yesman

@yesman@lemmy.world

I don’t read my replies

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. For a complete list of posts, browse on the original instance.

yesman ,

Personnel is much more apples to apples. Comparing spending between two nations muddies the waters.

I assume you're commenting on US spending, but consider that other countries don't have to pay US wages and benefits to it's soldiers, contractors, and manufacturers. If we could buy our weapons from India, recruit our soldiers from China, and build ships in S.Korea our defense budget would be much smaller without having to ration a single fighterjet.

Did you know that we spend almost 4X as much on social programs than we do on the military today?

https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/31f98769-15f4-44ad-9df1-1d43d4f7974a.png

yesman ,

FELLAS!

TIL in the Carboniferous Period, no fungus existed to decompose trees. They just grew on top of each other up and up.

The weight of the trees was so great that the ones on the bottom got squished and became coal. That’s where coal is from. Bonus fact: the whole time this was happening, sharks were hunting in the oceans. Sharks are older than trees and fungus!

yesman ,

The trees clogged the land, the water, and when one inevitably got struck by lightning, continent wide forest fires were common.

IIRC, it's these trees, not dinosaur bones that became most of the oil/gas deposits.

It's worth noting that when it comes to a species wrecking the environment, causing mass extinction, changing the climate, or spoiling the atmosphere, humans are not the first and we're not the worst.

yesman ,

SNL skit idea where Alito and Thomas have a podcast:

But before we get to all that... I just wanna say if you enjoy our jururerprudence and wanna see more rulings like these please consider checking out our patron.

yesman ,

That picture makes me feel like I walked in on my parents fucking.

yesman ,

If you invented something unique your first problem is going to be describing it to yourself. You'll need new nomenclature. The second problem is describing the unique thing to someone else.

One could argue that anything that can be nailed down by language cannot be unique because the metaphors and phrases to describe it preexisted.

yesman ,

Headline: US officials admit that TickTock ban intended to censor Gaza news.

Article: Romney and Blinken blame Israel's disastrous PR on social media and opine that this is a good reason to ban platforms like TickTock.

yesman ,

Libertarians: If you ignore how problems are systemic, then the individual can solve everything.

Honestly, I'm suspicious the writers at Reason use media to spread their message, why not just convince your friends one conversation at a time?

yesman OP ,

James “JP” Staples has been expelled by Phi Delta Theta. When a Mississippi frat throws you under the bus for being too racist, you're not going to have a good time.

yesman ,

If you want an institution that keeps the peace, protects citizens, and is accountable for use of force, then you'll have to create one whole-cloth. Because the police are not that institution and they never were intended to be.

yesman ,

Here is the install manual

yesman ,

https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/cf293ad0-31f7-4813-b069-61d8285fc071.jpeg

yesman ,

Blood Meridian by Cormac Mccarthy.

It's kinda hard to describe. I recon it's a parable about American colonization and the genocide of the native people. Like a map of how a project like that gets done and who benefits from it.

It's like a melodrama in that it's light on plot, and character motivation, but without the extreme circumstances unless you count the pervasive, persistent, and senseless violence. (that the characters themselves barely seem to notice) Not exactly a supernatural tale, but filled with dream logic, oh and the literal Christian Devil is one of the main characters.

This is the only book Ive ever read twice, back to back. I got to the end and was like WTF, turned to the first page and started again.

yesman ,

I love it. Tucker used to have an enormous platform he'd share with knuckleheads. But his platform has gone from a stadium act to a tent revival.

And it's not because he was fascist, it's because Rupert Merdoch traded Tucker's whole career to get a discount on the Dominion settlement.

yesman ,

The problem is that too many people think they are thinking critically. Pushback, fact-checking, and ridicule are all seen as evidence that one is correct because the crackpots all think they're fucking Galileo.

yesman ,

'The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine' by Ilan Pappe.

yesman ,

Articles like this are madding to me. The author painstakingly catalogues why policing doesn't work now, and never worked in the past. What's the problem: Incompetence laziness. (personal moral failings) What's the solution: reform. (of course)

Implied is the idea that policing is necessary. That society will just fall apart if we don't pay salaries to armed, unaccountable, and violent street thugs. What could undermine this childish faith more than the fact that pigs, in fact, don't do the core service we "require" them for?

The answer is that pigs do a great job, it's just that protecting the public isn't part of it. They're job is to uphold the social order and protect the property of the ownership class.

yesman ,

I'd rather be on the Ukrainian front than any place accurately represented by Blood Meridian.

yesman OP ,

Sometimes when a defense contractor and military branch love each other very much, they do a special hug, called an engineering and manufacturing development contract.

yesman ,

All you need to know about Ayn Rand is that she cashed her Social Security checks.

yesman ,

The physicist and the philosopher are both claiming that time is the order in which we observe things happening, the actual dispute is over the most fundamental force in science: nomenclature.

yesman ,

Countries that have to jump through hoops to get their hands on, or sell sanctioned goods is an example of sanctions working.

Y'all remember back in 2022 when certain items were hard to get a hold of because of supply chain issues? You could still get what you wanted through the one weird trick of paying a premium for it. And that was a significant factor in inflation.

The goal of sanctions is not to hermetically seal a country off from global markets, but to damage that countries economy.

yesman ,

A great number of the enslaved people trafficked to the English Caribbean were later trafficked to work camps in places like South Carolina. In that State in particular (may be the case elsewhere IDK), the majority of the English Colonists as well as enslaved people came from the West Indies.

By the 19th Century the Atlantic slave trade was outlawed in the US (1808). The British abolished slavery in 1833. Most enslaved people in the US were descendants of enslaved people already there. IDK what the birth rate for enslaved people was, but you can imagine that 100 enslaved people trafficked in 1700 could be over a thousand by the time of the American Civil War. So most of what we think of as the height of US chattel slavery was after the Atlantic Trade was in decline.

yesman ,

This is a common rural mentality. Animals are utilitarian and those who fail to be useful or prove to be a nuisance are a waste of resources. "useless eaters"

Unless you're vegan (and I'm not), you participate in this kind of cruelty, even if you happen to be a few degrees removed from it.

yesman ,

I'm a huge keyboard shortcut guy. But any more than two modifiers can fuck right off. I wanna launch a program, not play carpel tunnel Twister.

yesman ,

I don't think the Warsaw uprising is an apt comparison for the war in Gaza. Never-mind the inflammatory nature of the Israel/Nazi comparison. But it's just doesn't add much context or illumination to what's happening.

I think historic examples that could bring more light than heat are : Plan Dalet and the Nakba (47-48), Beirut ('82), or the First Intifada (87-93). I think it might help if people understood more about this conflict, rather than trying to retread it over with WWII.

yesman ,

Journalists killed in Gaza represent the vast majority of journalists killed worldwide in '23, '24. So if Israel is putting them in jail, it's softening it's policy.

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/2/15/nearly-75-of-journalists-killed-in-2023-died-in-israels-war-on-gaza-cpj

https://cpj.org/2024/04/journalist-casualties-in-the-israel-gaza-conflict/

yesman ,

Cable news' job is to sell advertising. Nelson is the judge of how well their doing.

This is what's so frustrating about neolibs like Jon. They think a call to honor, or perhaps some light regulation can reform capitalism. And even sillier, they imagine that a responsible cable news would somehow lead to an informed electorate.

This is an old schtick for Stuart. Fox News is crazy and CNN is stupid. Both sides, you guys. Please don't look at the incentive structure behind the curtain.

yesman ,

And my adult children don't speak to me.

yesman ,

I use Winamp on my PC.

First of all, it respects albums. Other players like VLC and Fubar2000 would order the songs alphabetically; it's annoying. Also in the "artist" list "The Beatles" comes right after "Beasty Boys" the way God intended.

Second it has an "always on top" feature so you can easily control it while gaming.

Winamp was made for people who listen to music the way I do. You know, old people.

yesman ,

Neat. Put the embassy in Jerusalem.

yesman ,

It's not fair to say that Zionist lobby controls US policy. There are plenty of examples when US interests conflicted with Israel and the US crossed it's ally. (Suez Canal crisis, arms sales to SArabia, Iran nuke deal)

The problem is that the US has no interest in the Palestinian cause. There's no political or strategic advantage to a free and sovereign Palestine. This has started to change recently with younger Democratic voters demanding a policy change. And we've seen direct policy shifts after the Michigan and Wisconsin primary protests. If there is a political cost to supporting the occupation, American presidents will change.

Lastly, I don't think it's accurate to assume that Jewish contributors to the Democratic party are necessarily Zionist. Even the article you site gives many domestic reasons why an American Jew would favor the Democrats.

yesman ,

Sure a neutral definition of propaganda will encompass any type of public message.

In popular usage, it means nefarious and deceptive messaging for wicked purposes.

juxtaposing the two meanings, especially to argue that one is more "correct" is just semantics.

yesman ,

Fire-hose propaganda is not for people who pay attention to current events. It's kinda like those scam emails with the bad grammar: they're trying to filter away the tuned-in to get to their core audience.

  • All
  • Subscribed
  • Moderated
  • Favorites
  • •
  • random
  • test
  • worldmews
  • mews
  • All magazines
    •