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fwiw I like seeing your art a lot and I don't think you're wasting your time at all

Bro is your legal name Harry Fishman? That's incredible.

I'm only praying it's as self destructive as it looks. If this is to be the downfall of American power, good riddance!

They say arrogance is the graveyard of empires. America pivoted to a soft power orientation in the '80s because it realized coups and invasions weren't panning out. Obama changed military doctrine to rely more on proxies, because you need locals to hold power. Anyway I'm sure this will go fine.

Sorry I can't get enough this is too much of a self-own

"Blowback isn't real" says guy supporting government militarily retreating to its own hemisphere as costs of empire rise, which hasn't done a large-scale ground deployment since Iraq because it's too expensive, which cut the NED since American soft power is failing due to its hypocrisy, which...

That's fine for a civilian who's neither a politician nor a diplomat or IR person. If you're aiming to say how countries *should* behave internationally, it isn't very helpful to name who the good guys and bad guys are, because it's ultimately a matter of perspective, and doesn't help you win.

From the Wikipedia article on blowback: "In formal print usage, the term blowback first appeared in the Clandestine Service History—Overthrow of Premier Mossadeq of Iran—November 1952–August 1953, the CIA's internal history of the 1953 Iranian coup d'état, sponsored by the American and British governments, which was published in March 1954.[3][4] Blowback from this operation would indeed occur with the Iranian Revolution and the Iran hostage crisis."

To put a finer point on it, one of the uses of "blowback" is in reference to the Islamic revolution coming to Iran as a result of "just" getting rid of a "bad guy". As the diplomatic costs of this outcome have been a frustration point for America for 40+ years now, I'd say actions have consequences.

Every time someone mentions "the bad guys" unironically in reference to geopolitics, I have to imagine they're not paying attention to their generals and diplomats because they're too busy watching Power Rangers reruns.

I hate to think about it so cynically because I genuinely dread the near future for Iranians, but I want to emphasize that even if you think about this in full IR psycho mode, it doesn't make sense and threatens to be a huge blunder for America. It's like this guy doesn't get that bombs cost money.

The good people/bad people IR distinction is absolutely crazy. Let's forget whether blowback is real or not; did America have a strategic interest in this? No. Not really. This is Israel's war and America's grudge. The result will be either a big expense for very little or a quagmire.

this is like a complex way of admitting that what u want out of life is a trans woman with a codependency streak

I still have this nervous twitch from my Tumblr years expecting any reaction to be the start of a dogpile

I do love how on this stupid website you can reply saying essentially "capitalism bad" and get met with thunderous applause. Social media really is something.

Skeeter needs to not send me a distinct push notification for every single like and reply this must be horrendous for people who are actually popular.

Similar story with news media buyouts. You might take a loss on the purchase, but when it buys you control over the civil society, it's not looking so bad for the rest of your assets. Influence is a profit stream for a diverse portfolio. Especially now that they're just stealing from the treasury.

It's also about profit. Compare lobbying: you might spend hundreds of thousands, even millions buying influence. This is cheap compared to either the profits you immediately accrue from favourable legislation, or the long-term risk of politicians who might undercut your investments gaining power.

It may be that a joint financing model could do the trick, but inasmuch as free software is more interested in making good software and keeping the ecosystem healthy than getting large and capturing value, it might always be screwed, and inasmuch as it's not, it may sacrifice being free software.

The yucky and dysfunctional version of this was when everyone got into DAOs a few years ago. That was silly. More practically, the Linux foundation is fairly successful at funnelling money towards infrastructure code, but not in a way where working in free software is much of a career.

More cynically, someone needs to crack a profit model for free software where maintainers of the software have a better solution for accessing the funding necessary to keep alternatives to the tech monopolies running besides begging for donations like they're Jimmy Wales if he worked for We.

Hopefully renewed European state interest actually gets some money into free software. If there's one model that might actually work, it's a bunch of nonprofits sustained as a public good in the security interests of the states that use them. But that feels overoptimistic.

This all comes to mind because I wanted to use Matrix about 7 years ago. I learned that, at the time, it was janky and the foundation was cash-strapped and the protocol needed a lot of fixing to deal with its security issues. All of these are still the case, but now also the French military uses it.

Firms will fund free software if its development benefits them, but if it's feature stable and not hugely significant, or if it wouldn't make much difference, they'll just free ride it. This is not great; sure, anyone can contribute, but it takes a real sicko to maintain a project for free.

Not all free infrastructure code helps a profitable firm secure a competitive advantage. Google made Chromium to control web standards and dictate everyone's access point to search, but WINE was struggling until Valve figured out it could fund it to undercut their PC platform monopoly.

So there's no economics of free software because there's no economics of software. Software in general is gratis, but big-to-huge firms have monopoly pricing power over managed networked software services and charge rents. But that still doesn't explain why infrastructure maintainers are broke.

The ecosystem controls the software services the Apple user accesses, the software services make the money. All profitable tech firms more or less work either like this, or the version of this where they sell managed hosting and networking services under a similar model.

Free/nonfree code can be preferred for different reasons, depending on its effect on the competitive environment, which can be important, but if Apple open-sourced iOS tomorrow, a chasm would not open up beneath them. Apple being the only distributor is just part of how they control their ecosystem.

But that's all because software businesses are largely indifferent to the copyright model of the code they're distributing, if they run a SaaS business (or an enterprise consultancy, infrastructure, and support business, in RedHat's case).

So I should adjust my claim here, because there are businesses that make money by distributing free software, and all the big tech companies are among them. There are businesses that specialize in mostly or only maintaining the free software ecosystem that make money.

But staffing requirements are high to get a service off the ground at all, and relatively smaller and smaller as it scales, making it possible for a large provider to extract huge economic rents on a software service.