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
4d 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
4d 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
4d 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
4d 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
4d 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
9d 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
9d 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
10d 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
10d 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.
An unknown assassin has attempted to kill President Trump at the White House Correspondents Dinner tonight. One person is dead. President Trump is unharmed. The disposition of the assassin is unknown.
ABigGuy4U
11d ago
Well statistically, wouldn’t “just like that of your parents” mean “divorced” for about half of them?
ABigGuy4U
11d ago
it seems strange why nobody did so
It’s a norm that evolved gradually. For most of the forties and fifties it was assumed that nukes were going to become commonplace in combat, and it would only be worrying if superpowers used them against each other.
Then Truman passed on using them in Korea, and Eisenhower passed on using them them to bail out the French at Dien Bien Phu. That began to solidify that these were really only special occasion devices, not just something you use because not doing it would be a pain in the ass.
Once you get to the Nixon administration, it’s starting to get set in stone. The Nixon admin considers using them in Vietnam, but determines the international blowback would be too severe.
Now, we’re getting close to Dune levels of nuclear taboo, where using them in any context would be highly controversial.
They aren’t necessarily an instant win button, but in both Ukraine and Iran they would be extremely useful. Iran’s nuclear facilities and underground missile bases would be pretty easy to dismantle with nuclear ground bursts. In Ukraine, every time the Russians had to spend nine months besieging an empty town like Bahkmut or Kramantorsk, they could have just dropped a 380kt warhead on it and been done in a week (mostly waiting for the fallout to settle).
ABigGuy4U
12d ago
You’re misinterpreting it. We’ve shot way past the point we can actually do anything about it, and it’s going to be much worse, much faster than previously expected. The calmness you’re seeing is public panic management.
ABigGuy4U
13d ago
It wouldn’t necessarily need to be that bloody. There are plenty of ways to use nuclear weapons on Iran or Ukraine that would be highly effective and cause minimal civilian casualties.
ABigGuy4U
25d ago
Half Life 2 is one the few games that capture how “ugly” assault rifles and grenades feel in real life. It’s like the video game equivalent of Heat
The interesting thing about Halo and the TV show 24 is how they were both thematically and tonally a perfect fit for the aftermath of 9/11 and the beginning of the War on Terror, even though they were both written before it happened.
ABigGuy4U
27d ago
Experts say the crisis was caused by years of ill-conceived dam projects and overpumping that destroyed a centuries-old system for tapping underground reserves.
To be fair, Iran is just one of the first countries to get hit by this. There’s a pretty good chance that you will see similar hydrological collapses in multiple other middle eastern countries, India/Pakistan, Western China, and the American Southwest.
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.
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