One restaurant owner doing something shady is decidedly not newsworthy at the international level. The local police is going to go enforce legal tender laws, and that will be the end of the story. The only context in which this is news is within some kind of “China is encroaching into Thai sovereignty” narrative, but for that you’d need …more than the sketchiness of one restaurant.

“Mr Puzder, does the President know that you don’t take him seriously?”

“Mr Puzder, can you please list which of the President’s statements are unserious?”

“Mr Puzder, is the White House aware of your attacks on the credibility of your President?”

It should be exactly like this, journalist after journalist should hammer this line on him until he fucking breaks.

I’ve had it with Americans getting a pass with the “hahaha just kidding” tactic.

There is zero reason why professional journalists should let slimes like this wiggle without pinning them down and mercilessly made to squeal the goddamn fucking truth. The media is complicit at this point.

The article links to the original version of it that’s in Hebrew, that seems to have more clickable links. If you speak Hebrew enough to be able to make use of the leaked docs, you can probably go digging there too?

FUCK IT WE’LL DO IT LIVE

The Greece figure looks wildly inaccurate, at least for the 50% of the population that lives in Athens.

Oh boy.

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Oh boy, when dedolarization comes, it’s going to hit the US like a wall of radioactive bricks.

You’re making a bunch of very condescending assumptions about where I get my info. For many years I have personally interacted with many Iranians from Iran. I’m not talking Shah supporters who left in '79, I’m talking folks born in Iran in the 80s-90s-00s who have families back home. I have friends and colleagues who were part of movements from the 2011 green protests all the way to the Mahsa Amini protests. Friends on whom I checked when there were big protests back home and now whenever the Americans and Israelis bomb their city of origin (“is your sister/mom/home OK?”). These are people whose heart bleeds for their home and are furious at the regime. So, you know, back off buddy.

Go touch some grass eh.

US brainrot much? What pro-genocide party am I voting for bud?

Lol, just to clarify, because your American(?) mind probably cannot understand what I wrote, and you respond with “???”:

You think I’m calling you a liberal because you support human rights and NGOs or whatever. I’m calling you a liberal because your basic unit of analysis is the nation. “The nation is its people” is not a Marxist statement. It’s a liberal-nationalist one, romantic nationalist: Mazzini, Fichte, Michelet, Paparigopoulos. Marxists don’t accept the “nation” as the unit of analysis. We ask where are the class antagonisms, political conflicts, and repressed social movements. Where did this go when you collapsed them all into “the nation”? In the “anti-imperialism” dualism, the clash of civilizations. Huntington, nationalism, clash of civilizations and romanticism. That’s the paradigmatic disagreement.

Bye.

You accuse me of …liberalism when you have swallowed hook line and sinker the romantic nationalism that is the foundation liberalism. I mean this is just out in the open:

The nation is its people. You don’t get to wiggle out by saying “I just hate the government, not the popular movement that formed the government”. Iran isn’t being occupied from the top by an invading army. It’s a super-majority Muslim nation that is governed by a popular clergy and democratically elected bureaucracy.

Ein volk, eh?

There is basically zero marxism in your diatribe. The only thing that has a “red” tint in what you’re saying is the word “imperialism”, but your framework differs extremely little from Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations. You use left-wing vocabulary, but the structure of your analysis is nationalist and civilizational rather than class-based.

I don’t see any point in continuing this discussion, we’re using fundamentally different paradigms and value systems here.

you conflate the Iranian regime with the Iranian nation

No, I don’t

Oh yes you absofuckinglutely do. You literally changed the noun here:

The Iranian regime is horrible

…

Practically every Muslim nation gets this treatment to some degree.

I wrote regime, you wrote nation. It’s literally right there for everyone to see.

Go ask Mohamed Morsi. Ask Mohammad Mosaddegh or Chadli Bendjedid. Ask Thomas Sankara. Hell. Ask Ismail Haniyeh. Ask all the Middle East liberals what happened following the Arab Spring.

Ah, but you misunderstood my question. You focus on the “anti-imperialist” side of the ledger, whereas I asked about all MENA countries. The “anti-imperialist” autocratic regimes are all degenerate cases that resulted from the defeat of movements, as a way to contain the population while continuing to exist in the imperialist order. Go and see what all the “anti-imperialist” autocrats, without fucking exception did to the communists, to the labour movement, to the radical youth. In Syria, in Lebanon, in Iran, etc. They all parrot/ed “anti-imperialist” platitudes while actually brutally suppressing the Left in all its expressions. And everytime a campist fool sings their praises, what they’re actually doing is revelling in the murder, torture and brutalization of Leftists. As if Iranian labour activists and feminist radicals owe your sorry ass to sacrifice themselves for your “anti-imperialist” abstractions.

Then broaden your view a little. Why are the western allies also autocracies? Qatar, UAE, Saudi, Jordan. Who do they also suppress? Right: the Left, the socialists, the labour movement, the radical youth. The same apparatus doing the same thing. If you boil it really down to brass tacks, none of these fuckers really care about imperialism, they care about their own regimes positioning themselves in the imperialist order. And how do you do that? Suppress the commies and the pinkos, suppress labour, suppress the youth. Same story, everywhere, whether with an “anti-imperialist” stick or a “royal” stick or a “national” stick.

If you actually want to be anti-imperialist, and live in the West as I assume you do, stop glorifying these assholes, focus on the class war in the imperialist core. If your heart bleeds for Iranians, stand in solidarity of the actual people bleeding from both american/israeli bombs and basij brutality, and if you can’t do both, if you can’t handle the heat, gtfo the kitchen.

I guess I can bat the question back to you. Why are so many NATO member states autocratic oligarchies?

That question is a gotcha only in your foolish campist framework. You really think I’m interested in …defending them?

Real life Colonel Lockjaw.

Huh, you conflate the Iranian regime with the Iranian nation. That’s not a reasonable thing to do. Hey, quick aside, why do you think middle eastern countries are mostly autoctacies? It’s not Islam, not by a long shot. Albania and Bosnia are majority Muslim. Who benefits from keeping the populations in the MENA countries muzzled up? Huh?

Ok, but which ones.

(Go ahead, comb your sources to find the ones that are 1. In a position to actually know what they’re talking about with authority, like the IAGS, and 2. Not also calling out China for its policies in Xinjiang.)

You’re throwing around the word genocide like it’s candy to the point where you’re conflating genocide with imperialism and terrorism. Sit down.

Is there a genocide happening in Gaza? And if your answer is yes, on what basis are you saying that?