They'll merge everything into some Skydance+ app, place ads in the basic tier with 720p, you'll get 1080p with ads for the price of Netflix (probably because of the "premium" HBO content) and then some insane subscription for the full 4K catalogue.
> Can this be undone in the future if folks realize it was too monopolistic and it was in fact an anti-trust violation?
I predict the democrats winning, shoving it all under that table and pushing for "reconciliation" and "moving forward" while continuing the rotten status quo that got Trump elected in the first place. Maybe a few token prosecutions of low level wage workers involved.
Circa 2008, into 2010, you had the Democrats running on holding Wall St accountable and a genuine class movement to reform capital in the US, Occupy Wall St.
Obama et al instead tore open old racial wounds, thereby destroying class solidarity in exchange for Wall St promoting their ideology, thereby creating “Woke”.
This was the origin of the Obama -> Bernie -> Trump cohort, who helped bring Trump into power a decade later.
Which part are you struggling to take as in good faith?
I’m sure it’s not your preferred narrative of the times, but we both knew that before I answered; so what is it that strikes you as in bad faith rather than my genuine interpretation of events?
I'm struggling to follow. The typical Obama was divisive/made race and issue has actually been a right wing dog whistle for "he is black and I don't like that."
Obama using race to distract from Occupy Wall Street. Bernie Sanders leading to Trump. The hole thing really. My good faith interpretation is you are leaving out parts you think are obvious and so if you show me those parts I will understand. Now, I think the parts you're leaving out are just not allowed on the site.
Obama used race (and in particular, neo-Marxist theories like intersectionality and equity) to displace conversation about class with conversation about race. At exactly the moment class-unity was driving meaningful capital reform in the fallout of the 2008 GFC.
There were numerous memes at the time pointing out the shift in the language of NYT et al from discussing class issues to racial grievances. Clear as day in Google’s metrics of media terms.
That shift in focus is what broke Occupy Wall St as a class movement — and was adopted by Wall St to appoint commissars of that ideology in exchange. Woke.
The Obama -> Bernie -> Trump pipeline is a cohort of working Millennials, ie, the proletariat who have lost faith in Democrat politics serving capital and racial tribes rather than the working class. So they elected someone with the right platform they believed would break the system — following the rigging of the 2016 primary. They’re one of the relatively small (1-2%) but engaged cohorts that switch teams, eg, when the election comes down to under 1% difference, which way they vote matters — and they generally vote anti-establishment, with increasing aggression.
Democrats have completed failed to perceive that reality and engaged in name calling instead — eg, the multiple replies calling me a racist to slander me and poison the well for debate.
I usually don’t reply because there’s no point making serious discussions to people who have already made up their mind, eg, sibling replies.
Ah yes, we all remember how America had no racism or anything like that before 2008.
Just like the emancipation proclamation solved slavery, racism was solved in the 60s. We definitely don't have (literally the same) people running around being rather transparent in their moronic racism all the time.
How dare Obama talk about a problem that affects 30% of the country continuously.
IMO, a better solution for the broadcast media part of this is to delegate content regulation to the states when the signal from a tv/radio station is entirely within one state (and some kind of join regulation when it spans >1).
Concentrating so much power in the federal government is problematic, and unnecessary.
I don't see it as a great idea to divide how content within a country is presented into 50 pieces based on whatever ideology that state's leadership has at that time.
Besides, that does nothing to address this mega-merger.
serious question how could you possible argue this is monopolistic when Disney, Netflix, and Youtube exist. It doesn't pass the barest level of scrutiny.
Monopoly is the wrong word, but it has a close cousin, “anticompetitive”. For free market people one of the major role of the government is maintaining competition and avoiding collusion, combining to competitors is straightforward collusion.
Yes. Ellison was called a sociopath by Oracle employees a long time ago, and many of Oracle's customers quickly agreed. Hence the quote:
> Do not fall into the trap of anthropomorphizing Larry Ellison. You need to think of Larry Ellison the way you think of a lawnmower. You don’t anthropomorphize your lawnmower, the lawnmower just mows the lawn - you stick your hand in there and it’ll chop it off, the end. You don’t think "oh, the lawnmower hates me" – lawnmower doesn’t give a shit about you, lawnmower can’t hate you. Don’t anthropomorphize the lawnmower. Don’t fall into that trap about Oracle.
There wouldn't be a clear "undo" button after years of joint operation. A future administration could in principle order the Time Warner assets to be spun back off, but realistically that'd be a huge headache, and I'd rather they spend their time and political capital imprisoning everyone who negotiated the deal.
So they’ve committed to for example releasing 30-32 movies a year for the next five years [1] but after that, no promises. Good thing mergers are famously temporary and we never need to worry about the next 10 years! Oh wait…
First it was Time in 1990, then AOL then AT&T then Discovery and now this. That's 5 owners since 90 for Warner Brothers and none of those really worked out well. I don't know enough to know if this stands a better chance, but if I was going to bet, I'd bet Warner has a new owner before 2030.
This is the first time they are being bought by another company that makes content. Every other purchase was to add content creation to an existing company. So maybe there is chance.
But probably not with Ellison in charge. He'll probably just drive both companies into the ground.
ATT shareholders lost $50B on Time Warner. And ATT lost $15B at least on DirecTV. Comcast is desperately trying to get rid of NBC Universal.
I would bet Ellison loses on this merger too. No one under the age of 60 cares about these legacy media companies to justify tens of billions of dollar valuations. At best, professional media studios are just an add on business for companies like Amazon and Apple and Disney and Sony, with Netflix being the outlier.
Do you think only left leaning perspectives should be reported?
There should be a diverse leaning of news companies, otherwise you'll only get half truths. You can't expect a left leaning news org to report anything bad about the left, or right leaning news org to present anything bad about the right. The left will be motivated to find flaws in the right, and the right will be motivated to find flaws in the left. That's a good thing. I believe an adversarial system is required to find truth. A center leaning news org is nice, but they may be motivated to keep their reporting "even", to not appear biased, which isn't really possible with the tick tock of republican and democrat leadership.
A for-profit news org changing leadership/alignment, in a response to massively falling profits [1], isn't a sign of dictatorship, it's a sign of them being aligned to the reason they exist: making moneys.
I think the public should be able to view true left-of-centre perspectives from mainstream media outlets, and that is very much not happening in the US.
If - for example - you find a major news outlet that's pro-union, pro-single-payer, pro-wealth-taxes, and pro-debt-free-education, let me know.
> view true left-of-centre perspectives from mainstream media outlets
Do you think this is being prevented somehow? There are many left leaning news agencies [1]. Maybe the "problem" is that they're all for profit, most of which comes from ads, most of which are anti union companies.
This is probably my leftist bias, but ever consider that "leftists" are more interested in laws and decency whereas "rightists" are more interested in protecting their tribe/movement? But you think both sides play like "the right" (each only interested in exposing flaws of the other side) because you're seeing from your right-leaning perspective...
Democrat Al Franken got kicked out of Senate when it was found he inapproprately kissed a woman. I can name a long list of creeps in the GOP side who received protection from their side. Matt Gaetz, Roy Moore, Sexual Harassment Hegseth, Epstein-Friend in Chief. The GOP doesn't seem to have any principles about which sexual deviant they have, they just care about having the majority (in congress) or the power. Oh yeah, speaking of that, sexual assaulter Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh...
I'd trust left-leaning media to report wrongdoing whoever does it, whereas right-leaning media will gloss or bare-face lie about wrongdoing done by the right, and exaggerate about wrongdoings by the left...
It sure feels like there are people who care about formulating and holding principles (e.g. "adultery is bad") that ought to apply to everyone, and then there are people who claim to believe the same but really they're playing some kind of game in service of their ultimate virtue of loyalty/obedience, to some hierarchy they consider existentially important.
The first group will define good/bad acts and then judge people by what acts they commit, the second defines good/bad people and then judges acts by which person is doing them.
On a similar note, I highly recommend a playlist of long-form videos from ~2016, titled (in the sense of an expose) "The Alt-Right Playbook". In particular, the video "Always a Bigger Fish" [0] tries to make sense of some persistent "how can they possibly believe X but not Y" disagreements when it comes to democracy and egalitarianism.
Left or right news orgs, try to pay attention to "lies by omission". I've noticed logical kids/teens are pretty good at pointing it out, since they have less context.
I live in the one of the bluest of blue states, in a very blue city. Corruption, not enforcing existing laws, and not adhering to laws, is a problem with both parties. Just go visit many of our previous local officials, who are currently in jail.
I'm not saying new should be entirely left and right. My point is that the adversarial system will find more flaws than a more neutral system. There's plenty of time, and all sorts of in-between agencies, to point out the neutral stuffs. My point is that the existence of even super politically aligned news agencies isn't some pure bad thing, or a sign of a dictatorship. We need both. All the news agencies being aligned one way would be a VERY BAD thing. There are very few right leaning news agencies.
CNN nudging more towards the right doesn't somehow influence the overall left leaning spread [1], or in any way indicate a dictatorship is on the rise.
> One of the longest-running tropes at The Verge is that a workable antitrust policy for the United States would be simply to forbid companies from buying Time Warner because it has never worked and it may never work again, and that we should just pass one law.
Checks out:
Jan 11, 2001: AOL and Time Warner merged to create AOL Time Warner
June 14, 2018: AT&T acquired Time Warner, renamed WarnerMedia
April 8, 2022: WarnerMedia spun out of AT&T, merged with Discovery
They did, but first they rebranded them as Max, thus destroying the incredible name value of HBO. It was renamed back to HBO as part of the spinout IIRC.
March, 1989: Time and Warner announce merger, Paramount launches hostile bid for Time.
January, 1990: Time responds by buying Warner Communications for $14 billion.
are you too young to have lived through the multiple recessions that have happened in the past few decades or Bernie Madoff or Enron? Or Theranos and FTX? and that's just off the top, give me ten minutes to dig in and I'll get you at least twenty more
Pedantic. The point was "aren't investors rational" and they clearly hop on short term fads to their and our detriment. Plus saying Enron wasn't a product of a merger is very funny
For example if you bought S&P 500 in Jul 1929, you got your investment back in 1955 (inflation adjusted). If you bought S&P 500 in Apr 2000, you got your investment back in 2014 (inflation adjusted).
99.99% of people are not investing a lump sum on one date and liquidating it all on another date. Extend this graph to today, and it will be much greener.
your own NYT link shows the vast majority of withdrawal dates to have a median of 4.1% followed by the 'slightly above inflation' group then the 'did not keep up with inflation' group with the green returns being the smallest likelihood. there's even this literal quote in the article:
"Market returns are more volatile than most people realize,” Mr. Easterling said, “even over periods as long as 20 years.”
in your second link, a commenter rightfully calls out that the log scale makes the data reductive
I think whatever it is that you need to fall asleep at night is your own habit - it doesn't need to be the rest of ours
They invest because they’re smarter than cherry picking outliers to base behavior on, like you are. They have empirically done well as a group over standard timeframes.
If you’re claiming the merger that created Enron is the sole or majority of its fraud 16 years later, then explain the vast majority of other mergers that weren’t fraud.
Or are you claiming anything that was a merger ends like Enron?
With passive investment everyone is buying crap all the time because they have no ability to discern what is or isn’t crap and the base assumption is 95% of stocks are losers but the other 5% win big
Really thinking about what happens with these mergers and splits. In the end it is just moving numbers from one pile to an other. Nothing is really created or destroyed...
Well there is massive waste of time on doing all the stuff need for it to happen. But I think they would have come up with something as unproductive as that anyway so overall it is not like that time would have been spend for anything actually productive.
Made up "value" moving from one place to an other. Just so that some people have something to do. And most likely they would not have much productive things to do in any case.
If they destroy things that were servicing public good like jobs, the market they are selling into, etc, it becomes the governments job to care. If you are advocating for zero oversight of corporations by government I don’t think you’ve seen the consequences of the last 40 years of the US. Monopolies only serve the owning class at the expense of the people.
I was at HBO during the AOL merger, and for a time my work email became gcanyon0264@aol.com, because AOL corporate email shared namespace with its customers, and my personal AOL account was… gcanyon@aol.com
> because AOL corporate email shared namespace with its customers
I wonder where this ranks in the top 5 stupidest things I've ever heard. It's bad enough merging customer databases when two companies merge.
No other major ISP has ever done this that I know of. Likely because it's completely unnecessary. Who made this decision (and why weren't they fired immediately)?
Nobody. Going back to 1989 every AOL account had a screen name that was used as your login and your identity. Being an employee was just a flag on your account in the database.
In 1993 AOL launched its internet gateway that accepted something@aol.com and put it in your AOL Mail box. You could tell that someone was an AOL employee because a banner (I think it was) appeared at the top of the message telling you.
Some of the network engineering folks had real aol.net addresses, but I don't know how that was handled internally. I also think the Netscape folks eventually made enough of a stink to keep their previous email address too.
This might be true for AOL; I wasn't there except as an early/beta customer -- something like 25% off their hourly(!) fees for life! :-)
But at HBO this was absolutely a choice. We had @hbo.com email addresses; it was a race among all the TW siblings who would jump on the @aol.com bandwagon fastest, and our CIO was eager to win that race: we were among the first to switch, and it was a pain in the ass. As one example, there was no good out-of-office functionality. I had built that for HBO in the mid-'90s on MS Mail for Mac, so regressing that hard was a bitter pill.
As another fun piece of trivia, I got one of the "blueberry"s -- a blackberry purpose-built to work with aol.com email addresses, and housed in dark blue translucent plastic instead of black. Good times...
Ah, so this is why our email addresses are @gmail.com and not @google.com.
I was always wondering about that; it seemed to me that it would have been free advertising to Google if their users had to write and say @google.com all the time.
By that logic we should encourage giant companies to buy Warner Brothers. Each time it fails, it helps topple leviathans, which decreases market concentration.
This time at least it succeeds immensely, at one thing. At helping America cash out one of it's greatest soft empires of all time: Hollywood.
All that culture that America has built for ourselves and exported to the world is now owned in massive part by sovereign wealth at Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Dubai. Perhaps our greatest export (along with, as every feel knows, microcode and pizza delivery), now massively foreign owned, given up.
https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/hollywood-hungry-gu...
And boatload of debt has been raised, to grease the handoff, to payoff some of the richest people for the acquisition, thanks to the overwhelming investment of these brutal human-rights-violating unfree countries, a massive 40,000 lb albatross of debt to wear around Hollywood's neck. All to do what America lately has traded its past couple bits of good and values for: helping a couple extremely rich dudes cash out, get filthy rich.
A behemoth indeed but the numbers also tell an interesting story. For TV screen share, Youtube has ~13% of total US viewing time vs ~6% for Paramount/Warner. They also go into this merger with staggering debt which does not bode well.
This would be the anti anti trust argument - that it's not studio vs studio, but it's type of screen-time vs other types of screen-time.
Was it Reed Hastings that was painting Netflix's main rival not other streaming platforms, but other types of leisure like video games? This was during the streaming wars IIRC.
Regardless of how you look at it, this is yet another confluence of IP franchises merging together, whatever juice is left in them squeezed out and reprocessed over and over over time. Kind of what Oracle is in software I guess?
Working in an adjacent entertainment IP focus business myself, my eyes are glazing over a bit at this point.
This is the same argument from when Sirius and XM radio merged. It didn't matter that they were monopolizing satellite radio because the real competition was terrestrial radio and internet radio.
Yeah, it's a rhetorical maneuver that's as old as monopoly power when you think about it.
"Actually we're really David and we need to band together against Goliath." Points at imagined external threat
The part that's wild to me is that we know that this merger extends to politics and control over media. The IP's, studios, franchises, all the actual businesses are just part of the estate. It's the Hearst Media Empire story retold again.
> Was it Reed Hastings that was painting Netflix's main rival not other streaming platforms, but other types of leisure like video games?
Yes. He always told us that we don't need to worry about the other streamers nearly as much as we have to worry about them turning off the TV and playing games or (gasp!) going outside. TikTok/Instagram Reels wasn't a thing yet, but if it were, I'm sure they would have been on the list too.
From my perspective YouTube has quietly won the streaming wars. It has a vastly wider variety of content, especially for non-fiction shows. In the cases where there's more direct genre competition, I tend to prefer YouTube overall because, despite its offerings being generally lower budget, they tend to represent a wider variety of "editorial voices". There's a lot of outright slop to wade through, ofc, but there's also a lot of creative risk taking out there to discover.
Meanwhile, yeah, Paramount, Time Warner, Disney, etc. have all become so money-minded and risk-averse that it reminds me of the twilight days of the old Hollywood studio system, where all the major production companies were locked into a heated battle to determine who could be the absolute blandest.
I kind of agree, and it's interesting how Nebula and Spotify (at least their video efforts) have been based on elevating and funding those ultra-budget YouTube creators. Like I watch Lindsay Ellis and Practical Engineering and SkillUp all on non-YouTube platforms now, despite YouTube being the recommendation algorithm that originally brought me there.
It's really the opposite model of the "major" streaming players who fund tentpole releases in the conventional Hollywood way, and then have a long tail of niche content (cooking reality shows and the like) that are clearly on a much tighter budget, but still basically modeled on being a cheaper version of a cable show rather than a much better funded version of a YouTube comedy troupe.
I was just listening to an interview with an up and coming playwright, and he made an interesting point that he really doesn’t like how expensive live theater has become. I guess he has been deliberately targeting super low budget not-even-off-broadway venues because he felt that a big budget stifles creativity. The more money the production stands to lose, the more pressure there is to play it safe.
That kind of describes my relationship with Nebula. There’s a lot of great stuff on there, and lately I have been watching it more than YouTube. But still, YouTube is where I tend to go when I’m looking to find something new that I genuinely haven’t seen before. I think the lower floor for production values is a big part of that.
I would definitely encourage folks to seek out community theatre where you are. Not that I don't enjoy a full on broadway-style blowout every now and then, but it's also been shocking to me how much of the difference between a $40 seat and a $150 seat is pyrotechnics and spectacle that don't really make the experience for me.
The words and the performances, the chemistry and creativity of the actors, that's the real priceless stuff.
> despite its offerings being generally lower budget, they tend to represent a wider variety of "editorial voices".
There's a huge amount of censorship with youtube though. The movies and shows on cable and streaming services can still talk about dead people without being forced to say they are "unalived". CNN can talk about a pandemic without calling it a "panini". Besides censoring specific words and phrases Youtube demonitizes entire genres of content along with anything that is "unfriendly" to advertisers. If that's the future of media in the US we're screwed.
You're misinterpreting what "threat" means. And in fact he used the word "competition."
He was talking about the "incumbent" they are trying to displace. Netflix's challenge was not getting people to switch from watching Hulu to Netflix, but to get them not to sleep in order to watch Netflix.
That's not true. That's the point. It is the same thing as what Reed Hastings is saying. He thinks he is saying some deep insightful thing, and it's ridiculous. It's 200% wrong.
> Regardless of how you look at it, this is yet another confluence of IP franchises merging together, whatever juice is left in them squeezed out and reprocessed over and over over time. Kind of what Oracle is in software I guess?
Cantrill tried to, as diplomatically as possible, warn everyone.
> Was it Reed Hastings that was painting Netflix's main rival not other streaming platforms, but other types of leisure like video games? This was during the streaming wars IIRC.
Yea, and spending time with your friends and family, meeting new people, sleeping...
From [1]:
> “Think about if you didn’t watch Netflix last night: What did you do? There’s such a broad range of things that you did to relax and unwind, hang out, and connect—and we compete with all of that.”
When I read that interview, I became a lot more cautious of using Netflix and other streaming platforms, knowing their design is adversarial to my values (I want to be deliberate about what I watch, not be manipulated into mindless consumption).
youtube has slowly become like 90% of my TV time over the past few years, I think it's the fact that you don't have to commit to watching 40+ minutes of something every time and there's just way too much interesting content on it
and i'm not even someone you'd class as young anymore, so I don't think this is a younger generation thing
I'm in the opposite camp. I find Youtube exhausting, and it keeps getting worse and worse.
Their ads are terrible. And since I watch via a device like Roku, etc, I have to put up with them. I've actively removed them from my devices. Occasionally, I feel like looking up some video. I install it, and often before I even watch the video I uninstall it because the awful UI reminds me of all the other awful stuff in it.
Curation doesn't exist. I have to work hard to find good content. Harder than any video service out there.
And shorts. Oh. Dear. God.
For some very targeted stuff (home repairs, video game walkthroughs), it's great. For the rest, it just sucks.
Of all of the various online services, YouTube is the one where I feel I get the most value in return for paying for premium. 90% of my video and music consumption is through YouTube, and it's all ad-free. (Well, except that so much of hobby YouTube is implicitly all ad because the video is about some piece of hobby gear, but that's sort of the nature of the beast.)
I've never watched a YouTube short.
My recommendations are all very well aligned with my interests. The trick here is to go through your watch history and delete things that are leading the recommendation algorithm astray. I am ruthless about that.
> 90% of my video and music consumption is through YouTube, and it's all ad-free.
If it works for you, great! Most video I watch is in the form of TV shows and movies. And Youtube sucks for that. Youtube is great for some hobby stuff. I used to like it for reviews, but even that sucks now - when I do a search I'm inundated with low effort reviews (i.e. by people who haven't used the product they're reviewing).
But if there's a creator you really like and follow, I can understand that.
> I've never watched a YouTube short.
Don't you think they should give you an option not to present them to you, given that you don't watch them?
> My recommendations are all very well aligned with my interests. The trick here is to go through your watch history and delete things that are leading the recommendation algorithm astray. I am ruthless about that.
I don't want to pay money and then have to do this. This is a pain I don't have to deal with in any other service.
> Don't you think they should give you an option not to present them to you, given that you don't watch them?
Yes, I certainly do! The fact that YouTube still tries to get me to watch Shorts every few weeks is 100% a user-hostile choice. Seems like basically every app these days does that kind of shit. It makes me sad, but it's pretty clearly in the set of things I can't change, so I try to just be mindful of the serenity prayer and accept it.
There are a few ways to disable/hide shorts. One day I said to a friend, “man I wish I could block these things, they’re insulting to my intelligence and just encourage clicking around” and my friend said “I’ve been blocking them for a while, just do this.” And while I can’t remember what “this” was, it’s worth a quick google.
Shorts are like the video equivalent of snacking on Doritos all day long.
I imagine they are that's why I pay for YT Premium, which I think is my most bang for buck subscription based on the amount of time I spend watching it
> Curation doesn't exist.
I don't find this a problem personally because 95% of my feed is just channels I'm subscribed to but YMMV depends on what you expect out of it
I watch Youtube on a Chromecast using the SmartTube app, which is a 3rd party front-end (side-loaded APK) for Youtube that eliminates all the ads, and lets you configure practically everything. Don't like "shorts", just disable them and they are gone. That's the main reason I sought out an alternative to the Youtube app, I hated the shorts and there was no way to get rid of them.
I love SmartTube, it's been great. I used to pay for a Youtube subscription to get rid of the ads, but that doesn't include the in-video ads that content creators put in there - but SmartTube has that covered too, in most videos I watch the in-video ads are skipped too. I have 5 chromecasts on the 5 TVs around my house, and every one of them has SmartTube installed. I wouldn't want to watch Youtube without it.
Are you watching YouTubeTV, or just independent-ish creator YouTube?
I watch probably an hour of YouTube a week and would watch more if I could find anything good.
My favorite TV of the past five years is probably Severance. Is there anything of that caliber on YouTube? One of the best movies I saw last year was on Netflix (Train Dreams). Are there great movies on YouTube?
I’d love to year about some of your favorite stuff on YouTube.
independent-ish creators (I'm aware that a lot of channels seem to be bought out by private equity lately), but mostly science, technology, speedrunning, mysteries, recipe guides, things like that, basically stuff that I'm interested in
Oh nice. I never thought of looking for recipes on YouTube before.
How much work do you put into curating your feed? Mine is terrible. For example, I’ll watch a video on how to fix my dishwasher and suddenly it thinks I want to fix all dishwashers.
I wonder if an AI could help me with this? I tell it five things I’m interested in and give it my credentials and it watches and likes stuff (or does whatever it has to to tune the feed) until the dashcam videos, first amendment auditors, reaction videos, and all shorts are gone.
There is some good content, but sadly the bulk of youtube now is someone sitting in a room reading an AI script for 30 minutes covering 2 minutes of content.
> you don't have to commit to watching 40+ minutes of something
This is funny because I have stopped clicking YouTube links for the simple reason that every video seems to be 45+ minutes. Which I get is based on how monetization works on YouTube.
Like Old Twitter, short-form video is a forcing function with value in forcing posters to get to the point. (I have never seen a YouTube Shorts or whatever link in the wild.)
X (Formerly Twitter) (The everything app) does have a huge issue with long drawn on tweets now. Not to mention people who try and bait people in with intentionally cutting things off.
Alone, their annual streaming revenue was something like $10 billion each compared to Netflix/YouTube at $50-$60 billion each, so they're lagging
(eg radio vs TV).
I've seen plenty of negative (and legitimate) sentiment around this merger but I'm cautiously optimistic that David Ellison, being half the age of anyone else with greenlight authority, will do something different/better.
Skydance/Paramount has had plenty of success attracting young audiences via UFC & gaming partnerships, so I'm not sure that's a counterpoint. Re forumulaic/bland that's a personal taste thing and not worth arguing.
The key contributor to Hollywood's waning influence is the generation gap; it's a cultural institution that is supposed to be culturally salient. Take the Mandalorian movie as an example; the biggest studio using the biggest IP to spend $300M on a movie... which lost $100M. That movie was competing at the box office at the same time with Obsession, which was made for $750k by a young Youtuber has made over half a billion worldwide.
As of today Ellison has an extraordinary amount of greenlight authority in an industry whose decision-makers are overwhelmingly a generation older. He can shake things up if he wants to, and I hope he does.
Being formulaic and bland is an important aspect of expecting someone to “do something different” or “shake things up”. If the owner of a film studio has so much green light power but the studio has primarily produced film following a single formula, which the audiences have grown bored with (hence bland), then how can there be an expectation of that owner suddenly doing something different simply because they bought another studio?
This is more consolidation of US media under extremely pro-Israel ownership. I don't think this will work out as well as they hope (look at CBS -- Bari Weiss has driven it into the ground) but it's scary how much US media a foreign adversary now has direct editorial control over, including both "news" and "entertainment", including TikTok.
Which foreign adversary and you implying? Are you implying that a specific ally of the USA is really an adversary? On what basis did you make this connection? Which foreign citizens are involved in this transaction? What tangible connection does said foreign adversary have to this company?
I was working with some interns and it's interesting to see how the youth knows not to trust Israel. You can see it with them just becoming the butt of more jokes, the shield of ww2 victimhood covering their behavior is slipping.
Consider me a politically ignorant folk who has heard Israel = Good his whole life, thought it was silly when recently people started hating on Israel, and has heard it long enough that he's wondering what he's been ignoring.
With that introduction, is there a quick sum up somewhere to get someone like me to understand why there's so much division on this topic? All I really know is that in the most recent stuff with Gaza, people think that Israel's actions are too much, but I would be lying if I claimed to know what any of those Middle East scurmishes are about.
I gotta be honest, given the LLMs we have today, it takes less words to get a list of references and context to read than it takes to type out your comment.
If you're genuinely curious about why people's views on Israel have shifted you could've got yourself excellent information with a simple prompt as such:
"Give me a brief neutral summary backed with reliable sources on the state of tensions in the Middle East today and the role played by Israel and other states. Help me understand why people's views on Israel have shifted so much since the start of the war in Gaza?"
I said list of references. You'd read the primary sources and make up your political opinion. But LLMs are good at providing pointers, much like wikipedia.
Have you been paying attention to american politics the last 15 years or so? It's become astoundingly clear that Mossad has blackmail material on virtually every major politician and uses it to get its way - including billions of dollars in funding and drawing the US into conflicts that do not benefit us and instead result in the deaths of Americans (and as of Trump's statement yesterday, the threat of bombings on American soil.)
>but it's scary how much US media a foreign adversary now has direct editorial control over
It's not antisemitic to criticize Israel, but this language is verging on antisemitic because Israel very much does not have "direct editorial control" over Skydance. David Ellison is the one with "direct editorial control" and you can certainly say he's "extremely pro-Israel" but he himself is not "a foreign adversary" by any definition of those words. So either you're being hyperbolic with the meaning of "direct editorial control" or you're insinuating that David Ellison will defer to Israel on everything because he's Jewish which is a common antisemitic trope[1]. I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume the former, but the latter is enough of a possibility that I would suggest rephrasing this comment to avoid giving supporters of Israel a legitimate line of complaint against your underlying point.
>David Ellison appoints Israeli to lead merged Paramount-Warner studios
The same thing happened with the Tik Tok purchase, the entire point of handing control of the Tik Tok algorithm to Larry Ellison was so that they could clamp down on the discussion about the genocide in Gaza. You can see the results of it in the reports that the world Jewish congress put out directly:
>TikTok is the exception, removing 64% of content overall (and 71% of
content formally reported to it), compared to 12–15% on every other major platform.
It seems like you fully ignored my point, so I'll repeat myself:
>You can certainly say he's "extremely pro-Israel" but he himself is not "a foreign adversary" by any definition of those words.
All you're showing is that his family is pro-Israel, but that does not mean they are controlled by Israel. These conversations about Israel always seem to remove the agency on the American end which is where a lot of the historical antisemitic tropes live. Whether it's intentional or not, it's phrased in a way to evoke the trope of a shadowy cabal of Jews pulling the strings behind the scenes, and other countries rarely get talked about in this same way. For example, have you ever heard anyone suggest Google and Microsoft are controlled by India because their CEOs were born in India?
"controlled by Israel" is kind of impossible to prove and that was never anyone's argument. But it's very obvious that these people are placing ethnic affinity and the interests of a foreign nation above the United States. They are going out of their way to buy media to shape the discourse of this country in favor of a foreign nation and a specific ethnic group.
>other countries rarely get talked about in this same way
They actually do, but the Israeli lobby has grown so powerful that it is now dominating most of the political action in the USA in a way that has become impossible to ignore.
There are actually plenty of conversations to be had about Indian ethnic affinity and lobbying. USINPAC is the Indian lobbying organization which is actually modeled after AIPAC (the notorious Israeli lobbying group which has political control over most of the US congress).
There is a looming argument which hasn't yet entered the public mainstream discourse about Indian foreign influence and Indian ethnic nepotism in the United States, but that is an entirely separate conversation.
Most Indian CEOs are the same caste (Brahmin) and there is a good argument that many of them have been nominated by the boards of their companies and institutional investors with large stakes so that they can navigate India's notorious bureaucracy and deepen ties to the country, which supplies much of the cheap labor for the tech industry. Many of them have direct ties to the Bharatiya Janata Party in India and can use the access to people like Modi to access more Indian labor as well as build more in India. Modi talks openly about exporting human capital and using its diaspora to wield influence in the United States. One can argue that they are taking a queue from Israel here.
>Narendra Modi urges the Indian diaspora to become an extension of foreign policy
>"controlled by Israel"... was never anyone's argument.
Yes it was. My comment was directly in response to someone saying "it's scary how much US media a foreign adversary now has direct editorial control over". I know that was not your argument, but it was someone's argument and I responded to refute it. I don't know what point you thought was being discussed, but it's now clear you misread the conversation.
They put Bari Weiss in charge of CBS news. Her only credential is being rabidly zionist. This trait got her blog purchased for 100s of millions of dollars (!!) and then put her in charge of CBS news.
If you want to split hairs between "controlled by Israel" and "controlled by people who's sole interest is supporting Israel", go ahead.
Before the Tik Tok purchase went through, the prime minister of Israel gave a talk in which he said:
>But we have to fight with the weapons that apply to the battlefields with which we engage, and the most important ones are on social media. And the most important purchase that's going on right now is? Tik Tok. Number One.
Later, control of the Tik Tok algorithm was given to Larry Ellison and they immediately used it to clamp down on discussion of the genocide in Gaza (as well as any other types of discussion they deem "antisemitism").
Now Larry Ellison's son has been given control of all these other media companies and has appointed an Israeli to run things.
This is DIRECT evidence of Larry and David Ellison working directly with the highest levels of a foreign government to manipulate public opinion on behalf of that foreign government.
Whether you say they are being "controlled" or doing it voluntarily, the outcome is exactly the same.
Let’s check where much of the ownership and money come from. From the LA Times:
> The Federal Communications Commission on Thursday granted Paramount Skydance’s request to allow Middle Eastern royal families to hold a substantial stake in a merged Paramount-Warner Bros. Discovery.
> Foreign investors, including the sovereign wealth funds of Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Abu Dhabi, are slated to indirectly own nearly 50% of the equity in David Ellison’s proposed mega-studio. That will give them a hefty stake in CBS, CNN, Comedy Central, HBO and two historic Hollywood film studios.
So foreign “adversaries” literally own enormous stakes in these companies and have been cleared by the FCC. Yet only possible pro-Israel influence by Ellison gets called out?
When they take dollars for oil, they would rather swap paper currency with real assets (ownership of firms). If US doesn't want that, they should make moves to remove USD as a reserve currency or preferred currency for global trade.
What about the pesky fact that there is a huge difference between the operational owner of a company and it's investors. Oh and those gulf state investors are aligned with the Zionists.
Stating obvious falsehoods as if they were true doesn't help your Zionist cause anymore. It's not only the Taliban and everyone knows it, so don't bother gaslighting. Just look at half of Eurpope. Or the Ed Sheeran debacle.
The European countries you're pointing towards are similar to the US in that most of their populace doesn't support the Israeli government but their politicians effectively do. Even the most vocally anti-Israel country, Ireland, is in truth the biggest US regime ally in the EU. This renders their Israel talk completely meaningless.
The part of Europe you're talking about is also more like a fifth than half.
Please. Ellison controls it, the gulf states are just investors. They also invested in Twitter, but people call out Elon, and no one has a problem with that.
Most of the gulf states are pretty much controlled by Zionists at this point anyway, or at least heavily aligned with them.
The entertainment industry is the opiate for the American masses. It has paramount power to deceive and beguile and distract, especially the middle class. Entertainment outlets are the prime propaganda mouthpieces for their sponsors. When their sponsor is not the domestic government, they serve as corporate propaganda and foreigner propaganda. American public broadcasting delenda est. So shut up and enjoy your Netflix.
I think it's great that the America supports Israel, whose values and interests basically align with the West, over the rest of the Middle East, Russia and China with their values, which being as diplomatic as possible, do not.
Just take a look at all the countries that are the most against Israel. They are a mixture of failed states, third world and what they all share in common is a distressing lack of regard for human rights. Both of other nationalities and their own. Europe is unfortunately going in that direction, and I believe it's no coincience that they are simultaneously becoming worse countries and more anti Israel. It's not causation but it is correlation.
The US couped, invaded, and destroyed tens of countries since WW2 until now. Israel is still massacring civilians in Gaza during a ceasefire and continuing their pogrom in the West Bank, killing people and stealing more lands. This is your example of human rights?
Yes. Your argument is fallacious because it's classic whataboutism. Just because the US have done some morally questionable things doesn't mean they are not committed to humanism in general and by comparison to all the other countries I've mentioned, they are so much better. And their trajectory over time is one of continued improvement.
As for your charges against Israel, they are factually incorrect. Israel is not still massacring civilians in Gaza, neither did they at any point engage in anything like a systemic, strategic program of killing civilians in Gaza. If you want to know what the casualty figures would look like if that was indeed the case, look at Iran which did do just that with the protests last year where they succeeded in murdering in one week roughly the amount of people Israel killed in Gaza in an entire year of active fighting. The worst you can accuse them of is of not doing enough to minimize civilian casualties. I will argue they did plenty but that's for another time. As for "progroms" in the West Bank, I would love to see what you're talking about. For your reference this is a wikipedia page on progroms[1] For some context, the number of extremist violent settlers that the whole world is fixated on numbers according to estimates in the dozens to hundreds.
Finally, I will leave it up to your imagination what it would look like if the roles were reversed, if the Arabs were dominant in Israel and the Jews were a minority, to help things along, here's examples from the wider Arab world[2]
those charges are very factually correct. eg. israel has killed >1000 civilian gazans since signing the ceasefire. thats about the same as how iran responded to a similar uprising as oct 7th. by comparison israel has killed at the very lowest, 70k civilians, probably more like 300k -500k if anyone is ever allowed to investigate the rubble from israel's subsequent destruction of civilian homes and infrastructure.
the systematic killing is pretty clear - tell people to evacuate to an israeli defined "safe zone" and then drop bombs on it. other defined policies had the idf mowing down escaped israeli-citizen hostages waving white flags and approaching the gaza border. assigning snipers to get headshots on children.
its a system informed by the fact that going too hard would result in instant sanctions, but the intent is made plenty clear, and the results are easily visible by counting the number of living gazans still in northern gaza.
palestine was under arab and turkish rules for centuries, and jews did much better than arabs are under israeli occupation
if the west was more values-similar with israel, there would be constant swastikas drawn on everything jewish owned or in jewish view, with a couple real true blue nazis going around beating up, killing, and stealing jewish property, and the government would keep pardoning them and insisting its not a problem because its only a couple hundred thousand nazis in a country witb many millions.
i sure saw in that video where cnn gets attacked by the idf clearing the way for settlers that the west bank is covered in stars of david, drawn the same way swatstikas are to terrorize people
Wow. You managed to cram so much propaganda into one post it's pretty impressive.
Civilians like maybe Ali Al-Amoudi? Or maybe Muhammad Yazouri? Nayal Abu Obeid? Izz al-Din al-Beik? Izz al-Din al-Haddad? Mohammed Odeh?
Is there any combatant Hamas doesn't call a civilian?
Since Hamas hasn't disarmed and Gaza wasn't demilitarized there is effectively no ceasefire. There is a war and Israel is attacking military targets as it is allowed to do under international law. Minimizing civilian casualties as it is required to do.
If Hamas, the democratically elected government of Gaza, has a problem with that then it can surrender.
Israel has only attacked the safe zone when there were military targets present, such as the attack on Mohammed Deif. That's on Hamas. Once you get the civilian/combatant breakdown from Hamas then we can check how many civilians per capita were attacked in humanitarian zones (very few) vs. zones that were evacuated (the majority).
EDIT: Re: The Ottomans. Massacred Jews in Safed in 1517. Ethnically cleansed Jaffa of Jews in 1917. And that's just the tip of the iceberg. No comparison whatsoever to Israeli Arabs who are equal citizens in Israel. As to the Palestinians in the occupied territories, they're not citizens. Also AFAIK the Jews didn't mount a campaign of suicide bombings against the Arabs or fire rockets into Arab cities.
Arab jews did not want to move to Israel, they were fine living among muslims. Mossad faked terrorist bombings in Baghdad and killed bunch of jews to create an illusion of jew hatred in Iraq.
Next you’re going to say that all the antisemitic commenters on HN are also Mossad in an attempt to convince Jews to move to Israel.
Are you Mossad?
I note that you wrote: “typical jewish propaganda and hasbara” - you forgot to say “Zionist” or “Israeli”. Was that a slip or have your handlers in Israel instructed you to be openly antisemitic now?
israel shares that same lack of care gor human rights. consider the use of rape and possibly bestiality to torture hostages in prisons, the state protection of terrorists, the lack of gay or even interfaith marriage, the genocide in gaza.
israel doesnt at all align with (modern) western values, instead more like the old apartheid south africa, or really, more like nazi germany in terms of supremacism and industrial might put towards surveiling and killing the less-than-human people you allude to as being less-than-human.
the causation of all those failed states is israel. it makes failed states because those are easier to conquer land from, and cant fight against all the abuses of humans.
sure, the US was half supportive of the nazis too, but that wasn't a good thing.
>consider the use of rape and possibly bestiality to torture hostages in prisons, the state protection of terrorists, the lack of gay or even interfaith marriage, the genocide in gaza.
Argument: Unproven claims, there are virtually no jewish terrorists, anyway in your own distorted mind Israel is a terrorist state.
Counterpoint: Oct 7, Bibas family, Hamas, Palestinan Authority/PLO, Islam.
>the lack of gay or even interfaith marriage, the genocide in gaza.
........
...
I mean, lets just take a moment to reflect on this. For more context Israel has a pretty strong gay culture, so your complaint is about a legal technicality. So you are mentioning that in the same breath as the the death of 70,000 Gazans? And you think that's somehow an argument that makes you look good???
I am a pretty outspoken supporter of Israel, but I have never come close to that level of disrespect to the Palestinian people as you have managed.
>the causation of all those failed states is israel. it makes failed states because those are easier to conquer land from, and cant fight against all the abuses of humans.
The causation of all those failed states is Third World values. Like blaming everyone else for their own failures.
You don’t get it, in their twisted worldview, Israel is to blame for anything. Coincides is exactly what’s being taught in every household in the failed states surrounding Israel. No jobs? Israel. Illness and death? Israel. Taliban slaughtering people? Israel.
Instead of understanding that these governments use the Israeli Palestinian conflict as a scapegoat, and Israel as a boogeyman, just to make the populous blind to the true cause for their suffering.
hm... if tens of thousands of Palestinian children are being sacrificed to Moloch in bloody religious rituals, it is perfectly logical to condemn those who perform the ritual sacrifice
who do you think is it fault for those dead Palestinian children ?
Its not hamas who performs mass ritual sacrifice of innocent children. These things have happened before hamas was created and documented by Church and in the Bible
And before you say that you don’t trust Israeli media, the world doesn’t care enough when it’s Palestinians at fault, so it’s not covered anywhere else.
Antisemitism. And I don't mean in the way some people try calling criticism of Israel antisemitism. I mean that person is bringing up nearly millennia old blood libel conspiracies.
From Wikpedia[1]:
>Blood libel or ritual murder libel (also blood accusation) is an antisemitic trope which falsely accuses Jews of murdering Christians in order to use their blood in the performance of religious rituals... Blood libels often claim that Jews require human blood for the baking of matzos, an unleavened flatbread which is eaten during Passover. Earlier versions of the blood libel accused Jews of ritually re-enacting the crucifixion. The accusations often assert that the blood of Christian children is especially coveted, and historically, blood libel claims have been made in order to account for the otherwise unexplained deaths of children. In some cases, the alleged victims of human sacrifice have become venerated as Christian martyrs. Many of these – most prominently William of Norwich (1144), Little Saint Hugh of Lincoln (1255), and Simon of Trent (1475) – became objects of local cults and veneration
It is not conspiracy, Saint Simon of Trent was recognized by Church for centuries
Even jewish historian Toaff documented cases of infanticide and connection to religious rituals in his book “Pasque di sangue”. Its all corroborated with evidence
>Saint Simon of Trent was recognized by Church for centuries
And why is that past tense?
>Even jewish historian Toaff documented cases of infanticide and connection to religious rituals in his book “Pasque di sangue”. Its all corroborated with evidence
From your own link:
>Toaff withdrew the book from circulation a week after its publication and republished it the following year with an afterword stating that there was no relationship between the use of dried blood in Jewish ritual and the alleged ritual murders underlying the blood libel.
because the Church has issued "nostra aetate", which was written by ashkenazi jews Gregory Baum, John Oesterreicher, Bruno hussar. This was a political decision driven by aftermath of ww2 and coordinated by the World Jewish Congress and had no basis in theological nor facts nor any other legitimate reasons.
>Toaff withdrew
of course, he withdrew because people did not like the original research he published. He literally received death threats by people who did not like the facts, so he decided to withdraw and self-censor out of caution for his own life.
It's simple: I don't want billions of taxpayer dollars going to a country that enforces the Hannibal Directive or the Dahiya doctrine.
If the Israeli government cooperates with the ICC, adopts full secularity and stops undermining their neighbors security, then I'd feel a lot better supporting them. Right now I'm only ashamed. There is no upside to sending Israel foreign aid after Likud manipulated Trump into starting an illegal war.
Dahyia doctrine - this means inflict damage on your enemy in such way that will deter him from ever trying to attack you again. It was named in the 2006 Lebanon war, which Hezbollah started, after which nasrallah admitted that if he knew of the Israeli response, he would not have started the war. I suppose your a 5 star general with a better way of creating deterrence.
Hannibal directive - affects only soldiers, and it means that the army must do whatever’s necessary to prevent a kidnapping. This is after a soldier was kidnapped into Gaza, kept there for 5 years without seeing any natural party to assess his condition (which is illegal but no one cares about that when Israelis are the victims), and eventually was released against 1,000 Palestinian prisoners, one of which was sinwar. Again, I assume you are a 5 star general that can find a better solution.
Israel is a secular state. The only thing controlled by religion is marriage (btw USA gives weapons to turkey, Saudi Arabia, UAE, where is the protest against support of these unsecular countries?)
And finally - how exactly is the Iran war illegal?
If Israel wanted to clean their slate, they can always present their case to the ICC. Little wonder that Likud lashes out and call the ICC "biased" for not sharing their beliefs, but such is the culture gap that the Israeli state has fostered. And such is the standards of cooperation and compliance that the rest of the world has come to expect since the horror of WWII. It's hard to not blame Israel for the terrible optics that their leadership has promoted and incorporated into their state's identity. The whataboutism in your comment proves that you also know it's wrong, but just refuse to hold Israel accountable the way that the House of Saud is (very justifiably) criticized. It's clear that Israel demands an ethical double-standard from the world.
Congress never agreed to it. Israel can fight all they want, but extended US operations are jeopardized without a congressional authorization. The upcoming midterms are going to shake things up, and it's very possible that the War Powers Resolution of 1973 will be enforced to stop funding for in-theater operations outside of CENTCOM basics and foreign aid. The war isn't popular, and US taxpayers can only foot the bill for so long before they abandon Likud's warmongering initiatives. Even Trump doesn't want to escalate, considering how many threats he wussed out of.
Sexual predator karim khan, which was the icc prosecutor, was supposed to arrive with a delegation to Israel to investigate the charges and see evidence from the Israeli side. A day before he cancelled the delegation and one sidedly published the accusations.
A year later we learned that he threatened his victim that if she would expose him, it would hurt the case against Israel.
Yeah, it's not great that the head of the corporation is so close with Netanyahu, but there are more immediate problems for the US. These corporations aren't ideological though, they'll just do whatever it takes to get what more of what they want. David Ellison and his daddy have both been more than happy to throw huge piles of money at Democrats and support them when they thought it was convenient. When Republicans are out of power they'll support whoever replaces them. When you have no morals whatsoever what difference is there in supporting a Democrat, or a genocide, or a Republican?
Like Grump himself, they pushed us into an unwinnnable quagmire that is helping to destroy our global leadership position - essentially indistinguishable from what an adversary would do.
The U.S. cannot claim to be "pushed" into any war. The US chose to participate in this war and chooses to stay involved every single day since it started.
"The US" is not a singular entity making a deliberate explicit choice, right? Just as it makes sense to say that Grump dragged the US into this war, it also makes sense to say that Israel helped. Think joint responsibility, not severable.
Yeah, but I have not seen anyone really do anything opposed to the war (or all the other shit), so its fair to say that the US made the choice to approve of the war.
US is not a single entity, it consists of a lot of politicians on the AIPAC's payroll or have videos of themselves doing illegal stuff on some tropical island
And the citizens do not have enough spine to bring their politicians to justice. If they weren't causing so much death and destruction around the globe the sidestepping-of-responsibility-shuffle of the american people would be really funny to watch.
Nationwide protests, general strike. Organizing groups that bring down whatever is left of US-justicias rotten arms on anyone trying to undermine democracy. Organizing groups that offer support and counceling for any victim of the regime. Boycotts etc. But most importantly: start 40 years ago and don't let the country become this way.
There are. Check out No Kings. My smallish "city" has a protest every week, and organizes a larger one every few months. I go when I can. Most people driving by are even supportive.
> general strike
There was talk of this a while back, and I analyzed it at the time - I don't see how it would help. In fact it seemed like it would make our position worse. The regime wants economic destruction, so its cronies can swoop in to pick up the pieces.
> Organizing groups that bring down whatever is left of US-justicias rotten arms on anyone trying to undermine democracy
From what I see, this is indeed happening at the state-by-state level. But it's happening slowly, and the distributedness makes it hard to see. And much of it gets stymied due to a lot of rotten interference by the federal government - they tend to get things moved things to federal court, where many of the judges are regime apparatchiks. And if they aren't, then the rioter in chief goes to work threatening them with stochastic violence.
> Organizing groups that offer support and counceling for any victim of the regime
There is definitely some of this at the grassroots level, but on the other hand it's pretty hard to help someone that has been dragged away to a concentration camp.
> Boycotts etc
Boycott who? The problem is all the corpos are basically in on it. I've stopped buying stuff at Home Depot, and now buy stuff at Lowe's instead. Big whoop! I expect to find out down the line that Lowe's's corpo management is also full of fascists.
> start 40 years ago and don't let the country become this way.
While the issues have been apparent all along, the problem is that the corpo propaganda has been successful at stopping any sort of reform that would allow us to address this ahead of time. Glaring meta issues like campaign finance and non-plurality voting are basically opposed by both professional parties, who had been offering us the shit sandwich vs turd torta dynamic for decades.
> And the citizens do not have enough spine to bring their politicians to justice.
This really betrays a lack of understanding of the structure of the government in the US. The Constitution, for better and worse, heavily insulates the government from tempestuous public opinion. The framers were readers of greek history who understood that democracy was a condition that a republic could devolve into. They built the system to give the voters the vibes that they had a say in the workings of their government while ensuring that in reality they had no such thing.
What are you trying to say? That the poor poor citizens' hands are tied? That they simply have to watch from the sidelines while their dear leader does its best zo sow ruin and carnage? This problem will never be solved while americans duck away from responsibility like they are about to win a limbo competition.
It's very easy to get on a tech forum and say "let's you and them fight," but violent revolution is generally pretty awful and typically ends up with worse conditions than they started with. I don't begrudge anyone for not wanting to go outside the regular electoral process.
I am not the most powerful empire in the world. It would sure be nice if I were, but unfortunately I am not.
So what exactly do you mean by my own choices? I do take responsibility for my own choices. I've done nothing that majorly supports this war.
What I have done that supports this war: 1. continue to pay taxes and otherwise participate in society. 2. voted for conservative (ie democrat) politicians that might work to oppose the con artist in chief regardless of their general support for Israel (although since we're talking about the Iran War specifically, I don't know if this actually counts)
Meanwhile I have protested, the regime in general not the war specifically. Stand out on a corner, sign, smile and wave. Most people honk in support, but once again what can they actually do? There is of course always more one can do to express opposition. But not working hard enough to oppose something is not the same as choosing to support it.
I assume you understand that you're not actually talking to the United States itself with this comment, so it seems like you're trying to assert some principle of collective guilt? I'd say that's an awful lot like the tripe that's used to try and justify the genocide in Gaza, whereby every Palestinian civilian is purportedly responsible for Hamas's rockets (etc).
Do they have the US interests at heart? Or their own? I think the latter, almost certainly. That makes them adversarial from a game theory perspective at the very least.
I am pretty sure that the ellisons care more about US interests than israeli interests. Whether they are selfish is orthogonal to whether they are a foreign adversary. Most people are selfish.
A lot of citation needed. Requiring that folks shut the hell up about the current political cause célèbre while at work is not the same as requiring that they "love Israel".
> An anonymous Substack, Oracle For Palestine, written by a group of Oracle employees, claims that that “our leadership’s unquestioning public support for Israel” has led to a failure of the company to address the one-sided political positions taken by top management and the discrimination faced by employees who don’t share the political views of management.
> “In response to legitimate concerns, many of us have been referred to internal mental health resources rather than having those concerns addressed appropriately,” said the group in a post last year.
> For employees, it’s clear: if you’re not for America or Israel, don’t work here
It sounds like internal opposition to Israel is punished at Oracle by systemically discounting their detractors as mentally unwell. You must love Israel at Oracle to avoid this discriminatory action.
The first citation is from anonymous sources, and doesn’t even claim that those people got fired for hating Israel.
The second mentions the US as well. I ask you - should a company want to hire people that are against its home country?
I could only find one publication of someone getting fired in this context, and even that was about this person using the brand logo for their protest as if it was on the company’s behalf. As evidence, none of the other employees participating in the same protest got fired for participating.
Edit: all this is far detached from your claim that you must “love” Israel. At most, don’t recruit the company’s brand to your protest.
US politicians are supposed to represent their voters who elected them. A foreign state putting massive resources into a state-supported program to get them to represent the foreign state's interest instead, is obviously a foreign adversary. It doesn't get much more adverserial than that! It's a direct attack on US internal democracy.
And this is just the tip of the iceberg.
You've just been raised to consider this as "normal". There's nothing normal about it, and if any other new country had started doing this you'd have recognized it for what it is.
Before someone says "all countries do this" - no they don't. Scale matters, impact matters.
Israel and her children have been weaponized by the democratic West (including México and Ukraine) as an arsenal of vengeance against our perceived adversaries, but Israel and her children cannot be contained or controlled by the democratic West forever.
"Now I am become Death, the shatterer of worlds..."
You could also say that Trump and a significant portion of the Republican party were weaponized by the rest of the party and are not so easily contained or controlled now.
They're killing Americans in the West Bank, grabbing US tax payer money while laughing at how easy are Americans to manipulate, aggressively spying on all kinds of US targets incl by placing spy equipment on Secret Service vehicles during visits, spitting on Christians who visit Israel, harassing American lawmakers and diplomats, dragging the US into wars that don't serve its interests or the interests of its other partners, draining US military equipment meant to protect other assets etc. etc.
I am sure no other country could get away with the amount of shit the Israelis pull on a regular basis.
> I am sure no other country could get away with the amount of shit the Israelis pull on a regular basis.
German here. Assuming you're American, that's a rich list LOL.
> aggressively spying on all kinds of US targets incl by placing spy equipment on Secret Service vehicles during visits
The US spies on everyone, including allies as nominally close as Germany. Thanks Snowden for revealing that one. And both the US and Russia are known to use their embassies as SIGINT collection bases.
> dragging the US into wars that don't serve its interests or the interests of its other partners
The US has dragged all of NATO into the mess that Afghanistan ended up being. I might let that one slide because 9/11 was a thing, but a few years later Bush dragged a bunch of other European countries into the mess that Iraq ended up being, and just this year, Trump was pissed that we didn't want to join the fun of bombing Iraq.
> draining US military equipment meant to protect other assets
Trump gave all but zero warning about invading Iran to anyone (well he did toy with the idea, but everyone dismissed it as the usual "deranged madman" brainfarts), leading to everyone (funnily including the US) emptying their entire stockpile of anti-air missiles out of sheer necessity. Millions of dollars just to take a glorified lawnmower on wings.
Israel didn't need to drag the US into bombing Iran. Many parts of the US Republicans have wanted to bomb the Mullahs into submission for decades.
I am not American but given Germany's own role in much of what is going on in Gaza and the West Bank, the weapons shipments to Israel, (no 2 supplier after the US) and the diplomatic cover it gives to Israel, there's a lot Germany still needs to reflect on today.
Hint: The lesson was supposed to be that genocide is bad, period. Not that it's ok as long as it is some of the descendants Germany hurt doing it this time.
Real genocide is bad. Abusing the term for propaganda is also bad.
The Islamist approach for global propaganda is try and associate each culture’s negative terms with Israel. So when they push content to Westerners they say Israel is colonialism, apartheid, and genocide. When they speak to Muslims the Jews are Kuffars and the war against them is holy. When they target the right wing Israel is taking American tax dollars for their own universal healthcare.
Israel has committed genocide in the Gaza Strip, UN Commission finds [1]
Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, scholars' association says [2]
A genocide is unfolding before our eyes: History will not forgive our inaction, UN Special Committee warns General Assembly in report [3]
Israel continues to commit genocide by targeting children in Gaza, UN inquiry finds [4]
The “scholars association” is a club of a few hundred people that anyone can join and they didn’t even have a majority vote on the topic.
The UN is openly biased against Israel. One of the reasons it gave for calling it a genocide was that during intense fighting an Israeli tank shell hit a fertility clinic destroying a few thousand embryos.
To put this in context: more than 100,000 babies were born in Gaza over the past 3 years, there are about a million abortions a year in the US, but one incident of an Israeli shell hitting an IVF clinic is enough for the UN commission to conclude it must be a genocide.
UN established Israel in the first place, yet when it criticizes its own creation in the most tepid of ways, it is biased. So was Folke Bernadotte wasn't he?
Time to point out Israel is spending $1 on online propaganda [1]. Every time they come up in HN you'll see some new green accounts fly in to defend Israel. And, funnily, those green accounts all go silent the moment you point out the $1 billion Israel is spending on propaganda.
I'm an open Zionist (although not the rabid Netanyahu-loving kind). I'm willing to accept downvotes for defending that position, but at least as a German who is currently an academic student and not associated with an employer I don't have to fear social repercussions for it as well (and notably, I write under my actual name).
Other people, particularly in the US, but also Spain or Ireland where the culture/social sphere is widespread anti-Zionist, might choose to not do so for the reasons I mentioned.
It's a bit rich pretending like Zionists are somehow to fear for their jobs etc. given getting pro-Palestinian professors etc. fired was the Zionist modus operandi for decades. Germany really hasn't changed much, has it?
Getting us into a useless war that decimates our economy isn't very allied of them. A waste of intelligent people and decades of political connections too, Trump is so easy to manipulate you don't NEED to be secretive.
This is not about the jews.. this is about the billionaires taking over media. If you're going to be angry, please place your anger in the right direction and don't get all antisemetic. Elon buying X, Bezos buying washington post, ellison controlling media... They are slowly controlling the stack.
You're right it's not about Jewish people; particularly in the US, but also in Europe, there are millions of Jewish people who are not Zionist, denounce the Israeli government and are great people.
That's why he said Israel. But good hasbara tactic conflating mention of Israel with "jews", keep it up.
I’m sorry, but I can’t help but see this view as ultra US centric. The Israeli government wanted to strike at Iran and needed a strong ally. It’s not a ploy to set a trap for the US, which is bonkers.
Here, let me rephrase it to be Israel-centric for you:
The Israeli government didn't need America to join. If they wanted to kill the ayatollah, they could do it alone. If they wanted to denuclearize Iran, every single expert affirmed that it wasn't a realistic goal, no matter how many allies they had. The net outcome of this war is extremely negative for the United States so far, and scott-free for Israel. Defense commentators had been predicting this Iran war manipulation for decades, and warned US policymakers to oppose it as far as they could. Israeli lobbyists now propose US enlistment laws, such is their need for wanton escalation under Trump: https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20260903-a-proposal-seeks-...
So, what was the goal? For decades, Netanyahu has used the threat of violence and war to secure his position as prime minister. He campaigned for Yitzhak Rabin's assassination, denied any incitement, and then took his place when he was killed. He's ostensibly corrupt and stands accused of manufacturing crises to enable his political support. His administration spends hundreds of millions of dollars rehabilitating his internationally reviled image. I wasn't born yesterday, you can't ambiguate Likud's history of escalation, assassination and manipulation.
I don’t stand for Likud, and I want them gone a thousand times more than you do, and have for years. I’m not defending the Israeli government’s decisions, and I’m not sure why you assume that.
My point, which you haven’t addressed, is that the US is responsible for its actions, and can’t blame anyone else for the decisions it makes.
Israel’s decisions are not About the US, and US decisions are not About Israel. I oppose both of these perspectives that you presented.
You can’t reason about this war without discussing energy and China. Yet many people gleefully volunteer their mal informed opinions about geostrategic affairs without addressing the biggest geostrategic factors that have been driving US policy for decades if not centuries.
What an anti semetic remark. You seem to have no issue with Saudi owning a major portion of tech, a country where lgtbq, woman’s, freedom of speech, and minority rights is not really a thing.
Being anti-Zionist and concerned about the single largest donor to the IDF now controlling a massive chunk of American MSM is not antisemitic. I also didn't say anything about Saudi Arabia so I don't know why you're trying to put words in my mouth there. For the record I don't think anyone should have a major position in tech, that's a huge problem.
Also, Israel is murdering women, children, lgbtq and attacking our freedom of speech (they also have murdered more journalists than any country in history and will not allow journalists into Gaza), so that's certainly a priority to address, especially since I as a US citizen am made complicit in these actions.
You keep saying he’s donated to the IDF. Do you have any source for that? Now if you mean FIDF, that is an organization which is somewhat equivalent to the USO program. Not really “military”, in the sense that no munitions were bought.
I've said it once. This is the second time you've lied about what I've said in this thread. I don't feel the need to continue this conversation, but here's more background on Ellison (and other billionaires) donations to the IDF:
Has she driven it into the ground? Remember that the goal is not to provide entertainment or news, but to act as a politically-aligned propaganda outlet. Has it really failed to achieve that goal?
But that's my point, do ratings actually matter? Are the ratings even representative of viewership nowadays? What if the goal is not to have good ratings or to be popular, but to generate politically aligned content that can be propagated across both broadcast and social media, and to act as a censorship gate against politically misaligned content?
Fun fact: Skydance was originally started as a vehicle to buy David Ellison an acting career [1], which spent $60M on Fly Boys. It grossed $17M. There's a very real "failed in Hollywood to alt-right" pipeline, actually.
The truth is that Hollywood was already dying and it had been systematically dismantled by short-term profit seeking. It dismantled the system that created hugely valuable properties like Friends, Cheers, ER, Seinfeld, etc where 22 episodes were created every year to a system where streamers could cut out having to pay for syndication by creating 8 episodes every 3-4 years.
You see a lot of stars of shows having podcasts now from shows that ended years or even decades ago (The Office, The Sopranos). In a healthy ecosystem, successful actors would be working actors.
You see productions chase tax rebates all across North America such as Georgia and Canada where once productions were typically based in LA and that had a ton of ecosystem benefits. As soon as the tax rebates go, so do the productions.
Gavin Newsom clearly isn't serious about becoming president because approving this merger is going to lead to even more layoffs and fewer productions. It's going to be deeply unpopular in California. For good reason.
So what's core to all this (IMHO) is... housing. Housing is an input cost to everything in that locations. LA used to be relatively cheap. It had a mix of housing types from single family homes to mansions to budget apartments so Ho actors, writers, etc could reasonably start out.
And then with declining demand as productions spread out and less pilots and shows were being made overall, the industry has become dominated by nepo babies.
I actually think that in future centuries when history is written about the turning point for American empire, it'll be the downfall of Hollywood. You cannot overstate the value the US had to export culture to the entire world with Hollywood.
>Fun fact: Skydance was originally started as a vehicle to buy David Ellison an acting career
Damn, I wish my daddy was a multi-billionaire and fund my nepo-baby hobbies with 8 figures.
>So what's core to all this (IMHO) is... housing.
The Backrooms and Obsession were made by youtubers with shoestring budgets.
The core is Hollywood hasn't made any new innovative and memorable IPs to convince people to spend money watching them in over a decade. People aren't gonna go to the cinema to watch a crappy new sequel/reboot of the Terminator or the Matrix when they can watch the better originals they already have at home.
>the industry has become dominated by nepo babies
More like it's been dominated by accountants and nepo-babies cosplaying as socialist political activists with zero talent to create something good worth watching. "Evil cannot create anything new it can only corrupt and ruin what good forces have invented or made"
> Fun fact: Skydance was originally started as a vehicle to buy David Ellison an acting career [1], which spent $60M on Fly Boys. It grossed $17M. There's a very real "failed in Hollywood to alt-right" pipeline, actually.
Fun fact: Ellison also started Annapurna, which is Megan Ellison's vehicle for pushing gay propaganda to children through games. "Mixtape" bombed hard despite overwhelming praise from bought critics.
In 1 or 2 years AI movies will be better in everything. From acting , to camera work to environments to story telling. Check out the quality of some of work already out there. There is a massive shift going on. China is going full speed mode. The film industry will be reshaped. Warner Bros should have used those billions to purchase products like seadance. Otherwise they are out
IMO Star Trek is mostly dead anyways. The Orville was the best Star Trek in a very long time. Strange Worlds started so strong but season 3 and 4 really took a nose five r
I've found season 4 of SNW to be the best Star Trek in the 21st century. Can you share what you enjoyed more in its earlier seasons?
DSC and Picard were long slogs in the spirit of "grit" and "realism." SNW having fun, switching up the mood every episode, and telling stories is a breath of fresh air. Strange New Episodes! The Henson Studio collaboration was amazing. Since Netflix canned Dark Crystal, I've been missing my weird muppets traveling across time and space.
Both LD and SNW managed to get less of that Kurtzman stink compared to Academy, DSC, or the movie which shall never be named. I hope they'll let the franchise mellow until they find new direction. (And a new owner.)
* Lower Decks is the truest Trek to ever Trek, but I know that's asinine so I saved my opinion for the footnote.
* ENT was off to a good start, but the 9/11-ification of TV took it off course.
I didn't like DSC and most of Picard either, just like you because it was too gritty. Although it certainly helped that TNG is by faaar my favorite of the Treks.
I liked that season 1 and 2 of SNW felt like the stakes were lower and there were fewer gimmicky episodes. The muppet episode for me for example was a huge negative. So was the fake documentary, the Event Horizon remake and of course the double episode where they were fighting manifested evil which to be couldn't be further from the Trek spirit.
> Although it certainly helped that TNG is by faaar my favorite of the Treks.
The final season of Picard was pure fan service AND I LOVED EVERY MOMENT OF IT! Even when I'm critical of Trek, I'm still there and trying to enjoy. Thank you for sharing.
I'm a sucker for a captain (or anyone) who falls asleep with a good book on his chest. Even if it's fan service.
During the height of the pandemic I rewatched TNG. When Timescape opened with Picard, Data, Troy and Geordie on their way back to the Enterprise in a runabout and having dinner together. Having these characters I've known and lived for so long have a casual work meal made me miss office lunch so much I almost started to cry. No other show would have been able to do that
The most significant thing here is not just the inevitable loss of jobs and the adverse effects of conglomeration/monopolies, but that the most historically filmmaker/artist-friendly studio is now co-owned by MAGA billionaires and the Saudis, direct opponents to democracy.
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[ 4.8 ms ] story [ 203 ms ] threadThey had a Lower Decks cartoon crossover already, so they can't even deny the possibility now.
I wonder if David Ellison is a fun guy IRL.
I predict the democrats winning, shoving it all under that table and pushing for "reconciliation" and "moving forward" while continuing the rotten status quo that got Trump elected in the first place. Maybe a few token prosecutions of low level wage workers involved.
Obama et al instead tore open old racial wounds, thereby destroying class solidarity in exchange for Wall St promoting their ideology, thereby creating “Woke”.
This was the origin of the Obama -> Bernie -> Trump cohort, who helped bring Trump into power a decade later.
Which part are you struggling to take as in good faith?
I’m sure it’s not your preferred narrative of the times, but we both knew that before I answered; so what is it that strikes you as in bad faith rather than my genuine interpretation of events?
There were numerous memes at the time pointing out the shift in the language of NYT et al from discussing class issues to racial grievances. Clear as day in Google’s metrics of media terms.
That shift in focus is what broke Occupy Wall St as a class movement — and was adopted by Wall St to appoint commissars of that ideology in exchange. Woke.
The Obama -> Bernie -> Trump pipeline is a cohort of working Millennials, ie, the proletariat who have lost faith in Democrat politics serving capital and racial tribes rather than the working class. So they elected someone with the right platform they believed would break the system — following the rigging of the 2016 primary. They’re one of the relatively small (1-2%) but engaged cohorts that switch teams, eg, when the election comes down to under 1% difference, which way they vote matters — and they generally vote anti-establishment, with increasing aggression.
Democrats have completed failed to perceive that reality and engaged in name calling instead — eg, the multiple replies calling me a racist to slander me and poison the well for debate.
I usually don’t reply because there’s no point making serious discussions to people who have already made up their mind, eg, sibling replies.
Ah yes, we all remember how America had no racism or anything like that before 2008.
Just like the emancipation proclamation solved slavery, racism was solved in the 60s. We definitely don't have (literally the same) people running around being rather transparent in their moronic racism all the time.
How dare Obama talk about a problem that affects 30% of the country continuously.
Concentrating so much power in the federal government is problematic, and unnecessary.
Besides, that does nothing to address this mega-merger.
> Do not fall into the trap of anthropomorphizing Larry Ellison. You need to think of Larry Ellison the way you think of a lawnmower. You don’t anthropomorphize your lawnmower, the lawnmower just mows the lawn - you stick your hand in there and it’ll chop it off, the end. You don’t think "oh, the lawnmower hates me" – lawnmower doesn’t give a shit about you, lawnmower can’t hate you. Don’t anthropomorphize the lawnmower. Don’t fall into that trap about Oracle.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc&t=2308s
goebbels is the movie influence of hollywood. its appropriate regardless
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2026/09/25/paramount-hollywood-prom...
But probably not with Ellison in charge. He'll probably just drive both companies into the ground.
I would bet Ellison loses on this merger too. No one under the age of 60 cares about these legacy media companies to justify tens of billions of dollar valuations. At best, professional media studios are just an add on business for companies like Amazon and Apple and Disney and Sony, with Netflix being the outlier.
There should be a diverse leaning of news companies, otherwise you'll only get half truths. You can't expect a left leaning news org to report anything bad about the left, or right leaning news org to present anything bad about the right. The left will be motivated to find flaws in the right, and the right will be motivated to find flaws in the left. That's a good thing. I believe an adversarial system is required to find truth. A center leaning news org is nice, but they may be motivated to keep their reporting "even", to not appear biased, which isn't really possible with the tick tock of republican and democrat leadership.
A for-profit news org changing leadership/alignment, in a response to massively falling profits [1], isn't a sign of dictatorship, it's a sign of them being aligned to the reason they exist: making moneys.
[1] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/cnn-net-worth-sliced-half-192...
If - for example - you find a major news outlet that's pro-union, pro-single-payer, pro-wealth-taxes, and pro-debt-free-education, let me know.
Do you think this is being prevented somehow? There are many left leaning news agencies [1]. Maybe the "problem" is that they're all for profit, most of which comes from ads, most of which are anti union companies.
What's the alternative? Mandated reporting?
[1] https://www.poynter.org/fact-checking/media-literacy/2021/sh...
Democrat Al Franken got kicked out of Senate when it was found he inapproprately kissed a woman. I can name a long list of creeps in the GOP side who received protection from their side. Matt Gaetz, Roy Moore, Sexual Harassment Hegseth, Epstein-Friend in Chief. The GOP doesn't seem to have any principles about which sexual deviant they have, they just care about having the majority (in congress) or the power. Oh yeah, speaking of that, sexual assaulter Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh...
I'd trust left-leaning media to report wrongdoing whoever does it, whereas right-leaning media will gloss or bare-face lie about wrongdoing done by the right, and exaggerate about wrongdoings by the left...
The first group will define good/bad acts and then judge people by what acts they commit, the second defines good/bad people and then judges acts by which person is doing them.
On a similar note, I highly recommend a playlist of long-form videos from ~2016, titled (in the sense of an expose) "The Alt-Right Playbook". In particular, the video "Always a Bigger Fish" [0] tries to make sense of some persistent "how can they possibly believe X but not Y" disagreements when it comes to democracy and egalitarianism.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=agzNANfNlTs&list=PLJA_jUddXv...
I live in the one of the bluest of blue states, in a very blue city. Corruption, not enforcing existing laws, and not adhering to laws, is a problem with both parties. Just go visit many of our previous local officials, who are currently in jail.
CNN nudging more towards the right doesn't somehow influence the overall left leaning spread [1], or in any way indicate a dictatorship is on the rise.
[1] https://www.poynter.org/fact-checking/media-literacy/2021/sh...
Jews in much of the world are hiding and are forced to extreme security measures around their synagogues and schools.
Post truth world. Sad stuff.
> One of the longest-running tropes at The Verge is that a workable antitrust policy for the United States would be simply to forbid companies from buying Time Warner because it has never worked and it may never work again, and that we should just pass one law.
Checks out:
Jan 11, 2001: AOL and Time Warner merged to create AOL Time Warner
June 14, 2018: AT&T acquired Time Warner, renamed WarnerMedia
April 8, 2022: WarnerMedia spun out of AT&T, merged with Discovery
...Paramount sulks, and bides its time....
That's what I've been thinking about so many "ordained" or duress "marriages" since long before 1989.
0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania?wprov=sfti1
Seems very rational to me.
I'm sure they'll love it when this AI bubble pops too
For example if you bought S&P 500 in Jul 1929, you got your investment back in 1955 (inflation adjusted). If you bought S&P 500 in Apr 2000, you got your investment back in 2014 (inflation adjusted).
https://www.multpl.com/inflation-adjusted-s-p-500
https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/interactive/2011...
"Market returns are more volatile than most people realize,” Mr. Easterling said, “even over periods as long as 20 years.”
in your second link, a commenter rightfully calls out that the log scale makes the data reductive
I think whatever it is that you need to fall asleep at night is your own habit - it doesn't need to be the rest of ours
Not understanding how investing works doesn’t make everyone else behave under your misunderstandings.
Or are you claiming anything that was a merger ends like Enron?
Well there is massive waste of time on doing all the stuff need for it to happen. But I think they would have come up with something as unproductive as that anyway so overall it is not like that time would have been spend for anything actually productive.
Made up "value" moving from one place to an other. Just so that some people have something to do. And most likely they would not have much productive things to do in any case.
Well you aren't losing your job
I wonder where this ranks in the top 5 stupidest things I've ever heard. It's bad enough merging customer databases when two companies merge.
No other major ISP has ever done this that I know of. Likely because it's completely unnecessary. Who made this decision (and why weren't they fired immediately)?
Nobody. Going back to 1989 every AOL account had a screen name that was used as your login and your identity. Being an employee was just a flag on your account in the database.
In 1993 AOL launched its internet gateway that accepted something@aol.com and put it in your AOL Mail box. You could tell that someone was an AOL employee because a banner (I think it was) appeared at the top of the message telling you.
Some of the network engineering folks had real aol.net addresses, but I don't know how that was handled internally. I also think the Netscape folks eventually made enough of a stink to keep their previous email address too.
> Nobody.
This might be true for AOL; I wasn't there except as an early/beta customer -- something like 25% off their hourly(!) fees for life! :-)
But at HBO this was absolutely a choice. We had @hbo.com email addresses; it was a race among all the TW siblings who would jump on the @aol.com bandwagon fastest, and our CIO was eager to win that race: we were among the first to switch, and it was a pain in the ass. As one example, there was no good out-of-office functionality. I had built that for HBO in the mid-'90s on MS Mail for Mac, so regressing that hard was a bitter pill.
As another fun piece of trivia, I got one of the "blueberry"s -- a blackberry purpose-built to work with aol.com email addresses, and housed in dark blue translucent plastic instead of black. Good times...
I was always wondering about that; it seemed to me that it would have been free advertising to Google if their users had to write and say @google.com all the time.
Yeah, we weren't thrilled.
All that culture that America has built for ourselves and exported to the world is now owned in massive part by sovereign wealth at Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Dubai. Perhaps our greatest export (along with, as every feel knows, microcode and pizza delivery), now massively foreign owned, given up. https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/hollywood-hungry-gu...
And boatload of debt has been raised, to grease the handoff, to payoff some of the richest people for the acquisition, thanks to the overwhelming investment of these brutal human-rights-violating unfree countries, a massive 40,000 lb albatross of debt to wear around Hollywood's neck. All to do what America lately has traded its past couple bits of good and values for: helping a couple extremely rich dudes cash out, get filthy rich.
Was it Reed Hastings that was painting Netflix's main rival not other streaming platforms, but other types of leisure like video games? This was during the streaming wars IIRC.
Regardless of how you look at it, this is yet another confluence of IP franchises merging together, whatever juice is left in them squeezed out and reprocessed over and over over time. Kind of what Oracle is in software I guess?
Working in an adjacent entertainment IP focus business myself, my eyes are glazing over a bit at this point.
"Actually we're really David and we need to band together against Goliath." Points at imagined external threat
The part that's wild to me is that we know that this merger extends to politics and control over media. The IP's, studios, franchises, all the actual businesses are just part of the estate. It's the Hearst Media Empire story retold again.
Yes. He always told us that we don't need to worry about the other streamers nearly as much as we have to worry about them turning off the TV and playing games or (gasp!) going outside. TikTok/Instagram Reels wasn't a thing yet, but if it were, I'm sure they would have been on the list too.
https://x.com/andlikelaura/status/1392091221032460291
Meanwhile, yeah, Paramount, Time Warner, Disney, etc. have all become so money-minded and risk-averse that it reminds me of the twilight days of the old Hollywood studio system, where all the major production companies were locked into a heated battle to determine who could be the absolute blandest.
It's really the opposite model of the "major" streaming players who fund tentpole releases in the conventional Hollywood way, and then have a long tail of niche content (cooking reality shows and the like) that are clearly on a much tighter budget, but still basically modeled on being a cheaper version of a cable show rather than a much better funded version of a YouTube comedy troupe.
That kind of describes my relationship with Nebula. There’s a lot of great stuff on there, and lately I have been watching it more than YouTube. But still, YouTube is where I tend to go when I’m looking to find something new that I genuinely haven’t seen before. I think the lower floor for production values is a big part of that.
The words and the performances, the chemistry and creativity of the actors, that's the real priceless stuff.
There's a huge amount of censorship with youtube though. The movies and shows on cable and streaming services can still talk about dead people without being forced to say they are "unalived". CNN can talk about a pandemic without calling it a "panini". Besides censoring specific words and phrases Youtube demonitizes entire genres of content along with anything that is "unfriendly" to advertisers. If that's the future of media in the US we're screwed.
He was talking about the "incumbent" they are trying to displace. Netflix's challenge was not getting people to switch from watching Hulu to Netflix, but to get them not to sleep in order to watch Netflix.
Evil maybe, but nothing moronic about it.
Cantrill tried to, as diplomatically as possible, warn everyone.
Nobody listened.
Yea, and spending time with your friends and family, meeting new people, sleeping...
From [1]:
> “Think about if you didn’t watch Netflix last night: What did you do? There’s such a broad range of things that you did to relax and unwind, hang out, and connect—and we compete with all of that.”
When I read that interview, I became a lot more cautious of using Netflix and other streaming platforms, knowing their design is adversarial to my values (I want to be deliberate about what I watch, not be manipulated into mindless consumption).
[1] https://www.fastcompany.com/40491939/netflix-ceo-reed-hastin...
and i'm not even someone you'd class as young anymore, so I don't think this is a younger generation thing
Their ads are terrible. And since I watch via a device like Roku, etc, I have to put up with them. I've actively removed them from my devices. Occasionally, I feel like looking up some video. I install it, and often before I even watch the video I uninstall it because the awful UI reminds me of all the other awful stuff in it.
Curation doesn't exist. I have to work hard to find good content. Harder than any video service out there.
And shorts. Oh. Dear. God.
For some very targeted stuff (home repairs, video game walkthroughs), it's great. For the rest, it just sucks.
I've never watched a YouTube short.
My recommendations are all very well aligned with my interests. The trick here is to go through your watch history and delete things that are leading the recommendation algorithm astray. I am ruthless about that.
If it works for you, great! Most video I watch is in the form of TV shows and movies. And Youtube sucks for that. Youtube is great for some hobby stuff. I used to like it for reviews, but even that sucks now - when I do a search I'm inundated with low effort reviews (i.e. by people who haven't used the product they're reviewing).
But if there's a creator you really like and follow, I can understand that.
> I've never watched a YouTube short.
Don't you think they should give you an option not to present them to you, given that you don't watch them?
> My recommendations are all very well aligned with my interests. The trick here is to go through your watch history and delete things that are leading the recommendation algorithm astray. I am ruthless about that.
I don't want to pay money and then have to do this. This is a pain I don't have to deal with in any other service.
Yes, I certainly do! The fact that YouTube still tries to get me to watch Shorts every few weeks is 100% a user-hostile choice. Seems like basically every app these days does that kind of shit. It makes me sad, but it's pretty clearly in the set of things I can't change, so I try to just be mindful of the serenity prayer and accept it.
Shorts are like the video equivalent of snacking on Doritos all day long.
I imagine they are that's why I pay for YT Premium, which I think is my most bang for buck subscription based on the amount of time I spend watching it
> Curation doesn't exist.
I don't find this a problem personally because 95% of my feed is just channels I'm subscribed to but YMMV depends on what you expect out of it
I love SmartTube, it's been great. I used to pay for a Youtube subscription to get rid of the ads, but that doesn't include the in-video ads that content creators put in there - but SmartTube has that covered too, in most videos I watch the in-video ads are skipped too. I have 5 chromecasts on the 5 TVs around my house, and every one of them has SmartTube installed. I wouldn't want to watch Youtube without it.
https://github.com/yuliskov/SmartTube/releases
I watch probably an hour of YouTube a week and would watch more if I could find anything good.
My favorite TV of the past five years is probably Severance. Is there anything of that caliber on YouTube? One of the best movies I saw last year was on Netflix (Train Dreams). Are there great movies on YouTube?
I’d love to year about some of your favorite stuff on YouTube.
How much work do you put into curating your feed? Mine is terrible. For example, I’ll watch a video on how to fix my dishwasher and suddenly it thinks I want to fix all dishwashers.
I wonder if an AI could help me with this? I tell it five things I’m interested in and give it my credentials and it watches and likes stuff (or does whatever it has to to tune the feed) until the dashcam videos, first amendment auditors, reaction videos, and all shorts are gone.
This is funny because I have stopped clicking YouTube links for the simple reason that every video seems to be 45+ minutes. Which I get is based on how monetization works on YouTube.
Like Old Twitter, short-form video is a forcing function with value in forcing posters to get to the point. (I have never seen a YouTube Shorts or whatever link in the wild.)
The key contributor to Hollywood's waning influence is the generation gap; it's a cultural institution that is supposed to be culturally salient. Take the Mandalorian movie as an example; the biggest studio using the biggest IP to spend $300M on a movie... which lost $100M. That movie was competing at the box office at the same time with Obsession, which was made for $750k by a young Youtuber has made over half a billion worldwide.
As of today Ellison has an extraordinary amount of greenlight authority in an industry whose decision-makers are overwhelmingly a generation older. He can shake things up if he wants to, and I hope he does.
is the thing he's bringing... advertising for the movies theyre going to make?
https://www.972mag.com/ellisons-paramount-tiktok-israel-medi...
Which foreign adversary and you implying? Are you implying that a specific ally of the USA is really an adversary? On what basis did you make this connection? Which foreign citizens are involved in this transaction? What tangible connection does said foreign adversary have to this company?
Now lets see..
Did you mean Russia?
Two RT Employees Indicted For Covertly Funding And Directing U.S. Company That Published Thousands Of Videos In Furtherance Of Russian Interests - https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/pr/two-rt-employees-indict...
Intel report: Putin directly ordered effort to influence election - https://www.cnn.com/2017/01/06/politics/intelligence-report-...
U.S. Accuses Russian TV Network of Conducting Covert Intelligence Acts https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/13/us/politics/russia-sancti...
Do you mean Qatar?
U.S. Orders Al Jazeera Affiliate to Register as Foreign Agent: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/15/business/media/aj-al-jaze...
Maybe you meant China? DOJ brands Chinese-owned U.S. newspaper a foreign agent https://www.axios.com/2021/08/25/doj-chinese-owned-sing-tao-...
With that introduction, is there a quick sum up somewhere to get someone like me to understand why there's so much division on this topic? All I really know is that in the most recent stuff with Gaza, people think that Israel's actions are too much, but I would be lying if I claimed to know what any of those Middle East scurmishes are about.
If you're genuinely curious about why people's views on Israel have shifted you could've got yourself excellent information with a simple prompt as such:
"Give me a brief neutral summary backed with reliable sources on the state of tensions in the Middle East today and the role played by Israel and other states. Help me understand why people's views on Israel have shifted so much since the start of the war in Gaza?"
I think that's actually what they hope, to discredit all mainstream media.
It's the same plan as with the federal government: discredit it and make people lose faith via intentional sabotage.
It's not antisemitic to criticize Israel, but this language is verging on antisemitic because Israel very much does not have "direct editorial control" over Skydance. David Ellison is the one with "direct editorial control" and you can certainly say he's "extremely pro-Israel" but he himself is not "a foreign adversary" by any definition of those words. So either you're being hyperbolic with the meaning of "direct editorial control" or you're insinuating that David Ellison will defer to Israel on everything because he's Jewish which is a common antisemitic trope[1]. I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume the former, but the latter is enough of a possibility that I would suggest rephrasing this comment to avoid giving supporters of Israel a legitimate line of complaint against your underlying point.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_loyalty#Jews
Larry Ellison:
https://www.dropsitenews.com/p/larry-ellison-vetted-marco-ru...
>Larry Ellison Vetted Marco Rubio for Fealty to Israel
Indeed Israeli media covers this also:
https://forward.com/fast-forward/853703/david-ellison-appoin...
>David Ellison appoints Israeli to lead merged Paramount-Warner studios
The same thing happened with the Tik Tok purchase, the entire point of handing control of the Tik Tok algorithm to Larry Ellison was so that they could clamp down on the discussion about the genocide in Gaza. You can see the results of it in the reports that the world Jewish congress put out directly:
>https://wjc-org-website.s3.amazonaws.com/horizon/assets/YNN3...
>TikTok is the exception, removing 64% of content overall (and 71% of content formally reported to it), compared to 12–15% on every other major platform.
>You can certainly say he's "extremely pro-Israel" but he himself is not "a foreign adversary" by any definition of those words.
All you're showing is that his family is pro-Israel, but that does not mean they are controlled by Israel. These conversations about Israel always seem to remove the agency on the American end which is where a lot of the historical antisemitic tropes live. Whether it's intentional or not, it's phrased in a way to evoke the trope of a shadowy cabal of Jews pulling the strings behind the scenes, and other countries rarely get talked about in this same way. For example, have you ever heard anyone suggest Google and Microsoft are controlled by India because their CEOs were born in India?
>other countries rarely get talked about in this same way
They actually do, but the Israeli lobby has grown so powerful that it is now dominating most of the political action in the USA in a way that has become impossible to ignore.
There are actually plenty of conversations to be had about Indian ethnic affinity and lobbying. USINPAC is the Indian lobbying organization which is actually modeled after AIPAC (the notorious Israeli lobbying group which has political control over most of the US congress).
https://www.trackaipac.com/
There is a looming argument which hasn't yet entered the public mainstream discourse about Indian foreign influence and Indian ethnic nepotism in the United States, but that is an entirely separate conversation.
Most Indian CEOs are the same caste (Brahmin) and there is a good argument that many of them have been nominated by the boards of their companies and institutional investors with large stakes so that they can navigate India's notorious bureaucracy and deepen ties to the country, which supplies much of the cheap labor for the tech industry. Many of them have direct ties to the Bharatiya Janata Party in India and can use the access to people like Modi to access more Indian labor as well as build more in India. Modi talks openly about exporting human capital and using its diaspora to wield influence in the United States. One can argue that they are taking a queue from Israel here.
>Narendra Modi urges the Indian diaspora to become an extension of foreign policy
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/mar/02/narendra-modi-...
Yes it was. My comment was directly in response to someone saying "it's scary how much US media a foreign adversary now has direct editorial control over". I know that was not your argument, but it was someone's argument and I responded to refute it. I don't know what point you thought was being discussed, but it's now clear you misread the conversation.
If you want to split hairs between "controlled by Israel" and "controlled by people who's sole interest is supporting Israel", go ahead.
>But we have to fight with the weapons that apply to the battlefields with which we engage, and the most important ones are on social media. And the most important purchase that's going on right now is? Tik Tok. Number One.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/3tdrO8bA7rs
Later, control of the Tik Tok algorithm was given to Larry Ellison and they immediately used it to clamp down on discussion of the genocide in Gaza (as well as any other types of discussion they deem "antisemitism").
Now Larry Ellison's son has been given control of all these other media companies and has appointed an Israeli to run things.
This is DIRECT evidence of Larry and David Ellison working directly with the highest levels of a foreign government to manipulate public opinion on behalf of that foreign government.
Whether you say they are being "controlled" or doing it voluntarily, the outcome is exactly the same.
> The Federal Communications Commission on Thursday granted Paramount Skydance’s request to allow Middle Eastern royal families to hold a substantial stake in a merged Paramount-Warner Bros. Discovery.
> Foreign investors, including the sovereign wealth funds of Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Abu Dhabi, are slated to indirectly own nearly 50% of the equity in David Ellison’s proposed mega-studio. That will give them a hefty stake in CBS, CNN, Comedy Central, HBO and two historic Hollywood film studios.
So foreign “adversaries” literally own enormous stakes in these companies and have been cleared by the FCC. Yet only possible pro-Israel influence by Ellison gets called out?
1: https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/business/story/20... 2: https://www.realclearpolicy.com/articles/2026/04/15/qatar_is...
I think you could make a graph showing the inverse relationship between how pro palestinian a country is, versus how crap of a place it is to live in.
So you're saying if a place is more pro-palestinian it's less crap to live there. Makes sense.
The part of Europe you're talking about is also more like a fifth than half.
Most of the gulf states are pretty much controlled by Zionists at this point anyway, or at least heavily aligned with them.
I think it's great that the America supports Israel, whose values and interests basically align with the West, over the rest of the Middle East, Russia and China with their values, which being as diplomatic as possible, do not.
Just take a look at all the countries that are the most against Israel. They are a mixture of failed states, third world and what they all share in common is a distressing lack of regard for human rights. Both of other nationalities and their own. Europe is unfortunately going in that direction, and I believe it's no coincience that they are simultaneously becoming worse countries and more anti Israel. It's not causation but it is correlation.
The US couped, invaded, and destroyed tens of countries since WW2 until now. Israel is still massacring civilians in Gaza during a ceasefire and continuing their pogrom in the West Bank, killing people and stealing more lands. This is your example of human rights?
As for your charges against Israel, they are factually incorrect. Israel is not still massacring civilians in Gaza, neither did they at any point engage in anything like a systemic, strategic program of killing civilians in Gaza. If you want to know what the casualty figures would look like if that was indeed the case, look at Iran which did do just that with the protests last year where they succeeded in murdering in one week roughly the amount of people Israel killed in Gaza in an entire year of active fighting. The worst you can accuse them of is of not doing enough to minimize civilian casualties. I will argue they did plenty but that's for another time. As for "progroms" in the West Bank, I would love to see what you're talking about. For your reference this is a wikipedia page on progroms[1] For some context, the number of extremist violent settlers that the whole world is fixated on numbers according to estimates in the dozens to hundreds.
Finally, I will leave it up to your imagination what it would look like if the roles were reversed, if the Arabs were dominant in Israel and the Jews were a minority, to help things along, here's examples from the wider Arab world[2]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pogroms_in_the_Russian_Empire
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_exodus_from_the_Muslim_...
the systematic killing is pretty clear - tell people to evacuate to an israeli defined "safe zone" and then drop bombs on it. other defined policies had the idf mowing down escaped israeli-citizen hostages waving white flags and approaching the gaza border. assigning snipers to get headshots on children.
its a system informed by the fact that going too hard would result in instant sanctions, but the intent is made plenty clear, and the results are easily visible by counting the number of living gazans still in northern gaza.
palestine was under arab and turkish rules for centuries, and jews did much better than arabs are under israeli occupation
if the west was more values-similar with israel, there would be constant swastikas drawn on everything jewish owned or in jewish view, with a couple real true blue nazis going around beating up, killing, and stealing jewish property, and the government would keep pardoning them and insisting its not a problem because its only a couple hundred thousand nazis in a country witb many millions.
i sure saw in that video where cnn gets attacked by the idf clearing the way for settlers that the west bank is covered in stars of david, drawn the same way swatstikas are to terrorize people
Civilians like maybe Ali Al-Amoudi? Or maybe Muhammad Yazouri? Nayal Abu Obeid? Izz al-Din al-Beik? Izz al-Din al-Haddad? Mohammed Odeh?
Is there any combatant Hamas doesn't call a civilian?
Since Hamas hasn't disarmed and Gaza wasn't demilitarized there is effectively no ceasefire. There is a war and Israel is attacking military targets as it is allowed to do under international law. Minimizing civilian casualties as it is required to do.
If Hamas, the democratically elected government of Gaza, has a problem with that then it can surrender.
Israel has only attacked the safe zone when there were military targets present, such as the attack on Mohammed Deif. That's on Hamas. Once you get the civilian/combatant breakdown from Hamas then we can check how many civilians per capita were attacked in humanitarian zones (very few) vs. zones that were evacuated (the majority).
EDIT: Re: The Ottomans. Massacred Jews in Safed in 1517. Ethnically cleansed Jaffa of Jews in 1917. And that's just the tip of the iceberg. No comparison whatsoever to Israeli Arabs who are equal citizens in Israel. As to the Palestinians in the occupied territories, they're not citizens. Also AFAIK the Jews didn't mount a campaign of suicide bombings against the Arabs or fire rockets into Arab cities.
> If Hamas, the democratically elected government of Gaza, has a problem with that then it can surrender.
The last election in Gaza was over two decades ago.
Hamas seized and have kept control of Gaza. Coincidentally, they are the only people with weapons in Gaza.
Arab jews did not want to move to Israel, they were fine living among muslims. Mossad faked terrorist bombings in Baghdad and killed bunch of jews to create an illusion of jew hatred in Iraq.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1950%E2%80%931951_Baghdad_bomb...
Jews were ethnically cleansed from all Arab countries.
Re: your link. I mean the Iraqi authorities said so. Yeah right.
Are you Mossad?
I note that you wrote: “typical jewish propaganda and hasbara” - you forgot to say “Zionist” or “Israeli”. Was that a slip or have your handlers in Israel instructed you to be openly antisemitic now?
israel doesnt at all align with (modern) western values, instead more like the old apartheid south africa, or really, more like nazi germany in terms of supremacism and industrial might put towards surveiling and killing the less-than-human people you allude to as being less-than-human.
the causation of all those failed states is israel. it makes failed states because those are easier to conquer land from, and cant fight against all the abuses of humans.
sure, the US was half supportive of the nazis too, but that wasn't a good thing.
Argument: Unproven claims, there are virtually no jewish terrorists, anyway in your own distorted mind Israel is a terrorist state.
Counterpoint: Oct 7, Bibas family, Hamas, Palestinan Authority/PLO, Islam.
>the lack of gay or even interfaith marriage, the genocide in gaza.
........
...
I mean, lets just take a moment to reflect on this. For more context Israel has a pretty strong gay culture, so your complaint is about a legal technicality. So you are mentioning that in the same breath as the the death of 70,000 Gazans? And you think that's somehow an argument that makes you look good???
I am a pretty outspoken supporter of Israel, but I have never come close to that level of disrespect to the Palestinian people as you have managed.
>the causation of all those failed states is israel. it makes failed states because those are easier to conquer land from, and cant fight against all the abuses of humans.
The causation of all those failed states is Third World values. Like blaming everyone else for their own failures.
Instead of understanding that these governments use the Israeli Palestinian conflict as a scapegoat, and Israel as a boogeyman, just to make the populous blind to the true cause for their suffering.
who do you think is it fault for those dead Palestinian children ?
Its not hamas who performs mass ritual sacrifice of innocent children. These things have happened before hamas was created and documented by Church and in the Bible
Here’s a recent video of a child carrying weapons for terrorists: https://www.ynetnews.com/article/bj0epw85gx
And before you say that you don’t trust Israeli media, the world doesn’t care enough when it’s Palestinians at fault, so it’s not covered anywhere else.
Its all corroborated and backed by evidence and was a official Church position for centuries
For example the stories of simon of trent and william of norwich
From Wikpedia[1]:
>Blood libel or ritual murder libel (also blood accusation) is an antisemitic trope which falsely accuses Jews of murdering Christians in order to use their blood in the performance of religious rituals... Blood libels often claim that Jews require human blood for the baking of matzos, an unleavened flatbread which is eaten during Passover. Earlier versions of the blood libel accused Jews of ritually re-enacting the crucifixion. The accusations often assert that the blood of Christian children is especially coveted, and historically, blood libel claims have been made in order to account for the otherwise unexplained deaths of children. In some cases, the alleged victims of human sacrifice have become venerated as Christian martyrs. Many of these – most prominently William of Norwich (1144), Little Saint Hugh of Lincoln (1255), and Simon of Trent (1475) – became objects of local cults and veneration
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_libel
Even jewish historian Toaff documented cases of infanticide and connection to religious rituals in his book “Pasque di sangue”. Its all corroborated with evidence
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passovers_of_Blood
And why is that past tense?
>Even jewish historian Toaff documented cases of infanticide and connection to religious rituals in his book “Pasque di sangue”. Its all corroborated with evidence
From your own link:
>Toaff withdrew the book from circulation a week after its publication and republished it the following year with an afterword stating that there was no relationship between the use of dried blood in Jewish ritual and the alleged ritual murders underlying the blood libel.
because the Church has issued "nostra aetate", which was written by ashkenazi jews Gregory Baum, John Oesterreicher, Bruno hussar. This was a political decision driven by aftermath of ww2 and coordinated by the World Jewish Congress and had no basis in theological nor facts nor any other legitimate reasons.
>Toaff withdrew
of course, he withdrew because people did not like the original research he published. He literally received death threats by people who did not like the facts, so he decided to withdraw and self-censor out of caution for his own life.
If the Israeli government cooperates with the ICC, adopts full secularity and stops undermining their neighbors security, then I'd feel a lot better supporting them. Right now I'm only ashamed. There is no upside to sending Israel foreign aid after Likud manipulated Trump into starting an illegal war.
Dahyia doctrine - this means inflict damage on your enemy in such way that will deter him from ever trying to attack you again. It was named in the 2006 Lebanon war, which Hezbollah started, after which nasrallah admitted that if he knew of the Israeli response, he would not have started the war. I suppose your a 5 star general with a better way of creating deterrence.
Hannibal directive - affects only soldiers, and it means that the army must do whatever’s necessary to prevent a kidnapping. This is after a soldier was kidnapped into Gaza, kept there for 5 years without seeing any natural party to assess his condition (which is illegal but no one cares about that when Israelis are the victims), and eventually was released against 1,000 Palestinian prisoners, one of which was sinwar. Again, I assume you are a 5 star general that can find a better solution.
Israel is a secular state. The only thing controlled by religion is marriage (btw USA gives weapons to turkey, Saudi Arabia, UAE, where is the protest against support of these unsecular countries?)
And finally - how exactly is the Iran war illegal?
If Israel wanted to clean their slate, they can always present their case to the ICC. Little wonder that Likud lashes out and call the ICC "biased" for not sharing their beliefs, but such is the culture gap that the Israeli state has fostered. And such is the standards of cooperation and compliance that the rest of the world has come to expect since the horror of WWII. It's hard to not blame Israel for the terrible optics that their leadership has promoted and incorporated into their state's identity. The whataboutism in your comment proves that you also know it's wrong, but just refuse to hold Israel accountable the way that the House of Saud is (very justifiably) criticized. It's clear that Israel demands an ethical double-standard from the world.
> Hannibal directive - affects only soldiers
Officially, maybe. In practice, we know that Israeli forces have deliberately killed civilians and reservists during Hannibal scenarios, too: https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20240709-israels-use-of-ha...
> how exactly is the Iran war illegal?
Congress never agreed to it. Israel can fight all they want, but extended US operations are jeopardized without a congressional authorization. The upcoming midterms are going to shake things up, and it's very possible that the War Powers Resolution of 1973 will be enforced to stop funding for in-theater operations outside of CENTCOM basics and foreign aid. The war isn't popular, and US taxpayers can only foot the bill for so long before they abandon Likud's warmongering initiatives. Even Trump doesn't want to escalate, considering how many threats he wussed out of.
A year later we learned that he threatened his victim that if she would expose him, it would hurt the case against Israel.
why did the jew never defend itself in the ICC, if he is innocent ?
There are. Check out No Kings. My smallish "city" has a protest every week, and organizes a larger one every few months. I go when I can. Most people driving by are even supportive.
> general strike
There was talk of this a while back, and I analyzed it at the time - I don't see how it would help. In fact it seemed like it would make our position worse. The regime wants economic destruction, so its cronies can swoop in to pick up the pieces.
> Organizing groups that bring down whatever is left of US-justicias rotten arms on anyone trying to undermine democracy
From what I see, this is indeed happening at the state-by-state level. But it's happening slowly, and the distributedness makes it hard to see. And much of it gets stymied due to a lot of rotten interference by the federal government - they tend to get things moved things to federal court, where many of the judges are regime apparatchiks. And if they aren't, then the rioter in chief goes to work threatening them with stochastic violence.
> Organizing groups that offer support and counceling for any victim of the regime
There is definitely some of this at the grassroots level, but on the other hand it's pretty hard to help someone that has been dragged away to a concentration camp.
> Boycotts etc
Boycott who? The problem is all the corpos are basically in on it. I've stopped buying stuff at Home Depot, and now buy stuff at Lowe's instead. Big whoop! I expect to find out down the line that Lowe's's corpo management is also full of fascists.
> start 40 years ago and don't let the country become this way.
While the issues have been apparent all along, the problem is that the corpo propaganda has been successful at stopping any sort of reform that would allow us to address this ahead of time. Glaring meta issues like campaign finance and non-plurality voting are basically opposed by both professional parties, who had been offering us the shit sandwich vs turd torta dynamic for decades.
This really betrays a lack of understanding of the structure of the government in the US. The Constitution, for better and worse, heavily insulates the government from tempestuous public opinion. The framers were readers of greek history who understood that democracy was a condition that a republic could devolve into. They built the system to give the voters the vibes that they had a say in the workings of their government while ensuring that in reality they had no such thing.
You used the term “us” so I’m playing along with that “us” vs. “them” state of mind.
So what exactly do you mean by my own choices? I do take responsibility for my own choices. I've done nothing that majorly supports this war.
What I have done that supports this war: 1. continue to pay taxes and otherwise participate in society. 2. voted for conservative (ie democrat) politicians that might work to oppose the con artist in chief regardless of their general support for Israel (although since we're talking about the Iran War specifically, I don't know if this actually counts)
Meanwhile I have protested, the regime in general not the war specifically. Stand out on a corner, sign, smile and wave. Most people honk in support, but once again what can they actually do? There is of course always more one can do to express opposition. But not working hard enough to oppose something is not the same as choosing to support it.
My point is that the US is responsible for its actions, and can’t excuse itself by claiming to be pushed around by anyone.
Some "really profoundly scary technology" was provided to the Israeli military by Oracle[2].
Given they're really happy to be political[3], this isn't your average 'no politics at work'.
1 - https://www.calcalistech.com/ctech/articles/0,7340,L-3912017...
2 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r8yo7_Inikg
3 - https://www.ynetnews.com/tech-and-digital/article/h1w11pj11a...
“The violent genocide committed against an unjustly occupied people.”
ftfy
> An anonymous Substack, Oracle For Palestine, written by a group of Oracle employees, claims that that “our leadership’s unquestioning public support for Israel” has led to a failure of the company to address the one-sided political positions taken by top management and the discrimination faced by employees who don’t share the political views of management.
> “In response to legitimate concerns, many of us have been referred to internal mental health resources rather than having those concerns addressed appropriately,” said the group in a post last year.
From a Ctech interview with Safra Catz: https://www.calcalistech.com/ctechnews/article/t05ji8sue
> For employees, it’s clear: if you’re not for America or Israel, don’t work here
It sounds like internal opposition to Israel is punished at Oracle by systemically discounting their detractors as mentally unwell. You must love Israel at Oracle to avoid this discriminatory action.
The second mentions the US as well. I ask you - should a company want to hire people that are against its home country?
I could only find one publication of someone getting fired in this context, and even that was about this person using the brand logo for their protest as if it was on the company’s behalf. As evidence, none of the other employees participating in the same protest got fired for participating.
Edit: all this is far detached from your claim that you must “love” Israel. At most, don’t recruit the company’s brand to your protest.
Aren't you people supposed to say "Israelis" so that you can pretend your antisemitism is "legitimate criticism of the country of Israel"?
And this is just the tip of the iceberg.
You've just been raised to consider this as "normal". There's nothing normal about it, and if any other new country had started doing this you'd have recognized it for what it is.
Before someone says "all countries do this" - no they don't. Scale matters, impact matters.
"Now I am become Death, the shatterer of worlds..."
not my downvote btw
I am sure no other country could get away with the amount of shit the Israelis pull on a regular basis.
German here. Assuming you're American, that's a rich list LOL.
> aggressively spying on all kinds of US targets incl by placing spy equipment on Secret Service vehicles during visits
The US spies on everyone, including allies as nominally close as Germany. Thanks Snowden for revealing that one. And both the US and Russia are known to use their embassies as SIGINT collection bases.
> dragging the US into wars that don't serve its interests or the interests of its other partners
The US has dragged all of NATO into the mess that Afghanistan ended up being. I might let that one slide because 9/11 was a thing, but a few years later Bush dragged a bunch of other European countries into the mess that Iraq ended up being, and just this year, Trump was pissed that we didn't want to join the fun of bombing Iraq.
> draining US military equipment meant to protect other assets
Trump gave all but zero warning about invading Iran to anyone (well he did toy with the idea, but everyone dismissed it as the usual "deranged madman" brainfarts), leading to everyone (funnily including the US) emptying their entire stockpile of anti-air missiles out of sheer necessity. Millions of dollars just to take a glorified lawnmower on wings.
Israel didn't need to drag the US into bombing Iran. Many parts of the US Republicans have wanted to bomb the Mullahs into submission for decades.
Hint: The lesson was supposed to be that genocide is bad, period. Not that it's ok as long as it is some of the descendants Germany hurt doing it this time.
The Islamist approach for global propaganda is try and associate each culture’s negative terms with Israel. So when they push content to Westerners they say Israel is colonialism, apartheid, and genocide. When they speak to Muslims the Jews are Kuffars and the war against them is holy. When they target the right wing Israel is taking American tax dollars for their own universal healthcare.
[1]: https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2025/09/israel-has-c... [2]: https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/israel-is-committi... [3]: https://www.ohchr.org/en/statements-and-speeches/2024/11/gen... [4]: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/jun/23/israel-deliber...
The UN is openly biased against Israel. One of the reasons it gave for calling it a genocide was that during intense fighting an Israeli tank shell hit a fertility clinic destroying a few thousand embryos.
To put this in context: more than 100,000 babies were born in Gaza over the past 3 years, there are about a million abortions a year in the US, but one incident of an Israeli shell hitting an IVF clinic is enough for the UN commission to conclude it must be a genocide.
The UN was openly biased against apartheid South Africa as well.
[1] https://quincyinst.org/research/the-eighth-front-inside-isra...
Other people, particularly in the US, but also Spain or Ireland where the culture/social sphere is widespread anti-Zionist, might choose to not do so for the reasons I mentioned.
That's why he said Israel. But good hasbara tactic conflating mention of Israel with "jews", keep it up.
Sorry, I don’t follow
The Israeli government didn't need America to join. If they wanted to kill the ayatollah, they could do it alone. If they wanted to denuclearize Iran, every single expert affirmed that it wasn't a realistic goal, no matter how many allies they had. The net outcome of this war is extremely negative for the United States so far, and scott-free for Israel. Defense commentators had been predicting this Iran war manipulation for decades, and warned US policymakers to oppose it as far as they could. Israeli lobbyists now propose US enlistment laws, such is their need for wanton escalation under Trump: https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20260903-a-proposal-seeks-...
So, what was the goal? For decades, Netanyahu has used the threat of violence and war to secure his position as prime minister. He campaigned for Yitzhak Rabin's assassination, denied any incitement, and then took his place when he was killed. He's ostensibly corrupt and stands accused of manufacturing crises to enable his political support. His administration spends hundreds of millions of dollars rehabilitating his internationally reviled image. I wasn't born yesterday, you can't ambiguate Likud's history of escalation, assassination and manipulation.
My point, which you haven’t addressed, is that the US is responsible for its actions, and can’t blame anyone else for the decisions it makes.
Israel’s decisions are not About the US, and US decisions are not About Israel. I oppose both of these perspectives that you presented.
You can’t reason about this war without discussing energy and China. Yet many people gleefully volunteer their mal informed opinions about geostrategic affairs without addressing the biggest geostrategic factors that have been driving US policy for decades if not centuries.
Also, Israel is murdering women, children, lgbtq and attacking our freedom of speech (they also have murdered more journalists than any country in history and will not allow journalists into Gaza), so that's certainly a priority to address, especially since I as a US citizen am made complicit in these actions.
I've said it once. This is the second time you've lied about what I've said in this thread. I don't feel the need to continue this conversation, but here's more background on Ellison (and other billionaires) donations to the IDF:
https://truthout.org/articles/these-billionaires-subsidize-t...
https://www.rawstory.com/bari-weiss-60-minutes-2677864198/
The truth is that Hollywood was already dying and it had been systematically dismantled by short-term profit seeking. It dismantled the system that created hugely valuable properties like Friends, Cheers, ER, Seinfeld, etc where 22 episodes were created every year to a system where streamers could cut out having to pay for syndication by creating 8 episodes every 3-4 years.
You see a lot of stars of shows having podcasts now from shows that ended years or even decades ago (The Office, The Sopranos). In a healthy ecosystem, successful actors would be working actors.
You see productions chase tax rebates all across North America such as Georgia and Canada where once productions were typically based in LA and that had a ton of ecosystem benefits. As soon as the tax rebates go, so do the productions.
Gavin Newsom clearly isn't serious about becoming president because approving this merger is going to lead to even more layoffs and fewer productions. It's going to be deeply unpopular in California. For good reason.
So what's core to all this (IMHO) is... housing. Housing is an input cost to everything in that locations. LA used to be relatively cheap. It had a mix of housing types from single family homes to mansions to budget apartments so Ho actors, writers, etc could reasonably start out.
And then with declining demand as productions spread out and less pilots and shows were being made overall, the industry has become dominated by nepo babies.
I actually think that in future centuries when history is written about the turning point for American empire, it'll be the downfall of Hollywood. You cannot overstate the value the US had to export culture to the entire world with Hollywood.
[1]: https://brobible.com/culture/article/david-ellison-tried-to-...
Damn, I wish my daddy was a multi-billionaire and fund my nepo-baby hobbies with 8 figures.
>So what's core to all this (IMHO) is... housing.
The Backrooms and Obsession were made by youtubers with shoestring budgets.
The core is Hollywood hasn't made any new innovative and memorable IPs to convince people to spend money watching them in over a decade. People aren't gonna go to the cinema to watch a crappy new sequel/reboot of the Terminator or the Matrix when they can watch the better originals they already have at home.
>the industry has become dominated by nepo babies
More like it's been dominated by accountants and nepo-babies cosplaying as socialist political activists with zero talent to create something good worth watching. "Evil cannot create anything new it can only corrupt and ruin what good forces have invented or made"
Fun fact: Ellison also started Annapurna, which is Megan Ellison's vehicle for pushing gay propaganda to children through games. "Mixtape" bombed hard despite overwhelming praise from bought critics.
DSC and Picard were long slogs in the spirit of "grit" and "realism." SNW having fun, switching up the mood every episode, and telling stories is a breath of fresh air. Strange New Episodes! The Henson Studio collaboration was amazing. Since Netflix canned Dark Crystal, I've been missing my weird muppets traveling across time and space.
Both LD and SNW managed to get less of that Kurtzman stink compared to Academy, DSC, or the movie which shall never be named. I hope they'll let the franchise mellow until they find new direction. (And a new owner.)
* Lower Decks is the truest Trek to ever Trek, but I know that's asinine so I saved my opinion for the footnote.
* ENT was off to a good start, but the 9/11-ification of TV took it off course.
I liked that season 1 and 2 of SNW felt like the stakes were lower and there were fewer gimmicky episodes. The muppet episode for me for example was a huge negative. So was the fake documentary, the Event Horizon remake and of course the double episode where they were fighting manifested evil which to be couldn't be further from the Trek spirit.
The final season of Picard was pure fan service AND I LOVED EVERY MOMENT OF IT! Even when I'm critical of Trek, I'm still there and trying to enjoy. Thank you for sharing.
During the height of the pandemic I rewatched TNG. When Timescape opened with Picard, Data, Troy and Geordie on their way back to the Enterprise in a runabout and having dinner together. Having these characters I've known and lived for so long have a casual work meal made me miss office lunch so much I almost started to cry. No other show would have been able to do that
I'm not sure I was interested in either company by themselves—less likely to be interested in the merged one.