I sorta agree with a lot of what you’re saying; not completely but I think you might have misconstrued some of what I was getting at here.

The US State Dept does a lot of good work

Agreed

There has been no “imperial” ambitions under the Biden administration; quite the opposite, really in countering imperial ambitions of Putin, while also coming down harder on Israel than quite literally any past Presidential administration in history

Agreed

Because the election is 62 days away. Withdrawing aid from Israel will immediately by framed by right-wing media, Republican opposition, AIPAC, Russian and Israeli troll farms as being “Antisemitic.”

Agreed

I’m not going to subscribe to this notion that they’re some inherently evil entity

I didn’t say they were evil. I said they’re not your friend; I think it’s weird for them to be showing up with a guitar like we’re gonna hang out.

Put it this way: If one of my neighbors regularly made phone calls ordering people to be killed, I wouldn’t hang out with them. Like if they showed up to a party with a guitar, I wouldn’t be able to get it out of my head that they might wake up the next morning and decide that a bunch of Houthis need to die, and then make it happen in the course of their working day. That’s weird.

I mean it is fine. You’re not wrong. And I have the luxury of sitting here in my safe little bubble protected by these wide luxury oceans with dudes staying up all night watching the satellites, making sure nothing geopolitically bad happens to anything American anywhere in the world. I definitely think that the US empire is by far the most benevolent of the big empires available in the world today. That’s a pretty fuckin low bar, but sure, I accept it. I mean I’m sitting safe and happy inside it and not trying to put a stop to it or anything so I might as well.

But at the same time, there’s people waking up in hell on earth right now. Like coming awake not eating for two days, hungry with their kids crying, some of their kids just gone killed by the shelling, no food, no toilets, just a big dusty hellscape with more death and misery and emptiness all around them. I get it that at this point we gotta just let that happen, I guess? It just doesn’t seem like too much of a fuckin priority to make it stop. We’re sort of trying, but not on the same level as if it was happening in Philly or Austin or something (or in Tel Aviv.)

I definitely won’t disagree with you about what Trump will do or the electoral calculus of supporting Israel. I’m just saying, you can’t be helping make that happen (or whatever other “lesser evil” atrocity, including the intermittency of our support for Ukraine and our weird little pussyfooting rules about how they’re allowed to fight back) and then be friends and show up with a guitar like it’s all cool. Yeah, I’m glad we have professionals keeping things under control. It is fine. But it would take a lot more humanity from the State Dept before I would really like something like this.

Look, I love this country. Part of why I love it is that streak of anti-authoritarianism that keeps the empire stuff in check, which leads to a lot of the good behavior you’re talking about, and also a lot of the rock and roll we make. I’m just saying… play some other fuckin’ song. “Rockin’ in the Free World” is a song of desperation inside the inhuman system that is America. It’s the homeless guy who knows it’s getting colder with winter coming on and still doesn’t have a place to go. It’s trying to keep hope alive even when you’ve given up on anything you can see or interact with to ever be deserving of hopefulness. You can’t be part of the system and play it unless you are actively fuckin fixing things (I’m not saying Blinken is not, you have a point about that part, but… Gaza.)

If you’re in Ukraine, and you want to play a kind of dark Neil Young song you can still rock out to, play “Powderfinger” about the kid who’s too young to be using a rifle but has to pick one up, all scared, because someone’s coming for his family. Or just play RHCP and blow off some steam. You can bring some America stuff and everyone can have a good time. I just feel like maybe he’s playing it thinking like “fuck yeah rock and roll” and I don’t know whether it’s occurred to him that a lot of the dark horrors that the song talks about are still going on, and for some people in the world he’s the central symbol of the system that’s exporting them to other countries so they can experience them too.

at least he’s got the balls to go to Kyiv in the first place unlike his predecessors

Yeah. This part, I like. We need more of this.

Edit: I got curious and I watched this. JESUS CHRIST MAKE IT STOP. As with many things, George Carlin said it far more succinctly than I could.

I gotta say

1. Fuck imperialism; the US State Dept is not your friend and they’re not supposed to be
2. The idea of the US Secretary of State playing guitar in a nightclub in Kyiv while supporting them in a war against imperialism is actually kind of incongruously good, gives me some kind of hope WHY THE FUCK ARE YOU SENDING WEAPONS TO ISRAEL STILL
3. From the short clip, that sounds like one of the least hip performances of an inherently pretty good song I have ever heard 😢
4. For the uninitiated

Almost all nuclear weapons require quite a bit of expertise to maintain over time. If they got sold off 30 years ago, chances are 99% that they’re mostly good for lighting off as a dirty bomb and not much else at this point.

Dude, you’re making yourself more important than you actually are. No one cares about you.

Seriously. The West keeps legit forgetting the whole thing is even going on, and then waking up and sending $50 billion and then getting distracted again.

The bravery of the Ukrainians and the 20:1 outmatchedness of the Russians in total industrial/technological capacity are responsible for the failure of the invasion. Not any kind of urgent priority or strong level of care on the Western side in any location west of Poland.

It is registered as a bot and shows for me as a bot. I prefer to keep it around and heckle it as opposed to “out of sight out of mind.”

Hmmm

This is a weird framing. The story’s not wrong, I am sure, but it’s just sort of askew.

I will make a maybe unwarranted prediction that I will find some other curious opinions being voiced by the specific journalist who wrote this story.

Brb

Edit: I am wrong. They’re just reporting from inside Ukraine stuff that is happening and so this is a relevant story.

Go fuck yourself

Dude you weren’t kidding. “New” was always a pile of ass, and just now I went back to Reddit for a little bit just to poke around and see how “new new” is. It was better for the first two things I clicked on (actually better than both old and new IMO for popping open memes and pictures), and then I clicked on an actual thread, and (1) the thread was clearly a fake story (2) it broke the back button and I couldn’t go anywhere else until it snapped me suddenly back to mbin again.

I decided to take that as a sign

I think they just have no idea what they’re doing. There’s no master plan. It is devolving into botshit, but not on purpose; it’s just because all the people with anything remotely resembling qualifications to run one of the world’s biggest social media sites have left the building at this point.

You are posting propaganda bullshit

Pretending not to know what I am saying! Good strategy. You can Google “tan suit” if you actually do need help with it.

Good to see the tan suit bullshit things-to-get-upset-about machine is updated for the modern era and dialed in to its specific audience

I wonder what the racial makeup of that group of experts is, or how they would react if the virus was spreading in a community that included their families. Or what is the racial makeup of the people funding this whole organization and deciding what is and isn’t some kind of “quicker than 2 years timeframe” emergency situation.

Holy shit; I thought at first that this was about the US state

And nothing about that seemed all that out of place 😕

, as well as data from studies carried out once the vaccine was deployed during the 2022 mpox outbreak. More than 1.2 million people in the United States received at least one dose of the vaccine at that time, and studies showed it provided a high level of protection against mpox.

Yet the W.H.O. did not open formal consideration of that research until last week.

Deusdedit Mubangizi, the W.H.O.’s director of health product policy and standards, said that the organization’s group of experts would meet the week of Sept. 16 to consider the submitted data, and could issue a license as early as that week if they were satisfied.

I stand by my assessment

TL;DR no one gives a shit because they aren’t white people and they have no money

Fuckin serious up

Imagine to yourself what the Venezuelans should do about this, to safeguard their future. Let Maduro win and hope for the best? Peaceful protest? War? What should they do? Really think it through, with the comfortable objectivity of distance and safety.

And then, get fuckin ready. We got 3 more months. My best quick recommendation is, allies. Allies in the real world who are marching, working, voting, putting time in. Solidarity will help you resist, and if the resistance fails, they’ll help you survive.

Also: Vote. Are you registered? vote.org

The war crimes were inside us all this time

Fuck 'em up

You’re allowed to say whatever you want; freedom of speech. You’re not allowed to operate as an unregistered agent of a foreign power within the US.

If they’re not filling out their 1124 forms, then fuck 'em. To prison they go. It can be a little lesser version preview of how they are saying they like for things to work in their chosen country of emulation and praise.