the best way to avoid paying high interest rates is to stop borrowing money and start saving money instead.

yeah, i would be strongly opposed to this.

it's an overreach of state power to tell private lenders what rate of interest they can charge. these are private contracts and people enter into them freely of their own will. restricting interest rates is islamic fundamentalism, and it reeks of anti-semitism. it should be rigorously opposed by everybody interested in freedom.

the actual result of a policy such as this is that emergency loan services will go out of business, taking away a service that people sometimes rely on and need. these loans will continue to happen, but they'll happen under the table, with more severe outcomes for people that can't pay the debts. lending out money to high-risk people at 10% interest will no longer make business sense, and the businesses will stop doing it. the result is not a decrease in interest rates, but a decrease in access to lending.

you want to continue to legalize and regulate high interest lending so it can be overseen by law enforcement, not drive it underground and make it worse by trying to ban it.

the state might step in and provide high risk loans at low interest if it wants, but it wouldn't have to interfere in private decisions made by consenting adults in order to do it.

https://apnews.com/article/trump-credit-cards-interest-rates-savings-banks-dba221f122789427c1c625ba873c9b71

they're not going to get support from the united states or europe, who are too busy jerking off arab princes.

the kurds, once again, offer the only hope for peace, stability and democracy in the region. my solidarity is with the coalition developing to overthrow the neo-nazi government that's recently taken over syria, with nato and specifically with turkish backing.

https://www.kurdistan24.net/en/story/886252/alawite-and-druze-leaders-declare-full-support-for-kurds-call-for-federal-system-in-syria

the iranian regime doesn't care about the well-being of the people protesting on it's streets. they're a bunch of apostates. they'll mow them down with machine guns before they meet their demands, or accede any power to them.

it's important that the protesters continue to broadcast to the world that they want a revolution, but they're largely wasting their time, on their own accord. there is no path to peaceful change in iran.

the question as to whether it's in us interests to intervene or not is an open question and i acknowledge i will not like the outcome, but this regime isn't going to be dismantled from the inside. overthrowing this regime will require the intervention of outside actors, and the use of violence.

the american tactic of generating unrest and provoking instability to topple governments without the use of military force requires some concept of democratic functioning in government as a prerequisite in order to be successful, even if the protests can get to critical mass. in the 21st century, critical mass will merely result in massacres and slaughter. populations cannot defend themselves with rifles against drones and tanks.

this tactic did not work in venezuela because the class divisions in the society were too deep for bourgeois support to get to critical mass, and there was simply no way to provoke enough unrest to topple the government, without first addressing the material conditions of workers, which workers understood would dramatically worsen in a return to banana republic economics and bourgeois democracy.

this tactic will not work in iran because the government would be just as happy to slaughter the apostates and do away with them than listen to them, anyways.

i want to be clear.

the correct way for new york city to deal with explicitly pro-hamas/pro-nazi protesters is not with a police response or with tepid political "condemnations". this is new york city. the correct way to approach this is to mobilize on the ground and brutally, viciously beat the shit out of them on the street - to cut them down in public and show the world that nazis are not welcome on the streets of new york, and this is what happens when nazis go there and try to set up.

you don't deal with these people by being nice to them.

you have to bludgeon them. you have to cut them down.

it appears as though new york city needs a good round of nazi head smashing by activists on the ground.

they should go in with clubs and just beat the shit out of them.

the only good nazi is a dead one.

https://www.politico.com/news/2026/01/09/we-support-hamas-chants-put-mamdanis-israel-stance-at-center-stage-00720393

i've read a fair number of attempts to deny that the romans named the region after the greek philistines.

but, in fact, in much of the sources an f is used instead of a phi. the word used in much of the roman and later arab writing is filistin, which became φilistine and then palestine, in english. most languages still retain the soft 'f' rather than the hard 'p'.  

there was a greek tribe called the philistines, of which palestine is etymologically derived from, living in the region as well. the philistines entered the region around they year -1200, in a migration referred to in historical sources as the invasion of the sea peoples. the philistine migration is recorded in ancient egyptian sources, and their greek ancestry has been upheld by recent dna tests. they are actually spoken of quite widely in the hebrew bible and their presence on the coast is also recorded in greek sources, like herodotus. it was the aryan greek philistines that wittle semitic david confronted with his slingshot (in the myth/legend recorded in the hebrew bible).

the philistines lived on the coast and had a string of cities there from the bronze age collapse to the eventual conquest by alexander, when they were absorbed into the new greek kingdoms in the region (the ptolemids and seleucids). they had a very big influence on the region, including influencing the religion in the generally-thought-to-be-arab enclave of petra, who worshipped a sky god named "dyushara", a clearly indo-european name that is linguistically identical to greek zeus or latin deus.

modern palestinians are descended from classical period hebrew groups, not the ancient greek philistines. you can find the odd blonde palestinian, and while they might imagine they have crusader ancestry, they're probably actually dragging around philistine dna. there was also a group that lived just outside the region, in the desert, and was called arabs by the roman and greek sources, but they weren't the same people that invaded it in the 7th century. those people that invaded are called saracens in the roman sources, are described as being "as black as the night" and migrated north from yemen. arabs were light skinned, like the jews were. the romans said the saracens were from arabia, as that is where they entered the empire from, and it took some time for the romans to understand what the fuck was actually happening, in terms of a migration event from yemen taking place. the muslims record this in their own history, as well. for the first several centuries, the roman sources actually consider islam to be a christian heresy by the desert nomads, related to the monophysitism of the egyptians. and, islam does consider jesus to have been human, like the heretical monophysite christians in the area did.

the romans did not imagine the term philistine. it was already there, and is in fact embedded in the hebrew mythology, itself. the jews were there (at least after cyrus), but the maximum extent of israel, which is something described in the oldest part of the hebrew bible, was not always reality. it's not like the romans just renamed the current state of israel to palestine. in fact, there was a historical division consisting of a north and south area, and that goes back to the assyrians, and is also noted in the hebrew bible, as well. the size of the hebrew state grew and shrunk over time as different people came in and out of the area, and the ability of the jews to project power and put vassals under their control increased and decreased; sometimes, the jews exerted authority over the other tribes, and sometimes those tribes exerted authority over them. the map wasn't set in stone by a dictate of god in the bronze age, held in place for centuries and then uprooted by the romans, like ultra-orthodox jews today would have you believe; maps are constantly changing things, in perpetual flux and evolution. history exists.

i don't know enough about classical period pottery to know who made this, but finding it somewhere in the south of the levant does not automatically make it jewish. there was a greek tribe in the area for essentially the entirety of the biblical narrative (which is a nationalist mythology and not history) and they left plenty of their own garbage there. there were also other west semitic groups, like phoenicians. an expert would be able to tell if the pottery was greek or semitic by examining it closely and the idea that it could have been "syrian or philistine" is entirely in the realm of plausibility. 

the artifact should be labelled by the group they think made it and an expert should be able to determine that.

https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/jewish-group-palestine-label-rom