Reading The Open Veins of Latin American and experienced the biggest oof when he started talking optimistically about the new Chilean president Salvador Allende

i feel like the boeing whistleblower case should radicalize more people. a major airline company is producing planes with less and less regard for safety and it's starting to get noticeable. man takes them to court, which would reduce profit at the cost of public safety. he fucking dies the night that boeings legal team asks him to stay an extra day. if nothing happens about this, i hope it gets through to people that america would literally kill you for a few extra cents

Boeing Killed A Guy!

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A History of the Democratic Republic of Congo… From IG - @redstreamnet — Did you know that the CIA once orchestrated the execution of Patrice Lumumba by a firing squad? On the 17th of January, 1961, Patrice Lumumba, the first democratically elected leader of the Congo, was executed by a firing squad following assassination plots concocted by the US and Belgian governments. Lumumba’s anti-imperialism and his vision of a united Congo made him an adversary of both Belgium and US imperialism. Although the CIA ordered his assassination, they weren’t able to carry it out themselves. Instead, Washington and Brussels secretly funnelled cash and aid to rival politicians who organized a coup and arrested Lumumba. He was then beaten, tortured, and killed. #BlackHistory #PanAfrican #AfricanHistory #AntiColonialism

JOHN MULANEY SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE 02/29/2020

How important do you have to be to have been “assassinated” instead of “murdered”?

That is…a good question

If the motivation is political, then it’s assassination. Otherwise it’s murder. You cannot be assassinated by accident.

If a jilted ex murders the Prince of Placeland, it’s just a murder.

If a jilted ex is also a member of a rival political faction, it may be assassination.

If a jilted ex is driving home in tears and accidentally runs over the Prince of Placeland in the middle of the night in a neighborhood where the streetlights are out because of the prince’s questionable infrastructure policy, it’s manslaughter.

Thanks murder side of tumblr

I realize this is the official difference, but what about organized crime killings? Those are assassinations. What about when folks try to hire someone to kill, like, they’re spouse or a business partner/competitor? Those are assassinations. Aaron Burr was often called an assassin, too, iirc, even though he killed Hamilton in a duel, so there’s also an element of insult and character-attack in the term.

I think the difference between “assassinate” and “murder” is actually pretty nebulous and tonal as a practical matter in English usage. It covers everything from paid murder, to the murdering of someone you don’t personally know for a non-personal motivation(being paid, religious or political motivations, pursuit of fame, etc), to a measure of the importance and fame of who is killed(for instance if, say, a pol insulted their security detail and a member of it killed them for that, it’d still prob be called “assassination”).

The one critical aspect of it, I think, is specificity of target. Pretty much every gun massacre in the US is ideologically(often politically) motivated, but we never call these people “assassins”. Of course, that could just be the same thing as how we don’t call it “terrorism” either, even though it clearly is that, because of the sort of people doing it.

bismuth was right and whenever media presents me with this type of “””moral dilemma””” i am unimpressed

the crystal gems have already long since proved that they can triumph using nonlethal tactics and diplomacy, while the homeworld has proved that it’s willing to carpet-bomb the earth with nightmare nukes, shattering and mutilating its own people. the final battle seems to have involved homeworld command drawing the crystal gems into a fully committed battle, then dropping the corruption bombs on everyone, even their own people, and calling it quits. 

the crystal gems using breaking points to permanently destroy their opponents in hand to hand ground combat would not have saved them, the way bismuth thinks. and would in fact come at the cost of their primary ideal: that every gem is a valuable individual who can be someone better than the mindless, violent, expendable tool they were made for. 

the breaking point offers, ultimately, a very small advantage: it keeps enemy soldiers from regenerating awhile after you defeat them, if you can’t bubble them. the disadvantage is now you have fucking murdered another person because it’s slightly more convenient than not murdering them. 

bismuth didn’t invent a insta-win button that rose was a sell-out all-lives-matter hippie for. she presented rose with a very stark decision over who deserves to be treated as people: the homeworld says ‘no one’, bismuth said ‘us, but only us’, but rose’s point of view was ‘everyone’. that is the correct ethical stance, and why humans have things like the geneva convention and nuclear armistice. 

i think how rose handled bismuth was brutally unfair, and i’m not happy that bismuth didn’t get the time and effort steven’s put in to changing peridot’s mind about unnecessary annihilation tactics, but the show doesn’t do disposable monsters. every antagonist so far— from lapis to centipedle to kevin— has gotten to come back and be treated fairly. i’m sure that once the current crisis with jasper’s been resolved, the crystal gems will have the time and breathing room to unbubble bismuth and talk her around. 

yeah, exactly :( that’s what broke my heart about this whole episode–all that stuff about taking the war to homeworld and shattering the diamonds and freeing everybody–that stuff never turns out how people imagine it will be. I think the breaking point definitely would have changed the war, but win it? Noooo.

I think something people aren’t considering is that the homeworld gems already permakill people. Bismuth said that all the crystal gems are doing is losing, but the war ended because homeworld killed or corrupted everybody and ran away–that wasn’t a victory. Nobody won anything. and did homeworld accomplish anything, save for the destruction of most of the Crystal Gems? 

I’ve always got this weirdly desperate vibe from homeworld underneath the ruthlessness and brutality, like, things aren’t working and everything is falling apart, but they’re still continuing as they’ve always done.

and i think bismuth was doubly wrong about losing, (not that I blame her, she just found out all her friends died and to her it feels like it all happened yesterday) as there’s definitely some kind of results from the crystal gems’ efforts. homeworld hasn’t taken earth yet–they didn’t even get their cluster. peridot is with the crystal gems now, and she’s fairly bursting with news about homeworld and its tech and recent doings. the crystal gems are learning more about corrupted gems and how they might go about healing them.

and @roachpatrol pointed out that from what we’ve heard from Peridot, things on homeworld aren’t exactly wonderful right now, what with their resources dwindling and everything.

I think, as are most things are in this show, that things are never as simple as they initially seem.

Mmmmnnnmmm Bismuth said THE DIAMONDS. She said she’d go shatter THE DIAMONDS, not that Breaking Points were going to be affixed to the arm of every Crystal Gem for every foot battle. Assassinating the enemy GENERALS is a perfectly reasonable thing to try when you’re AT WAR. To, you know, STOP THE WAR (and not just make things twenty times worse for the soldiers). Steven’s not wrong, but neither was Bismuth.

Everybody deserves to be valued and their lives treated with respect, but not at the expense of anybody else’s. It is BECAUSE every Gem is valuable that Gems who shatter other gems–Homeworld’s Diamonds–must be stopped. (Yes, even if that means “becoming a gem who has shattered another gem,” because it’s not as if you’re going to keep doing it.)

Anything that achieves this aim is better than not achieving it. Absolutely including Steven’s chosen path! 

But Bismuth wasn’t wrong, at least in my book. Because her aggression is defensive. Talking her down from going overboard is her teammates’ job, but the essential premise is not intrinsically incorrect.

I disagree. To begin with I don’t think it’s really presenting a moral quandary. The distinction here isn’t between diplomacy and violence. Rose was already fighting a war against Homeworld[1]. This was an argument over boundaries and standards; over how far to take their violence and its proper application, not whether violence in opposition to violence was itself “wrong”. And the tactical/strategic difference between bubbling and shattering is(like Roach says) incredibly marginal. A poofed and bubbled(or itemed) enemy is just as easily and surely removed from the field as a shattered one; heck more easily, as shattering requires a very precise strike to their Gem(something that’s going to be very difficult when they’re moving around and fighting back with their own body) while poofing just takes a certain level of damage to any bit of their projected form. So what’s the real benefit here? Knowing your enemies will be dead forever? We know why the Diamond-led Homeworld regime does it -to enforce their control of society and view of what Gems should be, and to permanently remove those who threaten their system- but how would shattering serve the Rebellion’s objectives? How would shattering liberate anyone or protect anything?

Nigel Farage: “We would have done it without a single bullet being fired" 

 A ! BREXITER ! SHOT ! AND ! MURDERED ! A ! WOMAN ! MP ! FOR ! BEING ! PRO-EU ! BECAUSE ! OF ! THE ! STATE ! OF ! THINGS ! WHICH ! YOU ! CREATED !