I swear someone wrote the plans for the operation 20 years ago and they just never bothered to update them.

Would love it if they were making a sedan or a subcompact. Not everyone needs or wants a truck.

“Progressive billionaire” strikes me as a contradiction of terms.

We know they’ll be bailed out either way. This is just to try to make popular opinion align with the inevitable.

Much obliged - I’ll be adding this to my reading list so I don’t get caught without citations again.

I’ve read his newsletter and that was enough.

There’s going to be a great need to properly educate the working class in the west before there’s much hope of socialism gaining any traction. They keep people just educated enough to innoculate them against critical thinking. I forget the exact statistics, but a depressing number of people have not read a single book in their entire adult lives.

There was an old episode of TrueAnon about the links between Epstein (and the CIA) to MIT that went over some of this stuff. I’m sure there’s probably a book or article about it somewhere, but I don’t have any better citation at the moment.

I agree that anything of import should be handled offline. So much lax security relies on the idea that you’re too small of a fish to be a target. By the time that changes, it may be too late if you’ve left too much of a trail - an adversary could have already mapped out the connections between everyone in your group. At this point, I think everyone in the west should include a hostile government adversary as part of their threat modeling.

And that’s why hand sanitizer is no replacement for masking, but given that the vast majority refuses to mask, I’ll stick with using both.

I guess they’ve gotten tired of beating their own wives and have now moved onto beating other people’s wives.

He’s Canadian, so he seems to be under the impression that the Canadian equivalents aren’t working with the CIA (though they absolutely are). No vassal state is going to make such a move when they all know what happens to those that step out of line; the empire will have to be way more collapsed before the EU and Canada start testing their leashes.

That doesn’t surprise me. I think he’s probably a socdem at best these days, specifically the kind of lib that thinks that we are in Bad Capitalism and if we just trust bust enough, we can go back to Good Capitalism, and all the smaller companies definitely won’t just devour each other and repeal regulations, putting us in this exact position or worse in another 20-30 years.

It’s so hard for me to read anything by Cory Doctorow or Ed Zitron these days because there’s always this giant, gaping void where class analysis should be. Is this the time they finally connect the dots, I ask myself? No! It’s never the time. It’s always enshittification this and business idiots that and never, ever a single whisper about capital. Brian Merchant and Ed Ongweso Jr. are much better in this regard - if you haven’t read anything by them I recommend you start.

As to the actual content here, this is precisely what the internet was always created to be. Do you think the DoD sorry, DoW created this as a happy accident? Just to help people? It’s always been intended as an anti-informational weapon and a surveillance network in-one. And all the attempts by vassal states to wriggle out of the trap will prove futile. China is the only country handling it the right way, and no capitalist nation will ever have the motivation to follow their example. There’s too much money to be made in making their own little tech fiefdoms.

Currently reading about all the horrors of the CIA - finished The Jakarta Method and Washington Bullets, currently reading through Killing Hope, and next on my list is Operation Gladio.

Ahh, but how much profit did the other systems produce for capital? Clearly that’s the only metric that matters. /s

I wish they’d channel that energy into developing class consciousness instead, but then they’ve been heavily disincentivized to do so between propaganda and the desire for wealth of their own.

Agreed, but until people start moving to PeerTube, we’re stuck with half-measures.

Invidious or another front-end of your choice, presumably.

That’s downright badass. May we be even a fraction as clever.

Unfortunately, I think you’re probably right. And yet, somehow we need to organize anyway because we can’t expect anyone to come save us.