"official acts" by a president vs personal acts

Hey what book is that image from? Looks interesting, and I love Losurdo so somebody he found "common ground" with is probably a good read as well.

If in the sequel their interests turn out to be uninteresting and their power turns out to be impotence, either this is the fault of dangerous sophists, who split the indivisible people into different hostile camps, or the army was too brutalized and deluded to understand that the pure goals of democracy were best for it too, or a mistake in one detail of implementation has wrecked the whole plan, or indeed an unforeseen accident has frustrated the game this time. In each case the democrat emerges as spotless from the most shameful defeat as he was innocent when he went into it, fresh in his conviction that he must inevitably be victorious, taking the view that conditions must ripen to meet his requirements, rather than that he and his party must abandon their old standpoint.

From Marx's 18 Brumaire: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/18th-brumaire/ch03.htm

Yeah Avatar was extremely self contained, as was Avatar 2. There are some loose plot points left dangling for the sequel but there's clear arcs and conclusions.

From the Economist:

Several rival Palestinian groups, including Fatah and Hamas, signed a declaration to form a unity government, ending years of division. China brokered the negotiations. Fatah, which controls the West Bank’s Palestinian Authority, was thrown out of Gaza by Hamas in 2007. The agreement paves the way for creating a government for the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

So that unity deal some folks were posting about actually happened. Amazing that China could pull this off, kudos to them for hosting. Hamas and Fatah back together again, that's the power of the disastrous operation in Gaza. Israel has never been more cooked.

It's officially Joeover. Biden is dropping out of the 2024 election. Now the chaos begins to replace him. What a shitshow.

Edit: source is https://xcancel.com/JoeBiden/status/1815080881981190320

Macron in a lot of ways seems to be following the Obama playbook. He's a young, by most accounts competent manager of an empire in decline wedded to his neoliberal ways while espousing hope and change. Due to the fact that neoliberalism can't actually do anything besides make a small circle of people an immense amount of money, the state atrophies anyway and brings about mass support for the far-right as the only viable alternative. Macron and Obama both will leave office having done their best to make sure a fascist government gets elected.

So Israel promised to respond to Iran's attack within 24 hours. Where is it? Another "Rafah invasion in the next week" moment?

I mean the obvious answer to this nerd is that the world of Dune is distinctly not capitalist. The empire is a feudal institution, planets are personal fiefdoms, and all those in positions of power are not concerned with capital or money so much as they are prestige and power. The spice trade on Arrakis is more similar to something like the Chinese imperial salt monopoly (a state backed monopoly where most of the rents were used to fund the imperial coffers) than resource extraction under capitalism, albeit a Chinese salt monopoly that involved the Chinese colonising a distant land and using it for the sole purpose of salt extraction. The state in Dune is not concerned with capital formation or expansion, the nobles are not concerned, and while there are certainly merchants and traders (as there are in most polities) they are tangential to how the system operates and are not the ones who determine state policy. A "real universe" does not imply that capitalism exists in all places at all times, this guy is just too enmeshed in capitalist realism to understand that the kind of stuff he's saying only makes sense in a capitalist context.

I'm not sure how to break this to you, but Halloween is European. Halloween was invented in Ireland, from the pagan celebration of Samhain. Even the practice of dressing up in costume and going from door to door asking for food is recorded as of the 16th century at the latest. Pranks, as well as "Mischief Night," also dates from the 18th century at the latest. This is all pre-Americanisation. It's not a continental European tradition but it's certainly European, not American.

This is par for the course with Israel. They have a whole thing called "The Hannibal Directive" that basically says it's better to kill IDF soldiers ourselves than have them captured by Palestinians. It's standard IDF practice.