Jewish Zionists and Israelis certainly play a significant role, but the tail is not wagging the dog. As Biden has explained for decades, “Were there not an Israel, the United States of America would have to invent an Israel to protect her interest in the region.” Israel is America’s unsinkable aircraft carrier in West Asia. Consider also that most Zionists are not Jewish, but Christian. AIPAC Not Just for Jews Anymore

Yes, there is ample evidence that we should be distrustful of capitalist, imperialist states and the corporations & capitalists which run them. Previously. Previously.

The answer was about a vague ‘they’ wanted us to think that, but it wasn’t true anymore.

I hear the vague ‘they’ so frequently now it’s just a normal conversation.

If you want to know what “they” someone might be talking about, then ask them. Some conspiracies are very much real.

Michael Parenti, 1996, Dirty Truths: Reflections on Politics, Media, Ideology, Conspiracy, Ethnic Life and Class Power:

Almost as an article of faith, some individuals believe that conspiracies are either kooky fantasies or unimportant aberrations. To be sure, wacko conspiracy theories do exist. There are people who believe that the United States has been invaded by a secret United Nations army equipped with black helicopters, or that the country is secretly controlled by Jews or gays or feminists or black nationalists or communists or extraterrestrial aliens. But it does not logically follow that all conspiracies are imaginary.

Conspiracy is a legitimate concept in law: the collusion of two or more people pursuing illegal means to effect some illegal or immoral end. People go to jail for committing conspiratorial acts. Conspiracies are a matter of public record, and some are of real political significance. The Watergate break-in was a conspiracy, as was the Watergate cover-up, which led to Nixon’s downfall. Iran-contra was a conspiracy of immense scope, much of it still uncovered. The savings and loan scandal was described by the Justice Department as “a thousand conspiracies of fraud, theft, and bribery,” the greatest financial crime in history.

Often the term “conspiracy” is applied dismissively whenever one suggests that people who occupy positions of political and economic power are consciously dedicated to advancing their elite interests. Even when they openly profess their designs, there are those who deny that intent is involved. In 1994, the officers of the Federal Reserve announced they would pursue monetary policies designed to maintain a high level of unemployment in order to safeguard against “overheating” the economy. Like any creditor class, they preferred a deflationary course. When an acquaintance of mine mentioned this to friends, he was greeted skeptically, “Do you think the Fed bankers are deliberately trying to keep people unemployed?” In fact, not only did he think it, it was announced on the financial pages of the press. Still, his friends assumed he was imagining a conspiracy because he ascribed self-interested collusion to powerful people.

At a World Affairs Council meeting in San Francisco, I remarked to a participant that U.S. leaders were pushing hard for the reinstatement of capitalism in the former communist countries. He said, “Do you really think they carry it to that level of conscious intent?” I pointed out it was not a conjecture on my part. They have repeatedly announced their commitment to seeing that “free-market reforms” are introduced in Eastern Europe. Their economic aid is channeled almost exclusively into the private sector. The same policy holds for the monies intended for other countries. Thus, as of the end of 1995, “more than $4.5 million U.S. aid to Haiti has been put on hold because the Aristide government has failed to make progress on a program to privatize state-owned companies” (New York Times 11/25/95).

Those who suffer from conspiracy phobia are fond of saying: “Do you actually think there’s a group of people sitting around in a room plotting things?” For some reason that image is assumed to be so patently absurd as to invite only disclaimers. But where else would people of power get together – on park benches or carousels? Indeed, they meet in rooms: corporate boardrooms, Pentagon command rooms, at the Bohemian Grove, in the choice dining rooms at the best restaurants, resorts, hotels, and estates, in the many conference rooms at the White House, the NSA, the CIA, or wherever. And, yes, they consciously plot – though they call it “planning” and “strategizing” – and they do so in great secrecy, often resisting all efforts at public disclosure. No one confabulates and plans more than political and corporate elites and their hired specialists. To make the world safe for those who own it, politically active elements of the owning class have created a national security state that expends billions of dollars and enlists the efforts of vast numbers of people.

This “evil/not evil” metaphysical dichotomy is a moral framework. There are no intrinsically ”evil” people, and I would drop that moral framework.

Philosophy professor and YouTuber Hans-Georg Moeller:

• Why Sam Harris is Wrong - A Critique of Sam Harris’ “The Moral Landscape”
• If Morality Exists Everything Is Permitted. (Q&A)
• Hans-Georg Moeller - The Moral Fool: A Case for Amorality

No one abides by community rules 😞 or understands that c/asklemmy is supposed to be a clone of r/AskReddit.

1. Open-ended question

3. Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below

This is more a question for [email protected].

IMO “developing” “masculinity”—“proper” or otherwise—is a fool’s errand. I don’t much care what various & sundry people think “masculinity” is or isn’t, and I’m not much interested in meeting the performance criteria of their varied & contradictory masculinities. I don’t hang out with the kinds of people who gatekeep gender.

Maybe someone should create a relationship advice community, because [email protected] isn’t supposed to be that. It’s supposed to be an r/AskReddit clone.

This is probably better asked at [email protected], where people may have informed opinions. Asking it here will likely get you mostly uninformed & misinformed opinions.

Please read community rules before posting, and please post Lemmy support questions to [email protected] next time.

Protip: Don’t announce to the world what domain(s) you intend to buy, because then someone might get to it first.

Not OP, but I find it dubious in the extreme: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=idcJsAFfieU&t=1796s

Western media cook up cartoonish anticommunist narratives all the time. It’s a lucrative business.

• They also train stations somehow have a lot of dead bodies, because North Korea is very cold. And there’s a train waiting area, and North Korea has one train go to one distance like a once a month. And like here it would take like one hour to go the other place in order to take a month at least to go because there’s no electricity and sometimes people have to push the train.
• In North Korea parents cannot feed their children. We give them mud because children is so hungry. And when you eat mud, you die in 10 days; you cannot go to the bathroom. Even though you know your children are dying, you still giving them the mud.

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Radio Free America: Three Stooges go to the Korean DMZ and ‘break’ DPRK ‘laws’ You’ll NEVER BELIEVE what CRAZY LAWS the DPRK will PASS NEXT!!!

Tankies have killed as many people as the Nazis, actually more.

This essay, Evans says, is authored by Bradley Galca of the University of Albany.

Maybe this? https://docslib.org/download/3584159/the-business-plot-in-the-american-press-by-bradley-m-galka

FWIW, it’s fairly rare for a deletion to not propagate. And I’ve yet to come across a rogue instance intentionally refusing to honor deletions. If we did, our instance would defederate from it.

I think it’s safe to say that this is an unappealing issue for most potential users.

I don’t actually think it’s safe to say that. I suspect that most people wouldn’t be very concerned about ActivityPub’s “best effort” federated deletion. But without actually polling people, I don’t think that either of these theories holds enough water to call “safe to say.”

This “fatal” flaw is hardly unique to ActivityPub. You fundamentally cannot control anything you publish on the internet. You can’t stop people from saving copies or taking screenshots, you can’t stop archive bots or LLM web scrapers, and you can’t force Lemmy instances to honor deletion requests.

Do you like Huey Lewis & The News? Their early work was a little too ‘new-wave’ for my taste, but when ‘Sports’ came out in '83, I think they really came into their own – both commercially and artistically. The whole album has a clear, crisp sound, and a new sheen of consummate professionalism that really gives the songs a big boost. He’s been compared to Elvis Costello, but I think Huey has a far more bitter, cynical sense of humor. In '87, Huey released this, ‘Fore’, their most accomplished album. I think their undisputed masterpiece is ‘Hip to Be Square’, a song so catchy most people probably don’t listen to the lyrics – but they should! Because it’s not just about the pleasures of conformity, and the importance of trends, it’s also a personal statement about the band itself!

I never met a bot I didn’t block. Maybe one day I’ll find one to be useful.