—spend two billion dollars creating AI whose only commercial application is creating naughty pictures of Taylor Swift
—move heaven and earth so it can’t do that anymore
—go bankrupt
—???????
—PROFIT
ABigGuy4U
1d ago
Ask the Shapiro right and the woke are actually the student protestors and that guy that immolated himself for Palestine.
Well yes that’s the problem. Both the true believers and the mercenary government and party apparatchiks considered themselves to be woke. For the last ten years that’s never been a problem, and the two camps have moved in lockstep with regard to domestic policy. But two years ago the international situation exploded in various ways and suddenly there is revealed a number of pretty big gulfs between what the different sub-denominations of woke actually want. And most of the revolutionary zeal is in the true believers, who are becoming disgusted and walking away, leaving the befuddled apparatchiks holding the bag.
ABigGuy4U
1d ago
When you describe it like that it sounds a lot like the Chinese Cultural Revolution: an auto-coup by one faction of the elite weaponizing the militant youth against a rival faction of the elite. It ended pretty quickly when the opposing faction of the elite ended up grabbing power.
Overextension of woke in service of America’s geopolitical goals introduced fatal cognitive dissonance that alienated the most militant core supporters of the ideological movement. The Woke movement has already survived quite a bit cognitive dissonance, but 2022-2023 produced too much.
2022: “The scary paramilitary guy over there? The one wearing the Black Sun T-shirt with the little SS Tottenkopf pin? Oh that’s just Sergeant Kravchenko. He’s woke actually. Yes it is perfectly normal that his friends attend some official funerals in full 1944 Waffen SS uniforms. Ok, his grandfather did shoot an entire village in Poland one time but we’re giving him a medal because those villagers were all communists. Yes we’ve been telling you that fascism is evil and communism is the future since kindergarten, but it just isn’t ok? We need to give them lots and lots of money to help them punch Nazis.”
2023: “Ok yes it’s technically a ethno-state. Ok so there are some theocratic elements too. Yes, some of the people who live there have different sets of legal rights because of their race. Liquidating a ghetto full of brown people is woke, actually. Shut up CHUD, we need to give them more smart bombs and if you say something else I’m calling the campus police! The police beating up student protestors IS woke god damn it!”
ABigGuy4U
3d ago
I think a lot of these companies were being told by big consulting firms like McKinsey that these strategies would open new markets and bring them a lot of money, and the companies genuinely believed them. They started cooling off on DEI and the Modern Audience when the promised returns never materialized.
ABigGuy4U
5d ago
I think the modern equivalent of the Franco-Prussian War (in terms of drastically misleading future military planners) is probably the Gulf War. Especially the battle of 73 Easting.
ABigGuy4U
5d ago
It’s almost is if the billionaires’ prior support of Democrats and current support of Trump were both purely out of selfish economic interest and had nothing to do with genuine principles.
ABigGuy4U
5d ago
Some of the currently in-use electrical infrastructure in California is so old that it was built by Thomas Edison himself. I’m not joking, it literally was.
ABigGuy4U
6d ago
The California and Texas Republics had better not cross the Kingdom of North Dakota. It has the world’s third largest nuclear arsenal.
ABigGuy4U
6d ago
Afghanistan arguably had a pretty strong patriotic movement, it’s just that it was on the side opposing the ANA. Granted that side wanted to revert back to tribal/religious rule rather than have a strictly 20th century nation state, but it was very unified in its opposition to foreign involvement.
ABigGuy4U
6d ago
The mafioso isn’t the only one paying in blood thoughbeit. Even in a best case scenario Ukraine’s economy and demographics have been permanently ruined. A harsh sacrifice perhaps, but one that Reddit and the US State Department are more than willing to make.
Frankly I’m not sure Putin is willing to accept any offer right now. The problem is geography. The Russians have spent three years attriting the Ukrainian army and slowly breaking through the massive network of fortifications, trench lines, and bunker complexes that were built up over ten years along the LPR/DPR border. Also most of Ukraine’s few hilly areas are in the east. Everything after Pokrovsk and Kramantorsk will likely be significantly easier. Russia has put in a large percentage of the effort, blood and money needed to conquer half or all of Ukraine, and they are being asked to walk away and leave that on the table. The time to make a deal would have been about six months into the war when the Russian army only had 180,000 men in theater and was being routed out of Kharkiv.
ABigGuy4U
7d ago
My point was it would have most likely lead to immediate military action by the United States. I wasn’t making any kind of commentary about the merits or lack thereof of communism or its application in Mexico.
Regarding your second point, that’s a genuinely interesting counterfactual, and I’m not sure what I would have thought if it turned out that way.
ABigGuy4U
7d ago
If you’re the head of a publicly traded corpo you kind of have to. Taking a principled stand that loses 25 percent of the company’s revenue can literally get you sued by the shareholders.
ABigGuy4U
7d ago
If the Soviet Union had sponsored a communist revolution in Mexico and then announced that they were admitting Mexico into the Warsaw Pact, what do you think would happen? Would you characterize the United States as a “rabid dog” for their response?
They “wanted to” in the sense that they are hauled off in unmarked vans by draft officers and kept on the line of contact by blocking detachments that will shoot them if they try to leave.
(1) Fight until the army collapses
(2) Cultivate stab-in-the-back myth that the war was eminently winnable if Ukraine had gotten just gotten more aid and gotten it faster
(3) Flee to a friendly country
I mean I don’t blame the guy, if he didn’t do it the hardliners would shoot him in the head and get someone who would.
ABigGuy4U
8d ago
I don’t see it happening now, but if Canada continues to suffer economic and political decline, I could see a Ukraine/Russia scenario in 10-40 years where certain provinces start trying to break off and join the United States, and that eventually leading to a war of annexation. Especially if the US continues down the authoritarian/militaristic path it’s been drifting along on for the last 4 decades.
ABigGuy4U
8d ago
We do have multiple letters from Queen Elizabeth I to the Lord Mayor of London complaining about the large numbers of “negars and blackmoores” in London and demanding that they be deported (they weren’t). I’m not sure if the people she is referring to would be what are now considered black people, or if they were more northern African.
ABigGuy4U
9d ago
Sure, if you’re a physicist you might quietly believe that there’s something fishy about the denial. Plenty of virologists found the claim that COVID was a natural phenomenon fishy, but they mostly kept their mouths shut and went with the party line. The ones that didn’t were mocked and their work was suppressed. John Q. Public who’s a machinist in Iowa would just believe what he’s told.
Netanyahu isn’t particularly religious either. Witkoff likely knew that and realized he was being blown off with an excuse as a power play, hence his reaction.
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