This reads like stand up from the 80s

Ever since the “Nobody knows how to fix a car computer except a Boomer Millennial” memes started trending, we’ve surrendered our “Better than that” card to GenZ.

Millennials are as vulnerable to this crap as anyone else.

• Boomer: I miss being young

• GenX: I miss being young

• Millennial: I miss being young

• GenZ / Alpha: I was told young people had more money 20 years ago and I wish I had more money

Hamas Says

Always telling when they refuse to point to the leadership they are ostensibly dealing with in between rounds of mass extermination.

Netanyahu has made it a national policy of targeting all former members of the Palestinian government, both in Gaza and the West Bank. His IDF kills militants and diplomats alike. They find family members and murder them, too. They gun down whole neighborhoods on the suspicion a Hamas insurgent might be inside. They fill their prisons with suspects and torture Gazans to death, extracting a few confessions out along the way. Then they kick off wars with neighboring Lebanon and Syria, they bomb their ostensible allies in Jordan and Egypt, and they even send bombers deep into Iran.

Hell, they are shooting their own Oct 7th hostages. Who is left to sign a “surrender” agreement on these terms? Anyone waving a white flag is bombed into the pavement.

Might as well ask for Anne Frank’s surrender as anyone in Gaza.

It’s an early YA novel and propaganda piece. Very good at what it set out to accomplish. Obviously, not good for a material understanding of the world.

Well, I’m glad Mamdani won in NYC and zionist liberals can finally put to rest the need to vote straight ticket Democrat.

It’s a hundred pages of diatribes, some misogyny, a story beat, another fifty pages raving about bureaucracy, a story beat, and 100 pages about brainwashing and how socialism fucking sucks.

The joke of 1984 is that Orwell neatly described the modern capitalist British State virtually to a T. Hell, it wasn’t all that far off from the contemporary British State, given the conditions of paranoia and economic decline the island suffered during the postwar aftermath.

In the era it was written, a lot of the diatribes about the nefarious villains of socialist politics felt like a guy throwing on a big spooky ghost custom with a light under the chin. But in the modern moment… fuck it if cops busting down my door because my elementary-school son was tricked into accusing me of ThoughtCrime during a mandatory Two-Minute Hate doesn’t feel like a thing that could really happen.

Then the most half-baked “how do I tie this bad essay together?” ending.

The execution was a forced ending. But the psychology at the end - this desperate liberalist clinging to an individualized, compartmentalized psychic resistance - absolutely strikes a cord. I know plenty of people (hell, I regularly indict myself) over the reflexive meekness draped atop rebellious fantasy. This growling whipped-dog sentiment, where liberals will say everything in a loud whisper, but duck their heads in terror at the first whiff of authority or consequence… as we move further and further towards fascism. I see it everywhere.

Orwell very neatly diagnoses the failure of the liberal opposition in the personage of Winston Smith and his peers. And it is even further pronounced in the meta-textual narrative, as Orwell himself is an embodiment of Winston. A man who has rewritten history at the behest of his imperialist paymasters (after a career as a fucking Burmese cop and nark, ffs) goes to his grave subsuming the revulsion of his own country with a fear and antipathy towards a distant foreign land.

As a coming-of-age book, particularly for American teenagers, “Catcher in the Rye” resonates for a reason. It does an excellent job of capturing the moment from a sympathetic point of view. And then you read it ten years later, thinking to yourself “Holy shit was I really like this?” only to realize you absolutely were.

Damn, if you posted this six months ago, people would have tried to ban you for it.

they’ve also read 1984 and thought all “adult” books are gonna be this fucking dreadful and boring

I gotta say, 1984 has a lot wrong with it. But it’s pretty short and punchy as books go. Espionage, sex, torture, murder. Orwell was Tom Clancy before Tom Clancy was cool.

If you’re looking for something that’s endless, dreadful, and boring, you might want a copy of Atlas Shrugged.

I swear Americans have never read a book that wasn’t Harry Potter in their lives.

Nonsense. Some of them have read The Bible.

They’re lining back up behind Eric Adams, which is functionally the same thing.

Step 1: Go to an Ivy League school

Step 2: Make friends with a failson/daughter of a prevailing plutocrat

Step 3: Put the Matrix-code screensaver on your laptop (apparently, this worked on Elon Musk in the early Twitter takeover days)

Step 4: ???

Step 5: Get a $10M Series A and a $100M Series B thanks to the family of your rich friends buying into your hair-brained Theranos knock-off.

Americans: “Tragedy of the Commons proves that people are incapable of working together for mutual benefit, because personal greed will always lead to the devastation of the collective common good.”

Chinese: “Why do you not simply arrest and punish the bad actors in your society when they overstep and impede on the general welfare?”

Americans: “Because that’s fascism. Also, we’re arresting and deporting you for asking.”

while it does stop a lot, missles and rockets still get through to Israel.

It stops some rockets initially. But the math of missile defense has always been needing two or more countermeasures for every incoming projectile. Consequently, its only useful against small or infrequent salvos. As soon as you get into a war with a modern industrial war-time economy (say, for instance, Iran) you can’t keep up with the number of inbound projectiles.

Once Israeli missile defenses run dry, there’s nothing left standing between them and the next strike.

I’m sure US citizens will also be glad to know that they have donated $2,600,000,000 of their tax dollars specifically towards just the Iron Dome project in Israel between 2011 and 2022.

It would be antisemitic not to be glad.

More or less risky and inefficient than the Iron Dome?

Asking for an Israeli guy currently hiding in a bunker.

It would be nice if the focus was on personal comfort over some ideological crusade.

Bras, head scarves, makeup, skirts versus pants, hair dye, hair length, heaven help you if you’ve got a position on cosmetic surgery… Everything’s a fucking binary. Like, I get complaining about advertisement saturation and the endless suffocating waves of online influencing and even the social/family pressures to look or dress a certain way. But at some point its got to be about what each person feels comfortable with.

Not everything has to be a political position. It is enough to say you are self-determined.

You can’t suggest that the Russian military is capable of using modern troop mobilization strategies. Or that mass media to the contrary might be a part of a racialized propaganda campaign to dehumanize conscripts in the opposition. Or that the Russians (who are curiously still closely aligned with the Saudis, the Israelis, the Indians, and a patchwork of far-right factions across Europe and Africa) aren’t a distinct uniquely horrible imperialist faction that good liberal Europeans need to use all military options to obliterate at any cost.

Only a Russian bot or a paid shill or a Tankie idiot would make such a claim. Why, when I read a post like this, I question whether it could even be produced by a human at all. It must be the viewpoint from the deepest bowls of the Nine Hells.

there is no evidence that the RF is seeking to expand westward

It’s weird to see NATO expand eastward for forty years, slowly gobbling up ex-Soviet states and replacing them with right-wing oligarchies and reactionary-lead business cartels. And then hearing how Russia is the expansionary power.

Weirder still to see the US bomb its way into Iraq, Afghanistan, and the length of North Africa, only to be told that armed opposition groups and disaffected insurgents are the product of Russian disinformation and imperialism.

If the US were to re-invade Vietnam, I genuinely do not know if folks on this sub would understand that the Vietcong and the Northern Vietnamese military were fighting for their independence and not some cat’s-paw of Evil Internationalist Socialism seeking to rapaciously colonize the native peoples of the French Catholic South.

A nightmare for the grandchildren who will lose limbs and lives over this primitive, abhorrent practice.

if they successfully fully take over, those same supporters now become the new threat

Quite a few of the current crop of deputized ICE agents are MAGA goons from four years ago. So long as you’re actively doing the gruesome work of ethnic cleansing, you’ll be given a pass.