and crime (like selling guns, drugs…) for extra money.

I hope you can see the contradiction here. You just said they don’t work and now say that they do illegal work. That should be your first clue that something about your information is wrong, because obviously these two things can’t be true at the same time.

More broadly, the idea that “whole communities of minorities stopped working” because of social welfare is, frankly, bullshit. And not just that, it’s the kind of bullshit that gets repeated everywhere (see: welfare queen rhetoric in America), because its purpose is to rile up working class people of the majority ethnicity against minorities. The fact of the matter is: People like having financial security and nice things, so the vast majority of people aren’t going to stop working because they’re getting the pittance of money that counts for social welfare in even really generous countries. When people don’t work, that’s almost always because they can’t work (see asylum seekers for another example), so whoever is telling you that dirty gypsies are lazily living off your tax money is feeding you bullshit. When it comes to Romas specifically, Romas have been shut out of polite society for centuries now, and it’d be ridiculous to assume that it stopped overnight. But we don’t have to assume; we know it hasn’t. It’s no coincidence that countries without intense and longstanding anti-Roma hatred also don’t have stereotypes about dirty Gypsies living off your tax money.

In past two years we stopped this and now condition social support with behaving.

So is there evidence that Roma crime is in any way correlated with social welfare or are you accepting that this “solution” worked based on vibes?

Admittedly I’m not well-informed on the early years of the Cuba thing (except that the Bay of Pigs was a thing), only the pre-Trump status quo, so I guess if you could point me to something that goes into more detail that’d be nice. That aside what I’m trying to say is that while the American embargo has been impoverishing Cuba, for the most part Cubans could get the basic necessities of life. Trying to cut off fuel is a new low.

If true, that’s not sabotage; that’s a terror attack. Yet another way dilly-dallying on backing Ukraine keeps blowing up in Europe’s face.

I don’t think you can tell me what you said without eating another deletion, but what broad argument were you making?

I more or less agres, but I wanna note that I’m a bit more optimistic than you in that I don’t think it’s quite too late. In principle Americans could start now and build the infrastructure for a successful popular revolt (though that infrastructure would be much better used preemptively to prevent the need for popular revolt); they just won’t because they still believe the fascists will let themselves be voted out of power. The bad ending is still preventable but it won’t be prevented.

Whether you consider this fortunate or unfortunate is up to you, but I don’t think this is likely. Not because MAGA won’t go that far, but because nobody in a position to organize a popular mass response (armed or unarmed) to a MAGA overthrow of democracy would actually do it. The right will enthusiastically support it, the center will be kinda mad but just fall in line and the left will be caught with its pants down because nobody is out there building the organizational infrastructure for such a thing.

That is not, in fact, Bin Laden’s plan.

First, because a nation with a nuclear arsenal ia not going to be allowed to collapse.

I mean, the USSR pulled it off.

It’s a harder sell, but it’s impacted by media straight up not talking about policy that way. Investigative journalism in America (and probably the broader West) is essentially dead, so the public becomes wildly uninformed and has to go off vibes.

A weak and servile Europe? Besides, America is squandering its overseas power at a rapid rate while destroying exactly the strengths that allowed it to maintain that power in the first place. America is obviously still the strongest country in the world, but it’s also in terminal decline that will become more and more visible over the years.

Edit: Also note that weakening popular forces and an unrestrained upper class are a recipe for disaster historically.

Taking territory and giving it to vassals does not, in fact, make one less of an empire. Britain had the East India Company running India yet it’d be ridiculous to say that India wasn’t part of the British Empire before the Raj. Also you get three guesses for why how America managed to extend from the Atlantic to the Pacific.

Sucks to be Europe right now though.

For mostly self-inflicted reasons. If those guys weren’t American vassal states they’d have just negotiated with Iran and the Houthis for safe passage for their ships.

True, but even at its pre-Trump worst America never tried to starve Cuba to death. You could say that Trump is willing to be more brutal in doing the things America has always done.

Mutual defence pacts, world bank lenders, and trade organizations are not empires, the USA has been giving away territory for many decades.

Until they overthrow inconvenient regimes on the other side of the world for sport, then they become empires.

Now the US has gone the way of Russia,

America today is only somewhat more evil than it was, say, 20 or 16 years ago. The “lesser of X evils” thing has always been bunk.

I don’t care much for Pizza Cake one way or the other, but damn this one really sucks.

This goes to c\actuallyinfuriating.

That might actually hurt shareholders, though.

Whenever you read about Somali pirates, remember that:

1- Somalis are being driven to piracy by international illegal fishing that destroys their traditional ways of live.

2- When the Somali Civil War led to the rise of a faction willing and able to stop piracy off the Somalian coast, America responded by backing Ethiopia in invading Somalia, deposing them and putting in charge the current useless government. This incidentally led to the civil war getting a new lease on life.

Like so many other things, Somali piracy is the fault of the global rich and America.

That’s one thing it can do, but there are other, actually useful things you can have it do. For example I’ve used it as a pseudo-search engine when Google refused to cooperate/when the thing I was looking up was too complex before.