You seem to assume that mergers and acquisitions are not an essential part of a market economy. Left to their own devices, capitalists will always end up trying to form monopolies. You need a strong regulatory state to keep them in check. But then because they are inexorably pulled towards maximizing profitability, they will try to capture the state and deregulate. So, unless you go to a very aggressively anticapitalist set of policies a market economy will never be “functioning” for long.

Best kind of Portlandia vibes.

Nothing serious, just walking down the national focus tree, while world tension increases in HOI4.

Russia is a genocidal gangster petro-state, led by a criminal wanted by the ICC, that should be kicked out of Ukraine, but credit where credit is due: the most recent era of great power military adventurism started when the US ignored the UN and international law to invade Iraq in 2003. So if we want to talk about who drove the world in this shit, the answer is clearly the USA.

Everyone wants the war to end, yet no one has a ready-made solution — perhaps there are none. We owe each other the honesty this moment demands. Anything short of Russia’s full withdrawal from Ukraine is profoundly unjust and outright dangerous, but an uncompromising pursuit of justice can also bring us to the point of no return.

Survival itself — enduring as an independent nation despite Putin’s history lectures — is already a victory for Ukraine. But the story won’t end there. Greedy states attack not because they are provoked, but because they can do so. Stopping them will take more than moral force.

Hey look, whataboutism!

Jeff, my boy, you finished the game, you hundred-percented it, just buy a chateau or something and retire to paint Warhammer and do pottery and tantric meditation or whatever man, stop hoarding money.

The shtetls are subjected to regular pogroms.

The only thing that would make this even more ridiculous is if the Trump organization sues them for copyright infringement.

you follow the guy on linkedin or something?

Israel is an Apartheid state (convicted) that is on trial for Genocide and whose political leadership is wanted by the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity.

You can’t pinkwash that.

That’s the wrong way to look at it. Israel is a project of the West. Merz explained it: Israel is doing our dirty job.

I think the owning occurred at bombing time not at building time.

One thing that is entirely facepalm-worthy is this “explanation” the Nova agency gave:

Francesco Civita, a spokesperson for Nova, confirmed that the news agency had ended its relationship with Nunziati over his Gaza question. Civita said that Nunziati had been let go for asking a question that was “technically incorrect” because Russia had invaded a sovereign country unprovoked, whereas Israel was responding to an attack.

So, Pinho could have just made that case, right? There was nothing pushy or loaded about the question. If anything, if one truly believes that the two cases are so different, then they should actually want to be asked this question, as a chance to educate the public about the difference.

Here is what mainstream Israeli press thinks of the term:

“Settler” is not a neutral descriptor. In English, the word entered common use in the early 17th century to describe people establishing permanent communities in sparsely inhabited areas. At first, the term evoked ideas of pioneering and self-reliance. But during and after the age of European colonialism, it grew heavier with meaning, often associated with conquest, displacement, and injustice.

In today’s activist and postcolonial discourse, “settler” frequently implies illegitimacy, occupation, and even violence. That shift in meaning has colored its modern use, especially in contested areas like the West Bank.

For Palestinians, the term “settler” is almost always pejorative. The settlements are seen as encroachments on land designated for a future Palestinian state, and the continuing expansion—especially under the current Israeli government—has been viewed as a major obstacle to any viable two-state solution.

So, no, those fuckers don’t consider “settler” to be anodyne.

Does the word “settler” have connotations of innocence in your culture?

Apartheid state doing apartheid things.

According to Vlad Vexler, in Russian political/bureaucratic culture this is not to be understood as real analysis and more to be understood as functionaries pitching themselves as useful to Putin: https://youtu.be/ZJryUKULZ_E

This isn’t 2005, where things are either newspapers or blogs. Welcome to 2025, where entirely online media organizations exist.

Canadian Dimension (CD) is a Canadian political magazine established in 1963 and based in Winnipeg, Manitoba. The publication is known for its left-wing orientation, including viewpoints associated with social democracy and libertarian socialism.[1] In 2019, Canadian Dimension transitioned to a digital-only format.[2]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Dimension