crushedoranges
No bio...
User ID: 111
crushedoranges
3mo ago
No, it wouldn't have, because the other SSRs wanted independence, and to keep them all in would have required a incredible amount of bloodshed that no Russian leader was capable or willing to do at the time. The Soviets were poor and backwards and would have fell ever further behind if they remained Communist. Think how poor Russians are now, and imagine them - even poorer - stuck with technologies from the 1970s: an international pariah from all the ethnics they'd have to messily put down with the army.
Could they have staggered along, like a North Korea or a Cuba? Maybe. But it would have destroyed the Russian people completely and utterly.
crushedoranges
3mo ago
A surer sign to divest from Barclays I've never seen.
crushedoranges
3mo ago
Then what, exactly, is all of this western aid paying for?
What is the length of commitment necessary from the West for Ukraine to win the war?
I think the average American is happy to support Ukraine, less happy, if it proves to be a Afghanistan-level commitment. Open-ended conflicts with no clear objective is the kind of foreign entanglement I do not like.
crushedoranges
3mo ago
I will make this post with the prior that I personally favor the Ukrainians and their cause.
I do not like warfare by media spectacle. Insomuch as this is a victory, it is giving the Ukrainians a positive media cycle. What strategic value was gained here? Has the overall situation changed much? It is very much stinks of desperation. Perhaps if you subscribe to vibes-based warfare it is a victory worth talking about. It embarasses Gerasimov (and Putin by proxy.) Who cares? Gerasimov is a nincompoop. He is a butcher and a moron, but even a moron can hold a trench line.
The memory holed offensives with the much-hyped Western equipment half a year ago destroyed much material and good men for no gain at all. I also believe that they wanted a good media cycle before the NATO conference. Zelensky's generals seem to be strategizing, not to win the war, but to get the best headlines in the west. Why are they doing this? I don't know. Why aren't they trying to win the war? Why are they spending manpower and material on what are essentially photo ops?
The only comparable situation I can imagine from history is Republican Spain throwing an excess of resources to holding Madrid, of planning offensives for newspapers and prestige. The Republicans lost for many reasons, but they lost, because they weren't fighting to win. Can the Ukrainians even win? I suspect that their American backers need political cover to continue their aid.
Reddit commenters and other slave moralists love to sneer at Elon because they have no idea what leadership is (and if they did, they're repelled by it). Leadership, in their heads, is mindlessly executing the agenda of the secret kings like them, which so happen to coincidentally align with a progressive agenda. Softheaded wannabe intelligentsia and open source communists who want the world to be run like a university.
Fuck them.
All the certificates and university degrees and soy can't make up for a lack of vision and a absence of testicles. If you gave a billion dollars to one hundred Silicon Valley alumni, ninety-nine of them would be overrun instantly by blaqq kweens and transsexual gooners because guileless, naive autists have no social defenses against San Francisco grifters.
Musk isn't perfect. But he has a spine, and he has vision, and in our degenerate age that makes him stand a giant in an era of dwarfs. No amount of technical ability can protect you from the culture war, just ask Stallman.
crushedoranges
3mo ago
And in terms of ethnogenesis, centuries pass in the blink of an eye.
There's an unfortunate saying that goes something like this: 'a dog born in the stables is not a horse'. I am Chinese in origin, and I can confidently say that if outsiders moved in and learned and spoke Chinese and did so for a thousand years, they would still be foreigners. (No one thinks that Mongols are Chinese.) That is the problem when creedal New World colonial nations cross-pollinate their civic nationalism into the old. They simply do not understand that a nation is more than a mere economic zone of free association.
For the British, they still haven't gotten over William the Conquerer (the difference between the posh and chav class distinctions in England is largely how much francophonian loanwords each uses). Anyone else is an outsider to this culture-struggle. Their cosmopolitan rootlessness precludes them from partaking of a nation's blood and soil, of which nearly all Old World states are in their essence.
crushedoranges
3mo ago
From the point of view of the Britons, the Saxons and the Normans are recent immigrations, recent meaning in the last thousand years. The Romans only get a pass because they immigrated before the time of Christ.
crushedoranges
3mo ago
Weird is a miliquetoast epithet, and not even the worst w-word one can imagine.
I think most everyone knows that Trump can escalate to Defcon 1 and call Kamala Harris a whore for sleeping with Willie Brown in exchange for political influence in California. If Trump was truly shameless, he'd have already done it. Asking whether or not she's ever given him a blowjob would destroy political discourse forever.
(The dems could call Trump a whoremonger, on the other hand, but typically procurers are less stigmatized than procurees.)
crushedoranges
3mo ago
You remind me of the historians described in Asimov's foundation who would do no original research, but instead compare and contrast academics of their past to construct their arguments. You are obviously well-read on NrX/reactionary argumentation, but twist it with neoliberal points. It's impressive, but in the same way that Rainbow Dash in a jar of suspicious liquids is impressive. One must pause in astonishment at the seeming inexplicable nature of the effort.
crushedoranges
3mo ago
I could have, yes.
crushedoranges
3mo ago
Ted Cruz and Chris Christie. (James Carville is Darkstalker Kaathe.)
crushedoranges
3mo ago
Get away from me, Kaathe!
The age of dark is not yet here!
crushedoranges
3mo ago
crushedoranges
3mo ago
Trump linked the fire of Jeffersonian politics that is in the lineage of Jackson, Teddy Roosevelt, Huey Long and Reagan, burning away the soul of his fame and legacy to reignite the Kiln of the First Flame beneath the Washington Memorial to extend the Age of America.
crushedoranges
3mo ago
In the balance of it, creating an technical class within North Korea that is not military in nature is important, I think. NK having its software devs being more civilian is important in the long term for creating a philowestern elite.
crushedoranges
4mo ago
What a pathetic end to a political career. To be humiliated as an old, senile fool by your own party. Almost Shakespearean in its pathos: King Lear, abandoned by his daughters: and the only loyal one to remain to him is a crack-smoking adulterer.
Those saccharine smiles in the audience, that praise him as being an American hero, smiling as they stab him in the back. Ugly.
crushedoranges
4mo ago
I can't love Donald Trump more than I already do, but this might do it for me. Fuck all of you safetyist milksops, we're on the singularity train. The AI waifus of the future will be American, goddamnit! I WILL MARRY MY FICTIONAL AI CONSTRUCT, YOU CAN'T STOP ME MODS
crushedoranges
4mo ago
Nowadays, it's more of the Indian Question (IQ), imo. The newer wave of overtly nepotistic ingroupers is bound for a Noticing, any day now.
crushedoranges
4mo ago
It seems awfully presumptuous to write a list for the 21st century given that we're not even a quarter of the way through with it.
crushedoranges
4mo ago
I'd like to say that just because you have a contrary opinion does not make it more probable that it is true, and that a universal confused/derisive reaction to the shape of your non-pinion should probably incite some self-reflection on your own take on things.
crushedoranges
4mo ago
We've found the one person on the planet who doesn't have an opinion on Donald Trump.
crushedoranges
4mo ago
Ah, it's a discord, but the initial reaction was some sort of air rifle. (I thought it was a .22). Mind you, it's only speculation. We'll get to know what happened real soon from the official news, I bet.
crushedoranges
4mo ago
Nah, if it was a solitary 'pop' possibly, but the shooter mag dumped after the initial graze.
Currently debating with online gun nerds on what sort of weapon it was.
crushedoranges
4mo ago
you beat me to the punch! Gack.
Well, this is big news. Very big news. I don't know what to say. Looks like we're back into the political assassination times of American politics.
No, it wouldn't. Even if you had the proverbial 50 Stalins in charge, the Soviet Union was running into the debts it had incurred to reality - no amount of will can overcome the demographic cliff, uncompetitive industries, and the ruling elite's lack of faith in its own ideology. You might as well say that Hitler could have held along for longer if he just 'cracked down harder.
It was over. Gorbachev was merely more deluded than most, in thinking it could be reformed. The hardliners that wanted to keep the Union together had no solution for the country's problems other than continuing the stagnation.
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