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.
ABigGuy4U
3mo ago
I don’t think the Ukrainians are responsible for their current predicament. Especially not the people. I don’t even think the government is: If Zelenskyy started negotiating a treaty he would end up couped out of office or dead within a week. If the Soviet Union had staged a communist revolution in Mexico in 1984 and stated their firm intention to bring Mexico into the Warsaw Pact and stage IRBMs in Tijuana and El Paso, I would lay the blame for Reagan’s subsequent invasion and the bloodshed that followed squarely at the feet of the USSR.
ABigGuy4U
3mo ago
In my opinion, Far Cry 2 is the best Far Cry game by a long shot. It’s the only one that actually delivered on the premise of being stranded in a hostile remote land and having to fight tooth and nail to survive. You have to be careful and think strategically. Especially when you’re playing on console and don’t have the ability to save anywhere. It also did the morally ambiguous premise a lot better than any of the others.
ABigGuy4U
3mo ago
Yeah I’m very pro-second amendment, but practically speaking if you’re in any situation where you have to pull out a gun you’re already half-screwed.
ABigGuy4U
3mo ago
nope it is not
Well, the United States overthrew their government to replace it with one less neutral to Russia, then they pressured them to be more and more militant towards Russia while arming them to the teeth, then after the invasion Boris Johnson scotched the potential peace deal, then the lead Ukrainian negotiator got mysteriously shot in the head, then NATO law makers procrastinated for 9 months before sending any of significant armaments they promised, so I would say it’s true.
What would even be the motivation, reasoning, and strategy here?
Anger when they realize they got their country destroyed based on a bunch of fake promises from people who didn’t really care about them at all.
As for your first point, the normal people will all have to stay behind and suffer but the ideological hardliners like what’s left of Azov Battalion will probably make it out. Those types usually do.
ABigGuy4U
3mo ago
If only the United Kingdom had a free press that could have informed the people of that fact.
ABigGuy4U
3mo ago
- It creates a large revanchist pressure group that will be spoiling to drag Poland into a war with Russia.
- Zelenskyy and other Ukrainian officials are already laying the groundwork for a Dolchstoßlegende, blaming NATO for dragging them into the war and then leaving them high and dry without sufficient support to win. Which is true, but in any case I suspect it will lead to a spree of revenge terrorism and assassinations by Banderite groups throughout Europe in the late 2020s and early 2030s. Probably using leftover NATO weaponry.
ABigGuy4U
3mo ago
I suspect that’s going to bite Poland in the ass eventually, but for different reasons.
ABigGuy4U
3mo ago
I think some Democratic PR think-tank finally realized that Democrats were in danger of being seen as the party of moralistic fuddy duddies and that the candidate switch-up was a good opportunity to try and change that.
The theory on the Las Vegas shooting is that Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman was in Las Vegas at the time and that the concert shooting was a diversion to draw most of the law enforcement resources in the city to the other side of town in order to give assassins easier access to Mohammed. In this theory Paddock himself was a patsy who believed he was at the hotel for a large illegal arms deal, and was shot in the head just before the massacre started. That would explain the rather excessive amount of arms in Paddock’s room, but I don’t know if I necessarily buy that myself.
ABigGuy4U
3mo ago
I'd argue you saw a lot of Roman culture in the way Britain managed it's empire. They knew all the tricks of the trade because at one point they had all been used on them. "Conquered, we conquer"
ABigGuy4U
3mo ago
It was never specifically confirmed, but there is a photo of Oswald handing out pro-Cuban fliers with a guy who looks a lot like Ted Cruz's father.
ABigGuy4U
3mo ago
The Chinese, Korean and Taiwanese markets all crashed overnight, the Dow and Nasdaq are all down, although seem to be recovering a bit from the opening bell. I think everyone is pricing in a war in the Middle East. Bitcoin is getting heemed.
ABigGuy4U
3mo ago
IIRC you have to be an Israeli citizen to be in the IDF, I could be wrong though.
ABigGuy4U
3mo ago
I find the idea of a President that is a citizen of any other country or having served in any other country’s military to be very disturbing. I would feel this way for any country that was the case for, Ukraine, Mexico, the UK, whatever.
There was some stereotyping, but the primary complaint was that it depicted a black sharecropper in the post-reconstruction era who seemed basically content with his lot in life. In my mind that's not that bad. There are plenty of people who live in unjust and meager circumstances who still manage to find happiness, and it doesn't imply an endorsement of the whole social system. That said I haven't actually seen it, I'm mostly going off the many many critical articles from the early 2010s.
ABigGuy4U
3mo ago
It's because Disney had much, much worse racial stereotypes in some of their earlier cartoons and comics, so when the 90s PC wave rolled around they went on a panicked spree to remove anything that could be deemed remotely offensive. It was probably a good idea for them: you see how much overexaggerated criticism Disney got for the Song of the South, and that was about in the bottom tenth of Disney racism.
ABigGuy4U
3mo ago
I would guess two things. First, pole arms are designed to be used in a formation and would leave you less mobile and potentially open to attack from the side and behind. Second, a pole-axe isn’t concealable, which would decrease gang members’ ability to ambush foes or hide their illegal weapon from the police.
ABigGuy4U
3mo ago
Also, I don’t think Israel wants to degrade the leadership structure too much, because it’s easier to have one organization you can negotiate with rather than five hundred separate cells all doing their own thing.
ABigGuy4U
3mo ago
Bin Laden’s death really was a big blow to AQ, because it was pretty dependent on his personal genius and financial connections. ISIS and Hamas and Hezbollah are more along the lines of a military, where it’s designed so that each officer or commander is fungible and can be replaced if killed.
ABigGuy4U
3mo ago
There is a specific cause of action that individual states can bring which boils down to “we entered the Union under certain guarantees, and this legislation violates those guarantees.” So changing the Senate to proportional representation or something similar that would screw over small states, or changing the separation of powers might fall under that. That said, at a Constitutional convention you could theoretically do anything, even repeal the Constitution and dissolve the United States.
ABigGuy4U
3mo ago
Regarding your point about weapon design: that’s the easiest part of building a nuclear weapon. Far easier than refining the fissile material. And there’s good evidence that Iran already bought the necessary weapon schematics on the black market in the late 1980s. Overall I agree that their intention and ability to get a nuke might be overstated.
I think you may be overestimating the amount of people you would need. Even many of the loopier conspiracy theories about 9/11 could be executed with 100 people or less. JFK’s assassination could easily have been done with a working group of five people fully read-in and a few unwitting accomplices.
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.
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