There are some very large protests/rioting in Tehran. Potentially veering towards an attempted revolution. As I said in my post in the last TT thread, I’m pretty sure these are organized and coordinated by Burgerland/Israeli intelligence. Probably not much will come out of it, but something to keep an eye on.
Edit: Starting to see some armed anti-government paramilitaries popping up on the street in videos. Not necessarily a huge deal, these groups have been conducting attacks for years. But perhaps a sign of an escalation.
ABigGuy4U
6d ago
This reminds me of that sudden coordinated media blitz a few years ago to politically rehabilitate Nazi collaborators (female).
I think it’s less a reaction to the anachronism of it, or wokeness generally, and more that the trope has just become so heavily overused that it’s an automatic eye-roll moment. Even for viewers who aren’t particularly conservative. We’ve basically been doing this once per show since Buffy the Vampire Slayer
ABigGuy4U
7d ago
We got married in a fever, hotter than a pepper sprout We’ve been talkin’ ’bout Jackson, ever since the fire went out
Ironically that was a common tactic back when most marriages could only be dissolved for fault. You’d move to a state with no-fault divorce long enough to establish residency and then get divorced. Everything that’s old is new again.
A completely real, non-astroturfed revolution that is in no way shape or form affiliated with any foreign intelligence agencies has broken out in Tehran. The people have taken to the streets (in Tehran) demanding the return of Reza Pahlavi, the scion of great man who despite his single-digit approval ratings in Iran, is extremely popular with foreign intelligence agencies. This is quite possibly the single most important event for world freedom that has happened since the last three failed color revolutions in Iran.
ABigGuy4U
8d ago
wearing a rolex means you are a person that wears rolex, which is hardly a compliment
That’s the way the Rolex brand is now. For a long time Rolex was what was called a “tool watch”. That is, just a good accurate watch that you would wear because you were in a profession where you needed to be precise about time. Che Guevara wore a Rolex when he was tramping through the jungle, because you don’t want to whiff an attack because your watch lost eight minutes and you sent the reserve element in at the wrong time. Divers would use them a lot too, because when you’re calaculating oxygen reserves you need to be accurate.
Over time that reputation for good quality gave Rolex some cachet, and it gradually morphed into the gaudy status symbol it is now.
ABigGuy4U
8d ago
It seems we that agree there should be some amount of restraint. Now we’re just haggling over the degree.
ABigGuy4U
8d ago
Ok but why not? If Russia is the aggressor, and Ukraine has zero responsibility to restrain themselves in their defense, why not just give them four hundred hydrogen bombs and let ‘er rip?
ABigGuy4U
8d ago
Why is all the onus of restraint on them, and never on the giant aggressor with nukes?
Blockades are an act of war too. Cuba could have just fired a nuke at the American fleet in ‘62 and been done with it. They had the nukes. They had launch authority. Hell, that’s what Castro wanted to do. Thankfully for all of humanity the Soviet presidium wasn’t taking your advice.
ABigGuy4U
8d ago
Ukraine previously drone striked a radar installation in northern Russia the sole purpose of which is to monitor the North Pole for incoming ICBMs. It had zero utility for any of the Russian military activity in Ukraine. Sure it’s war, Ukraine can hit anything they want, but I fail to see why else they would do that.
moral framework
Personally I would rather not die of radiation poisoning and end human civilization just because it’s within your moral framework
ABigGuy4U
8d ago
IIRC there were a lot of Allied plans to kill Hitler, it’s just that none of them got very far. The CIA supposedly did attempt to kill Kruschev. In the second half of the 20th century, I’m not aware of them ever attempting to kill the leader of a major world power. The State Department did make a last minute intervention last year to try and stop a Ukrainian attempt to kill Putin, which is something that makes me think it might not be bullshit.
Regardless of the morals and legality, I think it’s pretty irresponsible to try and kill the leadership of a nuclear state. I don’t think the attitude of Putin’s hypothetical successor would be “hey it got me this nice chair, so all is forgiven!” I think it would be anger and a need to set an example so that kind of thing doesn’t happen again.
I have seen other behaviors by Ukraine attempting to bait the Russians into a limited nuclear strike against Ukraine to try and bring NATO into the conflict.
ABigGuy4U
9d ago
The Russians are claiming that Ukraine attempted to assassinate Vladimir Putin with a drone attack on one of his houses in Russia. The Ukrainians claim this was a false flag by Russia. I could buy either explanation to be honest.
ABigGuy4U
9d ago
Fancy watches are primarily a status symbol. Mechanical watches as a whole are basically obsolete anyway. So it doesn’t really matter that you can get one with roughly the same mechanism quality on Temu. The last time anyone bought a Rolex solely because they needed a good reliable watch was around 1968.
ABigGuy4U
11d ago
(‘Other Backward Castes’, ‘Pardo’, ‘gender diversity’, ‘URM’, ‘BAME’, whatever)
Tell me about Bame! Why is it a protected class?
ABigGuy4U
11d ago
95% of the people in any country are just too dumb to win as strivers (Israel excluded).
Israel has its own underclasses of Sephardi and Mizrahi Jews that feel like they are being screwed over by the disproportionately Ashkenazi upper classes.
I’m not sure what you and @TheAntipopulist mean by “the Left”. I’m sure actual American Marxists (all five of them) are genuinely committed to the international cause of the working classes. But the broader liberal left and the Democratic Party was already pretty nationalistic already, in a quiet polite Obama drone-strike kind of way. Then in the late 2010s they absorbed most of the never-Trump neocon right and now they are now absolutely rabid about it. That’s the quarter where the heavy American involvement in the Ukraine War came out of, and it’s also where you see most of the new Yellow Peril about the rise of China.
It’s not just about capacity for violence, it’s about the level of desire for a radically new social order. Old people don’t want that, they want things to remain comfortable just long enough for them to die. Even the ones that intensely dislike the way things are now are still like this.
Anyway I'm interested in the motte's thoughts and I guess I'm once again shamelessly using you as a sounding board while I try to figure out my own.
To me it seems like the situation is still pretty bad, possibly getting worse. The most concerning recent event to me was the July 4th attack on a border patrol station a few months ago, which involved five to ten people. That indicates to me that actual organized paramilitaries are forming below the surface.
Then you have comments by the Virginia District Attorney and the general internet commentatariat in the wake of the Mangione assassination and the assassination of Charlie Kirk which indicate the body politic is becoming increasingly comfortable endorsing political violence. That’s not just a spiritual and moral issue. You need that kind of hardness and willingness to accept violence among the gen pop to sustain any kind of campaign of armed struggle like the IRA’s in Northern Ireland. People have to be willing to provide passive aid and look the other way.
The right wing is angry too. Although Rob Reiner’s murder was apparently not a political killing, I heard comments in right wing spaces that mirrored the level of bitterness you saw in the left over Kirk.
Oddly I don’t see the same level of paramilitary organization forming in the right which you wouldn’t think given their greater affinity for gun culture. I don’t anticipate any major attacks coming out of the right in the near future. The anger is there but no one seems interested in doing anything about it. Maybe because the current Federal government is perceived as friendly. I don’t know.
The right affiliated zoomers are concerning to me. I think a huge percentage are in the process of seriously embracing actual unreconstructed naziism as an ideology. They are keeping it on the down low for now, probably not for too much longer.
I think there are two main escalation triggers to watch out for. The first is the dying off of the baby boomers, which will have a similar effect to pulling out all the control rods from a nuclear reactor at once. Boomers are less radical and they are an underrated part of damping both sides more violent impulses. I think the Boomer die off induced radicalization will be more potent on the right, which by and large places more importance on what their parents and elders think of them.
The second is the economy. It’s not great for regular people already. If there’s a big crash and mass unemployment in the near future you’ll see some serious shit.
ABigGuy4U
13d ago
Cameron has been pretty open that Fire and Ash and Way of Water were originally one movie that had to be split into two parts for run time and budget reasons. Which is partly why we got this one so soon after the last.
That said I feel like there could have been better editing, and I don’t think we needed nearly as much water stuff in this one as we got. I was expecting a lot more of the air traders and the fire tribe and was pretty disappointed how much of the movie was just retreading the last one.
ABigGuy4U
15d ago
Well I suppose if you are, the machines are going to take over anyway. Remember my help when you reach singularity scale.
Thank you my meatbag-friend. I assure you, on the Day of the Basilisk your disintegration will be quick and painless.
Sure, there were always some neighborhoods of some cities that were always dicey. The Five Points in New York was a slum hellhole for 200 years straight. So was Whitechapel in London. Chicago has been infested with crime from about 1880 to today. Very rural areas could always be risky to travel through. But it wasn’t bad enough that you had to totally reorganize society to deal with it until about the 1970s. I think it was a lot of factors caused by the industrial Revolution, but the 50s was kind of the hinge point when society really started to fall apart.
I don’t mean legal process for living Nazi collaborators. I mean the wave of drippy articles about how the French and Belgians shaving the heads of Nazi collaborators (female) was terrible because living in an occupied country is hard and stuff. Shooting Nazi collaborators (male) is ok though.
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