ABigGuy4U
4d ago
China intensively polices any kind of capital or resource outflow. Chinese businessmen have sometimes gotten in trouble for just moving 40 million dollars out of the country to buy an overseas business.
ABigGuy4U
5d ago
Modern air combat is looking more and more attrition heavy. Ukraine and Russia basically can’t use close air support because it’s too dangerous. Even operating far from the front lines, both still regularly lose aircraft. And with drones and hypersonic missiles, both sides are still suffering aircraft losses even when the planes aren’t in combat.
Meanwhile India and Pakistan just recently had the only major air-to-air engagement of the 21st century and even though it was barely a skirmish it caused the loss of six to eight planes on both sides. Imagine what would have happened if they had been seriously trying to get air superiority.
And then you have Israel, who is fighting an enemy with no Air Force and no air defenses, and they are still running into problems with wear and tear because they are having to run too many missions with too few aircraft.
All in all this would seem to imply more planes are better, because you need to be able to afford losing quite a few.
ABigGuy4U
6d ago
Is there a word for this process? Or at least something to say when you notice somebody doing it?
It’s like some kind of... some kind of two tiered argument castle thingy.
I think that what Mr. Jones said was disgusting and should torpedo his chances of election. You’re still overreacting.
And yet when I say something perfectly innocuous and reasonable like “blow it out your ass Janny Hotpockets, you DO IT FOR FREE”, suddenly that’s a three day ban. Not this time though, I’m sure you’ll extend me the same charity you extend to Mr. Jones.
ABigGuy4U
9d ago
All it takes is for a populist upstart to sweep the 2028 Dem primary by steamrolling the wokescolds and pro-Israel donors.
That’s the whole problem though, Democrat Party bylaws and primary structure make it much more resistant to any kind of populist takeover. The leadership can jam the throttle and point the plane right at a mountain and there’s not much the rank and file can do to stop them.
ABigGuy4U
10d ago
Anecdotes and rumors. The fact that it gets mentioned in both positive and negative anecdotes about him makes me think it’s true. Muhammad Ali dodged the draft too, that doesn’t mean I would want to get in a fight with him.
ABigGuy4U
11d ago
I’m not a gay man but this seems utterly backwards to me. Liberace was the highest paid musician in the entire world, an immensely talented entertainer and genuinely skilled pianist. To achieve that level of status requires a massive amount of talent and effort and you’re saying it’s more gratifying and somehow harder to just be a generic handsome guy because… other gay men find you more fuckable?
This is definitely a real dynamic in straight couples to the point of being a cliche (The Eagles’ Take it Easy if you want an example). The attractive young woman is married to/dating a wealthy older man, but stepping out on him with a young poor man who she is actually attracted to. So I wouldn’t be surprised if it was a thing with gays too.
ABigGuy4U
12d ago
with implausibly organized leftist violence
The book it’s loosely based on, Vineland by Thomas Pynchon, was set in the 80s. The revolutionaries were ex-Weatherman/Black Panther types. Which makes a lot more sense than an organized leftist domestic terrorist group who used to engage in direct action against... the Obama administration circa 2010???
ABigGuy4U
12d ago
I don’t see how that’s relevant. We’re talking about Presidents and how attractive they were, not who is marrying Aisha in Goatfuckistan.
But the end effect of that reasoning is that the rankings of the hottest Presidents just become a list of the Presidents that happen to have been younger when they served their terms: Kennedy, Obama, Clinton, and sometimes Bush II. Meanwhile the models and the movie stars are confined to the bottom just because they happened to be quite old when they became president.
ABigGuy4U
12d ago
Take away Trump's money and fame, and he would not be the kind of person who makes other men nervous and easily picks up women.
Sure, maybe not today when he’s 79. But when Trump was a young man he was six foot four, fit, and had good hair. And he was always very confident, with a good deal of physical courage. Even if he were just an insurance salesman making middle class income, I don’t think he would have had any problems getting a date.
I keep meaning to make a Friday Fun thread screed about how Presidential hotness rankings are totally wrong because they only judge at the time the person was President. Gerald Ford was a male model who was on the cover of Cosmo for God’s sake!
It was ever thus. in 1802 if your unit dressed in buckskins like an American Indian, it symbolized that you were an elite ranger. The paratroopers that jumped into Brittany during the D-Day invasion shaved their hair into Mohawks and painted their faces with Iroquois war paint. MAC-V SOG units in Vietnam wore the Mohawk also (that’s what Travis Bickle’s hair in Taxi Driver is a reference to, in Paul Schrader’s original script he was a former Green Beret). Special units always try to aesthetically distinguish themselves from the rank and file, and taking on the characteristics of former defeated enemies is often a way to do that. In the 19th and 20th centuries that was the aesthetics of an Indian brave; in the 21st it’s the keffiyeh and beard of an afghani mujahideen.
It’s a very inside-baseball military fashion debate. Muslims in some countries like Afghanistan don’t respect men without beards. They think it looks effeminate. To assist with winning hearts and minds and blending in with the locals, special forces units and CIA Special Activities Division operators started wearing long beards like Afghani tribesmen. The problem is that when a crack elite secret unit of secret and elite crack operators starts wearing beards, everyone in the regular army is going to want to wear a beard because of the cachet and cool factor. But if you let that happen pretty soon regular army units are going to start looking like an episode of Duck Dynasty and grooming and discipline standards will go to hell. This isn’t about secretly forcing out black or Sikh soldiers, it’s about stopping posers. Hegseth made this explicit, during his speech he said “if you want to wear a beard, join the special forces!” This kind of thing has already happened many times before: tucking your pants into your boots is a fiercely guarded privilege that only paratroopers can exercise. During the American Civil War and the European Victorian era, some special units got to wear a fez.
ABigGuy4U
17d ago
Why would such individuals not simply up and leave?
—Having the freedom to change jobs
—In Diocletian’s Rome
Anon, I....
ABigGuy4U
19d ago
The vast majority of the MK ULTRA program files were destroyed and never released or leaked, so it’s hard to say. There were probably multiple types of techniques tested, and any that were successful were probably spun off into their own programs. In tinfoil hat circles I’ve heard of successor programs called MK NAOMI and MK MONARCH. I suspect some of the techniques of MK ULTRA or other similar programs ended up in mass media. In a democracy, being able to manipulate a huge number of people a small degree could be very useful.
ABigGuy4U
25d ago
Generally I would disagree. Older black Democrats in the south (the demographic you really need in a primary) tend to prefer friendly, kind of goofy white candidates to slick sharky ones. I think Biden’s reputation as a gaffe machine was actually an asset to him there. It’s one of the reasons I think Gavin Newsome will never win a fair democratic primary. On Pete specifically though I do agree, his only major resume item before being whisked away to Washington was a badly handled municipal police shooting.
ABigGuy4U
25d ago
You and @DradisPing are way overthinking it. The whole “infidel” thing and all the crusader stuff is just Millennial GWOT-Boomer edgelord cringe of the type that was very popular with American soldiers that served in the Middle East in the 2000s. You know, the demographic that’s going to make up 95 percent of the personnel of American Private Military Companies. It’s a motorcycle club for veterans, it’s not a surprise to see a bunch of them getting hired by a PMC through networking to do security contracting work in the Middle East.
ABigGuy4U
25d ago
Yes, instituting a 100k/year fee on top for every H-1B employee will effectively kill this program.
That’s the joke. If the H1-B program was being used by companies to bring in small numbers of absolutely indispensable exceptional talent (like they were all claiming) than a 100k per person fee shouldn’t be much of a problem.
ABigGuy4U
29d ago
A lot of right-wingers very publicly celebrated that death on social media.
It was definitely not just right wingers. The fear of another 9/11 hung over large urban areas for a long time and there was more than a little celebration in New York and Hollywood (Zero Dark Thirty). Especially since President Obama was the one that did it.
ABigGuy4U
29d ago
I don’t think this is entirely true. There is leaked audio of Trump and RFK talking on the phone and Trump is expressing skepticism and concern over how babies get so many vaccines so early. That’s a subject that also comes up periodically in Trump’s pre-political career tweets, including his much memed “...AUTISM! Many such cases!” Tweet. It’s partially a marriage of convenience, but it’s only possible because both Trump and Trump’s base are casually but broadly sympathetic to a lot of RFK’s causes.
I mean reputation for humanity and morals, not of fearsomeness. What I mean is that if you gave mass communication to soldiers in any war you would see some pretty ugly behavior and pretty ugly attitudes.
Kirk was unique in that he was the gateway between the normiecon boomer politics world and the underworld of bizarre lolcows. So he was very popular with normies, but there are also a ton of terminally online right-wing zoomers that liked him. One mistake everyone that is covering this is making is that young people don’t just follow a single political commentator. There are a good chunk of people that like both Fuentes and Kirk.
ABigGuy4U
30d ago
Which is an important factor that no-one really takes into account when doing the demographic projections.
They don’t need to. They can just say that to the entire class of students they teach with a straight face.
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