ABigGuy4U
2mo ago
Hollywood is turning to garbage because it’s now run primarily on nepotism, connections, blackmail and propaganda. The Acolyte is a good example of this. The showrunner/writer was Harvey Weinstein’s personal assistant. She likely got this opportunity as a bribe to keep her quiet because she knows where some of the proverbial bodies are buried (blackmail). The lead actress Amandala Sternberg is then selected because her parents have industry connections and she’s from a racial demographic that Hollywood favors (connections, propaganda). The supporting actress is hired because she’s married to the show runner (nepotism). The male supporting lead Lee Jung-jae seems to have been selected mostly due to talent. Notice that we are now four rungs down into the selection process and this is the first time that vocational talent seems to have been considered at all. And from everything I’ve seen in reviews left and right, he’s the only bright spot in this whole shabby enterprise. Many many projects are like this now. In the early days of silent filmmaking up until the 2000s, who got to make movies was primarily dependent on talent and sales. Now it’s like a late feudal monarchy or the Soviet Union. The number of Jews has mostly remained constant and I don’t think it’s a factor in the early success or the later decline at all.
ABigGuy4U
2mo ago
IIRC there’s still 50 or 60 nuclear warheads from Soviet stockpiles that went missing at the end of the Cold War and are still unaccounted for. I suspect Ukraine might have a few of those, but I have no evidence.
ABigGuy4U
2mo ago
I’m starting to believe that they honestly didn’t expect Russia to go for it. They thought they could just keep slowly boiling the frog and by 2030 Ukraine would safely be in NATO and Russia wouldn’t be able to do anything other than cope and seeth or start World War III. After Russia did go for it, I think the State Department backup plan is just to turn Ukraine into a disposable speed bump to keep the Russians out of anything important. Like the Baltic States. Or Poland.
ABigGuy4U
2mo ago
The problem here is the Russian progress in the east. Once Kramantorsk falls, the line gets much harder to defend, and the chances of a rapid collapse of everything east of the Dnieper gets a lot higher. Also, this is an industrial war, not a low intensity police action like the two Afghanistan wars. Barring a Korean War-style partial armistice, one of the sides is going to get too heemed to continue, sooner rather than later.
that’s not how anybody in the world has ever behaved with nuclear weapons.
You know, except for Russia. And the United States. And India. And Pakistan. And China. And North Korea. And France.
if they had, why wouldn’t Iran immediately go running to Russia for protection?
Well three days after that is when the Russian military flights carrying unspecified cargo started flying into Iran, so maybe they did.
ABigGuy4U
2mo ago
They also tend to be designed to have a somewhat unpleasant user experience, with a very slow absorption rate. The idea is to give you just enough nicotine to avoid cravings, but not enough to give you a buzz.
ABigGuy4U
2mo ago
It would allow Iran a much freer hand. Part of the reason they haven’t retaliated for the assassination of the Hamas leader in Tehran is that Israel passed back-channel threats to retaliate with tactical nuclear strikes. You see how the US and UK are constantly breathing down Ukraine’s neck about what they can and cannot do in their war with Russia, specifically because the Allies are worried about a nuclear response. Iran is never going to be able to undertake any significant campaign against Israel unless the have nuclear weapons. Now obviously if Iran ever pushed Israel into a genuinely existential crisis, nuclear response would be on the table anyway, like for any two other nuclear powers.
ABigGuy4U
2mo ago
Regarding your second point: You’re never going to see an incel terrorist or revolutionary movement actually consciously identifying itself as such. That’s correct. The problem is that you’re creating a pool of potential labor and mindshare for a wide variety of extremist ideological groups. If you look at the actual foot soldiers for ISIS (not the high level leadership), most of them joined because it meant they would get a wife. Not 72 heavenly virgins, one terrestrial wife. If you look at Black September, the vast majority of those guys were permanently single too. In fact, when the PLO decided to disband Black September, they specifically did it by getting all the members hitched and in families. I don’t know this for a fact, but I’m guessing most Brownshirts and communist guerrillas probably weren’t married men with families either.
ABigGuy4U
2mo ago
I don’t know why, I just find the graphics unappealing. I know Civilization isn’t supposed to be Crysis, but it easily looks like something that could have come out 15 years ago. And the art style isn’t great either. Like do the chunky five polygon tanks really have to be the same size as a skyscraper?
It would allow Iran to actually fight Israel which would draw the United States further away from Europe. You see how Ukraine temporarily got put on the back burner after October 7. Additionally, having the Middle East controlled by a Russian ally would probably be good for Russia.
ABigGuy4U
2mo ago
Wrong. The numbers are only that even because of old people. 80 percent of Gen Z women are liberal and 70 percent of Gen-Z men are conservative.
ABigGuy4U
2mo ago
What are the odds that Russia just straight up gives Iran nuclear weapons, Cuba style? Or have already done so?
ABigGuy4U
3mo ago
IRRC once you are on statins, it’s dangerous to ever stop them. I could be wrong on that though, I’m not a doctor.
ABigGuy4U
3mo ago
Impoverishing Europe might make Ukraine a bad ally to Europe, but it makes them a very good ally to the US State Department. Reducing the EU to a US vassal and lapdog has been a long term goal of theirs.
ABigGuy4U
3mo ago
I love Civ 3, my only axe to grind is the cheating AI. I know that all AIs cheat, they have to in order to match a human player. But the AI cheating in Civ 3 is so bad that the AI nations are basically not even playing the same game as the human player.
ABigGuy4U
3mo ago
It’s effective because it’s pretty realistic. And by “realistic” I mean it’s basically what already happened in Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia and Iran in the 80s with the serial numbers filled off. Margaret Atwood used to explicitly say this, but she’s gradually memory-holed that in favor of the book being a metaphor for the dark days of Ronald Reagan’s America. It’s a way for liberal women to freak out about the rollback of women’s rights in the global south, and fear that it could happen here too, without saying any politically incorrect things about politically protected groups.
ABigGuy4U
3mo ago
Oh don’t worry they’re working hard on that. Automakers are already proposing Saudi Arabia style GPS systems to auto-ticket anyone for driving above the speed limit. And lawmakers are discussing mandatory interlock breathalyzers for all drivers.
ABigGuy4U
3mo ago
I’m not absolutely sure about this, and I could be proven wrong, but I think people misunderstand China. I think China is a genuinely Marxist state that looked at the Soviet Union, and decided that they hadn’t properly done the first Bourgeois revolution. So they decided to go back, do the first Bourgeois revolution, and then have the second revolution later. I think that second revolution is about to happen soon.
Although not strictly a war, the Hong Kong protest leaders made a lot of mistakes because they were thinking more about how certain actions would play in the western media than how they would look at home.
ABigGuy4U
3mo ago
In my more tinfoil hat moments I think Ukraine is trying to get itself nuked in order to bring NATO into the conflict. Otherwise I agree with @Throwaway05 and @WestphalianPeace
ABigGuy4U
3mo ago
I remember in 2016 when Trump made a comment that Hillary Clinton had illegally deleted her private email server by “acid-washing” it. Snopes gave that statement a rating of “false”. Snopes’ reasoning: Hillary had illegally deleted her files with an app called “bleach-bit” and no physical acid was involved.
Well typically in most dictatorships there is a cohort of between ten and seventy percent of the population that genuinely do support the regime for ideological or materialistic reasons. And those people are usually the ones holding the guns. Stalin is actually kind of an outlier in the ratio of sheer fear to genuine support. Also, you don’t have to be a genuine hardline supporter of the regime to rat somebody else out to save yourself.
Roddenberry was a political odd duck much like Robert A. Heinlein. He was a progressive hippy, but also a former military officer and LAPD policeman. So he had a lot of progressive ideals, but also held fairly small-c conservative attitudes towards organizational hierarchy and he believably writes what a pseudo-military organization (Starfleet) would look and act like. And he’s pretty optimistic about that pseudo-military organization’s morals and goals. No Machiavellian glowies like Section-31 in his mind.
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