ABigGuy4U
2hr ago
And the classified congressional briefing last year after which half of congress was openly shitting bricks.
ABigGuy4U
11hr ago
The Bank of England also recently made some weird comment about how the government needs to prepare to take actions to prevent economic collapse if the US government disclosed the existence of ayylmaos.
Not to mention the fact that the UK government was probably providing assistance to Protestant paramilitaries, and also probably directly committed the single worst attack of the Troubles, the 1974 Dublin bombings which killed 33 people. Supposedly it was the UVF, but they never demonstrated anything remotely approaching that level of capability before or after, and it handily gave the Free State enough of a bloody nose that they mostly stayed out of the UK’s business thereafter.
If it gets bad enough I think you could see it move from an Irish Troubles to a Mexican Revolution, due to Burgerland’s similar federal structure. In the Mexican Revolution, you had a federal government and army of questionable legitimacy that controlled a good portion of the country, multiple state governments that were rebelling against the federal government and which had their own armed forces, individual sub-state regions that had de facto home rule enforced by paramilitaries, and large roving groups of political paramilitaries that moved around between states and regions and no defined home territory.
ABigGuy4U
2d ago
America isn't Niger or Iraq, there are no other bodies that can plausibly contest the government's surveillance, targeting and striking power.
You know, except for the fifty individual sub-nations that make up the US, all with their own parliamentary and executive branches, armed forces and state sponsored paramilitaries. Many of them are bigger than some European countries.
ABigGuy4U
2d ago
You are also not contemplating the most likely middle-ground nightmare scenario: There is no singularity, but AI is good enough that it puts most of the middle class out of work, there is no UBI and now you have a bunch of people who are purposeless, humiliated, have a lot of free time, and are pissed off and have nothing to lose due to their now degraded economic and social state.
ABigGuy4U
3d ago
Music tends to age better because it relies on fewer background cultural assumptions. War Pigs will still be stirring in a hundred years for the same reason Ride of the Valkyries is.
ABigGuy4U
3d ago
But there’s a very strong survivorship bias here. Weird Fiction was an entire commercial genre, and very popular. And now out of that whole genre you are left with maybe two authors who still have name recognition, Lovecraft and Burroughs. Jane Austen is still popular but the PCU (Pamela Cinematic Universe) doesn’t seem to have materialized. I’m saying that there was a very good chance that Star Wars was going to eventually fall into obscurity anyway, with or without Kennedy’s idiocy. Although she probably did speed the process up by about ten or fifteen years.
ABigGuy4U
4d ago
The IQ 140 mathematician whom nobody teaches to count will probably not discover any mathematics not known to a society who has spent a few 10k person-years of IQ 100 mathematicians on the subject.
Ramanujan did.
ABigGuy4U
4d ago
In theory it doesn’t. But how many properties remain really popular longer than fifty years? Sherlock Holmes and Dracula maybe, but for every one of those there’s a thousand things that died.
ABigGuy4U
4d ago
progressives who have decided to go full Provisional IRA
I wonder how far the Provos would have gotten if they had been made up entirely of middle aged women with not a single military aged male to be found.
Regan would have died laughing if that was the bill to cause this much of a headache to the Soviet Union.
Yes, but Russia isn’t the Soviet Union. Europe’s persistent fake befuddlement over why the party of Reagan doesn’t want to support a pack of deracinated, satanist, bioleninist bureaucrats over the (nominal) defenders of autocracy, orthodoxy and nationality isn’t helping.
You didn't need to call on Article 5 post 911, but you did and found it useful in so many ways
The other members of NATO pushed to invoke article 5, the United States rolled its eyes and agreed. Then you cucked out the second it became inconvenient and left the United States and Britain to fight alone.
Several EU countries sent tripwire forces into Greenland a few days ago.
Do the Europoors understand how insulting and alienating this is given their concurrent begging for US help against Russia? Even under Trump something like half of the military aid Ukraine gets is from the United States alone. This Greenland thing would be good cause to pull out of NATO if it wasn’t so impotent and pathetic.
In part because they seem to hate Filoni too for some reason
Filoni is a creatively middling hack, he only looks good because he’s been standing next to Kennedy for the last ten years, and at least he doesn’t despise the source material he’s working with.
ABigGuy4U
4d ago
Andor season 2 debuted with record viewership numbers.
If you actually run the numbers to get around the “minutes watched” dodge, it’s about 4.8 million viewers. That’s not abysmal but it’s definitely not great either.
ABigGuy4U
6d ago
Ukraine is allowed to have nationalism because it’s a convenient meat shield against Russia, and can only maintain it in practice because it’s too inhospitable for anyone else to want to live there.
If you see signs of entire military units defecting or walking off the job or refusing to open fire on civilians.
ABigGuy4U
8d ago
There’s three countries that have a shot at being the regional power that controls the Middle East: Israel, Iran and Turkey. That’s why they all hate each other! You notice that they weren’t constantly at each other’s throats back when Iraq was still a major military power.
ABigGuy4U
8d ago
Iran and Israel have adverse geopolitical interests. That isn’t going to change just because Iran isn’t being ruled by fanatics anymore. Iran having a government with popular support that actually has its shit together could very well turn out to be worse for Israel, especially in the long run. Israel probably knows this, and you would probably see an effort to break it into different countries by ethnic group the second the Islamic Republic is gone.
ABigGuy4U
8d ago
But I'm surprised what sort of outlets are carrying it.
The Gulf Arab states and Turkey don’t like Iran much either, nor do liberal Americans.
ABigGuy4U
8d ago
The fact that they are calling for a return of the Shah with a straight face is a pretty big sign that they already have no legitimacy.
ABigGuy4U
8d ago
ABigGuy4U
8d ago
If US/Israeli air power was so great, why haven't they been able to destroy Hamas? That was their goal right?
I’m increasingly starting to suspect that the Gaza war was intentionally fought with the aim of going on forever while still leaving Hamas intact. It’s not great for Israel’s security, or the IDF soldiers deployed there, or for the civilian population of Gaza, but it is pretty good for having a permanent excuse to skip your court dates.
America is a lot like Russia. It sees itself as the defender of Europe and the bulwark of European values. Meanwhile actual Europeans see them as a bunch of borderline-savages, and as much of a threat as the are a protector.
Part of why America is being so miserly today though is that it genuinely doesn’t have much to give. It’s heavy industry is gone, and other countries have caught up enough on its technological edge that it can’t cruise by on fancy widgets. And the people are too pissed off and distrustful of their government and economy to eat the half a million deaths that a major war requires.
Old Scranton Joe was more generous with the aid to Ukraine than the Don, but he was being a lot more miserly than Europe and the American deep state wanted. He was a bit out to lunch, but his one real red-line policy position that he was cogent of and involved about was no American ground troops in Ukraine. And the delusional deep state flacks (who mostly happen to be butthurt belt exiles) hated him for it. That’s why they turfed him out in favor of Kamala, an out-of-her depth human hamburger that would do whatever the CIA told her to.
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