Is it just me, or did Twitter just completely nuke all content from being viewable without logging in?
New from today: "A response to the controversy about me"
The dynamics between Putin, Prigozhin, and Shoigu/Gerasimov make zero military sense.
But they make a great deal of sense from the perspective of regime preservation.
This is now the most logical frame through which to analyze the Ukraine War IMO.
I now think this is the likeliest scenario.
Putin wants to wind down the war, Shoigu/Gerasimov to be the scapegoats for Russia's territorial losses, and Wagnerites the enforcers against the Z extremists who don't get the memo in time.
Though he seems to be considering it more straightforwardly 3h later (not necessarily at odds with above)
Does he have an account here? @akarlin
RWA:
Option 1: It's a PsyOp to cover up a serious Russian offensive
Option 2: We're going to WW3 with NATO
Option 3: It's real & Putin is using Prigozhin to get rid of Shoigu
Option 4: It's real & Wagner has actually begun a coup d'etat
Option 5: It's behind-the-curtain negotiations & gets nipped in the bud before it escalates
Though of course this is only the dregs of pro-Russian commentary that makes it into english.
I'm sure there are people who unironically think that trans women are the ONLY women
Because they are among the only people in modern society who undertake a mortifying and harrowing coming of age ritual that ends with choosing a new identity and induction into a rarefied community, trans women are men and cis men are not.
Already some discussion on this topic happening over in the Small-Scale Questions thread
In the emerging Culture War aspect: it's interesting that the "50 year old" part is relatively much more operative than the "white guys" part than usual.
As long as you have backups and appropriate procedures for them, the use of commercial game controllers is not by itself a problem. There are several good reasons that serious (indoors) military hardware is starting to do this and even better reasons for any organization smaller than that to, vs trying to develop their own hardware which can be much more stupid and dangerous. It's similar to the reason why billionaires, princes and presidents all use the exact same iPhone you can buy at the drug store.
Potential problems around it are:
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Bluetooth. Insane.
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Passing it around in that insanely cramped space, both because it could be dropped (especially with those huge stick extensions), and in apparently giving control over to passengers (depends on particulars of their culture around this, but no clues are public that it was very good)
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No alternate backup control system. Uncertain that this is the case but looks likely. The problem here would not be not having something "more advanced", but rather not having something that's much simpler.
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... okay maybe there could conceivably be some issues about its functioning in weird atmospheric conditions, it really depends on the specifics which I don't know, maybe it's just perfectly normal surface temperature/pressure/humidity/composition and fine. But the problem wouldn't be that they used the controller, it would be whether and how they tested it.
Perhaps the most telling indication about any of this is the story of how they didn't discover some thrusters were installed in the wrong orientation until they were already down at the Titanic. With a culture like that, it’s possible that their fatal error was something more mundane than anyone is imagining.
(but it was probably just the hull)
A reddit user claims to have been involved in the project in an earlier stage, has been commenting frequently with novel information about it: https://old.reddit.com/user/cowpunk52
edit: another: https://old.reddit.com/user/vangro
I don't think the Titanic is in a trench. Though I'd also kinda dimly thought it was, probably just Mandela-Effect-style confusion with the Mariana Trench. From either half-remembered childhood Deep Ocean Facts, or their more recent James Cameron connection.
That PDF is 400 pages long and not text-searchable, but it's obvious from the order of magnitude that this must be something like "every recorded medical event in tens/hundreds of millions of people" and completely meaningless without comparison to base rates.
I found a YouTube channel collecting videos credibly claiming to be "CIA video briefings for Reagan"
They're mostly under 10 minutes long, and faithfully produced in the style of an 80s TV news segment.
What specifically is the case against Bellingcat?
I've seen a lot of nonspecific innuendo about them especially since Elon Musk's "psyop" accusations, but then what seems like one of their main guys volunteers this apparently unprompted (which is the first I've heard about it despite following the Belgorod raid all day, including through pro-Russian sources), which seems at odds with the idea that they're so tied up with western intelligence agencies.
in 2018, a K-pop group (that I had also never heard of before) sold 2.5 million tickets to a 7-city US/Canada tour.
For comparison:
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350k of those tickets were 2 shows in Texas, which has a total Korean population of 70k
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Taylor Swift sold 250k tickets to 3 shows in Texas 2 weeks later
The K-pop invasion of the west was suspiciously closely preceded by the height of popularity of the competitive SC2 scene, which was of course extremely heavily Korean, with the most prestigious tournaments being Korean productions in Korea often with a heavy K-pop presence (most prominently a song that goes "GG GG baby baby baby").
I think this is underexplored.
Very low-hanging fruit, but here are Ian Miles Cheong and Tim Pool beclowning themselves in the face of this, and Elon Musk getting real close to it.
Piracy is good because digital media is a non-rivalrous good and the rights-holders in Movies and TV are almost universally bad: fuck them.
I try not to pirate things from people who aren't bad, usually small creators.
This should also apply to games, but as Gaben prophesized, Steam is just too convenient (there is also a higher proportion of rights-holders who aren't very bad in Gaming than in Movies/TV).
Is the new season of Star Trek: Picard worth watching?
For the type of curmudgeonly old trekkie who had to stop watching Discovery after 1 season because it was genuinely too hurtful to see that done to something he loves, and has only experienced any of Picard through the noble sacrifice of the Red Letter Media reviews?
I stopped watching the RLM reviews halfway through this season because it seemed like it might actually end up worth watching the show, but the problem is now I can't check in to see their final verdict without having it spoiled.
If you love The Operations Room, I would be extremely surprised if you did not find Montemayor's (very few but very good) videos worthwhile. They're quite similar, but Montemayor goes into more depth about who knew what when, and what big decisions looked like to the person making them, vs Operations Room's slightly more rote recounting of what happened from a god's eye view.
The explicit "fog-of-war from the personal perpective of the commander" approach that he takes in Midway and Eastern Solomons is absolutely incredible, I'm starving for more of it.
Very highly recommended. And if the YouTube algorithm has not also pointed you towards Eastory, Historigraph and Historia Civilis, I have no idea what it's doing. Also TIK, though he's slightly more of a stylistic divergence.
YouTuber Montemayor, one of the very best producers of the "battle told via map" genre who releases about 1 very high quality video per year, released Battle of the Eastern Solomons: Told from the American POV today. It's pretty good.
Check out his Midway from the Japanese Perspective first if you haven't.
It took having been reading every post of yours for like 3 months leading up to that one (sidenote: lol) to have had even the slightest chance of barely beginning to understand what the fuck you were talking about, at the time. 7 months of lost context and cognitive decay later, there is no chance I am ever getting there again. I'd need it spoonfed to me like an idiot.
It seems extremely implausible to me that the Yuddites are only pretending to be suicidally hopeless and their real motivating goal is eternal tyranny, rather than that, rightly or wrongly, eternal tyranny is sincerely the only alternative they see to certain doom.
I can assure you that there is a 0% chance that Kanye is just doing this as a stunt for publicity. The reported-on material consequences alone should get you down well below 10%. "What good is a publicity stunt when X", for about 15 different values of X. Following it unhealthily closely will get you all of the rest of the way to 0%.
And if your experience of this whole thing is primarily as an input into a Trump-DeSantis primary election horserace narrative, rather than both the Kanye-Fuentes axis and a Trump-DeSantis race being roughly equal inputs into what happens later, here's some light reading to start with.
bro
1yr ago
The war part of WWII is absolutely unbeatable, no other war can compete. I dare you as an autistic man to not enjoy this 29-hour, 41-part series on the Battle of Stalingrad told via map.
Rolling Stone lol
That really is the perfect source to use to accompany this take.
I don't even know where to start. The whole thing has been a fever dream. You will never be able to convince me that the last ~week especially hasn't been a simulation being fed into my brain as it's dissolved in a jar.
When [first-tier world-class sporting event] came to my much less contentious area, all reporting on "its costs" included all infrastructure spending that came anywhere near it.
Including "would have taken place regardless" stuff, which is not even close to a hard line (ie, based on other local infrastructure tendencies before and after it, "was going to happen anyways" can read as "within the next 60 years, maybe")
Ours was much less, but we had much less done than an entire city, an entire expressway system, a brand new airport, a port, etc.
I think your issue here is with a precedent that was set a long time ago, and that this does not seem inconsistent with. Of all the crimes of the media, I'm not going to get too worked up about this.
Earlier today, all entries in accounts'
/with_repliesdisappeared (though without the redirect to/homenow happening for everything)Nitter still works for the moment, though I can't imagine it will for long.
RIP geohot
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