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A bit late but didn't see it mentioned here. Democracy is when wrong parties are forbidden from influencing politics.

[-] AlbigensianGhoul@lemmygrad.ml 38 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

That it was an EU ship that came to the rescue isn’t surprising. Despite the EU’s scarce naval resources, they are currently the only ones there. There isn’t a Prosperity Guardian ship within 500 miles. Back in May when the carrier USS Dwight D Eisenhower was present, the US had 12 warships on station providing a mix of missile picket and escorting duties. Now they have zero. The UK for one brief moment had three. HMS Diamond did some outstanding work as part of OPG but when she left, we left.

There can only be one conclusion: that the US has given up on Operation Prosperity Guardian. It wasn’t deterring the Houthis and it wasn’t reassuring shipping so they might as well go and do something else.

I'm shooting blind as I haven't looked too deep into how the blockade has impacted global trade, but I think this makes perfect sense for the US.

It isn't that much further away around the Cape than through the Suez to arrive from the South China Sea to the US east coast, and AFAIK most trade actually happens with the West Coast through the Pacific or through Panama. So higher shipping costs harm Europe much more than they harm the US in this case.

Just like the Ukraine War, sanctions on Russia and China and the Nord Stream, it seems the US is intending on using this blockade to cannibalise Europe's economy even further. Expect another year of negative growth in the EU, specially with China becoming a suitable replacement as a high-tech producer worldwide. They don't have to go either through Suez or around the Cape in order to ship to a majority of the world's population.

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submitted 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) by AlbigensianGhoul@lemmygrad.ml to c/worldnews@lemmygrad.ml

mirror/skip paywall

Definitely worth a read now that even they admit it. It somehow tries to make the CIA the good guys that wanted to prevent it all, for some reason.

"An attack of this scale is a sufficient reason to trigger the collective defense clause of NATO, but our critical infrastructure was blown up by a country that we support with massive weapons shipments and billions in cash," said a senior German official familiar with the probe.

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German investigators believe Volodymyr Z was a member of a team that in September 2022 planted explosive devices on the pipeline route carrying natural gas from Russia to Germany, German media reported on Wednesday. German law does not allow publication of the suspect’s surname.

The Polish prosecutor’s office confirmed on Wednesday that it had received a German arrest warrant for a Ukrainian man who is a suspect in the Nord Stream attack named “Volodymyr Z”.

This is just too funny of a coincidence.

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I don't know this particular group, but sounds interesting.

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submitted 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) by AlbigensianGhoul@lemmygrad.ml to c/worldnews@lemmygrad.ml

If you want a horror story, read this other article about his confinement:

He has not been outdoors—apart from a minute when police dragged him into a paddy wagon—since he took refuge in London’s cramped Ecuadorian Embassy in June 2012. The embassy’s French windows had afforded glimpses of sky. Here at Belmarsh maximum security prison in southeast London, his abode since April 11, 2019, he has not seen the sun. Warders confine him to a cell for 23 out of every 24 hours. His single hour of recreation takes place within four walls, under supervision. His paleness is best described as deathly.

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CAAAApitalism, the highest stage of CAAApitalism

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submitted 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) by AlbigensianGhoul@lemmygrad.ml to c/games@lemmygrad.ml

Great article to revisit throughout the year if you care about game developers over game stock.

Most folks didn’t expect 2024 to be much better, but I’m not sure anyone was ready for it to be possibly worse—yet this year has kicked off with a string of big and small layoffs signaling that the corporate bloodletting rituals aren’t ending anytime soon. So Kotaku is going to try and track all of 2024’s layoffs as they happen. Hopefully, we don’t have to update this post that much.

[-] AlbigensianGhoul@lemmygrad.ml 59 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

How long until liberals start saying that the ICJ is controlled by Putin's ally, South Africa?

[-] AlbigensianGhoul@lemmygrad.ml 60 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

As capitalist, he is only capital personified. His soul is the soul of capital. But capital has one single life impulse, the tendency to create value and surplus-value, to make its constant factor, the means of production, absorb the greatest possible amount of surplus-labour. Capital is dead labour, that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks.

I'm starting to think Marx wasn't just using an allegory there.

[-] AlbigensianGhoul@lemmygrad.ml 48 points 11 months ago

And if Russia takes Ukraine then the rest of the EU is next.

Don't threaten me with a good time.

[-] AlbigensianGhoul@lemmygrad.ml 44 points 1 year ago

Tinder has rolled out its promised high-end membership, a pricey $499 per month subscription dubbed “Tinder Select,” which includes unique perks like the ability to be seen by more users, including Tinder’s “most sought after profiles,” the ability to direct message others without matching and other VIP-level features.

This could not go wrong in any way at all. Imagine being sued for ignoring abuse reports, and deciding to monetise the abuse itself.

[-] AlbigensianGhoul@lemmygrad.ml 41 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

There are usually half a million homeless people in the USA. That means that they could've bought each and every one of those a 200k dollar home with that money. They could also have paid a total of 50 million months of rent at the 2000$ median price. And this is even taking as a premise that housing should be sellable or rentable in the first place. And yet they preferred this instead.

Any Yankee around still not convinced that the USA government needs to end, this is your moment to reconsider.

[-] AlbigensianGhoul@lemmygrad.ml 38 points 1 year ago

Having gone through some of that myself, it always annoys me to no end how liberal outlets hyperfocus so hard on the methods (and banning of those) or vague "reducing stigma" rather than actually addressing literally any of the reasons people consider dying. I understand that there's no "one-size fits all" solution, but really basic stuff like having access to mental healthcare, or, in the case of their listed example, dignified drug rehab, being relegated to half a paragraph while they spend most of it talking about guns.

How about public funding for free mental healthcare in order to combat a mental health crisis? No? Or how to build local communities for support and mutual aid? Not that either? Or literally just listing reasons people did it so we can think of solutions? Nah, let's talk about the absolute only thing that Democrats and Republicans actually sorta disagree on, that is tangentially related to this, but will never actually change due to how entrenched gun culture already is in the USA.

CW: Suicide Methods

Research indicates that firearms aren't even that much more effective than some other suicide methods, though they obviously require some more preparation. I doubt banning guns is going to do much, and just actually reading the low rates of mortality and all the cases of people who survived it to a long lifetime of suffering and severe disability was enough to convince me that it is just a horrible risk to take, even if you actually believe that it is worth it.

If there is a nation that actually needs actual humanitarian aid from the USA, it is the USA.

[-] AlbigensianGhoul@lemmygrad.ml 38 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

At least I'm getting some gimp experience.

This quote is particularly telling.

Those concerns picked up steam in the past week after Ukraine launched a second push in the southern Zaporizhzhia region and has still come up mostly empty in the eyes of Western allies.

You know, like when you are doing a group project and all your "partners" just watch you do all of it, but in this case the project is made with other people's blood, and you already knew the whole class was gonna fail anyway.

It would be funny seeing the blame game getting heated between (what remains of) Ukraine and NATO, if not for all the senseless and pointless spilling of blood they could've avoided from the start. I bet eventually they'll agree on some third-party scapegoat a la WW1 Germany.

[-] AlbigensianGhoul@lemmygrad.ml 40 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

The article doesn't go into detail on that, so I just kinda guessed. I doubt that those "bribes" are only from bourgies since the demand to getting the fuck out is usually pretty high during war, and even some labour aristocracy folks (engineers, programmers, medics) could afford to go out. It's not some fantastic victory of socialism, but I prefer that over those same people getting conscripted to die in the front for nothing.

Though I could be wrong, are there ~~less trash~~ better sources than the Beeb on this that go deeper?

[-] AlbigensianGhoul@lemmygrad.ml 70 points 1 year ago

Officials taking cash and cryptocurrency bribes or helping people eligible to be called up to fight to leave Ukraine are among the charges, said Mr Zelensky, in a video posted on social media.

wtf I support military corruption now. These are probably the Ukrainian officials who have saved the most Ukrainian lives, and they're getting the treatment of Germans who helped Nazi targets flee from Germany. What an odd coincidence.

[-] AlbigensianGhoul@lemmygrad.ml 64 points 1 year ago

560 comments

[-] AlbigensianGhoul@lemmygrad.ml 43 points 1 year ago

Film workers will get better working conditions, and we won't have more buzz about Marvel movies. It's a win-win.

Also a good amount of productions were already halted due to the WGA strike that has been ongoing for 70 days. Unionize, y'all!

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AlbigensianGhoul

joined 1 year ago