So me invading your home with a weapon and threatening to kill your family, you would just let it happen?

Obviously not. I’d hand my young son, with no combat experience, a rifle and send him out to meet you. And when you shot him, I’d send my next son, who is even younger and easier to kill. And then I’d send my infant daughter, with a grenade tapped to her chest. And then I’d send my neighbors and my neighbors’ kids and their neighbors and their kids, until everyone on the block was dead.

And if one of them finally got you, I would consider all that bloodshed worth it. Because now we’ve secured the most important thing in the entire world - private property.

And if none of them got you, and you were still camped out on my lawn, I’d blame the Woke Leftists, the Transgenders, and the Jews for my defeat, because they caved to Russian propaganda when one more salvo would have done it.

You have been treading on the side of falsehoods

If you’ve been through basic or seen people who have, you’d recognize how difficult it is to fail out and how easy it is to simply be abused into a sufficient state of compliance.

Given the degree of physical, psychological, and - not uncommonly - sexual abuse you experience along the way, I wouldn’t recommend the experience.

Several of the apps traced back to Qihoo 360, a firm declared by the Defense Department to be a “Chinese Military Company." Qihoo did not respond to questions about its app-related holdings.

I have to wonder if this headline would be received the same way if it was “US State Department Accuses Chinese Internet Security Company of Conspiring With Chinese Government”, as all this seems to go back to a claim by Trump’s 2020 department that Qihoo leaked info to the Hong Kong police during the protests five years ago.

Still… Qihoo 360 appears to have been an active investor and developer in Silicon Valley since 2014. Chinese investment in the US isn’t new or even undesireable, as of a decade ago.

But consider how the US has also recently attempted to seize the US branch of TikTok and block domestic sale of Huawei phones. Add in the domestic freak out over Chinese AI companies outperforming their US peers. This could easily be American tech companies trying to freeze out their competition on national security grounds rather than Chinese tech companies posing a military threat to US domestic interests.

A large military force massing on the border of a quasi-neutral country, with the stated intent of restoring order and securing its territory against invasion, has a certain 2022 ring to it.

Have you not heard about the Maidan Revolution and subsequent civil war? The sharp divide between East and West, resulting in militia violence and hundreds of thousands of displaced residents? The billions in property destruction resulting from eleven years of armed conflict? The wholesale privatization of the remaining Ukrainian economy? Collapses in education, health care, transport, and energy within the country? Mass conscription and casualties resulting in depopulation of working-aged Ukrainians?

Or do you believe “Civil Wars are bad for your country” is a Evil Foreigner talking point?

Ukraine is fighting an existential defensive war

It’s bleeding out over a proxy war certainly. But it’s existence was foreclosed during Maidan. The civil war was the end of Ukraine. This is just dogs fighting over the corpse

You only fall out of basic if you’re an invalid. The military is very good at beating compliance into anyone else.

Go back to WW1 and you’ll have a hard time pointing to good guys. Even WW2 was heavily sketch. The US was halfway in bed with the Nazis under Hoover and only at odds with Japan because it was encroaching on the British opium trade through Hong Kong and Shanghai.

These wars were, at their hearts, the end consequences of a century of industrial imperialism. The good guys were in Latin America and North Africa and the South Pacific, fighting for their independence and sovereignty.

Ukraine defending their sovereignty against a foreign invader…

Wasn’t Donetsk in the grip of a civil war, during which ethnic Russians were being bombed and gunned down by Ukrainian militias? For six years?

I rather die a proud fighter

In what division? The 101st Chairborne?

All the Redditors who were going to die in glorious conflict did it in the first year of the war, when they gave away their positions doing social media influencer shit within range of Russian artillery.

Just fail it

So you can be shuffled in with the grunts rather than the officers?

The military loves putting dumb-dumbs through basic and stacking them on the front lines to catch stray bullets.

I mean, it’s a fucking pointless, blood drenched meat grinder on both fronts. Like some kind of WW1 reenactment with the safeties turned off.

You don’t need to be a fan of either side to want this nightmare to end. But since the people in charge have no real skin in the game (because they’re sociopaths who are more than happy to see these populations sacrificed to their vainglory) the killing simply will not end.

Heavy stuff.

The argument behind this book revolves around cheap, durable, and at-cost managed utilities with the capacity to shepherd renewable energy in a manner that replicates the need for base load.

The problem with this as a solution comes down to an unforgiving contradiction - this solution does not create high rates of profit. Without high-profit public works, you don’t get buy-in from the financial sector. And without financial sector buy-in, you don’t get business administrators willing to engage the private sector in construction, development, and maintenance of these systems.

The book doesn’t mint enough new billionaires, so it won’t be accepted as a solution in a western free market system. It is, incidentally, why nuclear energy is also unpopular in the US. Compared to gas, oil, and coal, the margins on nuclear electricity are too damned low. Green energy only works because it is so intermittent and temporal, allowing energy brokers to trade on the ups and downs of supply as they fall out of sync with demand.

If you make the system efficient, you lose all the opportunities for arbitrage that incentivize private actors to invest and extract wealth.

It’s like they want humanity to starve.

Quite a few members of the Trump Administration, including his Secretary of Health and Human Services, are avowed eugenicists.

Why the fuck would you even consider signing anything to that fat orange shit?

Ask Chuck Schumer. He insists he’s got his reasons.

Things have never looked better on the other side of the Pacific.

when that wagner guy revolted, it was the final nail in the coffin

What was crazy during the Wagner Revolt was the intransigence of the Ukraine line.

You’d think that would be the moment for a full press by Ukraine troops over a lightly defended border. But no… they just stayed put and watched Prigovian flounder.

Russia has thousands of men willing to fight in horrendous conditions.

They’ve got hundreds of thousands of conscripts who are largely dug in along an enormous front, along the four eastern most seized Oblasts in Ukraine.

Any attack they would make into a NATO state would be an artillery bombardment intended to deny Ukrainians resupply, not a ground invasion to secure territory. Particularly not when they have poor control over their own borders and a nasty instance of counter-insurgence popping up in and around their major cities.

• We’re on the verge of total victory

• The enemy is prepared to launch its biggest attack yet

Is the same war time propaganda we’ve been served up for decades. Iraq/Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Kosovo, Vietnam, Korea…

The news coverage is totally divorced from what is happening on the ground. There’s even a term for it.

Credibility Gap