• 0 Posts
  • 53 Comments
Joined 9 months ago
cake
Cake day: October 21st, 2023

help-circle

  • Oh, I got an idea. Let’s bomb the shit out of them, including a bunch of weddings, reinvade, and install another heroin kingpin as President.

    Look, the Taliban is shit and these stories are truly horrific, but where was the coverage of Afghanistan the last 10 years?

    Whenever I read these stories, all I see, aside from the obvious human misery and evil, is a media class that is continually trying to rewrite history to somehow justify the failure that was the 20 year occupation, and discredit the withdrawal.

    I hope this woman gets justice and I hope things improve for women in Afghanistan. But I also want the Western audiences not to be the blinded by the sinister intent that is behind a lot of the Western Afghanistan media coverage.

    Not because they should dismiss this women’s story, or those like hers, but so they don’t forget what a failure the NATO adventure in Afghanistan was. So they don’t believe that the next war, should go on forever, or that expeditionary military force and occupation can be used to improve women’s rights.






  • No one here is debating that there is some hidden upside to theocracy. They’re bad, we get it.

    His point though, is that much like the Miami Cubans, the Iranian exiles that fled after the overthrow of the Shah, tend to be part of the old ruling class that had been disempowered. At least, the most vocal ones.

    Also, just like Batista, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, was enabled and backed by Western powers, before revolutionaries overthrew him and ended his dynasty.


  • Sure, they had a system of relatively successive monarchies, but that isn’t the same as having a single running system of government. And it certainly not somehow more legitimate than theocracy, if your own benchmark is democratic rule - which you just said was the determining factor of a government’s legitimacy.

    Also, not for nothing, but the last monarchical dynasty was literally installed by the British, and propped up by Western powers until the people, or at least, a fanatically religious subset of the people, overthrew them.

    Again, it’s not like I’m a fan of theocracies, but saying that their current government is illegitimate is absurd, whether viewed in the context of international relations, or internal support and control.









  • You should really read up on how they operate.

    Here’s just one hypothetical based off available reporting, court cases, and leaked documents:

    Artist A has a history of performing at independent Portland venues but also tours the country and therefore has to use LN venues and TM services.

    When LN opens their Portland location, Artist A will have to either start using the LN venue, or find that the rest of their tour has suddenly run into financial issues with LN pricing and rebate schemes.

    So Artist A switches to Portland LN venue, and magically those issues start to go away.

    And that’s just the artist side, LN pulls variations of this monopoly abuse with local venues who refuse to Ticket Master, or sign with LN.

    I’m not even doing their criminal behavior justice and the real examples are significantly worse then what I quickly typed out. This will only harm artists, local venues, and Portland, if allowed.





  • If you’re Boeing, or even just a rogue Boeing executive/team, the best way to make sure you fail at this would be to leave an obvious trail of bodies.

    These ambiguous deaths are plausibly unrelated enough to justify no one looking too closely, but are clear enough for their intended audience.

    Hell, even if Boeing just got insanely “lucky” and these two deaths are as they appear, it’s still going to have a massive chilling effect on anyone else who might have been considering coming forward.