Grant wasn’t an Ernest Hemingway-style persistent heavy drinker, glass of whisky always in hand. Grant was more of a “spend nine months teetotal and then go on a three day bender” kind of drinker. Also by the time he was President he had quit drinking for good. Now Lyndon Johnson on the other hand, was a persistent heavy drinker and say what you will about him it never diminished his effectiveness as President.
I didn’t know WoW had permadeath. Ironically this sounds a lot like the kind of discourse that goes on in military circles after a special forces raid goes particularly bad.
ABigGuy4U
3d ago
I suspect the doctors would have been pretty cautious even if they were practicing in New York. Nobody wants to get sued out of business and have their license to practice revoke because they killed someone’s baby when it wasn’t medically necessary.
ABigGuy4U
3d ago
(not sure about that, but I definitely feel that there are less beautiful black women overall in media even if the total number increases)
I’m pretty sure it’s real, 4chan /tv/ has been complaining about that for years.
ABigGuy4U
5d ago
Israel’s economy and security situation can’t afford a permanent occupation of Gaza. Israel would need to keep 250,000 reservists mobilized, a significant proportion of their reserve force. Those guys all have day jobs, participating in the economy. The occupation force would be taking a small amount of casualties, every month, for as long as it was there. And it would leave the IDF badly undermanned in the event of any of the many, many other nightmare scenarios, like a full uprising in the West Bank, a major flareup by Hezbollah in Lebanon, an invasion by a neighbor, or a major civil conflict.
ABigGuy4U
5d ago
Netanyahu isn’t particularly religious either. Witkoff likely knew that and realized he was being blown off with an excuse as a power play, hence his reaction.
—spend two billion dollars creating AI whose only commercial application is generating naughty pictures of Taylor Swift
—move heaven and earth so it can’t do that anymore
—go bankrupt
—???????
—PROFIT
Ask the Shapiro right and the woke are actually the student protestors and that guy that immolated himself for Palestine.
Well yes that’s the problem. Both the true believers and the mercenary government and party apparatchiks considered themselves to be woke. For the last ten years that’s never been a problem, and the two camps have moved in lockstep with regard to domestic policy. But two years ago the international situation exploded in various ways and suddenly there is revealed a number of pretty big gulfs between what the different sub-denominations of woke actually want. And most of the revolutionary zeal is in the true believers, who are got disgusted and are walking away, leaving the befuddled apparatchiks holding the bag.
ABigGuy4U
7d ago
When you describe it like that it sounds a lot like the Chinese Cultural Revolution: an auto-coup by one faction of the elite weaponizing the militant youth against a rival faction of the elite. It ended pretty quickly when the opposing faction of the elite ended up grabbing power.
Overextension of woke in service of America’s geopolitical goals introduced fatal cognitive dissonance that alienated the most militant core supporters of the ideological movement. The Woke movement has already survived quite a bit cognitive dissonance, but 2022-2023 produced too much.
2022: “The scary paramilitary guy over there? The one wearing the Black Sun T-shirt with the little SS Tottenkopf pin? Oh that’s just Sergeant Kravchenko. He’s woke actually. Yes it is perfectly normal that his friends attend some official funerals in full 1944 Waffen SS uniforms. Ok, his grandfather did shoot an entire village in Poland one time but we’re giving him a medal because those villagers were all communists. Yes we’ve been telling you that fascism is evil and communism is the future since kindergarten, but it just isn’t ok? We need to give them lots and lots of money to help them punch Nazis.”
2023: “Ok yes it’s technically a ethno-state. Ok so there are some theocratic elements too. Yes, some of the people who live there have different sets of legal rights because of their race. Liquidating a ghetto full of brown people is woke, actually. Shut up CHUD, we need to give them more smart bombs and if you say something else I’m calling the campus police! The police beating up student protestors IS woke god damn it!”
ABigGuy4U
9d ago
I think a lot of these companies were being told by big consulting firms like McKinsey that these strategies would open new markets and bring them a lot of money, and the companies genuinely believed them. They started cooling off on DEI and the Modern Audience when the promised returns never materialized.
ABigGuy4U
11d ago
I think the modern equivalent of the Franco-Prussian War (in terms of drastically misleading future military planners) is probably the Gulf War. Especially the battle of 73 Easting.
ABigGuy4U
11d ago
It’s almost is if the billionaires’ prior support of Democrats and current support of Trump were both purely out of selfish economic interest and had nothing to do with genuine principles.
ABigGuy4U
11d ago
Some of the currently in-use electrical infrastructure in California is so old that it was built by Thomas Edison himself. I’m not joking, it literally was.
ABigGuy4U
12d ago
The California and Texas Republics had better not cross the Kingdom of North Dakota. It has the world’s third largest nuclear arsenal.
ABigGuy4U
12d ago
Afghanistan arguably had a pretty strong patriotic movement, it’s just that it was on the side opposing the ANA. Granted that side wanted to revert back to tribal/religious rule rather than have a strictly 20th century nation state, but it was very unified in its opposition to foreign involvement.
ABigGuy4U
12d ago
The mafioso isn’t the only one paying in blood thoughbeit. Even in a best case scenario Ukraine’s economy and demographics have been permanently ruined. A harsh sacrifice perhaps, but one that Reddit and the US State Department are more than willing to make.
Frankly I’m not sure Putin is willing to accept any offer right now. The problem is geography. The Russians have spent three years attriting the Ukrainian army and slowly breaking through the massive network of fortifications, trench lines, and bunker complexes that were built up over ten years along the LPR/DPR border. Also most of Ukraine’s few hilly areas are in the east. Everything after Pokrovsk and Kramantorsk will likely be significantly easier. Russia has put in a large percentage of the effort, blood and money needed to conquer half or all of Ukraine, and they are being asked to walk away and leave that on the table. The time to make a deal would have been about six months into the war when the Russian army only had 180,000 men in theater and was being routed out of Kharkiv.
ABigGuy4U
12d ago
My point was it would have most likely lead to immediate military action by the United States. I wasn’t making any kind of commentary about the merits or lack thereof of communism or its application in Mexico.
Regarding your second point, that’s a genuinely interesting counterfactual, and I’m not sure what I would have thought if it turned out that way.
ABigGuy4U
13d ago
If you’re the head of a publicly traded corpo you kind of have to. Taking a principled stand that loses 25 percent of the company’s revenue can literally get you sued by the shareholders.
ABigGuy4U
13d ago
If the Soviet Union had sponsored a communist revolution in Mexico and then announced that they were admitting Mexico into the Warsaw Pact, what do you think would happen? Would you characterize the United States as a “rabid dog” for their response?
Strange Rumblings in Columbia: Inauguration Day Weirdness
Some odd news and sights coming out of Washington in the last few days. First, the public Inauguration Day ceremony on the National Mall was cancelled. Ostensibly due to poor weather (the forecasted high temperature for Inauguration Day is 28F/-2C), although other Presidents have had public ceremonies in cooler temperatures. President Trump would be sworn in the Congressional chamber of the Capitol building in front of the full Congress, similar to a state of the Union address.
Then a day or two ago ago, that plan was cancelled, and the ceremony is being moved to the White House. It will be much smaller and most of Congress will not be there.
When Trump arrived in Virginia yesterday, all the cars in the motorcade had an odd feature. A three foot tall pole-like device attached to the roof, around 4 inches wide. It is apparently some kind of anti-drone countermeasure. There are rumors spreading that the first two ceremony types were canceled due to intelligence reports of a credible threat of drone attack.
Adding to the already odd protocol, it appears that Vice-President elect JD Vance will not even be present in Washington DC for the inauguration and will be sworn in at an undisclosed location somewhere else. This harks back to the years after 9/11 when Vice President Cheney would spend State of the Union addresses in an undisclosed bunker in case of a massive attack.
Meanwhile, there are still several thousand troops in Washington DC, who were brought in to safeguard the election certification process.
This all seems very odd. If this is in response to a foreign threat of some kind it seems like a very credible and serious one indeed. It is also of course sending bolts of static electricity through the creases of my tinfoil hat, but I have no idea how to interpret them. I would appreciate hearing anyone’s thoughts on this.
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