Crisis and Bailout: The Tortuous Cycle Stalking Nations in Debt
The government of Ghana is essentially bankrupt, and has turned to the International Monetary Fund for its 17th financial rescue since 1957.
:imf-cool:
Nancy Pelosi writes a letter to the NYT about the coup in Chile. Let us now praise the U.S. for declassifying documents about their complicity! Truth and justice will prevail!
For months, the Times has been exposing the phone numbers of soldiers who criticized the war as well as the numbers of potential family members.
The UN is a political organization and says whatever countries vote it to say. It’s also not a legislative organization, it’s basically a big political club of people who like to write strongly worded letters about things. Only the UNSC has teeth, and that hasn’t declared it illegal for obvious reasons.
The U.S. can veto its own condemnation, therefore the U.S. can never be condemned. Checkmate, tankies.
NEW YORK TIMES DOESN’T WANT ITS STORIES ARCHIVED The Times blocked a bot that had given the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine huge troves of websites.
By 2017, however, the Internet Archive announced its intention to stop abiding by the dictates of a site’s robots.txt. While the Internet Archive had already been disregarding the robots.txt for military and government sites, the new update expanded the move to disregard robots.txt for all sites. Instead, website owners could make manual exclusion requests by email.
Reputation management firms, for one, are keenly aware of the change. The New York Times, too, appears to have mobilized the more selective manual exclusion process, as certain Times stories are not available via the Wayback Machine.
The example they use for “certain Times stories” is the one about Russian soldiers’ phone calls from Ukraine.
Next you’ll be telling us that there’s more to the DDR than what’s contained in The Lives of Others!
Which books do you particularly recommend?
behave like authoritarians to keep members in line
I believe it was Voltaire who once said that democratic centralism is neither democratic nor centralism
I was once in the same org as (at least) one of the authors of this piece, and yeah, that was how we put it. “U.S. imperialism is bad, but so is Russian imperialism!” It led to some very convenient alignments with American foreign policy orthodoxy. I had an epiphany at the beginning of the pandemic, watching how well China handled it, and I’m embarrassed at how we fell for lines like that.
For your dunking pleasure. https://truthout.org/articles/is-brics-an-anti-colonial-formation-worth-cheering-from-the-left-far-from-it/
Ctrl-F - “authoritarian” - four matches.
Ctrl-F - “autocrac” - five matches
(Edit - typo)
Then every drawer would just say “Nestlé”
I wonder how they feel about the pro-Israel, anti-BDS loyalty oaths that academics have had to sign for years
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/07/world/europe/ukraine-cluster-munitions.html
War crimes: they’re literally all we have. But are they any good?
Top headline on the NYT site right now is just “Ukrainians embrace war crimes, but are they helping?”
It’s from this, but sadly we were only gifted this one fake page.
The next day, I sauntered onto an Oklahoma stage wearing a full cowboy outfit, firing a pair of six shooters in the air. “Howdy,” I said to the crowd, “I’m Sheriff Hillary,” I received the biggest applause of my whole career.
“If there’s one thing I hate,” I announced, “it’s varmints. And the worst varmints of all are cattle rustlers. make me your president and I’ll put a bullet between the eyes of every rustler in this state.” For emphasis, I bit a chunk out of a hunk of beef.
The crowd roared. They loved it. A chant started: “Death to rustlers! Death to rustlers!” Then a scuffle broke out in the front row. Three men dressed in denim tackled and hogtied a small, weasely-looking fellow. They dragged him up on stage.
“Ms. Clinton,” one man said, “this fella here is a rustler. He stole three of my prize cows last spring. If you kill him right now, everyone in this room will vote for you.” The crowd began a new chant: “Blood! Blood! Blood!”
The bound man pleaded with me. “Yes, I stole those cows,” he said, “but I only did it because my family was starving. Please, spare me. I’ll never rustle again.” My life and career have been defined by hard choices. This was perhaps the hardest choice of all. My phone buzzed. A text from Robby. It read, “The Algorithm says: the rustler dies.” “I’m sorry,” I told the man as I raised a pistol. “It’s not me. It’s the Algorithm.”
I squeezed the trigger.
I’m a firm believer in a philosophy of the ruling class. Especially since I rule.
Archive.is/ph/whatever has been failing for a lot of folk lately. If I click on an Archive link in Firefox it takes me to an eternal Captcha page, so I use another browser exclusively to bypass paywalls. I hope they fix it soon, as the problem seems to be affecting more people.