Avid Amoeba

Can confirm, have done it this way for years.

This is so true. 😄

Oligarchs have been unified by their pursuit for profit long before Russia became able to push any sort of effective propaganda to Americans. The Heritage Foundation that peddles these ideas did not emerge from Russian interference in 2016. Neither did Fox whose entire purpose is peddling domestic oligarch propaganda. Neither did the Chicago School of Economics anti-worker takeover of national economic policy. US oligarchs did not offshore middle class jobs or bust unions on Russian advice. This has been going on for a lot longer than the last decade. The pushback started as a result of FDR’s redistribution policies that cut US oligarch wealth in the aftermath of the Great Depression. First slowly, then more quickly.

And your “only way out of this” – why you don’t you tell me in small steps exactly how that happens. Lets hear it.

Campaign, donate and vote for “far-left” D candidates at every gov’t level - like AOC, Zohran, etc. Campaign, donate and vote for “far-left” independent candidatss where there’s no such candidates in that district. Join a union. Join a local socialist org. Eventually you’d tilt the balance of power in various gov’t institutions. Whenever you do that, you tax the rich to death. But that goes without saying cause every “far-left” candidate has that on their agenda.

E: FWIW, was where you are in my thinking a few years ago. I didn’t know as much about the historical development of econimic policy in the US, who drove it, who got richer, who got poorer, what tools were being used to do one or the other.

E2: And in case it isn’t clear how taxing the rich to death solves the problem, it deprives them from the money they need to buy the democratic system. It puts that money back into the majority’s pockets. Politicians have to fight for that money and therefore go back to serving the majority. They start passing the laws that you want passed. Like curbing online propaganda from both Zuckerberg and Putin. And many others that serve you instead of Bezos.

If on the other hand you eliminate all foreign propagnda with a magic wand today, all domestic propaganda will remain. Democratic control will remain in the hands of the oligarchs. They would keep making Americans poorer and poorer while scapegoating yet another group or actor. The most impoverished would completely lose faith in the democratic system because it no longer solves their problems. When the oligarchs propose a candidate who promises to solve the poverty (they themselves created) by dismantling democracy (since democracy is the only nonviolent tool that can strip them of their wealth), the desperate would vote for that. As FDR, and many others have explained a century ago.

The thinking that any of the current fallout in the US is foreign-led is not giving any good explanations for the reality we observe and therefore procides no good solutions. What you’re observing is primarily driven by the oligarch class in the US finding new ways to extract profit. That drives everything. It drives Fox, it drives the Heritage Foundation, it drives turning both parties in oligarch-serving machines. External factors are only helping accelerate it a bit. Feeding this machine with resources from the outside is a bad idea since most of those resources would be captured by the oligatchs. The only way out of this is to get an internal populist left movement to curb their power, reposses most of their resources and redestribute them to the masses.

Could be the last one before Peter Thiel’s gang taking over.

You never buy an individual firm stock unless you have insider knowledge.

One recent report raised troubling questions about potentially systematic efforts to advance antisemitic and anti-Israel information in Wikipedia articles related to conflicts with the State of Israel.

Of course they’d use the anti-Israel crutch.

I was talking about a laptop with non-removable battery of course! I turn off my desktop via Zigbee remote hooked to Home Assistant which flips a Zigbee power switch that the AC power cord is hooked up to. Even faster death than going under the desk and unplugging the power cord. Even just unplugging itself takes time.

Linux is so strong I turn it off from the power button. Saving 5 seconds.