None.

I think that the exact measure of whether or not a war is justified is whether or not people are willing to fight it.

It’s very rare for a war to be a direct threat to the people. That’s generally only the case in a situation like Gaza, in which the invaders explicitly intend to not only take control of the land, but to kill or drive off the current inhabitants.

As a general rule, the goal is simply to assume control over the government, as is the case in Ukraine.

So the war is generally not fought to protect and/or serve the interests of the people directly, but to protect and/or serve the interests of the ruling class. And rather obviously, the ruling class has a vested interest in the people fighting to protect them and/or serve their interests. But the thing is that the people do not necessarily share that interest.

And that, IMO, is exactly why conscription is always wrong. If the people do not feel a need to protect and/or serve the interests of the rulers, then that’s just the way it is. That choice rightly belongs to the people - not to the rulers.

Right. Go back and reread it - that’s what I said.

I’m fully aware that the DNC is under no legal mandate to operate legitimately or honestly.

And that’s rather obviously entirely irrelevant.

In point of fact, if the legal standing of their actions is the only thing that matters, as you imply, then the entire notion that Russia willfully acted to harm them collapses. How could Russia harm them by leaking details of things that are not illegal and therefore (purportedly) entirely acceptable?

If, on the other hand, we stick with the way that things have been presented by the DNC itself - that Russia willfully acted to bring them harm - then rather obviously even they are taking the position that the legal status of their actions is irrelevant.

Go ahead and pick either one - I don’t care. Either there was nothing wrong with their actions, in which case they could not be harmed by having the details of their actions leaked, or they were harmed by the the leak of the details of their actions, in which case their actions were self-evidently judged to be wrong, and the legal standing of them is irrelevant.

Literally, officially, it’s now entirely legal under federal law for officials to accept and even solicit bribes for specific services rendered, just so long as they do it after, rather than before, the service is rendered.

They aren’t even pretending to be a legitimate court of law any more - they’re just a rubber-stamping service for the oligarchy.

Already did, though instead of the bot, I blocked the entire instance.

That’s pretty much what it seems to amount to.

All of the focus has been astroturfed onto the fact that the leaks came from Russian sources, and away from the content of the leaks. The clear (though of course unstated) implication is that the wrong isn’t the DNC’s corruption, but Russia’s self-serving exposure of that corruption.

I’ve never bought this spin.

Certainly Russia had a hand in getting the leaks to Wikileaks, and certainly because they had an obvious vested interest in the US electing Putin’s sycophant Trump.

But I’ve never seen or heard of any specific evidence that any of it was “disinformation” - just the repeated unsubstantiated claim that it was. It appears to be exactly what it looks like - a detailed record of the DNC’s overtly fraudulent maneuvering to torpedo the Sanders campaign in order to ensure the nomination of Clinton, or more precisely, to torpedo the campaign of a sincere progressive who would likely threaten the ongoing flow of big donor soft money in order to ensure the nomination of a transparently corrupt neo-lib who could be counted upon to serve establishment interests and keep the soft money flowing. And notably, early on that was how the DNC treated it themselves, even going so far as to issue a public apology to the Sanders campaign “for the inexcusable remarks made over email” that did not reflect the DNC’s “steadfast commitment to neutrality during the nominating process.”

So what it actually all boils down to was that the DNC really was acting in a manner contrary to the public good, driven by their own greed and corruption, and the fact that Russia had a hand in exposing that in order to serve their own interests doesn’t alter that fact.

No matter how one slices it, the bulk of the blame for the whole thing rests squarely on the DNC. Yes - it served Russian interests to reveal the information, but had the DNC simply been operating in a legitimate, honest and neutral way, instead of self-servingly and dishonestly, there would’ve been nothing to reveal.

I would agree that Americans need to make “informed decisions” in the upcoming election - for instance, they need to be “informed” of the fact that one of the candidates is a convicted felon.

And on another note, here’s that “politically motivated” thing again.

Just as I noted the other day, when Alito trotted it out, how is there even a notion that it matters?

Let’s just run with the assumption that the prosecution was “politically motivated.” So what? The trial worked exactly the way a trial is meant to work - the jury heard the evidence and rendered a verdict based on the evidence.

What on earth does the supposed motivation of the prosecutor have to do with anything?

And just the other day, the Israelis were wringing their hands over the fact that 11 Israeli soldiers died in one day, but here they are, right back to killing Palestinian civilians at many times that rate, pretty much every single day.

It’s as if they’ve made sociopathy official policy.

Trump is owned by Russia.

It really is just that simple - Putin and his oligarch cronies have bought and paid for him.

I didn’t know that, but I’m cynically unsurprised.

A curious fact adjacent to that:

The US tobacco settlement is still ongoing. Each year, tobacco companies have to pay a particular amount of money to state governments, nominally to help offset the societal costs of smoking.

The total amount of the payments made to a specific state in a specific year depends on the number of cigarettes sold in that state the previous year. Not tobacco products in general, but cigarettes specifically.

It’s safe to assume that that’s relevant.

The system as a whole.

It’s so incredibly obvious that that would happen that I sincerely believe that that’s part of the intent.

Not to mention that all of this noise about flavored vape juice being some sort of underhanded scheme to rope in kids is one of the most ridiculously dumbass things that I’ve ever seen gibbering idiots apparently sincerely claim to believe. Well - this side of Qanon at least…

When I started vaping, premixed juice was the exception rather than the rule. So what you generally bought was nicotine extract, propylene glycol and/or vegetable glycerin, AND FLAVORING. Flavoring it was the standard literally from day one.

Nicotine juice is flavored and has been flavored all along for two very simple reasons: first and foremost because on its own, it tastes like crap, and second because everybody - not just kids but EVERYBODY - likes for things to taste good.

I am so fucking tired of assholes and idiots.

How thoroughly bizarre.

Does this guy actually live in a fantasy world in which, to him, the US supplying arms to Ukraine to aid Ukraine in fighting a defensive war in response to a Russian invasion of their country equals American aggression? How does that even work?

Russia invaded Ukraine.

It’s just that simple. That’s not an interpretation or an opinion - it’s an undeniable fact.

Russia invaded Ukraine.

That’s a clear, obvious, blatant act of aggression. In fact, it could likely be said that, internationally, there is no single thing that’s more clearly an act of aggression than one country invading another one. The exact thing that Russia did.

So how on Earth does this guy spin that into US aggression?

Quite seriously, I can only conclude from this that this guy, and whoever else is behind this, is literally insane. That must be the case pretty much no matter what. Either he’s so insane that he genuinely believes that defending a country against a foreign power’s invasion is “aggression,” or he’s so insane that he’ll brazenly (and at great length) lie and claim that that’s what he believes.

How did it come to this? How is it even possible for literal insanity to be presented as valid political opinion?

It’s just so… bizarre.

No - it’s actually not like that at all.

Google didn’t pay that money just to bypass the formalities along the way to paying a fixed fine - they paid it in order to head off the possibility that they were going to face a jury trial instead of a bench trial, since juries are far more likely to vote in favor of much bigger fines than judges are.

Mm… no. It’s really not.

The specific point of all of this was that Google wanted to avoid a jury trial, and the specific reason that they wanted to avoid a jury trial is because a jury trial is much more likely to end up with a much bigger judgment against them. A judge in a bench trial will follow established precedent to arrive at a reasonable penalty, while a jury can and often will essentially arbitrarily decide that they should be fined eleventy bajillion dollars for being assholes.

So their goal with this payment was pretty much exactly the same as the goal of the motorist who slips a traffic cop a bribe to get out of a ticket - to entice someone with immediate cash in order to avoid potentially having to pay much more somewhere down the line.

So basically the corporate equivalent of slipping a traffic cop a $100, then him conveniently deciding that you’re free to go.

Ah yes - the man who still has to have the vote rigged even after arranging for the murders of his opposition speaks on democracy…

Israel has rather obviously been using the attention on Gaza as cover for stepping up their efforts in the West Bank, even going so far as distributing automatic weapons to the illegal settlers, with which the settlers then entirely unsurprisingly went on a murderous rampage.

Just another aspect of the profound evil of Zionism.

I know Cory Doctorow coined the term “enshittification” to refer to a specific dynamic with social media, but what he described is really just a particular example of a more fundamental process that happens to virtually all notably successful companies. And this is a prime example of it.

In the beginning, the company gains success by offering a quality product that people want at a reasonable price. They actually provide a product or service the people want at terms with which they’ll agree, and thereby succeed, and that’s where the focus is.

But along the way, they pick up a layer of essentially parasitic executives and shareholders who are paid obscene amounts of money mostly just for having achieved their positions. They bring little if anything of value to the company - they just funnel enormous sums of money into their own and each other’s pockets.

And then the focus changes. It goes from winning customers through offering the best possible service or product at the best possible price to maximizing revenue with which to pay grotesquely inflated salaries and dividends to a relative few by offering the shittiest possible service or product at the highest possible price, and counting on market share, lack of competition, name recognition and inertia to keep the company going in spite of the fact that it’s now… enshittified.

And that’s what we’re seeing at Spotify right now.

See also : Uber, Airbnb, Netflix, Google…