• scarabic@lemmy.world
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      10 months ago

      Good god and I had only just forgotten about Betsy Freaking DeVos and her disastrous turn as Secretary of Education. What an asshole.

    • Poplar?@lemmy.world
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      10 months ago

      Erik Prince appeared on Breitbart Radio to allege that Hillary and Bill Clinton laundered money and frequented a “sex island” that was home to “underage sex slaves.”

      Huh

    • neidu2@feddit.nl
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      10 months ago

      “Call on meeeeeeeeeeee
      …as the viceroy of a neocolonial outpost.”
      *Local rubber farmers doing pelvic thrusts in the background *

      • mindbleach
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        10 months ago

        Call on meee
        Call on me
        Call on meee-eee
        As the viceroy for colonies

    • WhatAmLemmy@lemmy.world
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      10 months ago

      Because our “democracies” are a charade and most of our politicians are wholly pwned and financed by oligarchs like this megalomaniac psychopath.

      TL;DR because he’s a member of the oligarchy!

  • Mr_Blott@lemmy.world
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    10 months ago

    Erik, they got their cunts kicked by the rice farmers then the goat herders, have you learnt nothing?

    • Earthwormjim91@lemmy.world
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      10 months ago

      That’s kind of irrelevant though because the US wasn’t colonizing them. And in both, the US had complete dominance during the entire occupation.

      The south Vietnamese and the Afghan governments were weak and corrupt and caved as soon as the US withdrew. In a colonial situation, the US would have not pulled out at all and would have implemented a permanent occupation.

  • AutoTL;DR@lemmings.worldB
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    10 months ago

    This is the best summary I could come up with:


    Erik Prince has been many things in his 54 years on Earth: the wealthy heir to an auto supply company; a Navy SEAL; the founder of the mercenary firm Blackwater, which conducted a notorious 2007 massacre in the middle of Baghdad; the brother of Betsy DeVos, Donald Trump’s secretary of education; a shadow adviser to Trump; and the plaintiff in a lawsuit against The Intercept.

    Prince and Serrano either do not know or do not care that previous bouts of the European flavor of colonialism led to the deaths of tens of millions of people around the world.

    The book’s narrator, Charles Marlow, describes his voyage up a river into the interior of an unnamed African country that is obviously Congo in the process of being colonized by Belgium.

    March 27: “I ask Mississippians of all faiths to pray for all our coalition forces and the Iraqi people as they engage in an intense but noble battle against what is nothing but sheer evil.”

    Serrano at least is more in touch with the grimy reality of what they’re talking about, and he excitedly mentions how America could bring lesser nations “the professionalism they need to capitalize on their natural resources.”

    In any case, Prince’s words illustrate that we are living in a time in which many of humanity’s worst ideas, ones we thought were long dead and buried, have risen from the grave and are now staggering about again.


    The original article contains 857 words, the summary contains 239 words. Saved 72%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

      • mortemtyrannis@lemmy.ml
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        10 months ago

        He was technically, if Wikipedia is to believed.

        He was a Naval Special Warfare Officer so not a SEAL Operator but technically that still is a Navy SEAL.

        I know nothing about this person other than their wiki but I’m sure they conveniently leave off the fact they weren’t an Operator when saying they are a Navy SEAL.

          • mortemtyrannis@lemmy.ml
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            10 months ago

            I’m no expert but as I understand it, a SEAL Operator is the SEAL you think of when you think of a Navy SEAL aka the guy in the frog suit with the gun rising out of the water to take a beach.

            A Naval Special Warfare Officer is part of the support staff to the SEAL Operators effectively. I don’t know what specifically their function is (you can google it) but they probably do battlefield tactics for the actual Operators, they don’t go into actual battle.

  • mindbleach
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    10 months ago

    This monster can call for direct violence against millions of people and suffer no consequences. But if I say I hope a particular individual falls down a staircase and shuts the fuck up, that’s too far. ‘Well it’s a chilling effect.’ And suggesting someone’s homeland get nuked is not, somehow. ‘Well it’s actionable because you have access to a staircase but not nukes.’ So I should hope his house gets nuked. ‘Well no there’s a connection between extreme rhetoric and inciting mundane violence.’ Oh, is there?

      • DragonTypeWyvern@literature.cafe
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        10 months ago

        Vermont has the lowest GDP of any state at 41 billion dollars.

        If Vermont was an independent country, that would make it the 101st largest economy in the world.

        I realize that terminally online weirdos with an ideology to grind like to pretend America is some third world dystopia, but the reality is that Eric Prince isn’t talking about adding states, he’s talking about outright conquest so it’s just a bad angle you’re trying to attack with regardless.

        Like, the man is literally openly discussing horrors beyond human comprehension and your take is “American healthcare isn’t great for poor people?”

        Good news, dumbass, he’s got a plan for that, it’s called a slave economy, maybe focus on that?