Everyone knows

They definitely don’t.

Taxes do not pay for this stuff. This isn’t even obscure or complicated at all. Everyone knows the national deficit goes up every year and always has. The government could just as easily deficit spend for healthcare and such, on top of all the war. They print the currency, there isn’t some shortage of US dollars. There might be a shortage of labor for healthcare, since they want everyone working for the MIC.

The point is that people are paying money into the system, expecting it to work for their interests. The idea is to emphasize that it is not actually doing that.

I think it’s actually way more effective to actually educate people on how things work than for socialists/progressive forces to endlessly repeat canards about tax money yadda yadda yadda. It seems insincere to try to get people to believe something false (that taxes matter) just to get them to agree with you (that imperialism is bad).

The goal is to get people to think correctly about how the world works, not score rhetorical points.

I think far more effective messaging would be: The US is murdering good people, who just want to live good lives. Our labor is being used to make their lives worse. Instead, lets use our labor for everyone’s benefit. Lets replace the war industry with renewable energy, health care, and technology that benefits everyone.

In the abstract I agree with you, but in this context, there is nothing insincere about: “you pay into this system like it’s legitimate and it’s actually very crooked”. Of course it should go beyond that, which is why I emphasized in my previous reply the need to talk about imperialism and AES states and so on. As I stated before, “This alone is not anywhere near ML thought. It could languish in socdem territory if that’s all you say.”

It’s a tactic. Maybe there are more effective tactics to getting through to people, so if you have them from actual practice, feel free to share so others can learn from it. If the messaging you proposed is just an idea, then please try it and let us know how it goes. Maybe it would work really well on some people.

Instead it’s like people are trying to play into American greed and chauvinism by complaining about how expensive it is to murder Muslims. If only a Muslim life took $1,000 to destroy instead of $1,000,000!

No, I think it’s just a basic appeal to self interest, which is sometimes more effective than trying to rally someone to care about a person halfway across the world, at least as a starting point. I don’t see what is greedy about wanting healthcare or wanting to be paying into a system that cares about you. And it’s only chauvinistic from the standpoint of “better conditions for the people living in the imperial core at the cost of everyone else in the world.” Which again, could be a problem if you go for one form of appeal that has too much overlap with reform messaging and stop there. That’s why you don’t linger in one appeal and stop there. Political education must be continuous and consistent where possible.

So to sum up: I could see it being mistaken as reform messaging in some contexts, but when used as a broader strategy, I don’t see it as inherently being that.

If you read the article, you would see how absurd the situation is:

There is pressure to spend: if federal agencies don’t use the entirety of their budgets by the end of the fiscal year, then they lose access to that cash forever, potentially putting themselves in a situation where they have to request a reduced budget the following year. But the Pentagon’s long list of luxuries is hardly defensible.

I just picked out one of the more absurd-sounding examples of spending, which included millions on lobster, a part you ignored.

The US dollar belongs to the US government. They print it. The money is going to American companies. The products they produce are made in the US. Like why is it anyone’s business how much this stuff costs?

People pay taxes into this system every year. Some of them people who still believe in the system. It is absolutely people’s business to know where the money is going and why, especially when the system doesn’t even care what happens to them much of the time.

The underlying problem is the mass murder and putting all kinds of human labor and natural resources towards that evil end.

I mean, yes to a point, but that’s also dramatically oversimplifying. Even if the US wasn’t putting so much toward active murder, it’s still possible they could be wasting it on frivolous other things for the capitalist class while letting the masses languish. You can do both.

It matters to highlight this kind of thing for a couple of reasons:

1. To US people, it matters for emphasizing how duplicitous the government and its officials tend to be. For example, how they will act like healthcare or other services is impossible for the government to fund, but then inflate the Pentagon budget into the stratosphere. This alone is not anywhere near ML thought. It could languish in socdem territory if that’s all you say. But it’s a prime opportunity to start talking about imperialism and why it is that so much money goes into military in the first place. How much and often that money has gone to violently attacking peoples in other countries, whether they were communist or just wanting basic sovereignty. It’s an opportunity to contrast it with how far AES projects can/have gone when they do tend to put lots of funding into building up a society where human life is valued.

2. To people who aren’t in / from the US, it could still matter at times for emphasizing how little the US is like its soft power image of “freedom and democracy”. How much it puts into military might in order to hold onto its power, but also how corrupt its use of that same funding is for the enrichment of its administrators, on top of its bloodthirsty purpose.

I don’t get what is annoying about bringing it up. People need to know what they’re dealing with and leveraging the fact that they (in the case of USians) have to put tax money into this shambling mess of a system only to have some of it to go to some official buying very expensive lobster could really piss a person off and help them get to a place of rejecting it in general.

I would say so yes. I just wanted to highlight the absurdity of it; that the Pentagon budget keeps going up but also keeps failing audits, while its citizens can’t even get proper healthcare, demonstrating the absurd self-looting state of the empire.

The entity that keeps failing audits needs another funding injection. I’m sure it will go to important things that matter like $5.3 million for Apple devices such as the new iPad, and an astronomical amount of shellfish, including $2 million for Alaskan king crab and $6.9 million worth of lobster tail, while AI is used to deny health insurance claims.

Totally normal country, nothing to see here.

In the letter, Mr. Kent wrote about what he saw as a “misinformation campaign” by high-ranking Israeli officials and the news media, which he said had undermined Mr. Trump’s “America First platform and sowed pro-war sentiments to encourage a war with Iran.”

“As a veteran who deployed to combat 11 times and as a Gold Star husband who lost my beloved wife Shannon in a war manufactured by Israel, I cannot support sending the next generation off to fight and die in a war that serves no benefit to the American people nor justifies the cost of American lives,” he wrote.

Mr. Kent has been a key adviser to Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, and has been a voice advocating inside the administration for a more restrained foreign policy.

Moderate imperialist resigns, cites other imperialists being too extreme for him, blames proxy for empire’s rabid tendencies

That attitude has helped tech executives and their investors rationalize away one of the most irrational concentrations of finance capital the US has seen in decades. “Stop trying to make bubbles go away,” as the venture capitalist James Thomason wrote last year. “Yes, bubbles create volatility. Yes, investors lose money. Yes, employees lose jobs when companies fail. But the alternative is underinvestment in transformative opportunities.”

Easy for the capitalists to say. They don’t tend to end up on the street because of the consequences of playing fast and loose with jobs and economy.

Yeesh. I could believe it.

I remember stuff from a while back about how fucked up the Paul brothers were. Fucked up dad, fucked up sons, doing fucked up things. Can’t remember the details very well offhand, but the one that sticks out in my head was one of them (might have been Jake Paul, not entirely sure) doing this thing of:

Like just straight up sociopath shit. It’s hard to explain how one even comes across shit like this… I mean, it’s not like it was national headlines or something. I remember it being “youtube drama”, with somebody who had been a former girlfriend coming out and talking about abusive stuff. Back when the Paul brothers were still just Youtube fame. Except “youtube drama” still has consequences for real people, in spite of being rather insulated as dissemination of information goes…

So it isn’t really a surprise that the pedophile-in-chief would end up endorsing somebody like that.

(I encourage people to look further into the history beyond what I’m saying. I’m speaking rather broadly from memory.)

FYI, your link works if I copy/paste it, but for some reason, the address is linking to this post on lemmygrad.

As if it would look like this internally:

[https://peoplesdispatch.org/2026/03/03/tactical-retreats-why-venezuelas-revolution-still-stands/](https://lemmygrad.ml/post/10918350)

I seem to recall them weaponizing apps in the genocide against Palestine as well. The empire doesn’t know the meaning of shame.

I think you’re right and I was incorrect to use phrasing that suggested Trump is more brutal. As we often end up back on w/ regards to him, one of the key differences is that he’s mask off in doing the things that others were already doing before him - as in, previous brutality made more of an effort to build up to and massage narratives justifying it. Trump/admin does some of that, but he’s also more prone to saying the quiet part out loud and proud, making a mess of the work of propagandists in the process. But this is also in comparing him to the modern liberal order. If we go back far enough in US history, I’m not sure he is even stand out as being mask off.

I guess I more meant the openness of it with ICE and all, but you have a point.

What exactly do you think is going to happen if there isn’t a distraction. Damning stuff already came out in the Epstein files. It’s not like a bunch of arrests were made. The predators can’t be held to account if they’re the ones running the government and no, I don’t just mean Trump. His main thing is that he embodies the empire’s nature in a very transparent way. He’s not actually exceptional as brutality goes (maybe only in his willingness to attack US citizens directly, but I think that’s more an embodiment of the empire thrashing in its decline than it is about him specifically).

This scheme enabled the North Korean regime to secretly funnel lucrative US tech wages back home while establishing insider access to corporate networks.

TIL that if I were to get a job in tech, I’d be funneling lucrative wages to my bank account while establishing insider access to corporate networks.

I mean, I am a US citizen, so it would be perfectly legal and normal for me to do that. The only alleged dishonest part of this story is using a stolen or faked identity to get a job and even then, there are citizens of the US who lie about their capabilities or connections in interviews to get hired because it’s a fucked system so…

I just think it’s funny that they try to make “getting money from a job and knowing what’s happening at the company you work for” sound like scary clandestine stuff. Just because it’s N-N-North Koreans…! But I’m sure if this was Indian people or something, people from a country who the US does not vilify in the same way, they would at most call it fraud and leave it at that.

There’s long been easy ways to compile tidbits on a person from Reddit. Connecting it to other sources on the web in an automated way may be novel, but I’m skeptical about the accuracy claims. An AI telling you who someone could be is still a guess and if you can’t prove it some other way, it remains a guess. The important part, I would say, is the possibility of surveillance efforts using this kind of thing to make their jobs easier to make connections on who is who, which is something they’ve probably already been doing for years.

It’s all the more reason to be careful about what details you share about yourself and to never assume anonymity will protect you. Always be working to manage risk, never with a false belief that you can eliminate it entirely.

Empire shoots self in foot, clown makeup on face demands investigation into unmanned use of limbs.

In the fine print:

the best paint chips

You make a good point. I was kinda second-guessing emphasizing that part. The US would still be a nightmare prison complex with or without for-profit prisons, of that I’m sure. I do think there is something distinct, though, about formally tying market profit motives to putting people in prison and keeping them there.

The article notes that CoreCivic, the private company running the prison, defers all questions to DHS. Dilley, CoreCivic, and DHS all have one thing in common: they are beyond reform. They need to be shut down.

Some context I could find on CoreCivic:

from late 2025: https://timesofsandiego.com/politics/2025/10/06/corecivic-300-million-ice-contracts/

CoreCivic prison company will rake in $300 million from new ICE contracts

also from late 2025: https://www.tennessean.com/story/news/local/2025/08/19/corecivic-damon-hininger-ice-immigration/85723038007/

CoreCivic CEO to step down amid flurry of ICE contracts, soaring profits, prison violence

CoreCivic CEO Damon Hininger will step down after serving as head of the Brentwood-based private prison giant since 2009.

The company in an Aug. 18 announcement said President and COO Patrick Swindle will replace Hininger. Swindle will also take Hininger’s seat on CoreCivic’s board.

“I am humbled by the opportunity to have served this great company since I started my career as a correctional officer in 1992," Hininger said in a statement.

What a shock that the previous CEO started out as working for the prison system and became a CEO of a company profiting off of it. Something something revolving door.

The leadership change comes as CoreCivic and GEO Group - the country’s two largest private prison systems - have reported significant profits amid the sharp rise in immigration arrests and detainments.

In a second quarter earnings call on Aug. 11, Hininger said the country is seeing the highest detention populations ever recorded by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which has been CoreCivic’s largest customer.

“Our business is perfectly aligned with the demands of this moment,” he said. “We are in an unprecedented environment with rapid increases in federal detention populations nationwide and a continuing need for solutions we provide.”

Capitalist profit language in service of a manufactured rise in imprisoning people is some wild shit to read. It still boggles my mind that for-profit prisons are even a thing.

The following is intended as satire, not a real reported picture of events:

An inconsolable Sam Altman was found in his office, trying to teach a robot dog to put blocks in the right holes by offering it increasing sums of money each time it failed. With bags under his eyes, empty cans littering the walls, and a worn hoodie on his shoulders with the hood pulled up, the once bright-eyed and optimistic CEO, heralding the arrival of true intelligence any day now, was sharing some hard truths.

“It turns out the Chinese know how to build things,” he says, while he pokes the robot dog with a stick and tries increasing the offered sum to $500 instead of $450. The robot makes a movement and tries to nudge a square block into a round hole, which frustrates the weary Altman. “This robot is useless. How is it ever going to help break strikes if it can’t handle simple shapes?”

Sam Altman rose to fame, heading up a company known for transparency and openness called OpenAI. The company later reversed this decision when they realized it wasn’t profitable enough or good for business. When asked about his origins, some light returns to Altman’s increasingly deadened eyes, if only for a moment.

“Back then, it was about making waves. Now it’s about crushing the competitive with those waves until their bones break. For legal purposes, that was metaphor.” He prods the robot a few more times and a fanatical gleam rises in him. “Let’s raise the stakes.” He ups the offering to $5 billion. After all, he explains, it’s not like the robot will actually get the money anyway. The robot dog goes for a round block this time. The atmosphere in the room is tense. We could be witnessing history.

Then the robot nudges the round block at the square hole. Altman lets out a long-suffering sigh and puts his head in his hands. “The Chinese have something we don’t,” he admits in a rare candid moment. What is the miracle factor they have on hand? Socialism? Money? Integrity? Altman shakes his head, “It’s magic, it has to be, there’s no other explanation. They’re tapping into the cosmic energies that make up our world. And it’s going to take the Grand Wizard to stop them.”

When pressed about his choice of title and its historical connotations, he ends the interview and refocuses his attention on the robot dog, now upping the offer to $100 trillion. “What do I pay you for?!?” He is heard screaming as we retreat down the hallway, being escorted out by security.