MaximumCuddles
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User ID: 58
MaximumCuddles
2mo ago
I think there’s a real demand for sort of basic housing, I think the whole “standards have gone up” is a bit of a cope unless it’s specifically a complaint about building codes blocking new construction.
Myself and my medium sized family live in an 1000 square foot apartment. An 1100 square foot town home or duplex would be an obvious upgrade to work towards but stuff like that is simply not on offer in many places.
MaximumCuddles
2mo ago
I recognize some of these words.
MaximumCuddles
2mo ago
Weren’t they also responsible for translating and publish “Always With Honor” in the west?
One of my favorite books. A short memoir of Pyotyr Wrangel, the most famous and successful general in the white army during the Russian civil war.
MaximumCuddles
2mo ago
Quick note; I think using the fights & romances as sort of a zig-zag central beam of the narrative would be quite compelling, they seem even more central to your character than the more standard adventure fare of your far-flung career.
The whole fighter / lover tension seems to be wrought throughout it.
But then again I’m a military brat and third culture kid so that other stuff is more normal to me. Maybe that’s a plus; conflict and love are more relatable to a wider variety of people.
MaximumCuddles
2mo ago
My favorite was the “no US soldiers in an active war-zone” lie. Just a few weeks ago some US Soldier got shot by ISIS.
There was a viral video uploaded basically the same day of the debate that ended up getting millions of views of the debate on TV when she said that, and it pans out to like seven soldiers in a forward operating base being like “Wait… then where the fuck are we right now?”
MaximumCuddles
2mo ago
Your average democrat might lie less often than Donald Trump but they are much, much more dishonest in my opinion. It’s not even close.
Say there are two people. They both meet a guy who is 6’9” (2.05m) tall.
Person A says: “He’s the tallest person I’ve ever seen! Huge guy! At least 7’0” (2.13m) tall!”
Person B says: “He was probably above average height. I’ve seen taller. People before.”
Person A’s answer is a lie. The guy they saw wasn’t quite as tall as they said and it’s probable that they’ve watched a basketball game or a film and have seen a person who is taller than that before.
Person B’s answer is technically correct. They’ve probably seen basketball on TV, they’ve seen extremely tall people before. And the guy they saw was certainly taller than average.
But Person B’s answer is basically dishonest. The guy they saw was indeed extremely tall! They failed to convey that, all while being technically correct.
And Person A’s answer, while a lie, managed to be more accurate and honest assessment of the subject at hand. It was a much better answer if you wanted to know something about the subject.
Given a choice between them, I’d much rather deal with a person A, a liar who is directionally correct, than person B, a person that maybe rarely lies but also rarely conveys any useful information.
Person B’s answer is worse than useless; if taken seriously you would probably come to a conclusion further from the truth than Person A’s answer.
This is a rather simple and direct example but there’s ample situations like this on the real world. There really are a lot of Person B’s in the world, and once you see them you start seeing them everywhere.
MaximumCuddles
2mo ago
This is absolutely incredible. It’s like a small scale version of what happened to Japan after the second atomic bomb went off.
Allow me to explain; the first atomic bomb going off could have been seen as a one off, or an experiment, or as a luck break from the perspective of the Japanese.
The second one sent a clear message; we have more and we can keep doing this as long as we like.
It really was that second one that sent Japan into capitulation mode.
Now this is not as extreme as atomic bombs of course but the paranoia and fear from this following the pager attack has to be off the charts extreme. There’s absolutely no way of knowing if this is it, or they have something more in stored.
MaximumCuddles
2mo ago
Yeah, fair enough.
MaximumCuddles
2mo ago
I’m tapping the sign right now.
Journos Delenda est
MaximumCuddles
2mo ago
“Skill Issue.”
I agree.
At this point enough precedent has been set to paint the Arab / “Palestinian” / Islamist resistance to Israel as what they are; sore losers and pathetic failures who start fights and continually get their asses handed to them, no matter the price to their people.
Any dialogue about this issue that conveniently skips over this very obvious point I just automatically flag in my mind as fundamentally dishonest. It’s incredibly tiresome.
Stop starting wars with Israel and losing. Or don’t, I really don’t care.
MaximumCuddles
2mo ago
Yeah this is psychological warfare par excellence; the message is clear that the enemy can reach you at any time and you’ll never be safe.
MaximumCuddles
2mo ago
Didn’t Al-Queda frequently refer to Israel as a “Crusader State” in its propaganda?
MaximumCuddles
2mo ago
I basically agree with all of this.
My initial comment was mostly in response to the idea of Russia considering Poland / Baltic Countries / Finland part of their “sphere of influence”. To which I simply don’t find the idea of those countries coming under credible military threat from Russia to be a realistic prospect at all.
In regards to Ukraine, the motivation & justification for the Putin regime is more transparently obvious, even if you ultimately disagree with or oppose that regime. Which I sort of do, largely depending on my mood.
Ukraine has really outdone itself but I simply don’t see a way around them getting ground to dust eventually by the Russian war machine outside of a deus ex machina type situation where Putin chokes on a chicken bone and Russia descends into chaos. Hopefully they can settle before they run out of young men to fight.
MaximumCuddles
2mo ago
Is it? Russia is almost five times the population of Ukraine and militarily supposedly one of the mightiest nations on earth. Russia is noticeably richer and more advanced than Ukraine, and incredibly it’s less corrupt which is absolutely wild.
Lots of smart people thought the Russians would crush Ukraine in a matter of weeks, it’s incredibly impressive on Ukraine’s part that they didn’t. And equally embarrassing for Russia.
Ukraine is largely flat and featureless. Afghanistan it is not. Yes it’s a buffer state but historically buffer states come in many flavors; Ukraine’s particular brew is the easily traversed crossroads type.
A lot has happened between now and then of course, but this whole excercise is, on my end, indicative of the relative weakness of Russia.
Poland, even without NATO protection, is obviously a huge problem for Russia. This whole thread stated with me basically saying that the idea of Russia throwing its weight against Poland is absurd, so I’ll spell it out.
Poland is roughly the same population as Ukraine, with tougher and more diverse terrain, and has had greatly heightened peace-time military spending for years. It’s much richer, more advanced, less riddled by corruption, more homogeneous, and has a much higher state capacity.
And there’s no reason to believe that the ramp up that Poland could achieve would be any less spectacular than Ukraine’s. In fact there seems to be sufficient evidence for the opposite conclusion.
While Russia is clearly not on the ropes and it appears to me that they’re winning, it also appears clear that their regime is pretty brittle and couldn’t sustain the heightened war state to even look seriously at directly messing with Poland or the Baltic countries, or even Finland.
Even in its current fake and gay state, NATO would absolutely eat Russia alive. I can’t believe this is even remotely controversial to stay.
MaximumCuddles
2mo ago
You’ve missed my point entirely and in a hilarious way sort of made my point about the discourse surrounding Russia for me.
I never said Ukraine was winning, I never even implied it. I was really talking about the supposed other targets of Russia; Poland & The Baltics. I have no doubt that Russia could win this war given enough time and bloodshed, time and numbers are on their side.
The crux of my point was that Ukraine was an embarrassingly easy target and Russia still can’t manage it without enormous difficulty. They might win, they might not. If I had to bet money I’d bet money on Russia winning.
I have basically no dog in this fight but seeing Russia get its nose bloodied by Ukraine is like seeing a tatted up security guard getting their teeth knocked out by a 90lb twink; Turns out the muscleman was hopped up on bullshido and an inflated ego. Even with material support from the west, the arc of the war reveals a lot about the state capacity; all it took was a couple thousand mercenaries to turn around to legitimately threaten the regime. You’d expect that from some tinpot African authoritarian regime, but it was shocking to see that happen in Russia.
All your points on the desiccation of the western arms capability I fully agree with. But that has precedent; nothing reveals what technology is cost effective and practical like field testing in combat. And military spending in Poland and the Baltics are ramping up and have been for a while. Russia’s military capability or lack thereof has been largely revealed, and countries other than the USA and its satrapies and Russia have agency as well.
I think Russia winning the war might not actually improve the Russian position all that much. It’s not cope, I couldn’t give a fuck about the GAE. But every other country on Russia’s border are hardening against them, both politically and militarily. Aside from maybe Moldova, there are no easy targets left. Every other country that Russia wants to fuck with is much more dangerous than Ukraine.
MaximumCuddles
2mo ago
I think it barely matters. Even if article five isn’t invoked for some inexplicable reason, the resemblance to the interwar years is mostly superficial.
There’s a key difference; Poland would absolutely fucking shred a Russian invasion on a military level. Russia since the war began wasn’t even guaranteed on any given day to be the most powerful military in Ukraine.
Poland’s military spending and might is nowhere near the disparity that existed in the 30s when the Soviet Union was an emerging superpower.
If anything this war has revealed that the Russian military is a paper tiger riddled with incompetence and corruption. They’re laughable compared to the past, and demographics get worse for them each passing day.
They really are a third rate power at this point. If Ukraine, one of the poorest and most corrupt European nations, is giving them trouble even this deep into the third continuation war, then they don’t have a ghost of a chance at winning a war against Poland, or the Baltics, or Finland.
I’m very sympathetic to the DR in general but the Russia cope is absolutely bonkers, almost a perfect mirror image of the twitchy-eyed Ukraine boosters. That country is completely pozzed on almost every level.
MaximumCuddles
2mo ago
Oh this was years ago, and by the time I got banned I had very little illusions about most social media being in the hands of the enemy. The ban was merely amusing at that point, and not a surprise.
For a while they had to have at least some sort of plausible deniability that bans had to be related to rule breaking but in roughly the last four years they dispensed with even the slightest appearance of being rules based. They don’t even bother anymore, it’s easy to see when you have Reddit archives that allow you to read the comment or posts that people get banned for.
MaximumCuddles
2mo ago
I got permanently banned from Reddit for saying literally this.
No slurs, no mean language, no violent rhetoric. Just the forceful and clear eyed observation that people without children still naturally seek to reproduce their memeplexes, and will use other peoples children to propagate it in the absence of their own. In basically that exact language.
Funny the things you can get banned for saying. What’s that saying? “A hit dog hollers?”
MaximumCuddles
2mo ago
Much like the term “Neoreaction”, “Cultural Marxism” is really several strands of Marxist and post Marxist thought that has been woven together to form what is now the dominant group of ideologies on the academic left since the new left moved from the streets to the classroom and beyond.
Antonio Gramsci, an Italian Marxist, is the real jumping off point. Critical theory, third worldism, post colonial theory, orientalism, all these things flow from that particular bend in the road.
It’s a descriptor of a family tree of thought with a common ancestry. Without classical Marxism it certainly wouldn’t exist. It’s certainly a much more accurate and narrower description than “The Successor Ideology” or “Woke”.
I think the reluctance to be named, which has been expounded on both satirically and seriously by better writers than I, is ironically part of the fuel for the whole “conspiracy theory”. There’s no shortage of articles basically saying “Ok, you don’t like term X so what the fuck do we call this clearly aligned school of thought?”. “The ideology who shan’t be named?”
MaximumCuddles
2mo ago
I think this is easily overlooked, there are many aggravated assaults or attempted murders that occur nowadays in modern and prosperous societies that would have been murders or manslaughter in 1900 because the victim would have died of their injuries.
That and London being one of the most surveilled places on earth. It’s a deterrent for extreme violent action amongst the still rational violent actors but that deterrent has no relationship whatsoever with the underlying anti-social forces that propel murderous violence to bubble up from the depths of our collective depravity.
If 1900 London has a flat murder rate compared to 2024 it’s actually still rather damning.
MaximumCuddles
2mo ago
If you’re referring to me, I was never in a position where I felt obligated to break the law because I only have two kids and wasn’t interested in more. I still broke it by moving them out of their car seats much earlier than legally permissible, I had a certain deniability as my kids, like me, are absolute units and look older than they are.
In fairness to those who comply with that law out of fear, some laws are easier to break than others. Driving with your kids out of car seats is almost as severely punished as driving with a suspended license, with the additional issue of repeat offense possibly bringing CPS to your doorstep. Lovely.
All for some bullshit that doesn’t make any sense. But that’s par for the course in current year.
MaximumCuddles
2mo ago
Am I allowed to nominate a one word replay for an AAHQ
MaximumCuddles
2mo ago
I routinely ignore stupid laws as a matter of principle, however it must be said the penalty and fine for breaking that particular law can be pretty steep.
As to your other point, in our atomized age social status and the benefits they infer aren’t necessarily given by your immediate neighbors, family and friends. You’ll be happy to have their love and respect on your deathbed but increasingly in order to actually achieve any sort of real success you have to be plugged into a larger scene which is chock full of the fake and gay bullshit that I routinely complain about. That stuff has a monetary cost, not merely a psychological one.
Me personally, I’ve been somewhat lucky to find a niche which allows me to not worry too much about nebulous social status. It helps that I’m not personally very ambitious, but merely concerned with living an excellent life as an example for my children and hopefully their children.
I think the Inner Party / Outer Party distinction is pretty good.
The Outer Party is clearly a lot of blue tribe climbers with some red tribe elites mixed in.
The Inner Party is all blue tribe elites.
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