It’s a class war, but ordinary people have been effectively deprived of the ability to realize this. Marx had it right about the need for class consciousness.

I fear Canada will be the USA and Russia’s punching bag when they both get frustrated with how things are going.

I don’t think you can hold it against a prominent academic and critic of fascism that he doesn’t want to stick around and see what the fascists do to the universities, the philosophy departments, professors like him, and their families. And, believe it or not, here in Canada we have good universities that aren’t under threat, and probably just as much access to US news as you do.

Strategic control of the melting Arctic, half of which is bordered by Russia and the other half by Greenland and Canada, both of which Trump wants to invade. Also a foothold in Greenland would be useful in an assault on Canada, whose resources both Putin and Trump want. Canada would be fully surrounded by the USA and Russia.

What better way to destroy NATO for the Russians?

At least Trump’s Merdas touch is so powerful that, even when he tries to protect and boost the oil industry, Trump inadvertently fucks the oil industry.

I think there have been societies with genuine protections for free speech, and even in the USA there have been better times and worse. So I wouldn’t say that shutting down free speech is “what we are as a species.” As a species we have many impulses to be hostile to those we disagree with, but we also have the ability to see past these and to build societal systems that protect people’s right to speak freely. It’s up to us whether we pursue the latter or give up.

The new USA, where people are disappeared every day for their political views. Free speech evaporated overnight when the fascists took power.

They’re disappearing political activists.

Centuries of despots, despair and drinking.

Trump replaced the top brass with loyalists. I wouldn’t be so sure.

“Unfair left leaning” just means “true”.

White House officials said they were vindicated by the latest reporting, pointing to an earlier characterization of the discussions as “war plans,” language which had now shifted to “attack plans.”

So far these have been their arguments in defense of themselves:

1. Hey, this is the first time we’ve catastrophically fucked up on security in a whole two months so treat us with some respect! (And letting an unelected drug-addled Nazi and some disreputable teenagers roam freely through all government computer systems doesn’t count.)
2. We didn’t leak war plans to a journalist, like you all claimed, we leaked attack plans. Totally different so you’re a bunch of liars.
3. Nothing that was leaked was classified. We totally meant the movements of our bombers to be made public before the mission started.

Hands up who thinks these are not utterly ridiculous responses!

apparently for the crime of writing op-eds for her university’s newspaper in support of Palestine and pushing back against leadership’s actions.

There is no more free speech in the USA, this thing Americans always claimed to br so proud of. Now you can be kidnapped and disappeared for speaking out against government-sanctioned genocide.

By all accounts, Signal’s encryption is robust, so they’d need spyware on the device to monitor the contents of the chat, or even to see who else was in the chat. Since these people were using their own personal devices and not government devices, there’s a higher chance that Russia or China or some other power could have put spyware on their device. So that is a major lapse in security, and there’s a chance it could have been spied on. But the person being physically in Russia shouldn’t make it any easier for the Russian government to spy on the chat itself.

If they were using Signal on personal phones, an unofficial channel on unofficial devices, they already weren’t, even before they accidentally included a journalist in the chat.

So they’ll try to kidnap her illegally anyway. Hope she can find a way to stay safe.

Trying to make it sound like a technical failure, not a massive show of incompetence and a huge security lapse by people who are unqualified for their jobs and shouldn’t have been communicating through those channels in the first place.

And “It’s the first time we’ve really fucked up inexcusably in a whole two months” doesn’t really work as a defense. Nor is it true.

I think we’re already seeing that they’re quite capable of doing severe damage to the USA and other countries. You don’t have to be smart or skillful to be a wrecking ball. And, as another commenter says, the pandemics, wars and climate disasters they will bring have yet to really kick in.

This is the same team of geniuses that kept classified files, some of which were mysteriously emptied of their contents, in the unlocked bedroom and bathroom of a members-only club in Florida, near the swimming pool whose water mysteriously destroyed all the surveillance video just when the FBI were about to look at it.