Americans: “Tragedy of the Commons proves that people are incapable of working together for mutual benefit, because personal greed will always lead to the devastation of the collective common good.”

Chinese: “Why do you not simply arrest and punish the bad actors in your society when they overstep and impede on the general welfare?”

Americans: “Because that’s fascism. Also, we’re arresting and deporting you for asking.”

It would be nice if the focus was on personal comfort over some ideological crusade.

Bras, head scarves, makeup, skirts versus pants, hair dye, hair length, heaven help you if you’ve got a position on cosmetic surgery… Everything’s a fucking binary. Like, I get complaining about advertisement saturation and the endless suffocating waves of online influencing and even the social/family pressures to look or dress a certain way. But at some point its got to be about what each person feels comfortable with.

Not everything has to be a political position. It is enough to say you are self-determined.

Yes, but that doesn’t make the comparison to all countries with over 500 000 people meaningful.

Fair enough. Any state with less than 500k people probably shouldn’t be on the list.

It’s framed as “look, if we put US states on a graph with other countries, they have such a high incarceration rate that there are almost no countries even on the graph!”

It’s certainly possible that you have one big state with a high incarceration rate - Texas or California for instance - that’s throwing off the national average. States are free to set their own penal process. It’s not a given that every state has a globe-shattering incarceration rate.

Saying “It’s not just one or two states with astronomical incarceration rates, its the whole country contributing to the total” indicates something notable about the politics and culture of the country as a whole.

Wyoming could have an incarceration rate of 0% without affecting America’s position as a carceral state. That it doesn’t is meaningful.

If we play that game we can’t trust American numbers either

😏

If it was absolute numbers, it would maybe make a point.

If you have a population with 10M people and 20,000 of them are prisoners, that’s significantly less concerning than a country with 100,000 people of which 10,000 are prisoners. You can’t make an apples-to-apples comparison between Texas and Wyoming with raw head-count.

it’s somehow shocking that the individual states of the county with the highest incarceration rate in the world also have a high incarceration rate

It’s shocking that the state of Louisiana has a full 2% of its population in jail. That’s twice the US national baseline.

Interesting how it’s southern states at the top eh?

Legit amazed California wasn’t higher on the list. They’ve been doing mass-incarceration at an industrial scale since the 70s. But I guess the population is big enough that the per-capita statistics work out.

States like Alabama, Louisiana, and Oklahoma have such small and anemic populations and dedicate so much of their domestic budget to incarceration that they’re basically giant publicly subsidized slave plantations.

Nothing more American than privatizing and off-shoring our concentration camps.

Israel is trying to zero out that number as quickly as they can.

The trick is to always assume “China is lying about its internal statistics” and inflate whatever number they give by an arbitrary large percentage. 1.7M is obviously an under-count because the CCP is always lying about everything.

Also, you can do some broad brush “Everyone in Tibet, Xinjiang, Hong Kong, North Korea, and Taiwan are prisoners of the Chinese state, so actually that’s over 60M people” napkin math to make the numbers look better.

Well, in that case, how about you pay me that $10 you owe me?

If they actually had nukes already, none of this would be happening.

Something would be happening.

Israel seems perfectly happy to unleash wave after wave of terrorist attack and assassination campaign on individuals within the Iranian government. To date, this tier of attack has failed to cause any country to break the nuclear taboo. We didn’t nuke Afghanistan after 9/11 (although a few fringe elements suggested we should). Russia hasn’t used nukes in Ukraine. Despite suffering their own wave of terror attacks, France and England haven’t unleashed nuclear hellfire in North Africa or the Middle East. Indian and Pakistan haven’t traded nukes over their border disputes.

Would a nuclear-armed Iran drop a nuke over Solemani or the pager bombs against Hezbollah? If nuclear-armed Israel can keep their bombs on the ground, I have to assume Iran wouldn’t be any more extreme.

Is reading comprehension really that bad? The argument is that Iran is on the verge of having nuclear weapons.

For more than three decades, a familiar refrain has echoed from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu: Iran is on the verge of developing nuclear weapons.

Since 1992, when Netanyahu addressed Israel’s Knesset as an MP, he has consistently claimed that Tehran is only years away from acquiring a nuclear bomb. “Within three to five years, we can assume that Iran will become autonomous in its ability to develop and produce a nuclear bomb,” he declared at the time. The prediction was later repeated in his 1995 book, Fighting Terrorism.

The sense of imminent threat has repeatedly shaped Netanyahu’s engagement with United States officials. In 2002, he appeared before a US congressional committee, advocating for the invasion of Iraq and suggesting that both Iraq and Iran were racing to obtain nuclear weapons. The US-led invasion of Iraq followed soon after, but no weapons of mass destruction were found.

In 2009, a US State Department cable released by WikiLeaks revealed him telling members of Congress that Iran was just one or two years away from nuclear capability.

Three years later, at the United Nations General Assembly, Netanyahu famously brandished a cartoon drawing of a bomb to illustrate his claims that Iran was closer than ever to the nuclear threshold. “By next spring, at most by next summer … they will have finished the medium enrichment and move on to the final stage,” he said in 2012.

Now, more than 30 years after his first warning, Israel has conducted attacks against Iran while Netanyahu maintains that the threat remains urgent. “If not stopped, Iran could produce a nuclear weapon in a very short time,” he argued recently, suggesting the timeline could be months, even weeks.

Consider that Iran has already taken down - allegedly - as many as four F-35Is, I can think of a few reasons why the US has been reluctant to tangle with either country.

Trump’s rush to invade Iran only happened after Israel preemptively launched their military decapitation attack and missile bombardment “preemptive” strikes. The US has been dragging its heels on an Iran invasion since the 2002 Millennium Challenge suggested an all out war with Iran would be a disaster for US international fighting capacity. The definition of a pyrrhic victory.

Already, the US deployment away from the Pacific Rim has resulted in Chinese ships occupying territorial waters that the US had historically patrolled.

So this is already shaping up to be a historic internationally reorienting military blunder, even without nukes involved. Imagine the US trying to do an Iraq-style land war in Russia, plus an invasion of Iran, plus the low-key war with Yemen and Somalia, plus our military operations in North Africa, plus policing the Pacific, plus doing our military exercises on the US/Mexico border, plus whatever dumb horseshit military parades Trump wants to see.

They are simultaneously not real and done by leftists.

The protesters are too extreme. This is just what Trump wants. By provoking a police response, they are going to hurt their entire project.

They should behave more like… checks notes school shooters?

This is a very romanticized version of American intervention in WW2.

The bitter truth is that we had guys with Nazis war trophies back home who were waving Confederate flags the year after their deployment ended. Hell, we had guys like Mark Fuhrman, who were decorated detectives in the LAPD back in the early 90s with a naked well-established fetish for European fascism. And that’s before you get into the Ratlines that imported thousands of Nazis into Latin America under cover of the CIA and Opus Dei.

This isn’t something that got lost in translation or distorted through history. It’s a direct consequence of American fascism reproducing itself in America as an outcropping of American tendencies.

The Stars and Stripes is as much a symbol of fascist oppression in Vietnam and Indonesia and the DRC and the Oklahoma Reservation system as any German flag.

“People in the Middle East have been fighting for thousands of years, so you shouldn’t be surprised this is happening,” I yell from the cockpit of a US aircraft as I release the MOAB onto a mosque holding an Eid al-Fitr ceremony.

We delivered the car to spec. We have a hamster on a spinning wheel in the engine block now. You can upgrade the engine as part of our enhancement package, which costs an order of magnitude more money for a linear scale in performance.

Like a Pride Month to the Flammers