ABigGuy4U
16hr ago
If it gets bad enough I think you could see it move from an Irish Troubles to a Mexican Revolution, due to Burgerland’s similar federal structure. In the Mexican Revolution, you had a federal government and army of questionable legitimacy that controlled a good portion of the country, multiple state governments that were rebelling against the federal government and which had their own armed forces, individual sub-state regions that had de facto home rule enforced by paramilitaries, and large roving groups of political paramilitaries that around moved between states and regions and no defined home territory.
ABigGuy4U
1d ago
America isn't Niger or Iraq, there are no other bodies that can plausibly contest the government's surveillance, targeting and striking power.
You know, except for the fifty individual sub-nations that make up the US, all with their own parliamentary and executive branches, armed forces and state sponsored paramilitaries. Many of them are bigger than some European countries.
ABigGuy4U
1d ago
You are also not contemplating the most likely middle-ground nightmare scenario: There is no singularity, but AI is good enough that it puts most of the middle class out of work, there is no UBI and now you have a bunch of people who are purposeless, humiliated, have a lot of free time, and are pissed off and have nothing to lose due to their now degraded economic and social state.
ABigGuy4U
2d ago
Music tends to age better because it relies on fewer background cultural assumptions. War Pigs will still be stirring in a hundred years for the same reason Ride of the Valkyries is.
ABigGuy4U
2d ago
But there’s a very strong survivorship bias here. Weird Fiction was an entire commercial genre, and very popular. And now out of that whole genre you are left with maybe two authors who still have name recognition, Lovecraft and Burroughs. Jane Austen is still popular but the PCU (Pamela Cinematic Universe) doesn’t seem to have materialized. I’m saying that there was a very good chance that Star Wars was going to eventually fall into obscurity anyway, with or without Kennedy’s idiocy. Although she probably did speed the process up by about ten or fifteen years.
ABigGuy4U
3d ago
The IQ 140 mathematician whom nobody teaches to count will probably not discover any mathematics not known to a society who has spent a few 10k person-years of IQ 100 mathematicians on the subject.
Ramanujan did.
ABigGuy4U
3d ago
In theory it doesn’t. But how many properties remain really popular longer than fifty years? Sherlock Holmes and Dracula maybe, but for every one of those there’s a thousand things that died.
ABigGuy4U
3d ago
progressives who have decided to go full Provisional IRA
I wonder how far the Provos would have gotten if they had been made up entirely of middle aged women with not a single military aged male to be found.
Regan would have died laughing if that was the bill to cause this much of a headache to the Soviet Union.
Yes, but Russia isn’t the Soviet Union. Europe’s persistent fake befuddlement over why the party of Reagan doesn’t want to support a pack of deracinated, satanist, bioleninist bureaucrats over the (nominal) defenders of autocracy, orthodoxy and nationality isn’t helping.
You didn't need to call on Article 5 post 911, but you did and found it useful in so many ways
The other members of NATO pushed to invoke article 5, the United States rolled its eyes and agreed. Then you cucked out the second it became inconvenient and left the United States and Britain to fight alone.
Several EU countries sent tripwire forces into Greenland a few days ago.
Do the Europoors understand how insulting and alienating this is given their concurrent begging for US help against Russia? Even under Trump something like half of the military aid Ukraine gets is from the United States alone. This Greenland thing would be good cause to pull out of NATO if it wasn’t so impotent and pathetic.
In part because they seem to hate Filoni too for some reason
Filoni is a creatively middling hack, he only looks good because he’s been standing next to Kennedy for the last ten years, and at least he doesn’t despise the source material he’s working with.
ABigGuy4U
3d ago
Andor season 2 debuted with record viewership numbers.
If you actually run the numbers to get around the “minutes watched” dodge, it’s about 4.8 million viewers. That’s not abysmal but it’s definitely not great either.
ABigGuy4U
5d ago
Ukraine is allowed to have nationalism because it’s a convenient meat shield against Russia, and can only maintain it in practice because it’s too inhospitable for anyone else to want to live there.
If you see signs of entire military units defecting or walking off the job or refusing to open fire on civilians.
ABigGuy4U
7d ago
There’s three countries that have a shot at being the regional power that controls the Middle East: Israel, Iran and Turkey. That’s why they all hate each other! You notice that they weren’t constantly at each other’s throats back when Iraq was still a major military power.
ABigGuy4U
7d ago
Iran and Israel have adverse geopolitical interests. That isn’t going to change just because Iran isn’t being ruled by fanatics anymore. Iran having a government with popular support that actually has its shit together could very well turn out to be worse for Israel, especially in the long run. Israel probably knows this, and you would probably see an effort to break it into different countries by ethnic group the second the Islamic Republic is gone.
ABigGuy4U
7d ago
But I'm surprised what sort of outlets are carrying it.
The Gulf Arab states and Turkey don’t like Iran much either, nor do liberal Americans.
ABigGuy4U
7d ago
The fact that they are calling for a return of the Shah with a straight face is a pretty big sign that they already have no legitimacy.
ABigGuy4U
7d ago
ABigGuy4U
7d ago
If US/Israeli air power was so great, why haven't they been able to destroy Hamas? That was their goal right?
I’m increasingly starting to suspect that the Gaza war was intentionally fought with the aim of going on forever while still leaving Hamas intact. It’s not great for Israel’s security, or the IDF soldiers deployed there, or for the civilian population of Gaza, but it is pretty good for having a permanent excuse to skip your court dates.
Typically I would agree, but for Remedy games it only adds to the slight Twin Peaks-esque unreality of it. The only one it really hurt was Quantum Break.
ABigGuy4U
8d ago
Netanyahu was banking on pushing things to such a critical state that large scale US intervention and regime change would be required. Failing that, it would justify using nuclear weapons.
ABigGuy4U
8d ago
What a wonderful alternative theory of events. We had to hold Israel back for their own good.
Ok what’s your explanation? Trump strong-armed Netanyahu into stopping because he just loves Iran so much?
Israel knows and they seem fine with it. Solve the problem once and for all, you know?
Gambling is always fun when your losses will be covered by someone else’s money.
Not to mention the fact that the UK government was probably providing assistance to Protestant paramilitaries, and also probably directly committed the single worst attack of the Troubles, the 1974 Dublin bombings which killed 33 people. Supposedly it was the UVF, but they never demonstrated anything remotely approaching that capability before or after, and it handily gave the Free State enough of a bloody nose that they mostly stayed out of the UK’s business thereafter.
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