RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
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User ID: 317
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
3d ago
Because they'd rather lose goods to shoplifting than pay employees
They've been telling their employees NOT to interfere with robbers, this isn't a matter of penny-pinching. Plug 'employee fired for obstructing theft in store' into your search engine.
Nor does law enforcement care to crack down on basics like robberies, car theft, vagrants, drug dealing and so on (unless of course Xi Xingping is coming to town). See the open air drug markets in US cities, or how some US train stations are used for enjoying narcotics rather than travelling by train: https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2023-03-14/horror-the-deadly-use-of-drugs-on-metro-trains
It's not just corporations, it's a breakdown in society generally. The corporations don't want theft of their products but they're clearly more afraid of inconveniencing criminals, just like every other institution.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
2d ago
US leadership has been behaving somewhat hysterically with this latest war, they've been going around threatening the ICC with the gravest consequences if they dare charge Netanyahu:
https://www.politico.com/f/?id=0000018f-4e0e-d759-a9ff-ff4ee9420000
Issuing arrest warrants for the leaders of Israel would not only be unjustified, it would expose your organization’s hypocrisy and double standards. Your office has not issued arrest warrants for Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei or any other Iranian official, Syrian President Bashar al Assad or any other Syrian official, or Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh or any other Hamas official. Nor have you issued an arrest warrant for the genocidal General Secretary of the People’s Republic of China, Xi Jinping, or any other Chinese official.
Finally, neither Israel nor the United States are members of the ICC and are therefore outside of your organization’s supposed jurisdiction. If you issue a warrant for the arrest of the Israeli leadership, we will interpret this not only as a threat to Israel’s sovereignty but to the sovereignty of the United States. Our country demonstrated in the American Service-Members' Protection Act [also known as the Hague Invasion Act] the lengths to which we will go to protect that sovereignty.
The United States will not tolerate politicized attacks by the ICC on our allies. Target Israel and we will target you. If you move forward with the measures indicated in the report, we will move to end all American support for the ICC, sanction your employees and associates, and bar you and your families from the United States. You have been warned.
How exactly a threat to Israel could be a threat to the sovereignty of the USA is hard to comprehend, though it does explain the stance of the Republican Party.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
2d ago
It does rather undermine international law if America cheers and applauds when the ICC issues arrest warrants for non members in Russia and calls for arrests against non-members China and Iran, while threatening sanctions and force should Israelis or Americans be targeted. Then they complain about double standards!
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
4d ago
Isn't it whites that created the desirable accommodation and the jobs? The entire industries in question? The institutions that allow economic prosperity?
You're complaining that the people who developed the world economy, implemented free trade and organized mass migration aren't getting out of the way quickly enough, so you can reap more spoils from a presumably highly paid software job?
I have to admire your straightforwardness and consistency in this position.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
6d ago
Yes, Kierkegaard mentions that asterisk and notes that it doesn't significantly change the conclusions one should draw. It's rather hard to get a high sample size for white on black rape if it doesn't exist.
I think you meant rape is largely intraracial, which it is.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
5d ago
How about King Charles's mildly satanic painting?
I don't know why you'd make yourself look like you're bathed in blood or wreathed in unholy flame. Rand Al Thor can pull it off but he is the Dragon Reborn, greatest hero of two ages. When King Charles takes a cursed sa'angreal sword from an ancient fortress and faces down the forces of darkness, then he can appropriate fantasy hero aesthetics for official portraits.
I've argued in the past that there is a certain malign or subversive element in some elite art, consider people like Cleon Peterson or the Pope's rather unusual looking sculpture. Apparently that has all this special Christian symbolism - I would've thought that a cross would be more appropriate but what do I know?
There's also this (somewhat nsfw?) painting of a child getting throatfucked which somebody vandalized, much to the displeasure of Macron: https://x.com/Censor__This/status/1658938149844791300/photo/1
I could add in the CIA plot to spread abstract and modern art, though it's only relevant in the broader sense that art is political and related to politics. I don't have much of a thesis aside from 'a lot of modern art is quite disturbing and indicative of cultural trends towards shock value and dubious tolerance'. There's a time and a place for everything and sometimes that place is sites like bestgore, liveleaks or the artistic equivalent of AO3 rather than art galleries, in my mind.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
7d ago
If US intelligence was most focused on strengthening America's stability, wouldn't they try to shore up American identity? Wouldn't they want colorblind patriotism, the supporting the troops ethos? You want to smooth over divisions, you don't want to create even controlled conflicts. You'd try to subvert and suppress dangerous groups of course but you wouldn't try to suppress the majority's white identity, you try to annex it into American identity.
Look at what Russia does. Rally around the flag, enemies all around us, we're all Russians regardless of race/creed, sacred duty to the motherland... They suppress the liberal/trans/separatist minority rather than the majority.
Here's an interesting article that perhaps deserves a post of its own. There are many things to say about it ("Gorbachev and Yeltsin ruined ice cream, the cowards.") but you get the sense that the state machinery is trying to keep the country together, promoting unity rather than division: https://harpers.org/archive/2024/01/behind-the-new-iron-curtain/
That's not what the US is doing. They're playing the patronage/suppression game, not the national unity game. 'We need more blacks in the Air Force, quotas everywhere, need to fight white supremacy and racism'. Those Stand Down days in the US military to counter extremism, internal conflict over things like migration and national identity.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
14d ago
Australian boys make spreadsheet of girls attractiveness, national media, federal minister and state premier rush to condemn them. I'm pretty surprised this got any media attention, doesn't it seem trivial? This all happened on some discord server, it's not like they were parading it around. Does anyone think this would happen in their country?
It reportedly ranked female students from "wifeys", "cuties", "mid", "object", and "get out" to "unrapeable".
The school flagged notifying police about the list and looking into whether using the term "unrapeable" constitutes a threat, The Age reported.
I can't see how 'unrapeable' could possibly be a threat. Saying someone is vulnerable could be a threat, calling someone invulnerable is not... OK it's very rude, suspend the ringleaders - do police need to be involved? There's a certain level of hysteria here, you get the sense that the male principal fears for his job unless he takes this as seriously as humanly possible.
Allan said her thoughts are with the young women, who have received counselling at Yarra Valley Grammar.
It would be pretty crushing to be labelled unrapeable or 'get out' by your male peers, though I don't see how a counsellor could help.
Context: Australian media and govt have been panicking about male-on-female violence for a few weeks now. We recently had a mass stabbing by a mentally ill man, who targeted mostly women. Accordingly, male on female violence has increased statistically and the government has thrown a lot of money at various NGOs.
The Yarra Valley Grammar incident comes as the federal government last week announced nearly $1 billion of funding towards tackling violence against women, which has been labelled a "crisis" of "epidemic" proportions.
Additionally, there has been a lot of concern about Tate corrupting the minds of the youth. So this lets the media hit two talking points at the same time.
Merry said Yarra Valley Grammar holds "respectful relationship" classes but because of mixed messages on social media, "young boys get it wrong".
A related matter - youtuber argues that ranking women's attractiveness upsets the Byzantine system of female intrasexual competition, where every queen is praised as a 10/10 regardless of ugliness. I found the video pretty decent albeit a few minutes longer than it needed to be. It features the infamous Gorlock the Destroyer claiming to be a 10/10 (sarcastically?), which does make you think. There might be something to it - ranking women by attractiveness seems more dangerous than one might naively imagine.
In the male-dominated patriarchal society of the distant past, accusing men of being bastards or having incorrect lineage was a very serious matter. Legitimacy and preventing cuckoldry was deeply important to men, it informed the whole structure of European politics, inheritance and succession. Perhaps in the emerging future it's female sexual dynamics that will take priority and we'll see more of this kind of thing.
Premier (woman): "This pattern of violence against women — not only does the act of violence have to stop, but these displays of disrespecting women. Like, it's just disgraceful."
Lèse-majesté: an offence or defamation against the dignity of a ruling head of state or of the state itself.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
6d ago
BMWF couples are well over-represented
I recall a far-right talking point 'black on white rape 20,000, white on black rape 0'.
This link goes into detail on that and provides a fair few charts that show black women are generally considered unattractive: https://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/2023/02/white-on-black-vs-black-on-white-rape-statistics/
Personally I don't know why we'd need charts to show that black women are unattractive but they're there! The OkCupid and reply rate data is pretty clear, if gut instinct wasn't enough.
Kierkegaard also argues that black women who date white men are smarter than white women who date black men, which also makes sense. https://twitter.com/wayotworld/status/1789038821981495741/photo/1
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
6d ago
Yes, there's a whole twitter account of commercials that go out of their way to make white men look like fools: https://twitter.com/StupidWhiteAds
https://twitter.com/StupidWhiteAds/status/1781491226354585957
"Why yes, we at Doritos imagine our customers as impulsive white manchildren who are treated with contempt by their despairing (white) girlfriends"
Even Joe Biden is talking about it:
“I challenge you: Find today, when you turn on the stations, sit on one station for two hours. And I don’t know how many commercials you’ll see, eight to five, two to three out of five have mixed-race couples in them. That’s not by accident. They’re selling soap, man,” Biden said to a laughing crowd in Tulsa, Oklahoma. “Not a joke,” he added.
There's more at the below link. Sure, sometimes they're reaching for anti-white animus where there is none. But there's certainly something happening in the Netflix 'viewshaming' ad, you'd have to be pretty dumb to mix the subtext. Or the British anti-grooming film that was rejected because it dared feature a South Asian man grooming a white girl, it needed to be replaced with a white teen grooming other whites (and one African-Carribbean girl).
This is the same problem America had in the occupation of Afganistan. A true occupation and social change would need significant more support and time than what the American politics around.
Occupation is hard and bloody work. One of the many things that went wrong in Afghanistan were the methods. There were stories about US soldiers gritting their teeth to nubs at their Afghan 'allies' raping children in the barracks and how they couldn't do anything about it. The soldiers on the ground knew the whole campaign was a massive farce a decade before withdrawal.
https://www.thejournal.ie/afghanistan-sexual-abuse-us-soldiers-2343921-Sep2015/
The locals would do everything they could to cheat and rip off Western forces, launching attacks to get us to pay them for protection money, blowing up bridges so they could get lucrative contracts to rebuild them. If you're trying to do imperialism you have to have the right political/social methods. You need to credibly threaten enormous violence against those who displease you, you have to make it clear that you're not a pinata that can be extorted for money, you have to project fear and power. Consider what Israel does 'to make their presence felt':
Many roads are “sterile,” and the nearer they are to the settlement, the less access Palestinians are allowed. They cannot drive, they cannot open a store, and, closest to the settlers, they are not allowed to walk the streets. If a Palestinian family has a home fronting one of these streets, the army will seal the front entrance and the Palestinians will only have access over the roof and through the back door.
Our main job was to “make our presence felt.” The conscious policy was to give the people the sense that the IDF was everywhere, all the time. We patrolled the streets 24/7, picking houses at random, waking up the families at night and separating them into men and women, and searching, loudly and publicly. It fell to me as a commander to pick the houses, a selection that was made unrelated to military intelligence.
As an occupying force in a territory, you have to act like this. It’s a simple equation, as surely as one plus one equals two; this is what an occupation will result in. You can’t serve as a soldier in the Occupied Territories and treat a Palestinian as an equal human being, as the only way to control a civilian population against their will is to make them feel chased, harried, and afraid. And when they get used to that level of fear, you have to increase it.
Or:
In some army units, making one’s presence felt is referred to as “creating a sense of being chased.” That means instilling fear into the entire Palestinian population, a mission that by definition makes no distinction between suspects and innocent civilians, or between “involved persons” and “uninvolved persons,” as it is called in IDF parlance. Sometimes soldiers invade homes in the middle of the night just for training purposes. I raided homes in Jenin or Nablus simply to seize more optimal observation positions. According to one former soldier who gave testimony to Breaking the Silence, they would invade homes to test a new door-breaching device. Another witness said they went into a Palestinian home to be filmed eating sufganiyot (Hanukkah donuts) for a feel-good news story to be broadcasted that night on Israeli television.
That's what imperialism is about, stuff that would immediately put you in the 'glowing red eyes baddy' camp according to our norms. This is why we can't do imperialism proficiently. I don't mean it in the leftist frame that everything about imperialism is evil. It's a method all states have used to achieve objectives. In Afghanistan we were too lax, the Israelis seem too harsh (though they're still here). It's difficult to navigate between ineffectual rule and backlash, yet can be done. The Malayan Emergency and suppression of the Mau Maus show it's possible. Saddam Hussein's Iraq was very proficient as suppressing! Technology is not a factor - the Assyrians did imperialism in the Bronze Age, the Arabs did it, the Mongols did it, the Romans did it, the Spanish did it, the British did it, the Russians did it. There are gradations in repression, different kinds of institutions and administrative techniques. But you cannot do this stuff and keep your hands clean, it's just not possible. I know you mentioned will and stability but the proposals are standard progressive-frame economic/social-worker interventions.
Enforcing laws is so much easier than real imperialism! And the US can't even do that, there are open-air drug markets when Xi isn't in town. There are blatant robberies, out in the open. In San Fran police have given up on traffic infractions.
https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/bayarea/heatherknight/article/sfpd-traffic-tickets-17355651.php
In Canada you see the most cucked advice from police:
“To prevent the possibility of being attacked in your home, leave your fobs at your front door,” Const. Marco Ricciardi said at the meeting. “ Because they're breaking into your home to steal your car. They don't want anything else.”
This wimpy attitude is the problem, not a shortage of education or bussing or needing higher wages. It's not hard to whisk the problem people away, Bukele did it in El Salvedor with limited resources and opposition from the US. China does not have high wages yet people do not go around stealing and murdering like in America or Canada - they know the state will crush them. This is a lesser kind of imperialism in my mind, yet it's still of the same essence. Using force to create order but on internal rather than external entities - that's what police do.
What happens if people made to work in Amazon do a really bad job (many won't want to be there and some are innately bad workers)? What if they show up late? Are they fired, lose their welfare and are left to starve? Are they beaten? What do we do about protests - ignore them and crush rioters?
Or do we pay Amazon to have better workers cover for the bad workers in their make-work jobs? Do we fire the worst workers and give their welfare back, accepting the obvious incentive? Do we capitulate at the first riot because it's 'a bad look', it makes people think of Nazis? Do we capitulate at the first time somebody is unjustly mistreated by our policy, reshaping the whole policy because we're not yet adept at the techniques?
It's the same in education. What if the students are beating each other, thoroughly ignoring the teacher, making a circus of the whole thing? Are they actually punished or are they 'suspended' and given a holiday? Nobody would dare to behave in a British school 100 years ago like they behave today, there were real consequences. We don't need to cane students who aren't good enough at Latin, nor should we build a huge surveillance state like China. But we do need to accept that not everything is going to be resolved amicably, sometimes we need to punish and punish severely.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
6d ago
In Australia we just expelled a Chinese student for working on linking drones together to navigate through environments without GPS, since it was apparently 'WMD-related'. You should tread carefully, a lot of people are getting very excited/scared about drone navigation and targeting.
Honestly they're not wrong, I'm waiting for the moment 10,000 kill bots swarm out of a shipping container somewhere, they'll make 9/11 look like a joke.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
4d ago
Fact check "Young white men vote Trump": Mostly True
"For example, young White men supported President Trump by 6 points (51% vs 45%)"
https://circle.tufts.edu/latest-research/election-week-2020#the-views-of-young-trump-voters
Though you're also correct in that young people vote Democrat and that young white men don't overwhelmingly vote Republican: Young White voters preferred Biden by 6 points (51% vs. 45%).
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
6d ago
There could be complex cyclical trends in the Middle East. People get overly domesticated and decadent, then the next wave of steppe nomads arrive and conquer them, infusing more aggression and willingness to die. Effete intellectuals in Baghdad hit hardest by latest horde (or any disruptions really), ignorant peasants in the countryside are valued taxpayers and food suppliers. Cities were likely IQ shredders for millennia, you'd have plague and urban fertility reduction burning off natural enhancements in intellect, perhaps there was a delicate homeostasis, periods of rise and fall.
There's good reason why people dismiss HBD as explaining too much, just storytelling. But this is the social sciences. Few things are simple, there are all kinds of factors we can't measure.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
6d ago
Anti-colonialism.
If you look at Irish history, they had settlement and land expropriation from their stronger, religiously distinct, ultra-Western neighbour. They had vicious and protracted wars with Britain, insurgency, atrocities and terrorism.
It's quite similar to Palestine v Israel. More Western vs less Western, stronger vs weaker, religious conflict, land confiscation. Britain has been closely aligned with Israel since Suez.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
17d ago
We can synthesize infant formula but it's not as good as the real thing. We synthesize fake sugar, fake chemical food (by which I mean things like jelly beans - highly processed food with paragraphs of exotic-sounding ingredients). That was instrumental to the global obesity crisis and millions of premature deaths yearly.
Why would we be capable of synthesizing meat that's just as good as real meat? We probably couldn't tell if the synthetic meat was bogus in some subtle way. Maybe it has the wrong hormones, or the wrong mix of hormones or an absence of certain kinds of proteins. The people who brought us the food pyramid are hardly going to help. After obesity, microplastics and an ongoing crisis of mental illness we should be very wary of any novel synthetic-agricultural processes.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
7d ago
Non-Han minorities get certain privileges but if they step out of line they'll be in a world of pain. Imagine if a minority group in China pulled an LA riot or a Floyd in response to police brutality, let alone a CHAZ. They'd be whisked away, never to be seen again. The police would launch an orgy of repression and re-education. China is super into historical grievance narratives, patriotism and Chinese nationalism (as opposed to Han nationalism or multiculturalism). The only times they're allowed to riot is when there's some incident with the US, the Belgrade embassy bombing for instance. Then they have the police put the kid gloves on and subtly stoke the fires, while trying to keep things under control.
Imagine if the top earning film at the US box office was 'Saving Private Ryan' turned up to 11 with an ending caption saying 'the eternal glory of the US Army shall be remembered forever and ever, the brave martyrs live forever in our hearts'. That's the Battle at Lake Changjin, that's real, intense nationalism. The top grossing film in America is Star Wars VII, a woke remaster of the original Star Wars.
If Central Asians desecrate Russian symbols, they and their families are expelled. Russia takes national pride very seriously, to a quasi-religious level. There's a lot of intense patriotism and nationalism, people (Strelkov and co) who'll go volunteer to start a tough war in support of their national beliefs.
https://www.rferl.org/a/russia-uzbek-boys-expelled-eternal-flame/32726911.html
Russia and China - civic nationalism. USA and West - multiculturalism and wokeness.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
13d ago
In related UK news, the head of Cybersecurity for the treasury earns... 57K Pounds or 12% of comparable positions in business: https://twitter.com/jontafkasi/status/1641193954778697728?s=46
Just the other day the MoD was hacked: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/china-mod-uk-hack-data-breach-b2540489.html
I don't think they're solving their cyber problems any time soon. Joke country.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
11d ago
COVID was a big deal, so were the Floyd riots, so is inflation. The GFC was also a big deal and had correspondingly large media coverage. 9/11 and the global war on terror were likewise.
It's just that more important things are happening now than in the 2010s.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
24d ago
German Greens falsified evidence in order to phase out nuclear power back in 2022. Recently there was a Freedom of Information lawsuit that, despite the best efforts of the government, won and uncovered the documents. Amusingly the govt pleaded 'this needs to be kept secret lest all the countries we're trying to spruke our anti-nuclear, green ideology to realise how silly it is and combat our foreign policy' but failed.
A small group of Green politicians rewrote notes from technical experts to reverse the core message to be pro-shutdown of nuclear plants, fabricating safety concerns and arguing that necessary life-extension upgrades hadn't been undertaken. Despite being told that the message was rubbish they pressed on, lying to the public about why they were pushing what they were pushing.
The Germans turned their nuclear plants back on in a brief life-extension back in late 2022 before shutting them all down in 2023. I've maintained for several years that there's a high-level sabotage campaign against nuclear energy in the Western world. Most of the time it's not as clear as this. Usually it's procedural manipulation, regulations requiring pointlessly complicated and exacting reactor designs, obliterating the industry by not letting new power plants be made and a stubborn refusal to store nuclear waste permanently.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
6d ago
China is indeed doing things to minorities that American leftists could never dream of. Even allowing for US propaganda, they are not very tolerant.
In addition to the arbitrary detention of Uyghurs in state-sponsored camps, government policies have included forced labor,[5][6] suppression of Uyghur religious practices,[7] political indoctrination,[8] forced sterilization,[9] forced contraception,[10][11] and forced abortion.[12][13] Experts estimate that, since 2017, some sixteen thousand mosques have been razed or damaged,[2] and hundreds of thousands of children have been forcibly separated from their parents and sent to boarding schools.[14][15] Chinese government statistics reported that from 2015 to 2018, birth rates in the mostly Uyghur regions of Hotan and Kashgar fell by more than 60%.[9] In the same period, the birth rate of the whole country decreased by 9.69%.
Or consider what they've done in Tibet. That is not woke behaviour! They offer the carrot and the stick - if your ethnic group doesn't do what they want, they'll ensure you regret it. You had better be Chinese first, second and third, Tibetan fourth. It's very different to wokeness which is all carrot and no stick, for minorities at least. Wokeness undermines and reinterprets what it means to be American, Christopher Columbus Day or Thanksgiving are 'controversial'. It's thoroughly different to Chinese nationalism.
I'm not saying it's great to be super-nationalist like China but a certain level of nationalism is preferable for stability in a time of uncertainty.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
13d ago
The Australian govt is great at doing things with Indigenous issues, there's no shortage of activity! Only results fail. We shuffle the welfare system around from time to time. Cashless to non-cashless benefits and back again, trying to lower the drunkenness and violence. Every so often we put down a youth curfew in horrible places like Alice Springs and the Northern Territory. When the Right was feeling brave they tried a big crackdown. When Left were feeling brave, they tried for a referendum to enshrine indigenous legal bodies in the constitution. Nothing worked, though I'm sure many public sector jobs were created.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_Territory_National_Emergency_Response
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Australian_Indigenous_Voice_referendum
Primary was meh, very disorganized state schools.
Secondary was excellent, went to an expensive private boys school. Nearly everyone was very clever and most were very rich, getting dropped off in Porsches or BMWs by their lawyer-doctor parents. A small fraction got in via networking and were more interested in rugby than academics. We had big exams for every subject twice a year, everyone took them quite seriously. The classes for each subject were sorted from A to F or H based on the results from the exams, there was a very clear and objective hierarchy. I think this was a great source of male motivation: competition and prestige. Latin and Ancient Greek were offered, the teachers were paid as if they were university professors (and some had been). It was like a trip to an alternate dimension, we sang patriotic hymns in assembly. At one point the sports reports were read out as (quite good) poems. At one point they brought in a leading quantum physicist to deliver a speech about their work in quantum computing, it went right over 99% of our heads, faculty included. One boy asked a pretty incisive question, he managed to understand the content.
But you could tell that corrosive modernity was digging into the heart of oak and sandstone. A lot of kids cultivated imaginary mental disorders that got them more time in the important state exams for university entry. The younger generation of teachers were much more wishy-washy and progressive. We started getting land acknowledgements and denunciations of Pizzagate where we used to get hyper-abstract philosophical speeches in Assembly. Rumours abounded that they'd try to bring in girls at some point, though I've seen no evidence that they are. There was female-teacher-on-boy sexual abuse (I got a look at the teacher, definitely not the 'I wish that was me!' physiognomy) going on 2 years above me, they snuffed that story out of the media with a lot of skill.
I got along pretty well with people. Teachers were fine but some took themselves overly seriously, like it was their solemn duty to teach us music, languages or geography we had no particular interest in. Met some great, fun, smart people with the same exotic interests as me - friends for life hopefully. Some people, myself included, got pretty arrogant when comparing ourselves to ordinary kids. Arrogance has its virtues when you are indeed right and everyone else is wrong but it also has social pitfalls.
'Alone' is a key part of this, that's what the forest is there to imply. Obviously women feel safer on a street with 10-20 men than alone with a bear. Presumably they think that if one decides to attack them, the others will help them out or are at least supposed to help them. At least in daytime.
If men are so bad, why would having more of them around help? If a majority of men decided to use violence to subjugate women, it would be easily accomplished since men are more violent, better at organizing violence and are stronger.
Alternate thought from Devon Eriksen - they are humblebragging about being so desirable that men want to rape them while trying to preserve their compassionate credentials: https://twitter.com/Devon_Eriksen_/status/1785673620729073911
I think this is part of it. As a man, the value proposition of raping a woman alone in the woods seems pretty low. Momentary thrill but what do you do next? Leave her alive to report you? Kill her and bury the body? What happens when people come looking for her and find traces? You'd really need to be very impulsive or intoxicated by beauty to think this was a good choice of action.
You could short Ukrainian bonds perhaps? I don't know how to do that though, seems like Advanced Finance. Blackrock also has a 'Ukraine development fund' for post-war rebuilding, though that's a very small part of their operations.
The big problem is that this whole area is dominated by nation-state actors who can shut down trading and act as they please. Blackrock is almost a state actor, they're so big. I'm sure opportunities for profiting exist but they're mostly taken by people who can steal from govt contracts (the guys who get paid to laid down Dragon's Teeth, dump them in a pile and say 'job's done').
There are normal markets where you expect things to change quickly based on new information and then there are Special Economic Operations. Lockheed Martin didn't make such big moves as the war began. It went from 350 to about 440 in late '21 to 22 and it's stuck in that range since, decent but not great. Microsoft did better as a longer-term investment, over roughly the same period. BAE has done much better though, I don't know why. You might well think 'defeat in Ukraine will prompt higher militarization in the West' but the US and the West aren't actually militarizing, not since the war began. Munitions production remains pretty low. The US has been roughly treading water in defence spending after you adjust for inflation. These markets don't make sense and you should tread carefully.
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