The buildup begin in '21. Although I’ve had people yell at me for suggesting the war didn’t actually start in '14.

Age verification that will, itself, be quickly subverted and spoofed. And which they won’t bother to manage internally, because that’s hard

$1500/mo

Only available in Chattanooga, Tennessee.

I hate the US and Russia equally

If I were a native or neighbor of one, I might hate it more than the other, merely due to proximity.

I dont think anyone is saying we should invade Russia.

I seem to recall a bunch of anti-Russia hawks saying exactly this when the invasion happened in '21. The US, the EU, the rest of the Asiatic continent - they were all told they needed to team up and crush Russia, once and for all.

Now that the US has collapsed into a fascist regime marginally sympathetic to Russian white nationalism, the Keyboard Commandos of Reddit don’t really expect Cheeto Mussolini Von Putinkisser to take the fight to Moscow.

But I’ve also heard (1) Putin is senile / infirm / on death’s door and regime change in Russia will come any day now and (2) The Russian military is absolutely on the brink of collapse, so another year or ten of drone skirmishes will be the end of the entire Russian armed forces with a bit of patience. Just a few hundred more billion to Ukraine will be the end of the Russian army absolutely for certain guaranteed. So we never really needed to invade directly, just finance an endless parade of mercenaries to get the job done.

90% of the world online scammers and hackers

It’s crazy how these major tent poles of the modern internet - Facebook, Google, Twitter, and Microsoft - are all centered in the United States, but never bare any responsibility for the malicious traffic on their networks.

It’s crazy how Iran deciding to start taking fees for shipping is a blockade, when the entire national business models of Singapore and Panama hinge on their ability to do exactly this.

They’ve got concept art in the article.

If you believe in democracy, personal rights, and capitalism

🎼 One of these things 🎶 Is not like the other 🎶

🎼 One of these things 🎶 Is not like its brother 🎶

given how much modern ‘conservatives’ hate democracy and personal rights

“This far and no further” politics is a pox on conservatives and liberals alike. This is one of the reasons you see Gavin Newsom fucking around with TERFs in the name of fairness in college athletics. Its one of the reasons why so many people soured on Barack Obama inside his first term.

“Personal Rights” always seem to terminate at the edge of popular consensus.

teaches you to take pride in shit you’ve never done

The better outcome.

I’m more disgusted by the fuckers who go out and do the war crimes, then come home and demand everyone else say “Thank You For Your Service”.

Western corruption is starting a company to produce y and when a government orders x of them, x are delivered

Well… not always.

The initial contract award called for the combat-ready tankers to arrive in August 2017; the first arrived in January 2019. In the years that followed, the KC-46 program was beset by further delays, including production line problems that regularly stalled deliveries and an underperforming vision system. That system is years behind schedule and expected to come in October 2025.

and

Broken Boeing airplanes are going to the military thanks to corruption and bad decisions

Increasingly, the US model for contracting is to take money, outsource the work to a bunch of bargain basement contractors, pocket the profits, and then fail to deliver the end product.

Also R&D is priced in because it’s all done for the sake of making profit and must be recovered through the unit sales.

Again, this is something of an open question. The engineering of a given retailed unit is priced in as part of the unit rate. But the bluesky R&D is, as often as not, performed at the university level and then arbitraged through the private sector or simply stolen from rival militaries / companies / individuals through espionage and laundered through the private sector.

The Octopus Murders, on Netflix, tackles the anatomy of this kind of government-backed swindle with regard to the development of early iteration database technology.

The real difference between more Socialist/Communist models of corruption and the Western Capitalist style tends to be in the legal canonization of the corrupt practices. You really got to see this in the post-Soviet liberalization of Eastern European economies, as mafia cartels were supercharged by western financialization and eventually subsumed the entire federal apparatus of ex-Soviet states. What was considered a criminal black market prior to 1991 became the standard for managing the economy a decade later.

Rub a lamp

Genie comes out

Oooh, that felt good. Keep going and I’ll give you three full wishes.

Shrug

Keep rubbing lamp

Ooooh yeah baby. Give me your wishes. What are your wishes? You’re going to get so many good wishes, hon.

Victor Orban is also very much not Polish

Is he European?

We were talking about popluational trends and statistics though

Since the collapse of the USSR, the trend towards reactionary religious movements has only increased over time. You can definitely blame this on western evangelicals and Catholics piling into these countries during their brief liberalization phase. But to say Europe lacks a large and wealthy Christian community is to deny what’s in front of your eyes.

I will explicitly say that I’m talking about “median” population, not literaly the extreme 0.1%

The extreme 0.1% are the ones with all the money.

Past that, European parliaments all have their variation on the Christian Democrat Party. The CDU/CSU coalition is currently the largest party bloc in Germany, following the ignominious collapse of Olaf’s Greens. Idk how you win 208 MPs without a plurality of popular support.

How is China imperialist?

It helps if you insist the natural state of Chinese territory is a balkinized patchwork of ethnic enclaves fighting border wars “Romance of the Three Kingdoms” style, and the amalgamation of territory over 3000 years of dynastic rule gets dumped on the head of the current government.

Bonus points if you don’t mention Uyghurs

Uyghurs are the only Muslim group that the NAFO crowd are allowed to empathize with. And only when they’re local to the Tarim Basin. God help you if you’re a Uyghur living in Europe or Southeast Asia or the United States because they’re not welcome.

the zenz/ US propaganda

Mentioning the name of Adrian Zenz, the history of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation (and where it gets its money), or any choice passages from the book Worthy to Escape: Why All Believers Will Not Be Raptured Before the Tribulation marks you out as a Wumao Far-Left Ultra-Stalinist Botfarm with cooties and a stupid face.

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That is the joke, yes.

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