It is difficult to get Drezner to understand that American exceptionalism is already dead when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.

Maybe. I don’t think anyone knows what Trump will do, including Trump himself. He’s all id and no ideology.

The Houthis are the only Iranian proxy

The iron-clad rules of Western corporate publishing:

1. You must always call Hezbollah or Insar Allah Iranian proxies.
2. You must never call Israel or Ukraine US proxies.

Yeahno. The Lemmyverse doesn’t revolve around you. Curate your own fucking feed.

No? Despite Imperial core sanctioning efforts, Russia is doing fairly well. You wouldn’t know it from Western government propaganda or Western corporate media, though.

https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.PP.CD?locations=RU&start=2019&end=2023

Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and to remove all doubt.

deleted by creator

Yeah, because no one reads the goddamn community rules never mind follows them, making [email protected] a free-for-all.

Please elaborate and/or [Citation needed].

a rusty pineapple.

That’s a new Yogi-ism for me, a mashup of “rusty pipe” and “pineapple.”

TL;DR: Out of iPhone, Pixel, Android, AOSP forks, and GrapheneOS, the answer is GrapheneOS by a country mile.

The traitor won the popular vote and is the presumptive winner of the electoral college vote.

The constitution isn’t going to save us from this second Trump term.

• Wall Street Journal: Mueller Doesn’t Find Trump Campaign Conspired With Russia
• Jacobin: Democrats and Mainstream Media Were the Real Kremlin Assets
• Washington Post: FEC fines DNC, Clinton for violating rules in funding Steele dossier
• Washington Post: Russian trolls on Twitter had little influence on 2016 voters
• Jacobin: It Turns Out Hillary Clinton, Not Russian Bots, Lost the 2016 Election
• Matt Taibbi: Move Over, Jayson Blair: Meet Hamilton 68, the New King of Media Fraud The Twitter Files reveal that one of the most common news sources of the Trump era was a scam, making ordinary American political conversations look like Russian spywork
• Jacobin: Why the Twitter Files Are in Fact a Big Deal On the Left, there’s been a temptation to dismiss the revelations about Twitter’s internal censorship system that have emerged from the so-called Twitter Files project. But that would be a mistake: the news is important and the details are alarming.
• MSNBC Repeats Hamilton 68 Lies 279 Times in 11 Minutes
• Jeff Gerth at Columbia Journalism Review on Russiagate: Editor’s Note | Part one | Part two | Part three | Part four
• Matt Taibbi: WMD, Part II: CIA “Cooked The Intelligence” To Hide That Russia Favored Clinton, Not Trump In 2016
• Chris Hedges: Why Russiagate Won’t Go Away

Relatedly, that internet-famous Nazi bar story:

I was at a shitty crustpunk bar once getting an after-work beer. One of those shitholes where the bartenders clearly hate you. So the bartender and I were ignoring one another when someone sits next to me and he immediately says, “no. get out.” And the dude next to me says, “hey i’m not doing anything, i’m a paying customer.” and the bartender reaches under the counter for a bat or something and says, “out. now.” and the dude leaves, kind of yelling. And he was dressed in a punk uniform, I noticed.

Anyway, I asked what that was about and the bartender was like, “you didn’t see his vest but it was all nazi shit. Iron crosses and stuff. You get to recognize them.”

And i was like, ohok and he continues. "you have to nip it in the bud immediately. These guys come in and it’s always a nice, polite one. And you serve them because you don’t want to cause a scene. And then they become a regular and after awhile they bring a friend. And that dude is cool too. And then THEY bring friends and the friends bring friends and they stop being cool and then you realize, oh shit, this is a Nazi bar now. And it’s too late because they’re entrenched and if you try to kick them out, they cause a PROBLEM. So you have to shut them down.

And i was like, ‘oh damn.’ and he said “yeah, you have to ignore their reasonable arguments because their end goal is to be terrible, awful people.”

And then he went back to ignoring me. But I haven’t forgotten that at all.

JWZ: “I prefer to meet people where they are” says reasonable-sounding white dude holding court at a table in the back of a Nazi Bar.

It’s Bluesky. The Nazi Bar is Bluesky.

The memes are getting skibidier by the day.

For one thing, the duty to disobey unlawful orders goes all the way to the lowest E1.

History has shown that these are very seldom adhered to, and that adhering to them is a career-limiting—and even freedom-limiting—move. The whole War on Terror torture regime is just one example in the post-WWII era.

You really need to stop watching Maddow, Morning Joe, and the other Russiagate conspiracy theorists, because this sounds about as unhinged as QAnon conspiracy theorists.

The military is already struggling to recruit

This can be improved by worsening working class conditions and increased jingoism, which will almost certainly happen.