[Resources are] finite, as is our capacity to replenish them.

You think this is propaganda?

Arming Ukraine just prolongs a war that’s clearly lost. That costs more lives than it saves.

US, Israeli militaries jointly drilled Iran strike during Biden administration

Trump deported fewer people last month than Biden a year ago

What’s more important than the nuances of appropriations is the fact that Biden could have stopped giving weapons to a state committing genocide, but didn’t.

Everything else he did or didn’t do with respect to the situation is comparatively minor.

Why wouldn’t they be low after supplying Ukraine and now Israel for so long? They’re finite, as is our capacity to replenish them. There’s been plenty of reporting on the limits of our ability to do so.

Skepticism is warranted, but it could easily be true.

A major problem in the U.S. left is the habit of endlessly rehashing inter-leftist arguments that are not only from wildly different political contexts, but are also well over 100 years old.

1. It’s hard to imagine a topic with less immediate relevance to working people today.
2. Late-tsarist Russia (or interwar Germany) was so different than the U.S. in 2025 that you can draw exactly zero clean lessons from it. Every interesting takeaway must be couched in so many caveats that it loses most of its value.
3. 99% of people who engage in these discussions have at best an undergraduate level knowledge of what Russia was like before the USSR and during the transition to the latter. Nearly everyone is working from a patchy understanding of the facts.
4. Nonsense in the form of “I didn’t like the historical XYZ group, and today’s ABC group is basically the XYZs all over again, so I can tell you with certainty what bad things today’s ABC group will do in the future” is inescapable.
5. This is point 1 again, but can you imagine how out of touch you look getting into this stuff with some baby leftist who’s being radicalized by, say, the health insurance industry?

Reading history is good. Reading theory is good. But this stuff isn’t scripture and can’t tell you how Zohran or someone will play out. We have to go figure that out ourselves. There’s a reason every successful leftist movement prominently involved its leaders writing new theory and guidance for their own specific circumstances.

“Purposefully” is debatable, but whether intentional or by happenstance, damn it really is odd that so many descendants of Nazis are all over my imperial core countries that backed tons of fascist coups over the past 75 years.

His campaign’s equivocations around the question of Israel’s “right to exist,”

This is such an obviously loaded question. If he were asked “when did you stop beating your wife,” would we hem and haw over the semantics of his answer, or would we recognize the question is bullshit and look at the guy’s more substantive statements on whatever issue we want to know about?

He’s said Israel is indiscriminately killing civilians, that they have to follow international law, that Palestinians deserve equal rights, and he’s defended the slogan “globalize the intifada.” If you think he’s some closet zionist, you’re overthinking it.

The enforced silences are cracking—not with revolutionary rupture, but with the slow, grinding attrition of imperial consensus. What once had to be hidden can now be tentatively named, even if symbolic concessions are also made. What once marked the outer edge of the acceptable is now folded—awkwardly, cautiously, but definitively—into the domain of the political.

Can’t argue with any of this. It’s also notable how despite being a mayoral race, this is a big election – NYC has a larger population than all but about a dozen states.

There are three types of conspiracy theories:

1. Lizard people live in the hollow earth and mind control world leaders
2. The CIA admitted it on the Congressional record 40 years ago
3. The Enemy of the State zone, where it’s plausible but unconfirmed

rumors of a massacre in the Square would be easy to dispel if foreign journalists were allowed to stay and film. but protests were an embarrassment to China, and China sweeps embarrassments under the rug.

We don’t know how many people U.S. police kill every year, and you could fill volumes with all the other horrible stuff our government does that only leaks out decades later. Governments being shy about publicizing embarrassments is a government thing, not a Chinese thing.

The specifics of the incident are murky overwhelmingly due to one reason: the western world decided to mythologize it. The vast majority of western discussion on it now falls into two camps: right-wingers who deliberately spread the most lurid campfire stores imaginable (10,000 deaths! Tanks ground people into paste!), and liberals who lazily repeat inaccuracies and falsehoods that are occasionally more plausible (e.g., the legacy media doing this in the Columbia Journalism Review article). Some academics and leftists will try to sort through all this garbage, but they are the distinct minority.

“It’s the voters who are wrong, not my genocidal policies”

“Hey why aren’t people voting for me, wait, come back”

I have extreme anxiety talking to people I find attractive and have a very hard time reading people’s body language as to when they’re sexually interested, the only time I’ve ever managed to pick up a random person has been basically when I acted like a pick up artist.

Just ask them, word for word, “do you want to go on a date sometime?” It’s no more anxiety-inducing than anything else, and you don’t have to do any weird pick up artist stuff.

If they are actually interested in you, they’ll say yes.

My point was that China ordered the army to do what they did.

What’s your source for this? Had they been ordered to shoot a bunch of protesters, why would they have let protesters in the square leave peacefully?

The much more likely scenario is soldiers were met with deadly violence at some point and – as most armed people who face deadly violence will do – opened fire.

I’m not making an argument about what violence was justified and what wasn’t. I’m pointing out that the facts we agree on contradict your claim that there was some top-down order to massacre people, and that you haven’t provided any support for that claim in the first place.

There are a million problems with the police, but this isn’t anywhere near accurate.

https://www.osc.ny.gov/retirement/publications/1841/20-year-retirement-benefit

With 20 years of creditable service, you will receive a retirement benefit of 50 percent of your Final Average Salary (FAS).

NYPD cops aren’t pulling in an average of $1.2 million per year.

Edit – better source:

The average pension received by full career retirees was $84,964.

Columbia Journalism Review:

A few people may have been killed by random shooting on streets near the square, but all verified eyewitness accounts say that the students who remained in the square when troops arrived were allowed to leave peacefully. Hundreds of people, most of them workers and passersby, did die that night, but in a different place and under different circumstances.

The Chinese government estimates more than 300 fatalities. Western estimates are somewhat higher. Many victims were shot by soldiers on stretches of Changan Jie, the Avenue of Eternal Peace, about a mile west of the square, and in scattered confrontations in other parts of the city, where, it should be added, a few soldiers were beaten or burned to death by angry workers.

The resilient tale of an early morning Tiananmen massacre stems from several false eyewitness accounts in the confused hours and days after the crackdown. Human rights experts George Black and Robin Munro, both outspoken critics of the Chinese government, trace many of the rumor’s roots in their 1993 book, Black Hands of Beijing: Lives of Defiance in China’s Democracy Movement. Probably the most widely disseminated account appeared first in the Hong Kong press: a Qinghua University student described machine guns mowing down students in front of the Monument to the People’s Heroes in the middle of the square. The New York Times gave this version prominent display on June 12, just a week after the event, but no evidence was ever found to confirm the account or verify the existence of the alleged witness. Times reporter Nicholas Kristof challenged the report the next day, in an article that ran on the bottom of an inside page; the myth lived on. Student leader Wu’er Kaixi said he had seen 200 students cut down by gunfire, but it was later proven that he left the square several hours before the events he described allegedly occurred.

I’m certainly not getting my hopes up, but this being in LA instead of Kabul might have a significant effect on how willingly the rank-and-file will just open up on a crowd.

There’s a big Navy base in San Diego; some of the Marines are probably coming from there. Some probably grew up in California, more probably visited LA at some point. Going a few hours to a place where people speak your language and there is an In-and-Out Burger down the street is very different from going halfway across the world to a place where you recognize little and understand far less.

According to Defense Minister Israel Katz, the activists refused to continue watching the film after seeing the brutality of the attacks.

So this headline is probably a lie.

It’s simultaneously:

1. The broader U.S. imperial apparatus (e.g., the State Department) understands Israel’s importance for the U.S. and backs it for that reason
2. All sorts of minor U.S. politicians who don’t really influence foreign policy face a major hurdle from AIPAC if they don’t sufficiently support Israel

The U.S. is predominantly running the show, but Israel has agency too, and its state policy involves filtering out U.S. politicians who might oppose its interests as early as possible. This includes a massive amount of pro-Israel propaganda intended for mainstream consumption, harassing professors at colleges, etc.

Figuring out what portion of my rental income comes from the ICE client is not possible, as the family member who manages it declines to go to the trouble, which I understand is considerable.

The obvious response of “talk to your family member and figure out what the actual facts are” somehow never comes up.

Someone else highlighted that various types of funds (including pension funds) are often invested in similarly dicey business. This is a great place to educate and agitate, because a lot of people would be similarly troubled by this investment, but you actually have to talk to someone and probably do some digging.

You can’t unilaterally break the lease.Even if you could, ICE would simply relocate its facility.

You can usually break a lease if the tenant is doing something illegal on the property. Force them to fight an eviction. Force them to go to the trouble of moving.

Archive link?