Turns out the answer was government, all along...
I'm just saying most left people I know who want to reign in the excesses of US hegemony care about US military adventures in the Middle East, or interventions in Central America, or immigration policy, or neoliberal trade restrictions against weaker economic powers... it's highly unusual for the second thing on the list to be this particular European military alliance that is highly consensual and pretty productive for everyone who's a part of it, and which is targeted almost entirely (now that it's not the late 1990s anymore) at one particular big geopolitical power that they don't have any particular love for any more than they do for the US. If we were talking about reigning them in back when they were bombing the fuck out of the former Yugoslavia, then yeah I wouldn't bat an eye at it, but... I'm not saying it's impossible that someone from the left managed to authentically arrive at the conclusion that out of all the possible awful things the US does on the world stage, NATO's the urgent problem that needs to be torn down. But I think in comparison to the other obvious explanation, it seems a little implausible, quite honestly.
I learned today that Cornel West thinks the world would be safer without NATO. I won’t say that’s the only geopolitical opinion he felt strongly enough about to issue a press release about, but I had to go six months back to find another one, which makes a total of two that I’m aware of.
“Let’s not support Israel while they kill Palestinians,” of course, is honestly a pretty sensible and congruous number one… “why NATO is bad” and Ukraine, on the other hand, is a very surprising and unusual one to be number 2.
I haven’t really had a problem with it… maybe like 5% of the time it will want to do something a little bit weird like wrapping it in ``` but in general it seems like it works well enough to be able to parse with a program and just retry if it does something weird.
You do have to set it up a little carefully, I guess - like usually I’ll give it an example of what I want it to emit, and that’ll be good enough that that’s the form it will follow when it’s emitting stuff back to me. But yeah if you give it prompting and a specific machine readable thing to give back that seems like it usually works better than sticking with English and hoping it goes “yes” or “no” or etc like that.
Disclaimer: I have no idea what the right move here is. It's a shitty situation. "How Democracies Die" talks about it in quite a bit of detail, but basically, in the unfolding collapse of a democracy, there's a terrible temptation to start eroding democratic norms "in kind" in response to their eroding from the fascist side, but this is a mistake. You have to keep fighting on the tilted table without trying to tilt it back, because eroding the norms of behavior plays right into the fascists' hands and those democratic standards are horrifyingly hard to get back once you've broken the seal.
But, that being said, keeping in mind that this is satire to make a point: I don't think Biden should have Trump assassinated, or anybody. I do think that it would be a little more directly on the nose if he, as an official act, had Seal Team 6 ambush all the justices that voted for this (as an official act of course), take them with hoods over their heads and in ziptie cuffs to an undisclosed location, and then put up on YouTube the video of someone asking them a few questions in a bare concrete room in that undisclosed location, requesting that they clarify that this is really what they meant. Sort of bring some reality to what is the door they are trying to open, on a personal level, to them. Because I am 100% serious when I say that that is 100% very literally the door they have chosen to open. Sort of a "Let's close this door back up tight, right brother? Unless you are sure you want to open it? Really, like really for real sure with no backsies?"
Saying that it's okay if one group of people that someone tried to wipe out, does whatever they want, because of course they're the victims after all, is exactly how we got to this situation where Israel is creating on Earth a for-real biblical apocalypse and people are trying to defend their right to do so.
100% right. It is the temptation for easy solutions.
Turns out all that was needed to eliminate war and oppression was to pick out one semi-democratic country that’s doing it, and don’t vote in their elections, and bingo! Fascists take over, country collapses, no war and oppression anymore. I am amazed it was so easy the whole time and people were wasting their time with all these other more complicated structures and efforts to get it done.
Two things can both be concerning
When one side is being violent and racist against innocent people and then some other people start being violent and racist against innocent people on the “other side” to counterbalance, that’s not a calm or welcoming development for anyone concerned
Are you under the impression that Trump’s destruction of the US won’t involve him doing 10 times more terroristic things all over the world?
Or that the powers that will invade the power vacuum left by a US collapse wouldn’t instantly start resuming the exact same terrorism, and worse, that you are (with every righteous reason) opposing when the US is doing it?
It's good to see that the propaganda accounts have learned the Fox News trick of having one person innocently ask a question so a bunch of other people can rush in and provide the answer (which is turning out to be, big shocker, that Biden is bad and we shouldn't vote for him.) As Fox discovered, it seems a lot more organic that way instead of just having someone stand in front of the camera and say over and over "DON'T VOTE FOR BIDEN."
I am still waiting for them to learn to make accounts that are supporting Biden but doing a terrible job of it -- sort of a Lemmy version of Alan Colmes -- like "I'm glad the stock market and GDP are going up so much under Biden, as a rich person I think he's doing great with the economy and also he's sticking it to the Palestinians which I obviously support."
I've seen a little sporadic trickle of accounts with very bad semiconservative opinions and then also supporting certain Democrats, but they seem pretty chaotic and probably like authentic homegrown trolls. I think the real fake-Biden-supporting propaganda potential has yet to be unlocked. I do support this new development in innocent questions, though; it seems like it's got some potential.