Yeah, they kept getting acquitted. Part of it was because Elbit and other arm manufacturers don’t usually own their premises, but lease them. Meaning the property leasers are the damaged party (or at least one of the main ones) for the occupations and break ins. So lawyers for Palestine Action would demonstrate that Elbit was producing components for weapons that might make the property owners complicit in future war crimes litigation, and naturally those property owners don’t want any part of that when they could lease their facilities to some low risk company that just makes buts for forklifts or whatever.

The problem now is that this was so successful that the British state is now going after them with spurious and misused anti-terror charges, where the injured party would be ‘the government’, they can exclude pretty much any evidence or arguments about international law they want, or just impose such evil and impossible bail conditions on people they can then imprison them for 5 years for breaching bail conditions, like they also have been recently for pro-Palestine journalists.

The Americans had already used the bomb, twice, and even before that there wasn’t really any doubt they would if they could. As history proved both before and after Nagasaki, the US was happy to cause any amount of death and destruction to fight the (mostly extremely paranoid and overstated) ‘threat of communism’. And whatever you think about the idea of nuclear deterrence in the modern era, there’s little to no doubt it was the only thing preventing the US using nukes against the USSR.

I wrote this comment for a thread that just got deleted, so I’m just gonna post it here. It’s on the subject of the CIA pushing and popularising the idea of conspiracy theories in order to give themselves cultural cover…

Pretty much, certainly the US government at large. People often point to the aftermath of the JFK assassination as the Warren Comission report famously referred to ‘conspiracy theories’ and ‘conspiracy theorists’ frequently and the press ran with those terms. To the degree that this idea has been ‘debunked’ by modern corporate media, they use the classic sleight of hand by investigating whether the Warren Commission coined those terms, rather than popularised them.

One of the primary counter-agruements these people use is that Karl Popper’s influential philosophical book Open Society & Its Enemies used the terms when discussing how society creates meaning from events in 1945. And if you couldn’t tell by the title of that work, yes, Popper was a reactionary with a deepseated hatred for historicism, Marxist based thought, who believed that historicism was responsible for “20th Century totalitarianism” and that liberal democracy was the only acceptable form of government (because it didn’t require ‘bloodshed or violence’ for improvement ). And yes, he was of course popular with the US political class and establishment academics at the time, meaning the very people that would go on to be part of the state (from those elected to the intelligence community) in the 1960s when they popularised the term.

If you’re interested, the book Mirage Men might be worth a read. It’s a history of how the US military industrial complex and government perpetuated and used the UFO phenomenon not only as a smokescreen for secret projects and military action, but also psychological operations against the public. I think someone made a documentary of it years ago, but I’ve never seen itnso can’t say whether it’s a good portrayal of the book or not.

Don’t worry, the cast of the Thick Of It reboot are on it:

Ooof, the Lone Gunman show. That’s the real conspiracy; how a good spin-off with some great plot writing was doomed to failure by some of the absolute worst creative decisions ever.

(Also Sliders is fun, but I genuinely haven’t seen an episode in 20+ years)

First things first… yeah, that first album is fucking class. The later albums were weirdly overproduced (and apparently a nightmare for the band) but that first one is like a great rap metal / hardcore record with some tactical Cypress Hill inspired slow down. “I’m tired of waitin’, I’m tired of sleepin’” still feels like the premptive sound of nu/rap-metal for years to come but better.

Darky into Schpamb used to rock people’s shit when I played it - pale audiences ‘into’ rap getting shellshock (but the few metal kids going nuts for that bit) when they thought the classic bravado bit was over, only to be not even close to prepared for the unleashed skate-hardcore of Schpamb!

Boooo! Go back and read the megathread, plus seasons 1-7 as homework or you’re a lib who hate’s theory.

I was literally about to post a bunch and the next one was going to be Unmarked Helicopters. One of the greatest songs written about UFOs ever, even if it didn’t have the added cache of being (extremely briefly and badly mixed) in the bacjground of an X Files episode. Max fucking rocks, both as a character and a double-episode. Fuck the ‘Keys of X’ version that shortens it and forces the theme in at the end.

They were a band I saw sometime in the late 90s (not sure if it was before or after the Jive deal) on recomendation of a work friend because “you like that rap and metal stuff”. I saw them a few times later, but that early energy was incredible. I’ve never really gotten over that first album, for all its flaws, as a result.

Obviously it was later and rawer and maybe full on all the time, but It reminded me of the the first time I saw Dub War who might be one of the most underated / overlooked bands of the 90s. Partly because I went back to wathcing UK bands and when the rap/metal thing kicked off a couple of years later it already felt old and kind of a US import (apart from the aforementioned).

This is why I’ll never leave Hexbear, I love you idiots.

Basically just the rock that keeps away tigers at this point.

Or you’re a couple who plays together and/or you have kids.

Perhaps not for big new Sony titles, but if you’re a family / have kids you definitely want at least two as there’s still lots of good couch multiplayer games out there.

If it’s just for you then possibly for stick drift (rather than getting them later when they’ve gone up in price again) or because they still use a built-in battery instead of rechargeables, and they don’t last very long by comparison (and that play time gets even lower as they age obviously).

Including a second controller and bits you need (stand, disc drive) this is £900 in the UK. That’s almost $1200. Without a game.

Modern game graphics have killed the console market.

Bastani continues his pivot into dull English Bill Maher because actual leftists didn’t fall about to embrace him as some kind of intellectual thought leader.

Next week, a hard hitting interview where he briefly challenges Adrian Zenz on some of his past religious rhetoric before asking him to share his concerns on China for six and a half hours.

OK, I relented. Was he aiming for the fence for the sake of the video or just fucked it that badly?

Todays Mega is dedicated to all the old people that watched this show

The mega theme

Me

And I’m definitely not still watching it every year or two 30 years later instead of new things

How do people balance being really drunk / high with being a) comparatively very capable and b) not having the self-destructive instinct anymore compared to others?

True, but who gives a shit about finding out why a load of kids (1017) got blown up in the lobby of a gig venue, or how the guy did it? We’d give them a big cultural memorial but it happened in the North and it’s awkward because the only person who could address it was an enemy of the state.