ABigGuy4U
11hr ago
During the Cold War, you did have a lot of ridiculously incompetent third world armies being given pretty advanced soviet Migs. This is part of why NATO had such an unrealistically high opinion of its own vehicles and equipment: most of the time then they were fighting an enemy with Soviet gear, that gear was being operated by literal retards. It’s also why fighting Iran has been such a shock for America.
ABigGuy4U
12hr ago
Also the stealth Blackhawk. If one hadn’t gone down in Pakistan during the Osama Bin Ladin raid, it would still be unknown to the public. I think that one is especially significant since it’s a vehicle that routinely flies low, and and yet it’s hardly ever been seen.
ABigGuy4U
12hr ago
I'm a hard-SF nerd, so if I can't salvage your argument, who can?
I can. It’s not aliens. It’s the remnants of technologically advanced civilizations that rose and fell in earths antediluvian past. That would solve the two hardest problems, the interstellar travel physics issue and the ontological question of why they would travel a billion miles just to kind of fart around earth and the moon a bit.
As to why we’ve never found them, the deep ocean and deep underground are still pretty much uncharted and unobserved.
For secret aliens at Area 51, the compelling ideological scenario to maintain secrecy isn’t really there.
What is the compelling ideological scenario for the Chinese Communist Party to ban the existence of ghosts, and spend very real terrestrial government money and resources censoring media to make sure ghosts aren’t mentioned?
ABigGuy4U
13hr ago
Biological weapons are not nuclear weapons, gigantic state capacity isn’t necessarily needed.
ABigGuy4U
2d ago
What I resent most is losing the opportunity to be a hack writer. If I had lived in the 20th century, I know that I could have made a mint cranking out airport novels or slop short stories to Weird Fiction.
ABigGuy4U
2d ago
•extremely rare version that can pass from person to person
•pops up 800 miles from its closest recorded habitat
•in a cruise ship, the perfect floating incubator for massive global transmission
This sounds like a bio-weapon deployment.
ABigGuy4U
3d ago
Please do, I am trying to get confirmation about whether it sucks before I buy. I am interested in the premise as an occasional King in Yellow enjoyer.
Non-communist authoritarian countries usually have shared factors that make them less oppressive. The military junta that rules the Republic of Banana just wants to keep the shipments to the Dole company going. They will be ferociously repressive in certain limited circumstances, but they aren’t interested in regulating everyone’s fence-post heights to the millimeter in search of a better world.
Communist governments usually want to make major changes to the economy and society in a way that requires them to exercise a lot more direct state control.
ABigGuy4U
7d ago
What’s interesting though is that the split was long-predicted but took nearly a century to actually develop. Which would seem to moly there are other factors that have recently separated men’s and women’s joint interests.
ABigGuy4U
7d ago
I don’t think that’s a problem caused by dating apps. That gentleman would have been equally autistic and unappealing when he was an 18th century farmer. The difference is that back then, he would have had a lot more female relatives around to help him moderate that and present a courtable image.
ABigGuy4U
7d ago
@omw_68 That leads into the larger question of why the greater left seems to have suddenly put a damper on environmentalism and climate change activism. This seems like more than just a pivot to a new Current Thing. Environmentalism and climate change hysteria has been the background music of the left for the last 30 years, and suddenly there seems to be a coordinated move to turn down the volume. I’m not sure why.
ABigGuy4U
7d ago
Many men might tolerate occasional emotional outbursts from an attractive enough woman, but not threatening him with a knife or destroying all his possessions
I can fix her.
ABigGuy4U
7d ago
Even without activists there just aren’t that many pregnant woman today who absolutely cannot make a single one-day trip to the next state over to get an abortion. Teen pregnancy rates continue to fall through the floor, so they mostly aren’t minors. Transportation has gotten cheap enough and government assistance plentiful enough that it’s not financially impossible. Like the overturn of Roe I suspect the reaction will be muted when most women realize this doesn’t really affect them personally.
It was a meme posted by an Indian man on Twitter. It shows an image where half of Hitler’s face and half of Netanyahu’s face have been joined together at the center to make one face. They are both images where the men are making an intense Kubrick-style stare at the camera. The Indian Twitter user posted the image because he greatly admired both men and saw similar characteristics of personality in each.
It’s not that weird when you realize it’s an Indian guy from India making an independent assessment of both guys from his own vantage point: Hitler held all the imperialist powers of Europe by the throat for a moment, and did it while draped in a lot of mythical quasi-Hindu symbolism. Netanyahu is a strongman leader who defends his country from the Islamic hordes, much like Narendra Modi. All in all it’s no weirder than a western liberal admiring both Harvey Milk and Che Guevara.
ABigGuy4U
12d ago
Presidents have been assassinated several times before and it has been fine
I feel like with all four of those we kind of “got lucky” that nothing particularly important was happening at the time. Even with Lincoln, the Civil War was basically over when he died. We aren’t guaranteed that it will always be like that. If equally obscure President Rutherford Hayes had been shot instead of Garfield, we may very well have had a second civil war.
"When did being a racist become worse than being a serial killer?"
Given that Jeffery Dahmer spent a good part of his police interrogation trying to make it very clear that his victim typology was just co-incidental because of where he lived and that he was not a racist, I would say 1991.
ABigGuy4U
12d ago
I’m defining “serious” here as there actually being a completed attempt. I don’t count two retards being arrested for a completely unrelated crime 2000 miles from DC and then engaging some idle fantasy about an assassination during the interrogation as a serious attempt.
ABigGuy4U
13d ago
I think most of people who are afraid of handguns (I don’t mean people who just support gun control, I mean the ones who are genuinely scared of guns), haven’t been around much violence in general, so they don’t realize how easy it is to hurt someone with your bare hands or literally any object (just ask a prison guard). So to these people a gun is kind of like a magic totem of death.
ABigGuy4U
13d ago
They aren’t that common. Obama and Clinton had no serious attempts. Bush II had one, Bush I had one that was broken up in the planning. Reagan, Carter, Ford, had one each. To have one President get three serious attempts is pretty odd.
A few comments
•The Sons of Jacob definitely aren’t supposed to be a mainline Christian denomination. The name “Jesus” is pointedly never mentioned by anyone in Gilead, ever, nor is anything from the New Testament. The SoJ have difficulty controlling the Deep South due to Baptist insurgents, which would imply that many hardline denominations are not on board. Additionally, book Gilead has a strong racial apartheid element, with the “Sons of Ham” being confined to South Africa style Zanzibar-stans. This would seem to imply the SoJ are a strain of Dominionist weirdos and not mainline Christians. This was changed in the tv show to make the SoJ racially egalitarian, which honestly probably tracks better with radical Christian groups today. Many of the lower level political commissars of Gilead are former rad-fems, which also doesn’t really track with any 80s right wing or religious movement (though it seems oddly prescient today).
•It seems to be implied the fertility crisis caused massive social pressure which allowed the SoJ to seize power, and that the handmaids and the rest of the social structure are more of a semi-pragmatic measure to deal with that, and not just some stupid LARP. It annoys me that in the show Canada seems to be able to just be a normal liberal brunchtopia in the face of an existential demographic crisis.
•I think post-script seemingly taking place after the fall of the regime is an homage to Orwell’s 1984 with the Newspeak dictionary at the end.
True, most 70 year old Slavic men aren’t getting Botox.
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