It’s more just that while they’re calling Mamdani a communist, at the same time they’re doing the thing that is literally the single most Communist thing a government can do: have the state gain direct ownership or control of the means of production. Communism is many things depending on where, when, and who you ask. But the bare minimum, the common denominator under all forms? State owns of the means of production. And here’s Trump literally seizing the means of production. Not just giving out grants or loans, but literally taking a permanent equity stake in a major international company. That is the literal, most basic definition of a Communist action. If literally seizing the means of production isn’t Communist, what the hell is?

Meanwhile, Trump is over here practicing literal state socialism. The government now owns 10% of Intel.

Future generations of students will study the political philosophy of Locke, Marx, and Oda.

So your defense of Israel is that “well aktually the laws of war don’t technically apply to them!”

Fuck off with this genocide apologia. If you need to split hairs on the technical definition of the laws of war, you’re obviously doing something indefensible. Only Nazi trash feels the need to equivocate on something as unforgivable as genocide and war crimes.

Seriously, you need a therapist or a priest. Your soul is clearly broken.

It’s not a war because Israel doesn’t acknowledge it as a war. If it were a war, they would be treating Hamas as an actual military and be following the Geneva convention. Israel does not treat the thousands of Gazan hostages it’s abducted, who it nominally labels as “Hamas,” anything like what is required by the Geneva convention.

It’s not a war because Israel has chosen not to treat it like a war.

Coordinated for all the centrists except Biden to drop out at the same time, while Warren and Sanders split the vote of the progressive wing. When it looked like Sanders had a decent shot at actually getting the nomination, all the centrists except Biden dropped out simultaneously and endorsed him. Biden won the nomination due to a giant DNC-coordinated rat-fucking.

That’s what it comes down to. It’s not that I’m particularly pro-death penalty. Generally I’m not. But if you’re going to have the death penalty for anything, flagrantly violating someone’s civil rights should be right up there with murder in the list of eligible offenses.

I have no problem holding police officers to a higher standard of behavior than the general populace.

The traditional penalty for treason is death by hanging, at best. This is treason against the most fundamental values of what our nation is supposed to stand for. If you do this kind of thing, you have committed an unforgivable offense against everything this nation is supposed to stand for. If you’re a police officer that flagrantly violates someone’s rights, you should hang for it. If you’re a police officer that plants evidence on someone, you should hang for it. If you’re a police officer that shoots an innocent person, you should hang for it.

I have zero problem with holding police officers to a much higher standard that regular citizens. They want to go around calling themselves “officer?” Fine. I have no problem holding them to a brutal system of military justice. Make them earn their titles for a change.

This kind of police brutality needs to be a capital offense. We need to start hanging these pigs. Abusing your authority to this level is a crime on the level of treason. You absolutely deserve to die if you do this to another human being.

They obviously don’t want anyone confusing her with the Brazilian thrash metal band.

Have centrists stopped using the deaths of tens of thousands of children for cheap political points at every opportunity?

For changing their vote on a bill backed by lobbyists, maybe. But they have entire constituent services offices dedicated to helping voters out of just this kind of situation. Consumer protection is a common area they intervene in.

Exactly. The supply chains of a company like that are incredibly opaque, even if it’s a publicly traded company. How are we, the consumers, to know what a fair tariff price offset is?

It’s one thing if the product is made entirely in one country and imported whole by a seller. Someone in China makes a widget out of entirely Chinese parts, packages it in a China-made box, and sends it to the US, ready for store shelves? Well if the tariff goes up by 25%, no reasonable person could fault the import seller of that product for raising their prices by 25%.

But a big consumer company like P&G? They’re a multinational conglomerate. Even simple products like clothes detergent may have a dozen different ingredients from a dozen different countries. Some of those compounds have to go back and forth across borders multiple times as they go through various stages of chemical refining. And the tariffs the chemical precursors will be hit with may vary based on the chemical involved. It’s hard for the company itself to estimate what the fair break-even amount they should raise prices by to offset tariffs. What hope does the average consumer have?

So companies, being heartless monsters, see an obvious opportunity. Maybe after a thorough analysis of their supply chain by people with very fancy credentials, they conclude that they need to raise prices by 17% to evenly offset the tariffs. That’s the fair number; that’s just what’s needed to break even. But it took a whole team of business and logistics experts to come up with that number. No consumer will be able to check their work. So…what’s to stop them from using this as a chance to reap some profit? Tell customers that you need to raise prices by 25%. How will they know the difference?

And this is how you end up with corporations making record profits. Supply chains are too complex for consumers to determine what a fair price increase is to offset tariffs. So companies can figure out that fair number, add some additional profit margin to it, and just blame it all on the tariffs. Never let a good crisis go to waste!

At that point you call your member of Congress.

Instead of going after Steam for NSFW content, payment processors need to crack down on AI customer service traps. If your company doesn’t have a meaningful way of getting a hold of an actual human and disputing a charge, your company should be shut off from the payment processor networks. After all, the process of a chargeback normally asks if you’ve first exhausted their customer service options to resolve the dispute. Companies that don’t have any meaningful customer service simply shouldn’t be eligible for Visa/Mastercard payments. The chargeback risk is just too high.

Yes, but the point of this isn’t to win in court. The point is in the fighting. It is a stage performance. The actual outcome of the trial is predetermined but irrelevant to this whole political exercise.

It doesn’t matter. This is all about optics and red meat for the base. Trump can’t do anything for the egg prices, so he needs to find a scapegoat. He can now point out that his administration is taking concrete actions to address the egg prices. Scratch the surface and the whole thing crumbles. But that’s the case for most of the Trump cinematic universe.

There is a reason white supremacists like Steven Miller love this definition of antisemitism. There’s a reason most white nationalists are also Zionists. They fully support the idea of a Jewish homeland…so they can have somewhere to export all of America’s Jews to. They dream of a white ethnostate, and Jewish people do not fit anywhere into their vision.

I don’t think the current White House is going to go this far, but it’s absolutely part of their long term plan.

Columbia has decided to adopt the Hitlerian definition of antisemitism, one that embraces despicable ancient tropes of Jews being forever foreigners in whatever land they occupy.

Think about the actual philosophy behind this. The only way that criticism of Israel can be considered identical to antisemitism is if you believe that all Jews, regardless of nationality, beliefs, and personal character, have some innate tie to Israel. You can be a Jewish person, only a citizen of the US, with no interest whatsoever in the Israeli state, but it doesn’t matter. Simply due to your ethnicity and religion, you are forever tied to the state of Israel.

Columbia has fully embraced the antisemitic belief of the perpetual foreigner.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perpetual_foreigner

Columbia admins believe that no Jewish person can ever be a true full American. From birth, every Jewish person has innate ties to Israel. They cannot escape this tie. Thus any criticism of Israel is innately an antisemitic attack on Jewish Americans. To be a Jew is to be an Israeli, and to be an Israeli is to be a Jew. They are one and the same to the antisemites running Columbia University.

Notably, this was the belief also shared by the Nazis during WW2. Jews were considered perpetual foreigners in Nazi Germany. It mattered not how they lived their lives. They could never truly be fully German. They could have lived in Germany down ten generation and personally served Germany in WW1. It didn’t matter. Jews were always foreigners, and thus it was justified treating them differently from other Germans.

This was the logic of the American Japanese internment camps. Japanese were considered forever foreigners. They were interned regardless of their actual personal beliefs and loyalties. Their own character mattered for naught. If you were ethnically Japanese, you had innate loyalty to the Japanese emperor, and thus even Japanese American citizens were treated as suspect foreigners.

There is a reason the white nationalists currently running the White House have embraced this definition of antisemitism. If it is normalized that being Jewish and being Israeli are truly interchangeable, then why can’t American Jews be forcibly deported to Israel? If all Jewish people are essentially Israeli from birth, then an antisemitic administration can justify deporting any and all Jewish citizens “back to their homeland.” After all, they can be treated as suspect foreigners with dubious loyalty to the US. And this is ultimately why the right wing is so fond of this Hitlerian definition of antisemitism. Currently it’s being used as a cudgel to attack Palestinian rights protesters, but it can just as easily be wielded against Jewish Americans to justify their involuntary deportation to the state of Israel.