Actually it is. Not only in that particular occurrence, but every occurrence before it. At that particular time there was wide concern over the strength of Japan's military (they had completely wiped out Russia's navy in a single battle) and obvious indicators of belligerence within Europe. And...well...the rest is history.
You're obviously not playing the right game.
No free speech in the EU?
I didn't say EU, but because you mentioned it...
Look why don't you come over and we'll flip the finger to Macron together.
Umm...
https://www.rfi.fr/en/france/2...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/m...
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/w...
That wouldn't be a good idea... You can't even argue that these were "a long time ago" or a one-off or anything like that.
Next, we can do the same in the US
People do it all the time here. The closest thing to anybody getting into any kind of trouble over that, which I can recall, was a woman who got arrested for saying "you suck" to Bill Clinton in his presence during the 90s, and the media rightfully made a pretty big deal out of it because that kind of thing is widely considered to be unconscionable here. But no charges stuck at all, unlike the cases I linked above where people not only got arrested and detained, but got fined pretty hefty sums for far less than that, one in particular just for a comment left on facebook.
Many states in Europe, including France, have official laws on their books that make it a crime to insult politicians. Though France is mild in comparison even to e.g. Sweden and Germany:
https://www.politico.eu/articl...
And that's just within the EU. There's also Turkey, Belarus, Russia, and probably many others I'm not even aware of.
Because it means the American empire, which is propped up by the dollar, will have gone down the drain completely and we will still have the ridiculous military and we will use it.
You know, the whole purpose of passing a constitutional amendment to have a federal income tax on individuals was to fund the military. That social contract you always go on about not only demands that you pay taxes, but also that you go to war when drafted by the military. It's amazing the way you get all authoritarian about some unwritten social contract that you yourself wouldn't even honor.
What the hell are you talking about? If my net worth is $100 million and it drops by 90% I'm still filthy stinking rich and will never have to work again unless I blow through the money on extravagant spending.
Not all of them spend that extravagantly. Your personal favorite, Elon Musk, doesn't even live in an expensive house, or drive exotic cars, or anything like that.
And those numbers get a hell of a lot worse when you take into account billionaires.
I get that you have this image of them swimming around in a money bank like Scrooge McDuck because this is just the way you picture the world, but in reality that kind of money only exists on a ledger somewhere, and there isn't enough physical or even electronic money in the world to pay for 90% of it. They just have a large ownership stake in something that has a large market price. But a market price and what somebody might actually pay for it are two very different things.
This is before we talk about nepo babies and contacts and networking that you get to do when you're a member of the ruling class. The ruling elite have class solidarity while anyone that really works for a living does not. They take care of each other. We eat each other alive at the slightest provocation.
No, that's just you. You're obviously not even slightly aware of how many very rich people hate each other's guts, much like you hate mine for purely ideological reasons. Besides, all of the thought leaders who both founded and continue to define the very ideology you subscribe to were all these so called "nepo babies", yet you still look up to them anyways, but probably because you're not even aware of that.
I will never understand people that defend the ruling class. It is just the most bizarre thing to me. I can empathize with most things understanding the underlining emotions even if I don't feel them myself but that's one that is completely alien to me.
Rather, you mentally compartmentalize people into classes, and you have an undying hate for anybody who you unilaterally decide isn't in yours. People like me tell you that this doesn't do you any favors, but you're an old boomer set in his ways. If you could truly empathize as you claim, you'd know these people you "other" deal with the same things you do. Some of these guys spend nearly every waking moment doing work, even when supposedly on vacation. Some of them are narcissists, some of them are psychopaths, but traits like these are not at all unique to any particular "class" that you like to box these guys into.
And telling people they can unionize if they want is like telling Jews in Auschwitz they can go find another job. The people running the camp might have something to say about that...
Equating the economy to the Holocaust being a really bad idea aside (I've long since learned to expect this kind of thing from you,) who are the people running this prison your mind is obviously trapped in?
Again I will never understand why people pretend we don't have a ruling class after they've been told and shown that we do. I get the people who never encounter that information, it's not exactly talked about, but I don't get the people that have the information and just pretend it isn't there.
Nobody is pretending anything of the sort. You've created mental barriers and barricades that don't actually exist. This is either because you're old and bitter about having never made it anywhere in life, or you're just a clinically depressed negative Nancy. More likely a combination of the two.
Either way, you've demonstrated numerous times now, and very conclusively so, that you have very little understanding of how the world works, which is likely due to having so very little experience with it. Every time I've watched you try to explain different professions, or even explained your understanding of history or even civics, you've always gotten it incredibly wrong. It's therefore no stretch to say that you yourself genuinely believe there's some kind of invisible hand controlling you and everybody else, but that too is borne of naivety.
As you've made clear, repeatedly: You'll never understand.
That happens more often than you think, you just rarely hear about it. And often if the company is struggling financially, the executives are hit the hardest, seeing their net worth drop by millions if not billions.
https://fortune.com/2025/07/17...
I still remember when I got laid off ten years ago, the CEO was tossed I think about 4 months later. Good guy, I met him in person a few times as he'd sometimes have lunch with us, but the company just wasn't doing well under his watch.
Anyways, we don't need your fascism to "fix" all if your perceived problems, regardless of how real (or not) they may be. As the collie fucker said earlier, they can unionize if they want, or if they're like me, they just won't work for a company like that to begin with.
You mean like you do with collies?
The overseas resource thing didn't really work out. They work well for situations where you need to quickly staff a new in-house business unit while you mature it, or when you have a short term project that's too big for your own internal resources to build from scratch, or some other acute need, but they don't work well long-term.
Eventually a lot of those guys got jobs at IT support scam companies.
Decent chance we'll see something similar with AI tools.
I think Microsoft is a victim of industry hype that it itself is a contributor to. I'm still in the "wait and see camp" for AI, but right now this looks like a classic gold rush scenario, and so far the only ones who have made money (and a lot of it at that) are the guys selling shovels and pickaxes.
I think the vast majority of the money being spent on this will never see any meaningful ROI. You'll probably end up in an economic rule of three scenario, with the third basically breaking even, and the rest trying to dump all of their inventory.
They never truly had it. Though Europe in general just doesn't put a high value in it.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news...
Apparently it's even a crime to show your middle finger to the French president or say that a German politician hates freedom of opinion. Though Europe mostly hasn't known democracy even a century yet, half of it no more than a few decades.
You lose everything. Liberty, democracy, you name it. Over time it goes away because you've lost basically the only defense against tyranny. Doesn't matter your ideology. But if your ideology requires giving up free speech, especially political speech, even if it's "only temporary" then you've given up the rest as well.
I don't know, you'll have to ask them. It's hard for me to say anything for or against ICE because the signal to noise ratio is really low. When I see a comment like "ICE is shooting babies" (or whatever it may be) every time I ask a question to the effect of "what tells you that this is the rule rather than the exception?" the responses I get are less than useless. Some people on this site seem to love to create disinformation just to make themselves feel better. I literally watched amimojo create disinformation in favor of Hezbollah once. Think about that -- a literal fucking terrorist organization.
And so far, most of what I've been hearing about ICE appears to have the same motive, either for or against. So just like with the AI craze, I'm still in the "wait and see" camp, and for the exact same reason.
"It can't be bigotry rooted in racism if some of the targets look white" is a stupidly simplistic argument, but hey, DARVO works some times.
Which is presumably why you're trying to do exactly that. Let's break this down for a second: Among other countries, your link notes the Dominican Republic. About a fifth of that country is European, so I'm not sure where this "looks white" comes from. What is "white"?
Your comment history is interesting
Because authoritarianism is inherent in it. Riddle me this: Name some historical examples of where it hasn't.
You guys keep claiming it isn't, yet ALL available evidence says otherwise. Every time you guys have one of your stupid little revolutions, it's not even just authoritarian, rather all out dictatorships are the end result. Every. Single. Time. Karl Marx himself openly advocated for authoritarian rule for it until some arbitrary terms were met that basically he (or whoever the party leadership is) is the sole arbiter of, even saying free speech should be abolished until after the population has been sufficiently re-educated. You socialists (and fascists, though for different reasons) are so stupid that you don't even realize just how badly such plans have been used and abused, so you're doomed to keep repeating history.
while reflexively supporting all the Trump policies that are actually leading to authoritarianism.
Which ones? Name all of them.
There's a police state coming in on your right flank [substack.com]. You may want to worry about that instead of
Using the military for this purpose is definitely crossing a line that I'm not at all comfortable with, nor have I ever openly supported that. There are a few reasons I don't say anything about it on slashdot:
- Most of what I would have to say on it is typically already said before I even get a chance to respond. The anti-Trump crowd here is very strong, in many cases absurdly so, like that idiot drinkypoop and his earshot denialism or whatever rsilvergun's conspiracy theory of the week happens to be. I'm not going to join in with an echo chamber, especially not one filled with those slobs.
- It isn't at all without precedent to call in the national guard to assist with lawful activity that rioters are interfering with in a way that the local police can't sufficiently manage. This is that history thing I keep talking about. Read up on the Little Rock Nine.
abstract arguments left over from decades ago.
Actually the argument for socialism itself is abstract. The destruction it leaves behind is not; it is in fact quite measurable.
It matters if the song is stolen and repackaged.
Nearly all music is.
https://www.honest-broker.com/...
https://ipwatchdog.com/2018/03...
And there's probably a reason for this:
https://www.psychologytoday.co...
AI isn't the problem. Copyright laws in the US have gotten incredibly fucked up ever since we ratified the Berne treaty.
There's a fairly obvious implication in it. Do you really need it spelled out?
Uncompensated overtime? Just Say No.
