“The international community warns us of a humanitarian disaster in Gaza and of severe epidemics. We must not shy away from this, as difficult as that may be,” he added.

This is a nazi discussing lebesraum.

driving them out of their homes and into shrinking, increasingly crowded prison cities with horrendous living conditions is ethnic cleansing. But they also have killed many thousands of Palestinians, not counting the 11,000 since Oct 7.

If your only justification here is

The first thing I mentioned was ethnic cleansing, which tends to radicalize people after a few decades of it.

But also, Israel has Palestine inside a literal fucking fence. They control the fucking water supply. Yes, they are responsible for Palestine

Why do you expect the Israeli government to prioritise the lives of Palestinian over their own citizens when trying to smack out a terrorist threat?

Because they were instrumental in creating that terrorist threat in the first place, not only by perpetrating ethnic cleansing but by directly funding Hamas in the 70s and 80s as a counterbalance against the secular PLO.

Maybe if I read that it would temper my view of him, I mainly know him for writing an anti-Soviet book in the middle of a war with the nazis

Animal Farm

The plot reads like a sunday school scare piece to warn children about the dangers of satanism. It’s so vague and allegorical that you can’t really critique it. The message is basically “if you revolt against the capitalists, a scary bad man will take over and hurt you.” Also pretty disgusting that it portrays workers as farm animals and capitalists as humans. It’s a very “American schools during the Cold War would make kids read that” kind of book.

It’s not surprising that Orwell was a bigoted snitch who ratted leftists out to British intelligence, and was especially keen on turning in jews, black people, homosexuals, and anyone he deemed “anti-white.”

https://bennorton.com/george-orwell-list-leftists-snitch-british-government/

I’ll also throw in Asimov’s review of 1984 while I’m ranting about this creep

http://www.newworker.org/ncptrory/1984.htm

framework for statecraft

I kinda give side-eye to anyone really fond of the word statecraft. It’s sort of an “I look up to a lot of neoliberal ghouls” shibboleth.

Europe also benefits from literally trillions of dollars a year in net wealth extracted from the global south.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S095937802200005X

fucking communist countries have killed how many millions of their own citizens

Most of these articles cite the Black Book of Communism, which goes to absurd lengths to inflate the death toll of Communism, for example counting all the millions of nazi and soviet soldiers killed on the eastern front as victims of communism, counting the entire death toll of the Vietnam war, and even counting declining birth rates as deaths due to communism.

Noam Chomsky used the same methodology to argue that, according to Black Book logic, capitalism in India alone, from 1947–1979, could be blamed for more deaths than communism worldwide from 1917–1979.

https://web.archive.org/web/20160921084037/http://www.spectrezine.org/global/chomsky.htm

sing praise about Russia

I have never seen a communist claim that the modern Russian government is good or communist, only that it opposes western hegemony, to the occasional benefit of poor nations in the global south.

how old were you when the USSR fell? Did you experience communism, or the capitalist takeover after communism fell?

communism involves the abolition of the government. If you want to know what America does to communist movements undefended by government look at Indonesia in 1965–66

it is a requirement if you want to be a very rich social democracy

Economic liberalization is a defense against the kind of economic warfare that Cuba has been subjected to. Those are really the only two options: play ball with capitalism to some extent, or get strangled by sanctions.

I’ve been speaking with other more informed communists and they’ve told me

Lol this reads like social engineering to shift perception of ingroup mores. I guess I’m paranoid after seeing that Atlantic Council whitepaper calling for greater control of the fediverse.

God-tier title

Hold onto it and talk about it at parties?

If someone else has the main video site on the internet, that is a beachhead for building a larger platform and challenging Google as a whole.

Hahaha… to own them we’d have to pay for them

We’re already fucking paying for them! I’ve made this point twice now.

My brother

I’m out of patience

of Google, not Youtube

That’s my whole point! Google can afford it. Even if YouTube showed zero ads and earned zero revenue Google could afford it.

If I want to support a small creator, I donate. I don’t feel bad about hurting the bottom line of one of the highest-earning companies in the world.

Even if YouTube runs at a deficit, it’s probably worthwhile for Google to control the main video hosting hub on the internet and keep competition out of the game.

So does shipping, etc.

Spending on shipping or manufacturing is a lot less discretionary than spending on advertising. You have broad leeway to advertise less or more, and past a certain point the main requirement is that you advertise as well as your competition. If Google shows fewer ads across the board, even half as many ads, you’re still in business.

What is your proposed alternative?

If you want to talk real life, they’re already raking in $60 billion a year in profit so I see no need for an alternative. If you want to talk hypotheticals, I think central back-end infrastructure like Google’s servers — and the data we put on them — should be publicly owned, with an open-source marketplace of front-end services we can use to access it. We should be able to browse YouTube with whatever site interfaces and suggestion algorithms we find most useful, not the ones most profitable to Google.

Blackrock owns 5% of Tesla

Blackrock’s clients own 5% of Tesla.

Blackrock dies tomorrow if they do anything other than what their clients expect of them. The sole purpose of Blackrock is to invest rich people’s money and maximize returns for them while managing risk. They have some leeway in how they do this, but only up to a point. They’re very good at what they do but they are ultimately replaceable.

Also, when I said “they own the entire fucking planet” in my original unedited comment — which I edited for tone before I saw your near-immediate response — I was referring both google and the companies that advertise through google, which is why I said “they all make enough money already.” All is plural. Google sells enough ads, and their client companies buy enough ads.

Also, Blackrock is an asset management company that handles other people’s money. Google earns 16 times more revenue than them.

I gave you both revenue and profit. Their revenue was $280 billion, not $73 billion. $73 billion was their profit before tax, and $60 billion was profit after tax. $13 billion, the difference, was their income tax.

they took $470 million in losses

According to the Credit Suisse report, which also massively contradicted Google’s own earnings reports, lowballing YouTube’s revenue by a factor of ten iirc.

that…what?

Advertising costs money. To cover that cost, companies charge us more for their goods and services. I don’t know what is baffling to you about this.

Ads are a way for everyone to contribute a super small amount to keep the thing you’re on, online.

In 2022 Google grossed around $280 billion, and only around 10% of that from Youtube. Before tax they profited around $73 billion, and after tax around $60 billion. They’re doing fine selling ads.

And we paid all of that $280 billion, even those of us with adblockers, because companies charge us more to cover their marketing costs. I pay for google every time I pull out my credit card.

I don’t feel like watching ads to convince even more companies to pay google to advertise to me and buy my data. They’re all making enough money already, and every year they spend less of it on wages or tax for society to function. Their money goes to stock buybacks, payouts to their major shareholders, executive bonuses, and think tanks to push policies and social trends that hurt all of us.