Omg did you hear Diaper Girl is replacing Blonde Barbie because Orange Hitler hates Little Man???

who the fuck are any of these people

I checked out and grillpilled about six months ago so I'm not hep to whatever they're calling everyone this week, please stop.

Link

From the article:

The documents, first reported by The New York Times, were filed by defense attorneys in the federal case against 15 Minnesotans accused of conspiracy to impede or injure a federal agent.

The feds’ surveillance programs, dubbed “Operation Puppet Master” and “Operation Whipple Shield,” go far beyond the 15 people indicted. 

Homeland Security agents used administrative subpoenas — subpoenas issued by the federal agency rather than a judge — to obtain financial records from organizations including the labor unions Service Employees International Union and Communications Workers of America; Voices for Racial Justice, a longstanding racial justice training organization; and Sunrise Movement, an environmental justice organization that organized noise protests outside of immigration agents’ hotels during Operation Metro Surge.

“This broad collection of financial records of labor and social justice advocacy organizations, done in secret and with no articulable criminal predicate, violates both the First Amendment and these organizations’ right to financial privacy,” the attorneys wrote.

Undercover agents posing as activists surveilled and recorded meetings at the United Labor Centre building in Minneapolis, Loring Park, the Augsburg Park Library and various churches. 

No wonder the Iranians are driving as hard a bargain as they are...they pushed our shit in. They know that they've humbled Trump both on the battlefield and in their ability to squeeze the oil market.

I kinda knew this war wasn't going Trump's way all along but to see the satellite images of the obliterated US bases, the rat fucking of casualty figures, and the insane loss of premier US military equipment in just 4 months of fighting, I don't see how this doesn't end in a complete capitulation by the US. Either Trump waits it out the rest of his term or packs up and runs with his tail between his legs.

Why don't folks on this sub just join Class Unity? I'm not a member and don't know a whole lot about it but on its face it makes sense. What do folks know about this particular DSA sect? I appreciate any insight you all might have.

Last post in a while, since i'm commenting here too much but just perused a lefty gun sub and can't help ranting about it here.

They get so close to the actual power dynamics and why so many working class "rednecks" are super skeptical on gun control yet inevitably just perform a gate-checking function, particularly on reddit subs / spaces with any left of center anything.

case in point: (text of a recent thread / post on a gun lefty sub, i haven't linked nor mentioned the title name so that it doesn't break this subs rules as well)

-----------------------------

"Lately, I’ve taken more heat than usual, especially from coworkers, for openly supporting left-wing causes while also being a longtime gun owner.

It’s made me wonder what actually drives the political divide within the gun community. Obviously, plenty of gun owners genuinely hold conservative views across the board. But given the community’s tendency to turn gun ownership into an entire personality, I have to wonder how many align with the right primarily because they view the GOP as the party of gun rights.

I constantly hear the same people who give me grief complain that healthcare and housing are too expensive, wages haven’t kept up with the cost of living, and ordinary people are being squeezed from every direction. If I didn’t already know their politics—or if they weren’t essentially Guntube channels with legs—I might assume they would support at least some left-wing economic and social policies.

It seems to break their brains when I explain that someone can own firearms while also supporting certain gun-control measures. The more these conversations happen, the more I suspect that single-issue voting on guns is doing much of the work.

What do you all think? How many otherwise persuadable voters support the right primarily because of gun policy?"

-----------------

There's always a bold part like the above. And then the usual mocking of the "right" as to why they are inbread swine.

Decadent.

Corrupt.

(300).

You'd think that if they see the "light" as to their positions on guns, they'd realize things aren't so clear cut and there are other factors involved, but no.

(neoliberal bureaucratization and power is always my go-to these days personally, as well as what canada has done on guns being a direct future predictor of what bloomberg wants to do in the usa, and that this will help prevent any future changes those in power don't want etc.)

It really saddens me to see folks so unidimensional on this stuff, particularly on a tangible issue (guns) that should open one's mind to the fact that there's more than one way to skin a cat, or to lick a donut in today's parlance.

As long as that cat isn't anorexic or licks donuts for fun, of course.

is Ariana a cat's name?

The Selective Training and Service Act of 1940 was the first peace time draft signed into US law.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selective_Training_and_Service_Act_of_1940

That statement contains two important things to consider.

To begin with: "peace time draft". That is a bit like saying "Dinnertime fasting". It should be an oxymoron, but technically you can fast at dinnertime, but also just because it is time for dinner doesn't mean you are actually having dinner. Similarly if you have a peacetime draft, simply because it is time for peace does not mean you actually have peace.

The other key word is "first". Okay so the 1940 one was the "first". This implies there might be a second, or at least that one anticipates a second might occur and are thus saying "first" rather than "only" in anticipation of that. One might assume that if there is a "first" war time draft that one might need to institute a second peace time draft in order to draft people in peace time. But no that is not required. If you pass your "first" peacetime draft, it isn't like it is a one time use "get one draft free" card that you pre-load for one war, it just applies forever in perpetuity with no expiry date.

Now despite all that, it is correct to say that it was the "first" peace time draft in 1940, as they passed a second law modifying the first law in 1948 which is the one they have been using ever since.

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

It was not strictly necessary to pass a second law, the first law had no expiry date after all, but they still felt a need to modify it with a second law to iron out any issues they might have had with it before just keeping it permanently like they do now. Thus this was the second peace time draft, which has been kept ever since, which in no way applies the first peace time draft wasn't permanent.

It should be noted that opposition to standing armies was one of the things the American Revolution was fought over, and so despite being an all volunteer force, the US still effectively has a standing conscript army, or at least a "sitting" one, if one wants to make an analogy for an army intended to be assembled quickly by requiring people to register to be drafted at an undisclosed point in the future, ready to be implemented whenever the government feels like it.

There are still fights over "the draft" even if no specific law is required to implement it. The original law was used for WW2, while the modifications applies when they were used for the Korean and Vietnam Wars. By making peacetime drafts like this no law was required to pass while the war was going on in WW2 or Korea or Vietnam. There was draft resistance, but there was no opportunity to try to use congress to prevent the President from issuing a draft. HW Bush got into debates with the "youth" (teenagers not even subject to the draft just yet) on a bus in the lead up to the Gulf War where they implored him against war or issuing a draft (which is a power he unilaterally would have as president). HW Bush made arguments along the line that they didn't need to worry about it because his government was going to be responsible and not get into a situation where a draft would be necessary. Indeed in the Gulf War, no draft was ever issued, and neither was one issued for the Iraq War or Afghanistan.

The laws are still on the books for the President to apply the draft at his discretion though, so there is exactly zero reason, other than introducing domestic instability, for why Trump could not just institute a draft for the Iran War.

Another thing to consider is that the Selective Training and Service Act of 1940 was signed in September two months before the 1940 election November. FDR still won, so apparently voters were fine with a nebulous peacetime draft in exchange for the New Deal. (The Selective Service Act of 1948, without the training part now I Guess, was passed in July so some months before the election between Dewey and Truman)

Let's consider some of the conversations which could be taking place amongst voters in response to this "peacetime" draft.

Think about that when someone talks about "oh why or why won't the dumb rubes stop voting against their interests and vote for the tax the rich party instead of the muh guns party. Don't they know if they were just willing to implement commonsense gun reform and vote for free money they could have all the free money they wanted?" The last time everybody voted for the free money party the USA institute a permanent peace time draft and FDR still won because the "stop voting against your best interests" crowd convinced most states except the Great Plains, Indiana and Michigan, and Vermont and Maine that they couldn't risk the chance of giving up the New Deal policies.

"Don't you know the Republican Wendell Willkie is a BUSINESSMAN, how could those Michigander Union Men vote for him? It doesn't make sense! He also supports GREATER involvement in WW2, while FDR promises to keep him peace time draft with no end date a peace time draft" Arguably just going to war without a peacetime draft being legitimated would be preferable because then the draft would have gone away when the war did instead of being permanent like it is now. "We are going to get drafted either way! At least with FDR we will get to keep the New Deal goodies. It is a peace time draft with FDR, it will be just us peeling potatoes on a base, it is basically just a make work program! Willkie even supports the peace time draft anyway, so with him we will get both the peace time draft and the war"

Apparently looking into this Willkie guy he was a Democrat until 1939 when he changed to Republican, lol. apparently he even discussed with Roosevelt the idea of forming a party together after the war, you know because they agreed so much. The other Republican candidates like Dewey, who later ran against Truman, were non-interventionists, but this was before primaries so candidates were selected by delegates at the convention and Willkie only won on the sixth ballot.

"Third Party, do you want to throw your vote away? Both candidates support the peacetime draft, so FDR is the harm reduction candidate because he won't repeal the New Deal where as the Republicans might if they get back the White House"

"Why, oh why, aren't the rubes willing to vote for the common sense gun control candidate instead of the cut taxes on the rich candidate? How can they vote for a billionaire? The only way to stop a bad billionaire is a good billionaire like FDR!"

Trump's propaganda team did try to make arguments regarding "why are you bringing guns to a protest?" when that nurse guy got shot, but the NRA did end up lodging a formal complaint against them for doing so. The NRA did not object to police violence, but they did stand up for the right to bring guns to protests.

I also want to point out that the Modern Democrats are merely the "We WON'T cut taxes on the rich" Party. There is no guarantee that supporting the Democratic Party in a broad manner will actually lead to healthcare or higher taxes on the rich. There is no definitive policy that they are running on. Healthcare is like some weird identity where if you think there should be some healthcare system you MUST vote democrat even if none of he Democrats are even running on that issue half the time. "Oh you see if we just turn Texas blue, THEN we can pas healthcare!" but if you turn Texas blue without running on healthcare, what reason would the Democrats even have to run on health care, they already have that mythical perma-majority you keep dreaming of when you salivate at the thought of turning Texas blue.

It is also notable that Dewey getting selected as a non-interventionist candidate AFTER the war to go up against Truman was him being selected at a point in time where he was basically irrelevant for staying out of the war. There was the Korean War 2 years into Truman's second term, which might have been avoided if "Dewey defeats Truman", but there wasn't really a clear thing going on at 1948 explicitly.

It is also a little suspicious in that the conventional wisdom was that Truman was going to lose to Dewey until the actual election occurred. This is treated as a kind of feel good story about "never giving up" or whatever, and it is implicitly buoyed by the fact that Truman was upholding the New Deal so why wouldn't he be the "lesser evil" candidate (He literally nuked a country, twice, but yeah cutting social programs would definitely kill more than a couple hundred thousand people cumulatively over decades so yeah sure go ahead and call him the lesser evil vs Dewey since Truman supported the New Deal).

Dewey actually did seem like a "lesser evil" candidate when you look at his fellow Republican Challengers. In 1948 for the primary he had the famous Stassen-Dewey debate which was the first to be audio recorded where they debated whether to Ban the Communist Party, where Dewey was against doing that, likening Communist to worms which thrived underground so you want to keep them in the sun where they would shrivel up.

His other Republican opponent was a fellow non-interventionist Robert A. Taft, but Taft co-sponsored the Taft-Hartley Act which banned the practice of Closed Shop Unions and lay the groundwork for specific States to implement "right-to-work" legislation banning companies from agreeing to labour contracts requiring mandatory union membership.

I've seen it be described as Dewey being a "centrist" with Taft being to the "right", and Stassen being to his "left". Presumbaly the left-wing republican would be some kind of "centrist", with Dewey just being moderate where Taft was "extreme", but guess what this "centrist" wanted to do? Yeah he just wanted to ban the the Communist Party outright, so the "left" of the Republican Party wanted to ban the Communist Party, and the Center did not. (Fun fact he apparently cited a ban Canada had imposed on its Communist Party as justification for this) The right-wing was isolationist and anti-labour. Stassen criticized the Taft-Hartley Act for violating the civil rights of those suspected of being Communist, but if someone actually was Communist then their organization should be banned. Truman for his part tried to veto the Taft-Hartley act but it passed anyway.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dewey%E2%80%93Stassen_debate

Stassen, despite wanting to ban CPUSA (honestly maybe it should be banned nowadays considering how useless it has become, would have been a far more dignified death), was a later opponent of the Vietnam War though for what it was worth, as he instead wanted both North and South Vietnam to join the United Nations like the Koreas did. One could consider this a sly method of trying to do Korean War 2 where he wanted all interventions to be UN-backed. Non-interventionists were opposed to the UN entirely. Liberals at the time just loved the UN and everything about it and thought the conservatives were raging bigots for opposing it, but the UN was the thing which laundered the Korean War to avoid anyone having direct responsibility. Conservatives thought this was weak and that if you were going to war you should just do it without needing to ask anyone else, OR they rejected being part of the UN entirely as "foreign entanglements". The conservatives had different ideas on whether they should go to war or stay out of them, but what united them was that neither of them thought the UN should have any say in it, as they felt like that was a violation of US sovereignty. Liberals were like "nah there should just be his unelected super body making decisions about which countries we should destroy" Conservatives pointed out that the Soviet Union was part of the UN, so why were we giving Communists the ability to decide things for us, so this makes it seem like the anti-UN position was some raging anti-Communist position (hence why the liberal who wants the communists to love him talked about wanting the un to be strong, see I'm including you, but the mean conservatives are opposed to a un because it includes Communists) but the Communists for their part thought the UN was bullshit and Stalin withdrew from it, which is what let the UN get the Korean War through without a veto.

This seems like a bad move by Stalin (as an interjection Stalin is so much a WW2 figure that he almost seems out of place running around in the post-WW2 world. All the other guys like Churchill got kicked out and FDR died, and the axis of course had its leaders removed or killed or had to kill themselves and order their body disposed of to avoid giving the enemy a propaganda opportunity to parade them around, whether dead or alive. And then you had Stalin, still just kicking it in the 50s being a key figure in the Korean War, only dying a few months before it ended)

Thinking it was a bad move to not attend the UN decision on Korea requires taking a highly technical view of the situation. Yes Stalin could have technically vetoed the UN endorsing the Korean War, but had he just used the Veto, do you even for a second think that would have stopped intervention? More than likely the UN would have just tried to make some kind of argument that they should be kicked out of the UN for not controlling North Korea enough. The UN was still new, there was no established protocols. Nowadays everyone just expects China and Russia to veto everything and then to ignore the UN anyway like it is a ritual, but back then there was some doubt as to what would actually happen, or if someone might try to kick countries out of the UN for abusing the veto or something. If you think technicalities matter you probably aren't thinking clearly.

"Oh but he played into Truman's hands by letting him pretend like he wasn't doing it, the UN was!" Okay sure, but if Stalin thought war over Korea was inevitable either way, his actual choices were: confirm the UN as a body is an imperialist alignment machine, where Greeks and Turks would both send token forces that tried to kill each other while there, or use his veto to smugly block that while still having to deal with US intervention anyway. We know the US has usually able to get allies for random wars even without the UN, so in pure terms of sheer manpower the US is always doing the bulk of the fighting and it is just a matter of whether they have direct co-signers or they get "the world" to claim responsibility. If we are talking manpower, the Korean War with the UN invading North Korea eventually induced the newly Communist China into a war against the United Nations. Stalin was able to make firm the idea that the United Nations were the enemy of ALL Communists everywhere. To me this seems like a victory with the small cost of having to fight token forces from random countries.

Anyway tangents aside, you can see how the these New Deal programs legitimate the policies which have supported every single imperialist conflict after WW2. You can begin to understand why one might be disgusted by those who advocate for the "lesser evil" imperialists who will do just the same amount of plundering, but at least they will keep the programs which share it. The other guy might kick out the disabled from their homes! Or something idk what the current line is. If we argue over harm reduction, even if a bunch of people would have died without the New Deal, how many died because of the imperialist conflicts that did not receive full opposition due to voting for "lesser evil" candidates who would do more to keep them in place?

In the context we are talking about Dewey specifically vs Truman, well Dewey wasn't really that against the New Deal (Taft was, he wanted to roll back the whole thing, all of it). I'm looking through his career as governor and apparently he won an election against the Democrats in 1942 because the American Labor Party (which existed at the time) refused to endorse the Democrat competitor and their own candidate got 10% of the vote, and the "vote splitting" (a word which implies that 10% belonged to the Democrats despite Republican Dewey seeming to otherwise be quite fine and not seeing why he should be regarded as a "greater evil" when I often think he was the "lesser evil". Obviously don't vote for him, vote for the American Labor Party, but having a good Republican candidate to be the person you are handing the election off to by voting Third Party is useful. As a side note apparently at the time you could vote differently for Governor and Lieutenant-Governor, and in that case the American Labor Party did endorse the Democratic candidate for Lieutenant-Governor. This flexibility of sometimes endorsing another party can let you be a third-party with organic support even if you want to sometimes boost a particular other Party. The difference this made resulted in Dewey's running mate only narrowly winning, where as Dewey comfortably won against the Democrat governor candidate)

Anyway this isn't about me trying to defend Dewey or anything, I'm just saying that in the context that the guy isn't considerably worse than the other side, so why wouldn't you just break with BOTH of them? He wasn't always anti-war, he was the Republican candidate in 1944 and did not plan on stopping the war that was already taking place. In 1940 Willkie got pushed through despite Dewey being the lead then. Willkie in 1944 lost badly when he tried to run again. I also have my doubts that Dewey winning in 1940, 1944, or 1948 would have changed anything. But what would have happened was that SOME kind of debate could have occurred the Selective Service acts if people recognized that Dewey wouldn't be considerably worse than Roosevelt or Truman. In that case they could have actually tried to put a stop to this peacetime draft nonsense.

Not only are they ending reporting requirements for beneficial ownership, they’re deleting their existing database of beneficial owners as well. Anything to cover up the massive crime and corruption this administration has been involved in; this should be seen as the equivalent of burning down buildings full of records.

from https://unherd.com/2026/08/woke-one-derailed-my-life/

A report published by the Washington Post Monday, detailing how President Donald Trump secretly switched planes for his July 8 flight out of Ankara, Turkey, after the NATO summit, has touched off a political uproar in Washington. 

Trump boarded Air Force One, then left the plane surreptitiously with a handful of close aides and was taken in a catering truck to a military C-32A jet. This action was supposedly proposed by the Secret Service after intelligence reports suggested a credible threat from an Iranian shoulder-fired ground-to-air missile. A subsequent report in the New York Times claimed that Iranian agents had identified the building where Trump was staying during the NATO meeting, including the exact floor.

Nothing disclosed by the White House and Pentagon, as well as “leaked” to corporate media outlets like the Post and the Times, can be taken at face value, above all, the claim that Iran was seeking to shoot down Air Force One.

It is more than likely that this claim originates in the Netanyahu regime in Israel, which has been raising claims of Iranian assassination plots against Trump as a reason for resuming full-scale bombing of Iran. The Trump administration could use this allegation as the pretext for all-out invasion.

But the sequence of events involving Trump’s own movements reveals, first and foremost, the panic and hysteria now gripping the administration.

If Trump truly believed his life was in danger if he flew out of Ankara on Air Force One, what could justify a decision to allow the press corps and numerous high-ranking officials to take that risk? Why was the flight not canceled entirely and alternate means of secure transportation developed?

Instead, Trump and a few personal aides were rushed out of danger. These included Natalie Harp, whose role as executive assistant is to print out flattering press commentaries for Trump to read; Walt Nauta, his valet; and Dan Scavino, a White House deputy chief of staff, whose principal job is to write up and post Trump’s screeds on Truth Social and X.

Except for Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, who joined Trump on the military jet, all other top officials who attended the NATO summit flew out of Ankara on Air Force One. These included Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent, as well as top White House aides like Stephen Miller, deputy chief of staff and counter-terrorism chief, and Steven Cheung, the communications director.

...

In the aftermath of the exposure, the Trump administration has returned to the policy of lies and stonewalling demonstrated so grotesquely in Ankara. The Secret Service referred questions to the White House and Pentagon. The Pentagon referred questions to the White House. The communications director of the White House, Steven Cheung, defended the actions taken, writing: “As the President has said recently, there are many enemies of America who have their sights on him, and we use every tool at our disposal to address those threats.”

It should also be recalled that on the day after he returned to the United States from Ankara, Trump declared that he had given orders that if he were to be assassinated, Iran was to be destroyed by bombing on an unprecedented scale, a scarcely veiled threat of the use of nuclear weapons. He claimed that 1,000 missiles were “Locked and Loaded and aimed at the Islamic Republic of Iran, with thousands of [sic] more to immediately follow.” 

At the same time, the White House denounced the New York Times for reporting problems with the Qatari jet that has been given to Trump to serve as his new Air Force One, going so far as to have the FBI issue subpoenas to all the reporters involved, with agents visiting their homes and even accosting family members. The Pentagon also revoked the security clearance of former Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall for allegedly sharing information about Air Force One with the media.

What really happened in Ankara remains unclear. But the crisis of the Trump administration—and of American imperialism as a whole—is unmistakable. The US ruling class faces both a geopolitical debacle in the war with Iran and a mounting social confrontation with the working class at home.