MolotovHalfEmpty [he/him]

The Americans had already used the bomb, twice, and even before that there wasn’t really any doubt they would if they could. As history proved both before and after Nagasaki, the US was happy to cause any amount of death and destruction to fight the (mostly extremely paranoid and overstated) ‘threat of communism’. And whatever you think about the idea of nuclear deterrence in the modern era, there’s little to no doubt it was the only thing preventing the US using nukes against the USSR.

Don’t worry, the cast of the Thick Of It reboot are on it:

This is why I’ll never leave Hexbear, I love you idiots.

Basically just the rock that keeps away tigers at this point.

Bastani continues his pivot into dull English Bill Maher because actual leftists didn’t fall about to embrace him as some kind of intellectual thought leader.

Next week, a hard hitting interview where he briefly challenges Adrian Zenz on some of his past religious rhetoric before asking him to share his concerns on China for six and a half hours.

True, but who gives a shit about finding out why a load of kids (1017) got blown up in the lobby of a gig venue, or how the guy did it? We’d give them a big cultural memorial but it happened in the North and it’s awkward because the only person who could address it was an enemy of the state.

Best trained for the pantomime. Least trained for anything else.

They were locally. And then the right wing press got hold and decided it was a safety / political correctness issue gone mad and it instakilled genuine normal person’s gripes against it.

Cut to twenty-five years later and a friend who wrote a book a decade ago got stopped for wearing a tee shirt with the title on it two years ago.

And obviously that isn’t anything compared to the people they really weaponised this shit against even then, but that was a because a copper didn’t like it in a small historic market town.

Or if you’re British and want to blow up an arena full of kids going to a concert, the intelligence services will help set you up with terror training abroad and step in to help you out if you get into trouble at the airport with border control.

It was also probably referencing the mood in the Reagan 80s too. Same shit, different decade.

Yeah ASPI has long been a rabidly anti-China propaganda arm of the US. They’re the think tank that floods politics with rationales to destroy their own export economy, spend impossible amounts of money on nuclear subs they’ll probaby never recieve, etc. But they’ve also been used in the past much more broadly. They were one of the outfits laundering Adrian Zenz’s bullshit and the nonesense ‘satallite imagery’ from Xinjiang after people started realising that Zenz was a complete crank. The UK and European press also used them while doing long ‘investigations’ into why actually it actually definitely wasn’t Israel who bombed the al-Ahli hospital (until they admitted it and bombed a load more).

If you think that’s absurd you should see the UK’s constantly used Public Order Act which makes it a crime to engage in actions that “may cause a nuisance or offend someone”.

Do they have to actually do either of those things? No. Do the police need to provide an example of someone who was offended or ‘nuisanced’? No.

It’s literally a law that makes literally anything the police would like a crime, while also being grounds for preventing protest and using stop and search powers.

Have you seen this one, is it any good? It’s the one about the corrupt property entire that collapsed in the eighties right?

Yes, exactly. With a few other broader invest in Israel things too, but predominently, yes.

‘Investigative journalist’ Sam Cooper of The Bureau - a China-obsessed, shitty Canadian news site larping as the Intercept - has been caught fabricating news stories about ‘China connected Canadian figures’ meeting with Chinese spies and drug traffickers in a Macau casino because people noticed that the ‘leaked CCTV footage’ the story was based on was in fact a scene from a 2014 HK action comedy staring Chow Yun-fat.

The Bureau have quietly removed the story from their website, but neither them nor anti-China hack Sam Cooper have acknowledged the issue.

I love Columbo. The pacing and calmness of it is so refreshing compared to hyperactive modern detective shows. It’s largely devoid of copaganda, with Columbo being the kind of true detective that could basically not exist in reality. The performances are fantastic, with special shout outs to Donald Pleasence’s episode, the movie featuring Johnny Cash, and the four episodes starring and directed by the late great Patrick McGoohan.

I’m jealous. Best I can do right now is listen to Columbo remixes like this while I drink my coffee, answer my emails, and look at the fence the storm blew down yesterday and decide whether I can be arsed trying to fix it today while it’s still raining.

France has raided the home of and arrested Imane Maarifi, a French nurse who returned from working in Gaza and has been speaking out at protests and the media about the situation there. She’s supposedly charged with the crime of making public insults in relation to an Israeli investment and real estate fair being held in Paris this weekend.

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Agreed. This is the sensible pragmatist’s position.