The existential horror of suicide bombing is implicit in the nihilism of the bomber, an individual who believes their only value to society is as a personification of military technology. The show doesn’t explore this at all. The character doesn’t have any character. He’s just a throw-away threat used to explain another Supe’s disfigurement.

They got away with it because it has similarities with what happened in the past

Naqib is a lazy caricature of a Syrian guerrilla fighter. He gets something like two jokey lines, then gets decapitated. The writers got away with it because lazy caricatures of Arabs in action media are the standard for western media.

Compare him to Ted Sprague in the TV Show “Heroes”, a guy with a legit story arc, a tragic backstory, multiple confrontations with the protagonists, and an ongoing beef with “The Company” (the Vought counterpart in the Heroes setting) that drives the plot forward.

Of course Sprague is a mash up of Ted Kaczynski and Timmothy McVey rather than Cliche Arab. So I guess he deserves a bit more respect.

This supe was specifically made to trick the US into allowing supes into the military. The show got away with it because they’re criticizing the same thing you are.

It’s a cheap and lazy critique. “We gave the Muslim the Blow Himself Up power, virtually no lines, no real story arc, as a cheap throw-away useful idiot character to advance a plot that’s mostly about white people grappling for power”.

The writing isn’t particularly original or compelling anymore. It’s like they just gave up after season 3. Now every episode just an excuse to have Homelander laserbeam people in the dick. Invincible has gone the same way. They’ve substituted gross-out visuals for all but the most basic-bitch “Bad Guys Are Bad, Good Guys Are Annoying and Conflicted” story arcs.

Can’t believe the TV Show that freely trades on ethnic tropes would do this.

they knew it’s gonna pass anyway

Legislation doesn’t just pass by magic. There has to be a critical point of majority support. In this case, there wasn’t.

The final 47–52 tally disappointed advocates who had hoped to draw more GOP support.

This feels a bit like the Epstein stuff. Liberal politicians recognizing how ugly their primary bids could get and how dangerous the general could be for pro-Israeli candidates going into 2028 and have decided to hedge their bets.

Meanwhile Republicans seem dead set on making this a referendum on the US-Iran War, which their caucus largely supports.

We need a country to bribe our reps more than Israel does

It’s a circular scheme. Money we spend arming Israel goes to their weapons manufacturers. Their MIC collects a profit, which is milled back into campaign donations to US Congresscritters. Congresscritters take the money and rubber stamp more tax-dollars to Israel, to buy more weapons, to generate more profit, to bribe more of Congress.

China, you’re our only hope.

President Xi, please liberate our people.

Best time to cut ties with Israel was 20 years ago.

Second best time is now

This guy will have 6 months to reflect and learn that nuance.

I suspect he’ll turn this into another spectacle. I’m more disgusted with social media platforms that continue to monetize his behavior

If you believe in democracy, personal rights, and capitalism

🎼 One of these things 🎶 Is not like the other 🎶

🎼 One of these things 🎶 Is not like its brother 🎶

given how much modern ‘conservatives’ hate democracy and personal rights

“This far and no further” politics is a pox on conservatives and liberals alike. This is one of the reasons you see Gavin Newsom fucking around with TERFs in the name of fairness in college athletics. Its one of the reasons why so many people soured on Barack Obama inside his first term.

“Personal Rights” always seem to terminate at the edge of popular consensus.

teaches you to take pride in shit you’ve never done

The better outcome.

I’m more disgusted by the fuckers who go out and do the war crimes, then come home and demand everyone else say “Thank You For Your Service”.

Outside the Toiletry Fire Bandit, I haven’t seen any evidence of the former. But as someone who has worked in a warehouse, I’ve seen ample opportunities for the latter.

You’d need media that wasn’t predicated on advertising revenues.

being knowledgeable

IQ has nothing to do with being knowledgeable. Shit headlines like this play into the exact same eugenics theory of humanity that gooners like RFK Jr and Peter Thiel have been pushing.

I don’t know how well that corresponds to IQ

It’s quite literally just a measurement of one’s pattern recognition speed. Has nothing to do with your politics.

Case in point, Christopher Langan, who regularly outperformed on these cognition tests, was a total nerd on trivia, and ended up becoming a forest ranger because he had a perpetual chip on his shoulder. Once his reputation blew up as someone who could ace cognitive tests, he leveraged that into becoming a right-wing grifter.

The guy is a total piece of shit who tests well. Go out to any of the Ivy League universities and you’ll find this kind of person in spades. Silicon Valley, the DC Beltway, Wall Street, Raytheon Acres, the Florida Real Estate scene - very intelligent assholes are a dime a dozen. FFS, we built our rocket labs on Nazi scientists. No shortage of right-wingers in the “High IQ” space.

Western corruption is starting a company to produce y and when a government orders x of them, x are delivered

Well… not always.

The initial contract award called for the combat-ready tankers to arrive in August 2017; the first arrived in January 2019. In the years that followed, the KC-46 program was beset by further delays, including production line problems that regularly stalled deliveries and an underperforming vision system. That system is years behind schedule and expected to come in October 2025.

and

Broken Boeing airplanes are going to the military thanks to corruption and bad decisions

Increasingly, the US model for contracting is to take money, outsource the work to a bunch of bargain basement contractors, pocket the profits, and then fail to deliver the end product.

Also R&D is priced in because it’s all done for the sake of making profit and must be recovered through the unit sales.

Again, this is something of an open question. The engineering of a given retailed unit is priced in as part of the unit rate. But the bluesky R&D is, as often as not, performed at the university level and then arbitraged through the private sector or simply stolen from rival militaries / companies / individuals through espionage and laundered through the private sector.

The Octopus Murders, on Netflix, tackles the anatomy of this kind of government-backed swindle with regard to the development of early iteration database technology.

The real difference between more Socialist/Communist models of corruption and the Western Capitalist style tends to be in the legal canonization of the corrupt practices. You really got to see this in the post-Soviet liberalization of Eastern European economies, as mafia cartels were supercharged by western financialization and eventually subsumed the entire federal apparatus of ex-Soviet states. What was considered a criminal black market prior to 1991 became the standard for managing the economy a decade later.

I’m speaking less about the Catholics in the pews and more about their Bishops.

The Bishop of Rome seems broadly critical of the entire US political establishment.

There is a whole Wikipedia page on politicians who have been denied communion over pro-abortion stances

Recent popes have presided over Masses at which pro-abortion rights politicians have been given communion on many occasions.

So this does not seem to be a universal doctrine, just a habit among certain priests and bishops looking to make a stir.

On January 21, 2021, one day after his inauguration as president, Biden received communion from the hands of the archbishop of Washington, DC, Cardinal Wilton Daniel Gregory. The event was condemned by conservative activist Austin Ruse, in Crisis magazine. In October of the same year, Biden stated that during a meeting with pope Francis, “We just talked about the fact he was happy that I was a good Catholic and I should keep receiving Communion”.

How many warehouse fires are there in the average week?

Great question. Would be a logical place to begin analyzing trends.

Shame we don’t have any actual fucking journalism in this country. Maybe some podcaster will give us the well-researched details inside the next few months. I’ll keep my eyes peeled for a WTYP or TrueAnon news dump.

Statistically this isn’t occuring more than normally

I mean, it’s hard to say without doing some kind of actual statistical analysis.

If the reporting is purely stochastic, driven by arbitrary changes in click-through habits, then it is very possible that fires are more common and people are more interested because they’ve been seeing more of them in their neighborhoods. It’s also possible that fires are less common and people are curious about them because they’re such a novelty.

Idfk. But I wouldn’t be quite so blase about an uptick in stories absent any actual baseline of the event.

Amazon’s burning approach to unsold and returned products

While it’s fun to believe this is some kind of underground protest by the workers, it is far more likely that the Amazon policy of incinerating unsold goods to sidestep the cost of returns has created enormous fire hazards within their warehouses. This, combined with a chronic short-staffing of facilities, poor maintenance of infrastructure, and excess volume of returned goods due to the increasingly shoddy nature of their 3rd party vendors, puts all the pieces in place for routine self-inflicted arson.

But Democrats are probably more likely to be pro-Choice, and the American Catholic Church has made the abortion issue a litmus test for support.

YMMV. Plenty of Catholic Democrats have campaigned as Pro-Choice. The odd secular Ayn Rand loving Republican always finds a way to be Pro-Life. Rank and file Catholics routinely advocate for abortion rights, breaking 60/40 in favor as of just last year. Abortion prohibition hasn’t been a winning issue with Catholics in my lifetime.

Really, the Catholic Church has brought this onto itself.

Totally ahistorical. Catholics (in America) are practically synonymous with liberalism going back to the 1930s. They’ve been in the tank for the Democratic Party since Kennedy.

If anyone has shifted over the last few decades, it’s Republicans who have become more Catholic, not Catholics who have become more Republican. TradCath influencing and political leanings come from historically Protestant regions that are seeing the local evangelical churches dry up from lack of attendance or go bankrupt due to corrupt and incompetent leadership. Increasingly, the Catholic Church is the last church left standing in Rust Belt and Sun Belt states that have seen poverty wipe out the traditional middle class religious centers.

Might as well just get rid of the first amendment at this point.

You’re super late to the party. 1A has been a running joke in legal circles since checks notes the Alien and Sedition Acts.

It’s always been a paper promise. Even when the state isn’t explicitly cracking down on anti-government speech and opposition groups, they’re constantly surveilling and censoring it. Without a meaningful political coalition surrounding the speaker, cops always find an excuse to arrest you for something. And if you can’t lock someone up, well… don’t look to hard into who shot MLK.

People unironically believe Trump is cool and suave.