ABigGuy4U
19hr ago
What put me off of ever wanting to ride a motorbike was a shock video posted on 4chan of a man flying over his handlebars and getting impaled on a wrought iron fence. The fence part wasn’t what put me off. It was the part where his genitals are effortlessly shorn off his body by the seat, as though they were made of naught but modeling clay. They then go undignifiably flopping off into the road. Bear in mind, when they talk about the risk of injury, 15 to 25 percent of those injuries are pelvic.
Border crossing has a different risk profile than already being in the country illegally and just staying there. Crossing the border is often physically unsafe and arduous, and paying a coyote can cost most of the immigrant’s net worth, not to mention the significant travel just to get to Mexico to try it. And something like half of all deported immigrants are ones caught at the border and turned back. So if you are a poor potential immigrant it might really be better to stay in your home country and wait for a more opportune time to try. Whereas if you are already in the US illegally you already have most of the upside and fairly low risk of being deported even with aggressive enforcement policies going on.
ABigGuy4U
1d ago
I suspect that wouldn’t be the type of battle you could fight with tanks.
Five things:
One, Iraq had just spent 8 years fighting bloody trench war against the Iranians, which had worn down their military.
Second, The Iraqi Army had a lot of specific issues that made their unit cohesion particularly bad.
Third, there was a much bigger deficiency in Iraq’s air defenses than modern day Iran, which meant that the Air Force had pretty throughly diced up the Iraqi Army before American ground troops even started moving
Fourth, while he’s often stereotyped as a moron due to his years in the Bush Administration, Colin Powell was actually an extremely competent general who employed a very nifty encirclement strategy that collapsed the Iraqi Army with relatively little fighting. If he had gone with the boneheaded frontal assault strategy that the crayon-eaters in the Marine Corps wanted to use, you could have very well seen 30,000 American casualties on just the first day (which is what the internal planning was estimating).
Fifth, Saddam’s Invasion of Kuwait was the geopolitical equivalent of knocking over a liquor store, so he got zero outside help or support. Iran would likely receive a substantial amount of support from Russia, Yemen, Shia paramilitaries in Iraq, and possibly even China.
build out giant munitions stockpiles
The problem is the military will then turn around and make a contract with Lockheed Martin for the GigaShell9000, which does everything a regular artillery shell does but costs 2.8 million dollars per unit and four billion dollars up front for R&D. Lockheed estimates the first five shells will role off the assembly line in 2033 but they should able to produce as many as 92 shells per year, once their production line gets fully spun up in the summer of 2045.
ABigGuy4U
2d ago
Silicon Valley oligarchs didn’t go MAGA because they wanted Trump to win, they went MAGA because they thought Trump was going to win anyway and it’s better to get on his good side. At least now he’s not talking about using the Clayton Antitrust Act to shatter them into a million pieces and scatter them to the four winds.
ABigGuy4U
3d ago
but based on a bundle of multiple commodities.
That was the plan for the (still hypothetical, possibly defunct) BRICS dollar.
ABigGuy4U
4d ago
The level of escalation the Biden administration was pushing was scary. I was seeing organized pro-nuclear war shilling everywhere. They were even smart enough to vary the message depending on the medium. On Reddit it was “lol Russia is so corrupt and their nukes are so old that they probably don’t even work” on 4chan it was “Nukes don’t really exist, the Jews just made them up”. For offline boomers you just had a lot of glossy magazine articles about American missile defense systems.
That’s all pretty rich coming from you Harry. You screwed up your country’s economy so badly that you almost got kicked out by a military coup.
The Japanese sources are a bit ambiguous but they point to Yasuke being a retainer for Odo Nobunaga (basically a court hanger-on). Given that he doesn’t seem to have had any combat training prior to his association with Nobunaga and the fact that he was only with Nobunaga for like 8 months means he was probably never in the field kicking ass anyway.
Then in 2019, historian and college professor Thomas Lockley wrote a book about Yasuke. Lockley, who is fluent in Japanese and teaches at a college in Japan, was able to get ahold of a lot of the original Japanese sources for his book. Lockley revealed that the original portrayal of Yasuke was inaccurate and that he really was a man at arms and a very notable Samurai of the era. This lead to a historical reevaluation of Yaskue in the west and made Lockley somewhat famous. Ubisoft hired Lockley as a historical advisor for their game, and for publicity.
Except it turns out that Lockley’s book was mostly bullshit. He had written two versions of the book, one in Japanese and one in English. The Japanese edition mostly adhered to the version of the Yasuke narrative in my first paragraph, the one that is actually supported by the historical record. The English version throws that all out, intentionally misrepresents the sources, and presents basically a made up narrative. Lockley was relying on the language barrier to ensure that no one would ever check his homework. Which they didn’t, until the controversy over the game blew everything wide open. Lockley is now under investigation by Japanese academics for what is basically academic fraud, he deleted all his socials, the Japanese parliament has even gotten involved, and Ubisoft has a hot mess on its hands.
ABigGuy4U
6d ago
You’re not supposed to feel sympathy for the 400 pound space marine, you’re supposed to feel disgust tinged with the hope that hard work will make him a real man.
ABigGuy4U
6d ago
Two-year-old girl from Andhra Pradesh, India, has died after contracting H5N1 bird flu
This is like the fifth death from bird flu I’ve heard about. Does this mean it’s crossed the inter species barrier? Is there anything preventing human-to-human transmission? Or are these some kind of weird edge cases?
I don’t know anything about economics. But I do find it odd how tariffs are supposedly a relic of a bygone era, an economy-wrecking direct tax on the consumer that only an economically-illiterate fool would ever think to use.... and yet every single other country on earth seems to use them.
ABigGuy4U
6d ago
Several Roman emperors actually tried to restore the Roman Republic. It never worked out because the Senate didn’t want the responsibility. They preferred to be a bickering social club.
ABigGuy4U
7d ago
In 80s and 90s movies, gangs of criminal thugs would often reflexively be portrayed as diverse, so you’d have one white guy, one black guy, often one Asian guy, etc. It was kind of funny because of its dissonant sense of optimism. I have a dream where roving bands of murderous junkie rapists do not judge by the color of one’s skin but by the content of one’s (bad) character.
ABigGuy4U
7d ago
The study that was a big part of the Brown v. Board of Education ruling was later revealed to be complete bullshit and nobody cared about that, so I think she is probably safe.
ABigGuy4U
8d ago
Given that the US very much wanted Russia to join the capitalist democratic world order and get rich and fat and bent over backwards to try to make it happen
That’s what the US said meanwhile they were pillaging the Russian economy, sponsoring Chechen terrorist groups, and muttering darkly about how it would be better if Russia just collapsed.
ABigGuy4U
8d ago
He has made the world strictly worse, especially for Russians.
That last part is a pretty difficult argument to take seriously given the absolute state Russia was in when he got the job.
ABigGuy4U
9d ago
Ironically this hypothetical Zoomer conservative sounds a hell of a lot like the archetypal Boomer conservative.
Both sides have ways around this, they just aren’t well publicized because they are scary and unconstitutional. If President Reagan and his government had been eliminated in a first strike, retaliatory launch orders would be given out by an unelected triumvirate headed by Dick Cheney, hidden in a bunker in the Appalachian mountains. If the Soviet presidium had been wiped out launch codes would have been dispensed by a Soviet AI called Dead Hand, hidden in a bunker in the Urals. After the Cold War both sides of course scrambled to claim that neither of these systems were actually used, but I’m sure modern classified equivalents exist. Neither the American or Russian deep states are going to gamble the fate of the country on the President getting hustled out of bed in time.
ABigGuy4U
10d ago
That’s what second strike capability is for, to maintain the threat of MAD even if a stealth first strike successfully eliminates one of the parties. Russia maintains second strike capability in two ways: 12 nuclear submarines (nuclear here meaning armed with nuclear weapons, not just nuclear powered) and a system of road mobile ICBM launchers that would be dispersed out into the Siberian countryside in the likely event of a conflict. Both the submarines and the road launchers carry high-yield warheads that are designed for counter-value attacks, that is destroying enemy cities and economic targets, not just the enemy’s nuclear weapons. Each submarine carries sixteen missiles each carrying four half-megaton warheads. Meaning that just one surviving submarine could destroy most of the major US cities east of the Mississippi River, or all the capitols of Western Europe. And like @functor was saying, there are systems in place to allow for launch even if the political leadership is dead. The United States has similar capabilities, both in the launch infrastructure and backup launch authority.
ABigGuy4U
11d ago
Mostly because she promotes herself that way. Zegler could have certainly downplayed her Colombian ancestry.
If you want a counter-example, look at Anya Taylor-Joy who despite being a double minority (Ayylmao-Latina) mostly just bills herself as white.
Two Chinese nationals fighting in Russian units were just captured in Ukraine. Potentially as many as 16 have been captured so far, and the Ukrainian intelligence services have identified approximately another 150. The Chinese government issued a somewhat milk-toast advisory about how Chinese citizens should avoid traveling to foreign war zones, but otherwise took no action.
It is possible that these men were simply private citizens who chose to join the conflict. There are adventure seekers, soldiers of conscience, professional mercenaries and penniless drop outs with no better options from many nations fighting on both sides of the conflict already. But the volume, and fact that there don’t seem to have been any Chinese nationals fighting until just recently makes me think that it might actually be People’s Liberation Army troops secretly but officially deployed to the conflict.
In my opinion, China has already been a firm supporter of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, they have just kept their support quiet and mostly laundered it through private companies in order to avoid retaliation. At this point China and Russia’s geopolitical interests align much more than they differ. America is stepping on the hopes and dreams of both, and it is in China’s best interest to keep America tied up in Europe for as long and to the greatest extent as possible. Redditors constantly point to a couple of border squabbles from 60 years ago as evidence that the two countries are constantly waiting to stab each other in the back, but the main interests of each are quite far apart: Russia’s in Europe, and China’s in the Pacific.
Given the recent tariffs, China might not have as much incentive to hide their support nearly as much. Full sanctions from the US are untenable, and they are already being tariffed as much as the US economy will bear.
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