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Reposted by Calliope

Joe Stieb @joestieb.bsky.social · 14h

This is savage and completely righteous.

Wajahat Ali @wajali.bsky.social · 1d

With receipts!

www.theguardian.com/stage/2025/o...

‘Amoral, evil’: vitriolic backlash builds against comics who played Riyadh festival

Murder by bone-saw, lashings for rape victims, punishment amputation, jail for satirists … these are the Saudi human rights abuses fuelling the fury being directed at the likes of Louis CK, Dave Chapp...

www.theguardian.com

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Calliope @calliope5431.bsky.social · 14h

They're both bad, there's probably corruption here, but frankly it's not exactly to the US's disadvantage if Qatari pilots can defend themselves against Iran themselves.

The nasty truth about the Gulf States is that they're some of the strongest Western-aligned autocracies on Earth.

Andy Craig @andycraig.bsky.social · 14h

Hegseth sucks. The Qataris suck. But we aren’t giving Qatar an airbase in Idaho. It’s building dorms etc. at an existing base to train them on F-15s we sold them, just like Singapore already has there. Common arrangement we have with lots of countries. This one was already being planned under Biden.

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Calliope @calliope5431.bsky.social · 14h

Zaibatsu with American characteristics, more and more people are saying.

Liberal Currents @liberalcurrents.com · 22h

“The problem with billionaires isn’t that they’re hoarding money that would otherwise pay for a Scandinavian social utopia. It’s that their money has become a source of wildly distorted political power that allows a few men with extremist views to wreak havoc on the rest of us.”

Billionaires Are Hoarding Power, Not Money

Billionaire money has become a source of wildly distorted political power that allows a few men with extremist views to wreak havoc on the rest of us.

www.liberalcurrents.com

Reposted by Calliope

BeijingPalmer @beijingpalmer.bsky.social · 15h

rare earths are an exercise in American inability to govern. the problem of Chinese dominance in the sector has been known for over a decade. there was a broad bipartisan consensus that it was a problem in DC, at least among anyone who knew even a little about it, and constant discussion of ...

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Calliope @calliope5431.bsky.social · 16h

This is like criticizing Montezuma for not being a great Spanish intellectual like St. Ignatius. He was never Spanish in the first place, that's sort of the entire point.

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Calliope @calliope5431.bsky.social · 16h

Peter Thiel's shtick gets progressively funnier as Peter Thiel himself asymptotically approaches the literal biblical Antichrist.

Michael Derby @michaelsderby.bsky.social · 21h

Conservative tech lord Thiel said tighter financial regulations “were a sign that a singular world government has begun to emerge that could be taken over by an Antichrist figure who could then use it to exert control over people.” Via WashPost

Inside billionaire Peter Thiel’s private lectures: Warnings of ‘the Antichrist’ and U.S. destruction

In leaked recordings of private lectures by tech billionaire Peter Thiel he argued that “the Antichrist” is likely to take the form of a critic of technology.

www.washingtonpost.com

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Calliope @calliope5431.bsky.social · 16h

I actually don't know if "political spending" is the biggest issue. Frankly, the problem seems to be more about billionaires devouring entire media ecosystems (WaPo, Twitter, etc)

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Calliope @calliope5431.bsky.social · 17h

Yeah this is literally the only thing Claremont has ever actually gotten right, and I have zero doubt they'd disavow it all today now that the big players are on their side:

The Zaibatsu-ization of America

Our tech overlords have forsaken innovation for consolidation.

americanmind.org

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Calliope @calliope5431.bsky.social · 17h

Khanna may well not "take a dime" from AIPAC. He's also an open defender of the American big tech zaibatsu, any one of which has more money than the market cap of every major Wall Street bank in the US combined.

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Calliope @calliope5431.bsky.social · 17h

Ro Khanna's literal job is to represent the 17th district of California, also known as "Silicon Valley." Apple corporate HQ is *in his district*, he has as much right to complain about Big Money as John D. Rockefeller.

Joel S. @joelhs.bsky.social · 1d

Ian Carroll, whom Democratic representative Ro Khanna is featuring in this video, claims Israel invented Holocaust denial to discredit its critics, that the US is controlled by a "Zionist mafia," and that Jews did 9/11.

Really bad that Democrats are platforming overt antisemites like this!

Ro Khanna @rokhanna.bsky.social · 1d

I don't take a dime from any PAC or lobbyist, including AIPAC.

I am proud to be one of the handful of Democrats standing up against Big Money.

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Calliope @calliope5431.bsky.social · 18h

"Al-Qaeda killed my love of sambusas. Also around 3,000 people, but mostly the sambusa thing."

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Calliope @calliope5431.bsky.social · 1d

Entirely correct. This is hardly the international system's "first rodeo" with murderous leaders. Franco and Salazar were in the heart of Europe and died peacefully in their beds! So did Chiang Kai-Shek. Mengistu Haile Mariam is still living in Zimbabwe, having never been extradited to Ethiopia.

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Calliope @calliope5431.bsky.social · 1d

Nor is this *new*. Idi Amin and Jean-Bédel Bokassa were both *far* less valuable than Netanyahu and the Israeli regime are, and (quite frankly) perpetrated far worse crimes. Both men were given cover by their sponsors, neither of whom had anything close to the leverage the US possesses.

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Calliope @calliope5431.bsky.social · 1d

Corporate wants you to tell the difference between these two pictures:

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Calliope @calliope5431.bsky.social · 1d

From the American Century to the Century of Humiliation in 8 months.

Justin Baragona @justinbaragona.bsky.social · 1d

Besides linking Tylenol in pregnant women to autism, RFK Jr. now says circumcision is part of the reason why kids are autistic.

"Children who are circumcised early have double the rate of autism, and it's highly likely because they're given Tylenol. None of this is positive..."

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Calliope @calliope5431.bsky.social · 1d

If someone had told me in 2023 that Hezbollah and Hamas would be all but obliterated, Assad would be overthrown, and Iran would be crippled within two years, I'd have been shocked. But it is an accurate assessment of what happened.

The weakness displayed by Russia, Iran, etc was genuinely stunning.

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Calliope @calliope5431.bsky.social · 1d

Yeah, "six kids or bust" is just divorced from reality.

The big issue is that most of the world currently has below-replacement rates and just keeps on dropping, which wasn't true even 20 years ago. Nobody should want to have the same number of children as we did in the 1800s - but 2005?

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Calliope @calliope5431.bsky.social · 2d

Kissinger won the Nobel Peace Prize for negotiating a ceasefire in Vietnam, it wouldn't be at all unprecedented for Trump to win it should the Gaza situation actually stabilize.

I hope the Nobel Committee has slightly more dignity than that, however.

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Calliope @calliope5431.bsky.social · 2d

I doubt it's fully a lost cause - or at least, it had better not, since the consequences of that are too ghastly to contemplate - but the amount of cash currently provided definitely isn't enough to reverse it. Who knows, really - we've never seen anything like this in world history before.

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Calliope @calliope5431.bsky.social · 2d

I mean it's functionally a chaebol/zaibatsu setup, correct? Massively powerful system-defining firms who have gotten fed up with Republican governance?

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Reposted by Calliope

Maia @maiamindel.bsky.social · 3d

yeah every democracy on earth is falling apart at the same time and the average person has two thirds fewer friends than in 2014. but you can put multiple slurp juices on apes

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Calliope @calliope5431.bsky.social · 2d

Yeah the dunks are almost certainly coming from people traumatized by (conservative and/or religious) parents and grandparents asking them "when are you going to get married and have kids" and reading a social policy as a personal attack.

Reposted by Calliope

Matthew Downhour @matthewdownhour.bsky.social · 2d

You can save up 20 pounds of gold that’s worth years’ worth of spending power on goods and services and that works for you, personally. But if no one has kids, then in 30 years it doesn’t matter how much gold is in your vault - goods & most importantly services simply don’t exist

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Calliope @calliope5431.bsky.social · 2d

Yeah this is basically correct, you probably do need to actually pay a competitive wage for what is (at least a lot of the time) a full-time job.

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Calliope @calliope5431.bsky.social · 2d

Still mind-shattering to me that *not* having children is judged the "sluttier" position (because you're a filthy whore on contraceptives who gets 12 abortions a week, one assumes) than having them (look, you just put in a mail order for kids and the stork arrived 9 months later).

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