Good advice

Russia is currently importing gasoline, due to domestic shortages caused by the war.

Even if the US could buy it’s way out, I don’t think Russia has enough to sell

Definitely crooked.

But cooked? Not holding my breath.

“Don’t watch the snuff film!”

Well, okay. I wasn’t. But now I’m still not.

We know Covid originated in Wuhan.

That’s never been confirmed.

Neither has the “no natural zoonotic path” bit, incidentally.

Accidents happen even in level 4 biolabs.

And we’re back to Wuhan Lab Leak Theory.

I’m thinking, “How do I keep my information out of the hands of centralized database looking for people spreading discontent?”

On a public forum?

A siloed server with good security could lack anonymity, but because the data is not centralized, the feds would have to take a special interest to create an account, and because there would be so many of these instances, it would be a very time consuming process.

Kinda depends how it’s hosted. You don’t need an account to mine AWS if you can just pick through the backend.

Basically describing what happened with Lemmy. What started out as Reddit Minus Shitbag Mods became a screaming match between .world and .ml, while everyone on .hexbear retreated into exile.

You still won’t have any real trust, because the accusations of “bot” and “shill” will follow anyone who violates a taboo. But you’ll at least have a few people you recognize, who you can have well-defined opinions on.

t will apply to them too.

No it won’t. That’s not how The Network State functions.

You have a very clearly designated In-Group and Out-Group. Just stay in the In-Group and you’ll be fine.

You’re not going to beat segregation by telling a bunch of coked up white boys “One day you won’t be allowed to drink from a water fountain”. Everyone knows that’s not true. That’s not how these barriers function.

UN: “We were unable to stop the genocide in Palestine, but at least we get to jerk ourselves off with an award ceremony.”

Israel/US: “We’re moving to sanction the award ceremony and assassinate anyone catch jerking off.”

there is no natural zoonotic path to Wuhan

How do you get from “we don’t think the disease naturally originated in Wuhan” to “China engineered a virus, released it in their own city, and then used that as a vector for malicious infection of the rest of the world”?

Half the US intelligence agencies support the lab origin theory.

They also insisted Iraq had nuclear weapons.

AWS is the real cash cow

Significantly higher margins and bigger government contracts, particularly with state security services. So no surprise there.

But Amazon, as a retail business venture, generates significant profits on its own. What’s more, it is gradually supplanting the USPS, which puts the business at the logistical center of a critical piece of US infrastructure. A classic “Too Big To Fail” setup that also guarantees Amazon a customer base indefinitely and lets them freeze out competitors as the USPS decays.

AWS is a bigger funnel of money, but Amazon retail and wholesale is an enormous economic footprint with lots of downstream political consequences.

Beginning to think that Jeffery Epstein was at the center of a massive financial and influence peddling network that reached into the highest levels of business and politics.

Well, now that we know this picture exists, I’m sure someone will be doing something about it.

The alternative is sadly a Republican, which is even worse.

Harm reduction is when a liberal kills you politely.

now trans people are stuck waiting through 4 years of transphobic hate

The difference I’ve seen between cis-activists and trans-activists is that Trans people are done waiting.

I see more direct action in an LGBTQ aligned street corner than a No Kings parade.

Trans people will keep being trans. They’ll keep helping each other transition. Fuck the law. Fuck the cops. And fuck any liberal fascist politician who tries to stop them.

They don’t even have to be communists, per say. Just being Asian and unaligned is enough. Or Haitian, for that matter.

a guy who has been out of power for a decade

You keep bringing up this Adolf fellow, but he hasn’t been in power in a long time. So why would he be relevant?

Biden commissioned a report that was inconclusive, in part because of non-cooperation from the Chinese government.

Wasn’t the United States involved in spreading misinformation about Chinese COVID vaccines at the time of this research?

The clandestine operation has not been previously reported. It aimed to sow doubt about the safety and efficacy of vaccines and other life-saving aid that was being supplied by China, a Reuters investigation found. Through phony internet accounts meant to impersonate Filipinos, the military’s propaganda efforts morphed into an anti-vax campaign. Social media posts decried the quality of face masks, test kits and the first vaccine that would become available in the Philippines – China’s Sinovac inoculation.

Reuters identified at least 300 accounts on X, formerly Twitter, that matched descriptions shared by former U.S. military officials familiar with the Philippines operation.

It was definitely some random scary bullshit on the internet that co-mingled the two. But so much of the hype in the early days of COVID ended up being FUD used by the administration to justify draconian anti-immigration policies. We had FOX News screaming about Leprosy and “Mexican Flu” being transmitted by Migrant Caravans decades before that. Any disease outbreak became an excuse to hyper-police people entering the US at the borders.

Part of the problem with all this disease discourse is that it’s routinely anti-foreigner agitprop. This goes straight back to The Spanish Flu, which originated from a Haskell County, Kansas pig farm and got spread across Europe by WW1-era US soldiers. It became major weapon of the 20th century reactionary right to ban Italian Immigrants way back then. Now we see disease scares used to freeze out everyone from Taiwan to Brazil to Afganistan. If anyone is sick anywhere, it’s an excuse to ban migrants everywhere.

Leaving their international airports functional while locking down their cities, intentionally infecting as many places as possible.

Are we still doing Wuhan Lab Leak Theory? Wasn’t that debunked ages ago as some Trumpie lie pushed to deflect our own abysmal COVID response?

The Cruelty Is The Point

That doesn’t make any sense.