“Once we have enough information on our elected officials, they will most certainly align with our interests” is a beautiful idea. But simply not born out in practice.

Far too often, you can have someone on camera dead-to-rights doing the most corrupt shit imaginable and… they’ll win in a landslide in the next election cycle, because they’re doling out the red meat to the right constituents.

it’s on Lemmy too.

Kinda hard to gauge the degree though.

Are you a bot? Am I a bot? Is anyone reading this or is it all just bots jerking each other off?

But everyone seems to rather sit on their phones or being plugged into music than to talk to strangers and live your life in the real world.

I grew up in the 80s.

People stared at their newspapers/comic books or their Gameboys or had eyes closed listening to head phones or just tried not to make eye contact.

There was not some golden era when talking to strangers was normal and people were living in the “real” world. Today isn’t nearly as divorced from the past is people like to pretend.

Banks aren’t allowed to be this blatantingly shady

😆

Private Credit/Equity is is playing the role of facilitator of collapse

Which are just a backchannel for the original Banksters, in the same way that Bear Sterns and SVB were back doors for the bigger and more heavily regulated formal banking sector prior to their own implosions.

Hey, remember that time Aaron Swartz used public APIs and perfectly legal aggregation of information to compile scientific journals in a data set outside the paywall. And he was arrested, prosecuted, and threatened with life in prison until he (allegedly) killed himself?

Then his original and highly lucrative pet project, Reddit, was mutated into a propaganda factory by the Epstein Class, cannibalized by the Investor Class, and gutted for AI slop by the Tech Sector?

What determines whether a bubble pops or not is not logic but rather belief

Well… there’s harder economic realities that people eventually bump into. And that shapes belief in the credit markets and the investment banks.

For instance, Greenspan hiking interest rates from 2006 to 2008 was what put Lehman Brothers and Bear Sterns under pressure to cover an escalating interest payment. When they began to default, all their creditors panicked (justifiably) and began withholding shorter term lending. And that accelerated the collapse. But because of the network of interbank lending, Lehman tugged on the strings of Goldman, WellsFargo, BoA, JP Morgan…

It wasn’t just vibes. There was a material credit crisis resulting in Bear Sterns - specifically - not having enough money in the till to pay its credit notes. And because everyone was so highly leveraged, there was a real accountable cascade of defaults.

In theory, bigger institutions could have backstopped the slide by offering even more generous credit terms (which is what the Federal Reserve / US Treasury ultimately did). The “vibes” part was the risk/reward analysis. Everyone could see the looming risk. Relatively few executives could conceive of the long-term consequences of a collective bank run.

some economists have warned

We’ve been getting this warning for years. Over the same time, the value of these stocks have not diminished.

Did you not read the article?

It’s the exact same article that gets printed twice a month going on 40 years.

I would bet even money that it is itself AI generated, at this point.

Headline: “AI STOCK SELLOFF!!!”

glances at stock chart YTD

:-/

According to that definition Snowden doesn’t defecate, he goes for a heroic dump.

If he’s shitting on the right people, I think this qualifies

America: “How much deficit are you on?”

Russia: “$70, maybe $80B, my dude.”

America: “You are like a little baby.”

You could have a heroic doctor but nobody’s full time job is ‘hero’.

Anyone who is regularly engaged in heroics would be a full-time hero, in the same way that anyone engaged in full time medical practice would be a doctor. In Snowden’s case, he effectively quite his job at Booze-Allen and became an advocate for dismantling of the surveillance state effectively full-time. He stopped drawing a salary as an intelligence analyst and focused all his time on assembling, distributing, and propagandizing the nature of the PRISM program and the need to end it.

A hero is a term that’s useful in a novel but some people wanna cosplay

It’s a term that is used to describe an individual engaged in a heroic effort on a sustained basis. To your point, you could easily describe a Doctors Without Borders volunteer or a volunteer firefighter as a hero-as-full-time-job. Depending on your ideology and the individual’s circumstances, you could also describe a civil rights advocate or a military operative or a journalist as a hero.

It’s a weak descriptor, because just calling someone a “hero” doesn’t explain their heroic status. Whereas, calling someone a doctor pretty clearly illustrates how they’re (presumably) spending their time. But “Hero Journalist” definitely conjures an image that is different than “Paparazzi Journalist”.

A hero is a concept

It’s a descriptor of a person or personality.

“Help! Help! I need a doctor.”

“I’m sorry ma’am, but a doctor is more of a conceptual term. Nobody here can fulfill your request.”

Anything in particular? Or is this just bad vibes?

His politics seem to lean closer to libertarian nut-job than anything else

Sure, but you could say the same of Luigi Mangione and that isn’t slowing anyone down.

Case in point, Glen Greenwald broke the Snowden leaks, and I considered him one of my heros for a time,.but these days he sounds more like Tucker Carlson than anyone else.

Glenn was always a libertarian crank. But after he got ousted from The Guardian, his economic needs superseded his politics. I might suggest that if Glenn had ended up on MSNBC rather than the gutter for FOX News washouts, he’d be denouncing Snowden today rather than praising him.

The point is, admire heroic actions, but don’t make people your heroes.

I don’t think you can criticize Snowden because the guy who interviewed him ended up becoming a crank. But I also don’t know of what became of Snowden, outside “he fled to Russia after Hong Kong wouldn’t hide him”.

I might suggest that Snowden was only able to leak what he did because he climbed up the ranks through Booze-Allen to begin with. And there you’ve got an inherent problem with whistleblowers - either coming or going, they must have done something you don’t like.

But I’d say his turn of conscious and his work ethic and professionalism in how the information was aggregated, leaked, and confirmed makes him a role model for anyone else who aspires to turn coat against a fascist regime. Whatever you think of the individuals, you still do need Role Models in order to inform how you might achieve similar results. That means studying other people - studying history at the individualist level - and asking how they did what they did. Ideally, you’re studying people you admire because you want to be more like them. Realistically, you’re going to study people and see their warts. And that might shape what you think about their motivations and whether your own motivations lead you the same way.

Okay, well then I guess I’ll just wait for that to happen

Israeli settlements

Strange that the prohibition would extend to cat’s paw of the fascist regime, but not the massive genocidal police state that enables it.

Let’s not glorify Hezbollah

Well, they’re Evil Brown Muslims, not Righteous European Judeo-Christians.

On day 1 they’d institute hijab requirements and stone gay people

Westerners discover gay rights (kinda) and five years later they’re slapping the rainbow flag on tomahawk missiles.

The whole “democracy” thing is little more than a show, if you ask me.

American Democracy has a lot of angles to it. If money was the only object, Jeb Bush would be in his third term.

Given the way that impeachment ended, I’m sure a lot of people would like if we did

Do you really think that Trump and his billionaire cronies don’t have the media under their thumb?

I think media owners regularly have to discipline Trump with negative news stories and right wing hecklers.

Neocon Hecklers got him into the Iran War. Wall Street hecklers got him to sign a deal. And Zionist hecklers will likely convince him to blow it up again.

The fact that he’s still in office at all borders on a miracle

Once you prove you can get elected, you develop a level of inertia that keeps getting you elected.

Yes, Eisenhower was a scumbag. But compared to

The big difference between Eisenhower’s two terms and Trump’s two terms boils down to the alignment of the US national media at the time. Eisenhower had them under lock-and-key day one. Trump’s had an off-and-on relationship going back to his Central Park Five ad.

The dirty truth of Presidential politics is that lots of these guys are corrupt, lots of them are incompetent, and lots of them are complete assholes. But public opinion hinges on whether the national media wants to scream at them. Trump getting into a four month long disastrous war with Iran is - frankly - a huge improvement over the Bush Jr (decades in Iraq/Afghanistan) or Reagan (instigated the Iran-Iraq War which killed millions) or Eisenhower (toppled multiple liberal Middle Eastern governments from the inside). Assuming this peace deal sticks, he’s going to go down as one of the least reprehensible US Presidents to meddle in Middle Eastern politics, by volume of atrocities committed.

Drump is actually the best representative this country has ever had.

He’s definitely a symptom of the US decline. But given our nightmare run at foreign policy across the region, that’s somehow managed to be an improvement.