Prelude to the Apocalypse

[AGermanArtist]

If this is god's chosen, then I question the nature of this god.

[Sengoku Strider]

Pissed off at your bank account? Looking for a way to really get back at it? Why not buy 47 Trump NFTs two weeks before Christmas to pay a rapist billionaire's entirely self-inflicted legal fees? Buying 47 of them will earn you a scrap of the very same iconic suit he sweated through in hot Georgia August weather for his mugshot!



But that's not all! If you buy $10 000 worth of NFTs right now, you win a chance to meet the man himself at a glitzy Mar-A-Lago gala dinner!

Note:
*No travel, hotel, parking or other fees will be paid
*You will not be staying at Mar-A-Lago
*Dinner may not take place at Mar-A-Lago
*Trump may not attend
*Dinner may not occur

Fine print

Spoiler

https://collecttrumpcards.com/terms

Bonus Gala Dinner: The Bonus Gala Dinner will be delivered as an NFT. The Bonus Gala Dinner recipients will need to "burn" this NFT in order redeem their ticket to the event. The Bonus Gala Dinner is tentatively scheduled to take place in 2024 at Mar-a-Lago, but may be rescheduled to a different date or location, as determined in our sole discretion. In the event President Trump is unable to attend the Bonus Gala Dinner, or if the Bonus Gala Dinner cannot take place for any other reason (including, but not limited to, force majeure (such as a governmental order or mandate, epidemic, pandemic, or any other causes beyond our reasonable control)), then we may reschedule the Bonus Gala Dinner or individuals who qualified for the Bonus Gala Dinner will be awarded a limited edition Trump NFT in lieu thereof, as determined by us in our sole discretion. All travel-related and other expenses not set forth herein, including but not limited to meals, ground and other transportation, parking, gratuities and incidental hotel expenses, are the sole responsibility of verified Bonus Gala Dinner recipient"

[BryanM]

Is there a Trump body pillow or a Trump figurine where he's in a skimpy outfit?

I'm incapable of comprehending anything that's outside of weeb...

[BulletMagnet]

Strider, I know we've already been back and forth on this, but I have to repeat, I really, really hope the prosecution has their ducks in a row when it comes to the deals they're making with Trump's co-conspirators to steal the election, because the latter are just plain flipping the bird at us at this point.

[Cuilan]

Just for fun, do an internet search for "mao kissinger 10 million women".

[BryanM]

the prosecution

And once again, it's going to be hilarious when he wins from a jail cell without any more than the usual amount of rigging.

Hah... yesterday I came up with scenario that almost annoys me as much as the fact that Harris is the next anointed Dem nominee: Biden coming back to run again in four years after losing. He wouldn't because the donors prefer a bit of churn, but it would be funny for our hellworld.

Shit, does it even matter if he can put on the clown show for the cameras, when we won't bother with televised debates anymore? (Which is a massive loss: just imagine a split-screen debate where one candidate is in prison in his prison uniform! My god this is the stuff you'd see in a dark comedy movie! We're missing out on so much gold!)

Fucking 100%+ price inflation on groceries. And there are people still thinking this isn't the end of the our current world.


Also massive lmao at liberals thinking him going to jail will hurt Trump any and make him magically disappear like any other talisman they clang to that didn't work. (Spoiler: Prison Trump will be a story for like two days, and the polls will go right back to where they were to begin with.) Like even if Biden wins the election, there magically isn't going to be another Trump.

This is the world these guys built. Liberals always choose fascism over socialism. Not 100% of them of course, but always a majority. Always.

[Sengoku Strider]

Strider, I know we've already been back and forth on this, but I have to repeat, I really, really hope the prosecution has their ducks in a row when it comes to the deals they're making with Trump's co-conspirators to steal the election, because the latter are just plain flipping the bird at us at this point.

That apology is a joke: "I apologize for my actions in connection with the events in Coffee County." It doesn't even list the crime. But she's like a 68 year old woman and it was a non-violent first time offence, so she got off light under Georgia's first-time offender laws. Her record even gets wiped clean if she doesn't reoffend while on probation. She still has to testify, so maybe what she had to offer was just that good to get a plea that lenient? Either way the real punishment now that she's plead guilty are the billion dollar civil suits from the election machine companies, which this surely just lost for her.

For a preview, see Rudy G getting nuked from orbit today:

Giuliani ordered to pay $148M for spreading lies about Georgia election workers

He made the usual song and dance on the courtroom steps about appeals for the sake of the echo chamber, but he's already confessed to the crime, it's just a question of whether he gets stuck with an astronomical unpayable sum or an even more astronomical unpayable sum. "Early in the trial, Giuliani’s lawyers said a damages award in the tens of millions of dollars would be the 'civil equivalent of the death penalty.'" Rudy's own lawyers pronounced him civilly dead. Before they quit for non-payment.

Is there a Trump body pillow or a Trump figurine where he's in a skimpy outfit?

I'm incapable of comprehending anything that's outside of weeb...

You're the guy who dies right at the beginning of the horror movie if you think going into that particular darkened basement is any kind of a sane move.

Spoiler

[Cuilan]

This is the world these guys built. Liberals always choose fascism over socialism. Not 100% of them of course, but always a majority. Always.

That subset of liberals you are referring to are known as the "Petite Bourgeoisie".

[neorichieb1971]

Do USA politicians actually know how to fix issues? They spend a hell of a lot of money but don't seem to be fixin anything.

[BryanM]

https://i.postimg.cc/1ty53ZPs/t-jz-C97- ... -Lxjvc.jpg

Argh. Sam Altman posted one of those disingenuous "there's massive antisemitism on the left, too!" things on his tweeter the other week.

Antisemitism on the right: "The Jews will not replace us!" "Netanyahu is our real president!" *draws a menorah, like it's some kind of sinister satanic pentagram or swastika*

Antisemitism on the left: "Killing thousands of kids indiscriminately is kind of bad." "Slaughtering native people and taking their land is kind of bad." "Hamas wanted to provoke a massive amount of violence - as a recruiting drive for their organization, and to garner sympathy for their country's situation abroad. Doing what Hamas wanted you to do is maybe bad."

Yeah, those are totally the same thing, Sam...

The news articles speculating about Iran's nuclear weapons program is always reassuring. For the doomsday watchers hoping for a more explosive end of the world.

I honestly wonder about that quantum immortality+anthropic principle thing. Maybe every day, most of the time, the world really does end in a nuclear holocaust, but we're just constantly hopping onto divergent worldlines Hobo'ing Kyoma style. It's an extremely stupid idea, but isn't really fundamentally any dumber than hydrogen existing.

That subset of liberals you are referring to are known as the "Petite Bourgeoisie".

They make up a little more than half of the Democratic party, and 100% of their representation on TV. Which results in them grooming and shaping their half of the electorate.

It's really fucked that democrats are becoming the party of elite professionals, and the republicans the party of broke fascists. Still a functional situation for capital, though it makes the guys who like to pretend there is no violence or suffering in the world a little nervous.

Do USA politicians actually know how to fix issues? They spend a hell of a lot of money but don't seem to be fixin anything.

It's not a function about knowing, it's a matter of caring, richie. Making life better for the general population isn't their goal or function. Making life better for their bosses, is.

Their employers are their donors. They work for them. And so do their whole families, and all their friends and employees.

One of the classic outright bribes is the fake job. When a former president gets paid 400,000 dollars right into their pocket, to spend 15 minutes talking about what a great job they did while in office, do you think that $400,000 spent by the company thinks that fifteen minutes of mouth noises will get an actual return? Or are the mouth noises irrelevant, and it's really about paying them for what they did for them while in office, and to let the next guy know a paycheck is coming if they do their bidding as well?

When a TV network pays the president's daughter $600,000 to appear for a couple minutes-long fluff pieces, was the profit from that coming from all the people tuning in to watch? Or was it coming from the government?

The overwhelming majority of these people are like the captain of their own little pirate ships, hustling for money to keep their crew happy. They have no other interests or goals in life whatsoever. That's how our system works - if you have enough money to have people to work on your behalf, you have power. If you don't, you don't.

John Boehner handing out bribes on the House floor is one of those iconic moments.

So our politicians are doing a bang-up job. Have you seen the stock market recently? Number goes up. Everything's fine. Hiccups like ~2008 are an anomaly, as long as everyone doesn't try to cash out at the same time we're going to continue to do great!

A more optimistic version of myself used to enjoy Represent.us content. Corruption is Legal and Honest Gil At A Republican Caucus were my favorites..

[Sima Tuna]

"Killing thousands of kids indiscriminately is kind of bad." "Slaughtering native people and taking their land is kind of bad." "Hamas wanted to provoke a massive amount of violence - as a recruiting drive for their organization, and to garner sympathy for their country's situation abroad. Doing what Hamas wanted you to do is maybe bad."

I made those exact arguments and was served up the very responses of "u r antisemite" and "u must love hamas." As if Terrorism A is supposed to make Genocidal Response B suddenly okay.

[neorichieb1971]

The Gaza situation will hurt Israel in the end. If you take a Hollywood storyline the bad guy never wins the loot.

If Israel conquers gaza, strips it clean of its citizens, builds on it and takes it for itself and gets clean away with it, then it just opens the doors for everyone else to do that.

If nobody steps up with force to stop that happening, we are all fucking doomed. It paints a bad picture all around for our species and it won't be long before some government in the world says something. I think right now other governments are just watching to see how bad it gets before they make comments.

The one thing I've learnt is that Israel bought a lot of rockets and munitions for this event. I mean, FFS one day I heard they shot 6000 of them. Where can you store 6000 rockets without anyone noticing?

[Sengoku Strider]

The Gaza situation will hurt Israel in the end. If you take a Hollywood storyline the bad guy never wins the loot.

Despite the entire internet rushing to take sides and make it a cudgel for their local political debates, this isn't a good guy/bad guy kind of conflict. The two sides have been ruthlessly killing each other's children for years and anger runs deep. It's a decades-long proxy war with a rotating cast of regional and global puppet masters using multi-generational resentments to pull the strings of genocidal nationalist fanatics in each camp. This round it's Iran + Qatar with a side of Russia vs Saudi & the US fighting over trade pipelines, but if you want to know how deep this conflict actually goes, DNA shows the Palestinians are the modern-day descendants of the Biblical Canaanites.

This didn't start in October, and it won't end whenever the IDF decides they've smashed Gaza to tiny enough bits.

[BryanM]

The Gaza situation will hurt Israel in the end. If you take a Hollywood storyline the bad guy never wins the loot.

If Israel conquers gaza, strips it clean of its citizens, builds on it and takes it for itself and gets clean away with it, then it just opens the doors for everyone else to do that.

But that's literally how it works in the real world. The strongest gang takes everything.

Aborigines being slaughtered is the norm. It's easy for people today to say "oh, those poor native Americans" now that they pose no threat and don't own anything worth stealing. Even in the 1960's, Canada was rounding up native kids and sending them to Catholic schools. Fun things happened within.

(And the Daily Mail uses the word "Alleged" whenever they talk about the death pits. Stay classy, Daily Mail.)

Part of the grooming of us cattle includes making us think "morals" and "ethics" are real things. They are not. Guy with the biggest gun takes all the loot. The only reason they impose rents on us instead of taking everything we have is obvious: if you kill people you can't continue to profit off their labor. No gang slaughters their livestock, until they're not able to continue laying eggs and such.

[BulletMagnet]

if you want to know how deep this conflict actually goes, DNA shows the Palestinians are the modern-day descendants of the Biblical Canaanites.

Considering that the Israeli government and military are openly referring to the Palestinians - not just Hamas - as the "seed of Amalek", i.e. one of the various tribes that Israel is commanded to eradicate in the Bible, it's not exactly a mystery what the endgame is here, and any government or individual who declines to condemn it (or, worse, supports it), well, as the saying goes, "I have questions".

[neorichieb1971]

But that's literally how it works in the real world. The strongest gang takes everything.

Israel is not the biggest gang though. The biggest gang is the supplier of the weapons. If the weapons supplier has a different moral code Israel should run out of weapons soon.

[Vanguard]

Despite the entire internet rushing to take sides and make it a cudgel for their local political debates, this isn't a good guy/bad guy kind of conflict.

Yes it is. This is one of the most black and white conflicts imaginable. One side is a fascist, apartheid, race supremacist theocracy attempting to genocide the other so they can steal their land. The opposing faction is made up of dirt poor third worlders whose goal is to avoid being massacred, dispossessed, or enslaved.

Israel targets locations they believe will cause the most civilian death. Israel has, multiple times in this very conflict, directed civilians to take refuge in a safe zone they've designated, and then bombed the safe zone. They've deliberately targeted civilians, children, journalists, the families of journalists, hostages, and humanitarian aid groups. Just today Israel attacked a Christian church in Gaza. An Israeli sniper killed a woman there, and then killed her daughter when she came outside to help. The only war criminals in the world that even compare to the Israelis are the Americans and frankly even they are nowhere near this brazen.

Both the motives and the methods of the Israelis are infinitely worse than those of the Palestinians. This absolutely is a good guy bad guy conflict.

The Palestinians have no options to prevent their own destruction. Israel ignores treaties the instant they become inconvenient just like their big brother America does. They continue to slaughter Palestinians and take their land regardless of whether the Palestinians fight back or try to play nice.

Israel is not the biggest gang though. The biggest gang is the supplier of the weapons. If the weapons supplier has a different moral code Israel should run out of weapons soon.

The American elites aren't going to stop sending weapons and billions of dollars to Israel for free anytime soon.

[Sengoku Strider]

Yes it is. This is one of the most black and white conflicts imaginable. One side is a fascist, apartheid, race supremacist theocracy attempting to genocide the other so they can steal their land. The opposing faction is made up of dirt poor third worlders whose goal is to avoid being massacred, dispossessed, or enslaved.

You're talking about one of the most diplomatically complex and tangled situations in recorded geopolitical history. Torture, rape, intentional killing of children and civilians, at this point there is no meaningful human rights accusation you can throw at one side that you can't throw at the other. Painting one as the aggressor when both only exist in the first place because of the money and weapons provided by greater foreign powers is to miss the broader conflicts that have perpetuated this one for decades. The current regimes in Israel are just inheritors of that history, the external actors are spread across dozens of countries at both the state and substate levels. And framing one group as the "rightful" indigenous people of the region and the other as colonial invader is just partisanship, they've both been there for millennia despite the best efforts of a parade of empires and religions.

This current breakout of war didn't happen because the poor huddled Palestinians were suffering so much they had no choice but to massacre and rape their way across Israel. War broke out October 7. This Wall Street Journal article from October 6 basically lays out the motivation for this round of fighting:

DUBAI—Saudi Arabia has told the White House it would be willing to boost oil production early next year if crude prices are high—a move aimed at winning goodwill in Congress for a deal in which the kingdom would recognize Israel and in return get a defense pact with Washington, Saudi and U.S. officials said.

In 632 AD Muhammad died. A bunch of his followers went with his cousin and appointed successor Ali, and became Shia. The rest elected his father in-law Abu Bakr as caliph, and they became Sunni. And the two sides have been squabbling ever since. Mecca in Saudi Arabia run by the royal family is the seat of Sunni power. Iran, run by the Ayatollahs, is the seat of Shia power.

The Shia are vastly outnumbered, only about 15% of Muslim believers. Oil rich Iran have championed the Palestinians, in part in an attempt to prove they are the 'true' sword of Islam. But also in part because they've become client states of Russia and China by dearth of their revolution overthrowing the US-backed Shah and continued opposition to US-backed Israel.

Saudi Arabia was getting deep in bed with Washington, and were about to formally recognize Israel and create oil and resource pipelines for them, in exchange for a defence deal. Iranian military had been training Hamas and planning the logistics of a potential attack for some time; hundreds of Hamas soldiers trained in Iran in the leadup to the attack. Literally the day after Saudi intentions become public in American newspapers, the attack was ordered to disrupt this.

This round of fighting happened because of 6 different countries who don't even have a boot on the ground. Israel being nicer guys or not connected to defunct Western European empires wouldn't have changed anything here. Foreign money has been using the Palestinians as a chess piece since the 1940s, as part of a conflict that's been ongoing since the 630s.

[BulletMagnet]

Painting one as the aggressor when both only exist in the first place because of the money and weapons provided by greater foreign powers is to miss the broader conflicts that have perpetuated this one for decades.

The additional factor not mentioned here is that while both sides of the conflict claim the other is a real and ever-present threat to their very ability to exist, only one is speaking truth when it does so.

[orange808]

The additional factor not mentioned here is that while both sides of the conflict claim the other is a real and ever-present threat to their very ability to exist, only one is speaking truth when it does so.

Is that really true? Seems to me that neither Israel or Iran are in any danger of disappearing any time soon. The proxy war won't end any time soon.

Everyone involved is an asshole.

[BulletMagnet]

Seems to me that neither Israel or Iran are in any danger of disappearing any time soon.

Iran, no, but I was referring to Palestine.

[Sima Tuna]

Yeah, Palestine is gonna be RIP in a year or two at most.

[BryanM]

Okay, time for memes from a nerd faction this week. These are way more dense than regular memes.

Spoiler

For some reason I always feel like the Wojak-type memes people are the most honest about things. I guess mainly because they're not trying to sell someone something, just express how they feel about the zeitgeist.

[Cuilan]

Okay, time for memes from a nerd faction this week. These are way more dense than regular memes.

Spoiler

For some reason I always feel like the Wojak-type memes people are the most honest about things. I guess mainly because they're not trying to sell someone something, just express how they feel about the zeitgeist.

How do I become one of those In-Tulpa things?

[BryanM]

How do I become one of those In-Tulpa things?

Oh god, that's one of those I Have No Mouth horror kind of things.

First, you'll need to stop being human. That means having your brain modified. Replaced ship of theseus style with artificial neurons, or some wonderful good-ole fashioned flesh-smithing. Molded into the perfect little tool for the corporation. Then you could be plugged in and be like a subordinate slave node to the master control unit that runs these things.

Fortunately us meatbags will be way more inefficient than just mass printing circuit boards, so you'll have to slave away in the Microsoft activity mines for like 200 years to be able to save up enough to pay for the transition.

--

Due to you expressing a little interest in becoming Joi from Blade Runner 2049, now I know there's a Blade Runner TV series being made maybe.

[BulletMagnet]

So yeah, to all the "the Capitol riot only happened because of stoopid government security lapses" crowd, it turns out that not only was the march to the Capitol not even remotely spontaneous, as its organizers were directly communicating with the White House to make it happen, but both sides were also deliberately keeping it all a secret, to ensure that adequate security would not be present. Backin' the Blue and all that.

Also, just in case this headline and quotes like the following aren't enough to depress the hell out of you...

Holly Rice, a 57-year-old poll respondent from Cumming, Iowa, said she was backing Trump for his policy agenda, saying “I don’t care what he tweets.”

“It’s a little off the wall, but you know? A lot of them do stuff like that,” Rice said. “At least we know he’s not a polished politician. He reminds me of my father.”

...could someone please tell me what the ever-loving fuck this particular statement is supposed to mean?

“A government-run system, it’s going to do nothing but end up like a Canadian or European system. They pretend to give you good health care, and you pretend that you don’t want to get sick. So yeah, we need an alternative.”

First off, I'm not sure how health care systems that cover their entire populations while delivering both reduced costs and superior outcomes to ours nearly across the board for the better part of a century can be said to be "pretending" to provide good-quality care, but even more inexplicably, what the hell does it mean to "pretend you don't want to get sick"? I was under the impression that most people genuinely don't want to get sick, maybe I'm just weird.

On a related note, I happened upon a feature the other day detailing how the NHS in the UK has been piecemeal starved and privatized for several decades now, that every time it happens both its quality and finances deteriorate, and that the proposed "remedy" to the situation from the pundits and politicians always seems to be "more privatization and cost-cutting". Memo to the rest of the planet: by all means learn from the US's experience in this area as well as others, but please, please, please learn the right lessons.

[orange808]

but please, please, please learn the right lessons.

People are fucking thick. They don't learn anything. That's the heart of the problem.

People in America don't know that outcomes can be better for less money. They're stupid. People in other nations are equally stupid, their elites just haven't found a way to fuck them.. yet. No worries; give it time. They'll willingly give up their health care in time. People love libertarian fantasies. (Because they're stupid.)

[Sengoku Strider]

Painting one as the aggressor when both only exist in the first place because of the money and weapons provided by greater foreign powers is to miss the broader conflicts that have perpetuated this one for decades.

The additional factor not mentioned here is that while both sides of the conflict claim the other is a real and ever-present threat to their very ability to exist, only one is speaking truth when it does so.

I'm calling a tie on that one. The real and ever-present threat to their very ability to exist posed by each side against the other is the whole reason we're now in the fourth ugly generation of this conflict. The Palestinian issue, one indigenous land claim among countless in the world, indefinitely remains as high-tension as it is because Israel is surrounded on all sides by openly hostile parties supporting them. The basic situation is the same as it has been since the start. Like, you can just reuse a map from the Six Day War to illustrate the lines of threat:



The lone real difference is that the Saudis are talking about recognizing Israel, thus taking their arrow off the map. That shift was significant enough to blow the powder keg.

Going clockwise:

Lebanon to the north is home to the Hezbollah Jihad Council, who were originally scheduled to take part in this attack. Except things got way too crazy right off the bat, when Hamas' opening PR gambit was to rape and mass murder attractive young people with instagram accounts at an EDM festival because I guess Brazilian psytrance is haram AF.

Wagner Group backed Ba'athists run Syria to the northeast. Yes, the Saddam Hussein Ba'athists. It is also in decade two of a civil collapse with Kurdish and American and Turkish backed factions all fighting each other. It is unavoidably an incubator for radicals.

Iraq is now entering its third consecutive decade as a failed state since Operation Iraq Freedom. Which followed 9 years of bloody warfare with Iran in the 1980s, then Operation Desert Storm in '91. It is nominally run by anti-US militia leader and Shiah cleric Moqtada al-Sadr. It is also unavoidably an incubator for radicals.

The Jordanian royal family to the southeast are not militant, but they made the family brand as staunch pan-Arabists and have been backing Palestine since the 1940s.

Egypt to the immediate south is run by the Muslim Brotherhood, a pan-Arabic movement with ties to Qatar whose stated aim is the old classic of establishing a global caliphate under shariah law. Egypt is of course home to the Suez Canal, vitally strategic to the global economy, and the Brotherhood are wisely staying out of this whole thing. While also very non Brotherhoodly refusing to let Palestinian refugees enter.

I should add that Iran, who are the biggest dog in this show and Qatar, where Hamas leadership were actually living (until Mossad publicly declared they were after them last week and they rather sensibly scattered to the four winds) aren't even on the map.

Now, you might say "But message board guy, the US spends more per year on its military than the rest of the entire world combined. It could be a tough fight, but they'd beat these guys even if Iran's way tougher than the Iraqis were." In a conventional war, sure. But we know that's only how the war starts, after that civil order breaks down and the violence never ends. It would take a lot to get the US to jump back into another Middle Eastern quagmire right now. "But America could just nuke 'em if it came down to it." America nuking to save srae

And I'm not Jewish, but if I were, "History shows that public opinion in other countries will always support my people" might not be at the top of my list of core beliefs. It's not a given for them that they really do have US missiles at their back, especially 25 years from now when the oil in the region doesn't matter quite so much and US evangelicals are down to 12% of the electorate.

[BulletMagnet]

The Palestinian issue, one indigenous land claim among countless in the world, indefinitely remains as high-tension as it is because Israel is surrounded on all sides by openly hostile parties supporting them.

Whatever threat the surrounding pro-Palestinian nations might pose to Israel, it certainly doesn't appear to have dissuaded the latter from very openly escalating its current campaign - assuming you believe it was anything else from the start - into a brazen, all-out effort to finally erase Palestine completely from the map once and for all, no matter how much they have to destroy and how many civilians have to die. And I'm really not sure what else they could possibly do to finally bring down the supposedly imminent wrath of their neighbors upon them beyond that.

If anything Netanyahu and company appear to be betting that their regional adversaries will be forced to change their tune altogether once there's no longer a Palestine for them to support, and I'm inclined to think they're at least largely right, if only because several such nations already did so when the Trump administration declared its Mideast diplomatic policy to be "we're with Israel on absolutely everything, take it or leave it, losers", and heaven knows Biden isn't going to move the needle much on that front no matter what atrocities are committed.

[Sengoku Strider]

Everyone's talking about the Middle East while ignoring the human race's true apocalyptic elephant in the room. I think you all know what I'm going to say here, it's Satan's metric system.