coffee_enjoyer
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User ID: 541
coffee_enjoyer
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24d ago
I knew that he would be pro-Israel but it’s a little too much for me. Cutting 500mil funds to a university because their students protest against Israel, not releasing the Epstein files, and now trying to primary Thomas Massie is too much. At this point I’m willing to become a loyal Democrat if they come out strongly against Israel.
coffee_enjoyer
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24d ago
Our instincts evolved in a different environment, one where revenge and harming defectors were conducive to genetic fitness, hence the instinct for revenge and/or harming defectors never went away. Children show this instinct. The variables of today aren’t the variables of our prehistoric environment. If you didn’t retaliate when a tribe member harmed the group, the group as a whole perishes, and those genes are lost. If you don’t retaliate when an enemy attacks your tribe, either the enemy takes your mates or your own tribal group disposes you. Hence the genes.
So the feeling of dissatisfaction from an inability to retaliate will stick around unless you’ve somehow developed a sense of superseding brotherly love in an abundant positive sum environment where the harm is trivial and low stacks (because heaven), or something like that. Importantly, this feeling can be hellish because it’s your deepest biology signaling that your very genetic fitness is at stake — not much different than if your very life were at stake, because genetically it is.
coffee_enjoyer
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26d ago
Are the death penalty (and penal theories broadly) not downstream from how we feel about others? Such that it’s about feelings, and not “theory”?
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I can imagine a criminal to whom I have no social feelings; if the crime is bad, I would like him punished severely, even to the point of death. This is because the absence of administering the punishment is evolutionarily painful to me. Humans evolved to want to punish wrongdoers.
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I can, for brief moments, imagine myself being such a loving Amish fella that I genuinely love every human as if they were an adorable puppy or priceless artifact. And I see their sins almost like “mistake theory”. If this is a person’s abiding belief, and he believes in an afterlife, then I can imagine the evolutionary need for revenge simply turning off, entirely.
Is there necessarily more to it than this? Those who opposite the death penalty probably don’t have an abiding feeling of vengeance. Those who support it would probably feel better knowing crime is taken care of (a sense of balance being restored).
coffee_enjoyer
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26d ago
I agree that this a criticism of Christianity, but I think it applies to virtually every faith except Judaism, because Judaism is uniquely oriented around perceived familial ties and extrajudicial nationhood. Muslims haven’t always defended other Muslims, they have routinely warred against each other. Buddhists didn’t always defend Buddhists. Sikhs would likely defend to such a degree, but again, that’s because it naturally construes itself as its own nation. This is one of the drawbacks of a purely spiritual religion that isn’t concerned with genetic ties.
coffee_enjoyer
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27d ago
If they created what was of value in the country, then it’s not “affirmative action”, it’s justly securing the fruit of one’s labor with the knowledge that other peoples may not or do possess the same high trust genes and culture adaptive for great nation building. The Bantu had the opportunity to develop their own things in their own areas that rivaled Afrikaner development, but they were not able to do this, and aren’t able today. Neither are Indians, it would seem, from reading about experiences in India. Perhaps, much like soil-rich produce, you need high-fertility farming communities outside of urban areas in order to sustain the very spark of the civilization so prized, lest the less-trustful urban genes proliferate.
coffee_enjoyer
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27d ago
Fun. I was thinking recently that so much “religious experience” makes sense even when only including the emotional, and ignoring altogether physical facts and logic and memory. If you are praying in awe at God, then God can just be a placeholder, and provided the experience of “awe” occurs in relation to your life, it is a very beneficial experience to cultivate. Same with humility (a beneficial and adaptive state), petitions (salience of your desires), sustained worship (the training of our attention), thanks (the training of appreciation for things we ought to be appreciate of), apology (salience of wrongs), favor (confidence). We could be tempted to call a person who cultivates these feelings religious, even if it occurs entirely within one’s emotional activity and with no actual belief in God. And then, if there’s some scholarly theist who believes all the right things but lacks this emotional dimension, we would be tempted to call them totally lacking in God. It’s a fun thought: God as Divine Placeholder. God existing in periphery but lost as soon as we focus, like an object in the dark that can only be seen when we aren’t directly seeing it.
coffee_enjoyer
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28d ago
In that example, sure, but re: Ukraine, we have like two or three decades of American foreign policy experts talking about how Ukraine is a special red line for Russia. There’s no indication that the slippery slope is anything but fallacious here.
coffee_enjoyer
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28d ago
Why think about a whole country like a gambler, though? This reminds me of Trump telling Zelensky “you’re gambling with lives and you don’t have the cards”. If your country is at stake, then such extreme caution is required that worst case outcomes do disprove strategy. There is a poster here (forgot who, apologies) that uses the metaphor of XCOM frequently. In XCOM, if you die your run is permanently over. So unlike gambling, in XCOM you only want to take odds that ensure victory, or nearly ensure so. You would never consider a “90% chance of winning the engagement” dice roll, because over eleven engagements you’re going to lose permanently. Now Ukraine can be considered one singular engagement. Should they consider something that has a 10% chance of permanent loss? If someone robbed you and said, “give me 30% of your earnings or I will throw you off a plane with a parachute that has a 10% chance of malfunctioning”, I think the former option is always better because of the value of what is safeguarded. That’s important for Ukrainians (obviously), but it’s also important to the West if Russia continues inflicting casualties such that Ukraine has no more viable manpower. Because then they get the whole country.
I have no idea what the actual chance is of Russia taking the whole country — that information is only understood by JD Vance and Trump, who are privy to the absurdly expansive American intelligence network on Russia plus all that Ukraine knows, plus more knowledge of the global economy, plus knowledge about the potential of unrest in the Middle East and over Taiwan! Plus knowledge about both American and Russian technology, plus greater knowledge of nuclear armagaeddon threats. Has the CIA come out against Trump this time on the Ukraine question?
Put another way, any amount of getting pulled over when driving drunk disproves the strategy of driving drunk. Because you shouldn’t drive drunk, because the consequences are so extreme. Perhaps America believes that Ukraine is currently in geopolitical “drunk driving” mode, which is dangerous to the bus filled with naive Europeans who share the road with him.
Remember that whether Ukrainians live under oligarchic control in corrupt Ukraine, or oligarchic control in Russia, hardly affects their lives. Farmers will farm, miners will mine, CounterStrike players will бляt. From the standpoint of a prole like me, I can see the Slavic Christian happy in either region of control, having their basic needs quite met, hopefully reproducing. When war is over, the smart ones will continue to move to the West. It makes Russia more powerful if it takes Ukraine — which isn’t ideal — but I’m not a permaelite like Robert Swan Mueller III, I haven’t invested my reputation into whether America controls the fate of Eastern Europe. And I’m someone whose first American ancestor fought the war of independence! This is not a “life or death” war to me and it shouldn’t be for the average Ukrainian, who has been made to believe that it is much they like were made to believe in Bolshevism a century ago.
coffee_enjoyer
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29d ago
Ukraine will likely invent atrocities to boost morale, sure. But I don’t think the average person actually believed in the Bucha et al stuff. Atrocity propaganda has been a staple of the Western war machine since Leopold in the Congo, probably even before.
coffee_enjoyer
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29d ago
I wonder if this event will be remembered in the same way turning Jewish arrivals by boat prior and during WW2 is remembered
Why would you think that these two are remotely similar? Preventing Jewish immigration ostensibly meant that they could all be killed. Sending Ukrainians back simply means that some percent of them may be drafted by the Ukrainian authorities, and some percent of that may die accordingly, with the rest probably safe in Kyiv.
coffee_enjoyer
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30d ago
Coca Cola, DOW Chemical, Goldman, Nestlé, Shell are clients to STRATFOR. Yale relies on a UPenn report to advise students to aim for a job there. So they appear to be decent mall ninjas. Although, I don’t think the CIA would pass on the opportunity to make money and advise American companies at a “non-affiliated”, “totally independent” think tank. So they might just be ninja ninjas, dressed up as mall ninjas, because who would ever think the mall ninja was the real ninja all along?
On YouTube: youtube.com/watch?v=21Gouq6hp-0
A lot of people thought that there would be a conflict with Japan at this time. Hilariously, when I went to find a source for my recollection of “1980s fear of Japan”, the first was themotte back on Reddit: https://old.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/dclpo3/understanding_1980s_american_worries_about_japan/
STRATFOR has been called a “shadow CIA”: https://www.barrons.com/articles/SB1002927557434087960 , https://www.reuters.com/article/business/wikileaks-targets-global-risk-company-stratfor-idUSL5E8DR01/
coffee_enjoyer
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30d ago
Civilization can be construed as a hack programmed onto our collective evolutionary codebase — a codebase that has very finite space and is rewritable. The language used is complicated and easy to misunderstand.
Surely it would be more better if nature just gave us all strong willpower
Truthfully, I’m not 100% sure what willpower means. Is this when we convince ourselves that the immediate thing in front of us has salvific importance, or that the failure to pursue it opens the gates of hell, metaphorically? In that sense this it’s a kind of meta-social managing of ourselves, what Marcus Aurelius did in his Meditations and what Goggins does in his podcast. There’s a great Louie CK bit on Goggins that I adore: “it’s hard to be that guy — you can be that guy, and then you’re tense all the time, and then you die. It’s not like you become that guy and then you break into some infinite perfection. You just become that tense guy and then you die”. We can see why people don’t become that guy: (1) it’s unpleasant and humans are designed to pursue pleasure; (2) the pleasure which Goggins receives as compensation for his pain is a hyper-socialized glee at his superiority which is instantly diminished the more that people become like him. In other words, who is going to watch him carry the boat? Who is there to yell at? Jocko has one kid, by the way; the fat comedian has two.
Or if our natural urges pointed us towards that better life in which we're successful all on its own?
Nature has its own consideration of success. We don’t have a say in it. All we have is our hacks, and there’s little telling whether our hacks are better than the hacks the previous coders came up with.
The desire to be a loser, and the hatred of my own inadequacy coexists in the same body
A wise man once wrote:
I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate… I have the desire to do what is right, but not the ability to carry it out. I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I keep on doing… I see in my members another law waging war against the law of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members. Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?
You have competing instincts. There’s a bunch of social instincts, which in their optimal form will make you do the prosocial behaviors which you’re complaining that you don’t do (this includes exercise, diet). Then there’s more animal instincts: not waste energy, to eat more, and so on. Then there’s the omnipresent antisocial super-stimuli which are a virus to your social instincts. This is the algorithm that shows you a bunch of social information, some validating, some alarming, etc. Video games. Etc. If you feel important, high-ranked, competitive, engaged, desired online — or chasing these regardless — then why would you go to the gym to be Goggins? You would have to exercise for eight months to maybe get a few more likes on an Instagram post, and it’s questionable whether that will really lead to anything, and besides, maybe women online are more attractive? This is reality without Goggins-tinted goggles. What a lot of weight lifters will do to increase motivation is (1) look down on everyone else, (2) believe that exercise has cosmic import. The first is morally bad, the second is Frank Yang. In any case, you would need to continually convince yourself of this motivation with reminders, cues, variability, pilgrimages, dark nights of the soul…
To continue the quote above,
Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord! So then, I myself serve the law of God with my mind, but with my flesh I serve the law of sin.
We can interpret this atheistically. The flesh, the sinful body, this is all of the lower anti-social instincts and viruses. The Christ, the Lord, this is the hyper-social, omni-social exemplar, the pious and continual thinking of whom acts as an antivirus which can free the codebase and allow us to implement our own hacks again (which may or may not be better than the original hacks).
coffee_enjoyer
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1mo ago
Maybe we're seeing the rise of a new ethnic group, not based on shared genetic traits, but on certain cultural traits being emphasized more than others, as has happened thousands or millions of times in history?
What does this mean?
coffee_enjoyer
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1mo ago
The same European countries who sided with Zelensky after his insulting comments against Vance (insinuating he doesn’t know enough about Ukraine to comment, then interrupting him) are now aghast that Vance demeaned their relatively irrelevant militaries? These are unserious leaders. Perhaps we should actually consider allying with Russia.
coffee_enjoyer
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1mo ago
Kolomoisky was considered a notoriously corrupt oligarch in a country that is known for both corruption and oligarchs. So what is your evidence that a Russian in this industry would be just as corrupt? There’s at least one Russian oligarch, Vladimir Potanin, who intends to donate most of his wealth to charity when he dies. And Alisher Usmanov has donated to philanthropy in the tens of billions.
coffee_enjoyer
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1mo ago
I would agree with the point you are making if I believed that a Russian would be just as corrupt as Kolomoisky. But I don’t think this is true. A Russian would be corrupt, yes, but probably not as corrupt. And a Russian who is spending lavishly on prostitutes and vodka is at least keeping resources within the economy. If I’m not mistaken, the consensus is that Putin has the oligarchs under control.
coffee_enjoyer
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1mo ago
In my first comment I point to how Kolomoisky doesn’t simply spend his ill-gotten funds as the prototypical prodigal son, but instead very meticulously allocates his resources to help his own tribal members. The 100 million dollar Jewish center may employ hundreds of Jews, may give out scholarships, etc. It gives aid to the ultra-orthodox to ensure a high birth rate. There’s the Chabad donations, donations to Jewish educational media, to “Federation of Jewish Communities of the CIS”. This isn’t a billionaire who wants to live and let live, this is someone who is fundamentally transferring the resources of one people to another. It’s pure tribalism: exploit the resources you have momentarily seized, and then give those resources out to thousands of Jews across the world, in the form of enormous endowments and donations.
Florida, with $11 million in donations over a dozen years, and New York, with $10 million, are the focal points of their Jewish giving. But the pair has also given money to Jewish organizations in Connecticut and Canada, Massachusetts and Montana, Denmark and Jerusalem. They give to synagogues, to schools, to summer camps and to Zionist organizations, with individual grants ranging from $180 to more than $1 million.
coffee_enjoyer
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1mo ago
You don’t have to be as extreme as SecureSignals to see how crazy this scenario is. Ukrainian’s talk about “land” and protecting their sovereignty when a foreigner owned most of their land’s resources via corruption, to launder to his own people thousands of miles away. You mention Poroshenko, but Poroshenko had the awareness to go after Kolomoisky, which is why Kolomoisky fled to Israel (until Zelensky’s reelection, which was his own project). Kolomoisky really wanted his Jewish protege Oleksandr Lazorko in charge of Ukraine’s oil industry at a separate company, and when Poroshenko fired him…
On the morning of March 20th, [a journalist] Leshchenko got a tip that armed men in camouflage and bulletproof vests had arrived at the Kiev headquarters of Ukrnafta, Ukraine’s largest oil and gas producer. Kolomoisky’s PrivatBank Group has a forty-two per cent stake in the company. The men spent the weekend securing the building: they brought in supplies, blocked the entries, and even welded metal grills onto the front entries. One of the men told Leshchenko that he was from the Dnipro-1 Battalion, which has been funded largely by Kolomoisky.
In mid-March of this year, Ukraine’s government put in place reforms meant to improve corporate governance, curb the power of oligarchs, and, in particular, to reduce Kolomoisky’s authority over the oil-and-gas sector. Kolomoisky wasn’t pleased, and on March 19th, Radio Liberty (a branch of Radio Free Europe that was founded as an American news source for the Soviet Union) posted his first YouTube hit. The video opens with a group of men, who are dressed like soldiers, carrying boxes, sports bags, and what appear to be firearms into the headquarters of the state-owned oil-pipeline company UkrTransNafta. Its C.E.O., a Kolomoisky ally, had just been replaced, meaning that Kolomoisky would lose his considerable influence over the company. Kolomoisky is then seen leaving the building, flanked by thick-necked men in black.
When foreigners raid your country’s resources with their own paramilitary forces, and arrange for people to become president, you don’t have sovereignty. The reason these people fled Russia is because Russia stamps down on this stuff — replacing it with their own Slavic version, sure, but at least it doesn’t go to an insular tribe from a different culture. See what they did with Bill Browder.
coffee_enjoyer
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1mo ago
Because this influence in Ukraine — that pushed for a NATO alliance despite the promise of war, funded programming to change sentiments, bought the current president’s popularity, funded battalions that waged violence, exploited the resources for their own gain and their tribesmen — have less in common with the average Ukrainian than Vladimir Putin. So when we are talking about:
victims
dictator
land
We should consider who the victims are, who the dictator is, and who has ties to the land. The other complaints in the post, about bombings and invasion, are a natural consequence of a war caused by a foreign influence within Ukraine — a corrupt influence which stole resources from the people and sent it off to their foreigner cousins 5000 miles away, in the largest money laundering case in history. Do you want what is best for the people or not? The post appears to imply that the current Ukrainian leadership that is negotiating is interested in “[the Ukrainians’] Own Good”. Per the above, that is very doubtful. Their past history shows that they consider Ukraine a resource to extract for their own clan.
coffee_enjoyer
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1mo ago
I’m not sure if you’re aware of who has been influencing Ukraine and what that means for “sovereignty over their land”. Kolomoisky, a Jewish oligarch, is responsible for Zelensky’s rise to power and has an outsize influence in Ukraine. Some information about him —
Dozens of New York’s Jewish organizations have had their bottom lines bolstered by two businessmen accused of laundering billions for a Burisma-connected Ukrainian oligarch, public records show. Mordechai Korf, 48, and Uri Laber, 49, have shelled out more than $11 million to nearly 70 yeshivas and religious charities in Brooklyn and across the state, according to federal tax filings.
But Korf and Laber are more than just generous benefactors: since 2006, the Miami-based pair have allegedly been middlemen for Ukrainian billionaire Ihor Kolomoisky, funneling $4 billion of his ill-gotten gains to buy property and businesses in the U.S, according to three civil lawsuits filed by the U.S. Department of Justice in Florida federal court.
Kolomoisky, who built his fortune during the lawless years immediately following the fall of the Soviet Union, reportedly has a controlling interest in Burisma, the Ukrainian oil and gas company which put President Biden’s son, Hunter, on its board of directors in 2014 at a salary of $50,000 per month. Kolomoisky dispatched his private army to take over companies and destroy a Russian-owned oil and gas refinery in Dnipropetrovsk in 2014, according to reports. Korf and Laber — who met Kolomoisky decades ago while working and volunteering in the Ukrainian province he governed — gave a total of more than $1.4 million to Brooklyn’s Jewish Educational Media, and nearly $1 million to the Manhattan-based Federation of Jewish Communities of the CIS [Commonwealth of Independent States, nine countries which banded together after the 1991 dissolution of the Soviet Union].
Kolomoisky associates with and helps mostly other Jews, not just when he launders his money to his tribe abroad, but also at home:
Kolomoyskyi has been a prominent figure in Ukraine's organised Jewish community.[38] In 2008, he was elected the President of "the United Jewish community of Ukraine" in Kyiv.[39] He became a major funder in Ukraine of the Chabad movement, which has Ukrainian roots.[40][41] In 2012, with Gennady Bogolubov and Victor Pinchuk, he financed construction of what purports to be the largest multifunctional Jewish Community Center in Europe,[42] the Menorah Centre, in downtown Dnipro. Comprising seven marble[43] towers (of which the highest is 20 stories) arranged in the shape of a menorah,[44] it houses a synagogue, two hotels, kosher restaurant and grocery store and Jewish Memory and Holocaust Museum.[45][46]
His money went toward building up a parallel ultra-orthodox Jewish colony in Ukraine:
Over the years, he [funded by Kolomoisky] built up parallel education networks, ranging from kindergarten to college. One offers a high-level Jewish liberal education (its primary school once claimed to be the biggest Jewish school in Europe), and the other is much smaller and runs along Chabad-Haredi lines, with a program of Torah studies and separation of boys and girls. Kaminetsky is the archetype of the enterprising Chabad shaliach (emissary), building his own institutions while blending himself and his family into the local community and culture.
His relationship to Zelensky:
The journalists uncovered that law firms running offshore companies — used by former owners of PrivatBank Igor Kolomoisky and Hennadiy Boholyubov to funnel millions of dollars in depositors’ money abroad — lied to the financial monitoring agencies as to who was behind these firms. Also, according to the journalists, Zelensky’s offshore companies accepted payments from Kolomoisky for video content. Kolomoisky’s 1+1 media holding was the key buyer of TV series, shows and films created by Kvartal 95 production studio, founded by Zelensky
Kolomoisky gained his power by hiring gangs to kill whoever stood on his way, at least according to Ukrainian authorities last year. And according to the Atlantic Council:
Zelenskyy’s campaign depended heavily on the backing of Ihor Kolomoisky, arguably Ukraine’s most controversial oligarch of all
During the campaign, Zelenskyy appointed Kolomoisky’s personal lawyer as a key adviser, travelled abroad to confer with the then-exiled Kolomoisky on multiple occasions, and benefited from the enthusiastic endorsement of Kolomoisky’s media empire.
Kolomoisky is accused of helping Zelenskyy settle scores and undermine potential challengers. One of these is Vitaly Klitschko, the former world heavyweight boxing champion and current Mayor of Kyiv who is often cited as a potential future rival presidential candidate after comfortably securing re-election in the Ukrainian capital last year. Kolomoisky’s media outlets have stepped up their attacks on Klitschko, while friends and allies of the mayor have become the targets of police investigations. Klitschko himself complained about harassment after armed officers from the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) raided his apartment building in May.
Kolomoisky, of course, owned the TV station that first propagandized Zelensky to the public. He played a character who becomes President, a way to manipulate the public into eventually voting for him.
So yeah, when I think of “sovereignty over my land”, I don’t think about Kolomoisky taking over the resources of a country through murder, illegally extracting all the money he can, spending that money on a lavish 100 million dollar “Menorah Center” and services for his foreign tribe members, funneling the rest of the money through his tribe members to help his co-ethnics 5000 miles away, and then using this media control to boost the popularity of yet another tribe member by depicting him as the president in expensive TV series. When I think of sovereignty, I do not think of “the largest money laundering operation in history”.
If I were Ukrainian I would not want to be controlled by these guys. I would rather be controlled by my brothers in Russia. The fact that they have put out calls for their tribe to flee Russia tells me all I need to know.
coffee_enjoyer
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1mo ago
Are you pursuing the right physical sensations? Have you dipped your feet in a cold slowly water on a hot day? Laid in the sand and moved your hand around? Wind through your hair on a very windy day? Do you enjoy the sensation of the sun on your face? Tried weighted blankets? Gone down a hall on a bicycle?
coffee_enjoyer
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1mo ago
The confrontation starts at 3hr7min here when Zelensky becomes accusatory with Vance at the prospect of any diplomatic action. He does this with a smirk on, and ends with “what kind of diplomacy, JD, are you speaking about? What, what do you mean?” I find it hard to interpret this as anything but extremely insulting. Wars in history have been fought against nations for less insulting behavior. The tone is demeaning and he’s casting doubt on America’s ability to pursue diplomacy. When Vance replies, Zelensky immediately interrupts him with his arms crossed, looking away. Then Zelensky interrupts again (remember, after speaking for 2 minutes). Then Zelensky says, “have you ever been to Ukraine, that you can speak of what problems we have?” He is the VP, he has all the data. This is an insane way to speak to the VP.
I would have liked to see him immediately kicked out of the White House right there and StarLink shut off. Make Ukraine fire him, then resume discussions with someone who isn’t incompetent at basic human manners.
My first priority is “White population doesn’t go down + they aren’t discriminated against”. My second priority is that Israel doesn’t exert undue influence on us, and instead we exert it on them. But if Trump continues to be so comically submissive to them I will temporarily flip my priorities around. Also, new information I’ve learned on the Mennonite birth rates in South America make me care a little less about White TFR (eg in this century they will make up most births in Bolivia).
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