ABigGuy4U
1d ago
It’s also the only state in the union that went blue in the 1984 presidential election. Although admittedly Mondale was a local boy so that’s part of it.
ABigGuy4U
1d ago
I thought the concept of the directorship of a federal admin agency being a King Arthur sword in the stone type thing was really funny.
ABigGuy4U
1d ago
I think that’s also probably why you saw space horror start to pop up in the late 70s. It kind of petered out in the 90s because space feels too far away anymore to be creepy.
ABigGuy4U
1d ago
the regime is not as ideologically aligned with the public as they had hoped.
The never really were, Iran is what would have happened if the Bolsheviks had gotten stuck in the Soviet Twenties for fifty years.
The US military, regardless of what the political branches think, is convinced that Global Climate Change is very real. Most of the northern arctic ice is going to melt off, leaving behind navigable water ways, habitable islands (at least habitable enough for major military installations) and major oil and minerals deposits. And due to the nature of a globe shaped earth all this stuff is both on North America’s doorstep, and Russia’s. So for the last ten or twenty years the military has been quietly screaming at the top of its lungs to anyone who will listen that controlling the Arctic is one of the paramount security concerns of the 21st century. Greenland is very important for controlling the Arctic, especially considering Canada is getting more and more politically unreliable. And leaving it under Denmark’s control is a giant liability, since Greenland is pretty close to Russia and Denmark has zero military capacity. They lasted literally 8 hours against Nazi Germany, and are probably in worse shape today.
Also to Trump personally I think there’s probably a legacy interest of being the first President in 150 years to make a major territorial acquisition for the United States.
I suspect an agent provocateur of some kind triggered Kent state by firing rifle shots over the heads of the guardsmen. There were several soldiers that reported that they opened fire because they were being shot at, and civilian reports of seeing armed people in civilian clothes. And the shooting doesn’t really track like a traditional riot control accident given the distances involved.
ABigGuy4U
3d ago
You guys have all gotten so into the weeds about the mechanics of the individual shooting that you’re missing the big Fort Sumpter style moves that are going on right now:
•There’s something like 3000 federal law enforcement offers deployed in Minneapolis right now
•Mainstream media, Reddit, and various politicians have incited multiple assassination attempts on these officers
•Relatively photogenic citizen non-felon in gunned down in ambiguous situation, there is now a bloody shirt to waive
•Mayor and Governor are now calling for the removal of all federal agents from Minneapolis
•Governor Walz is now threatening to use the Minnesota National Guard to remove federal agents from the city, setting the stage for conflicting guard federalizations and call up orders
•You will have an armed unit of the state/federal military apparatus actually having to pick a side in a legally ambiguous situation
•You will have armed state/municipal police facing off against armed federal agents with the national guard caught somewhere in the middle
This is not good. No matter who’s fault it is, this is not good.
ABigGuy4U
4d ago
Recently there was a post on the front page about how time seems to flow faster as you age. This, as far as I can tell, is a human universal.
I think this is generally true, but I think a lot of the posts about it on Reddit and elsewhere are astroturfed bullshit to cover for the fact that our collective time perception got royally fucked by the COVID lockdowns. Or perhaps by dark physics weirdness.
ABigGuy4U
4d ago
I just have to point out a clever joke in the title that almost no one notices. The Patriot Game is the title of a pro-Republican Northern Irish ballad that was popular during the Troubles. There are a lot of versions, but one of the most popular ones was by two Irish brothers named Liam and Tom Clancy.
ABigGuy4U
4d ago
I think everyone is quietly going to think that a mother of four is less pathetic than a cat/dog mom of four, but now days they probably would be more careful about saying it out loud.
ABigGuy4U
5d ago
Pink is kind of unusual in that she started with a highly sexualized aggressively edgy punk style and then in the mid 2010s aggressively pivoted to much more middle of the road family friendly pop-banger mileu.
ABigGuy4U
5d ago
There is no obvious counterpart of this for women
Cats. The female social equivalent of porn is cats. It’s a hyperstimulus that satisfies a biological drive that the person would have gotten social esteem for had they successfully achieved it “the right way”. In this case the biological drive is having children and being a mother. And you see similar stereotypes about the excessive user being creepy and filthy (the cat lady hoarder crammed into her apartment with her ten cats and a box of wine).
ABigGuy4U
5d ago
Whereas Swift seems to have managed to get those 20 year olds to be her audience as well.
Taylor Swift is kind of sui generis because she’s the last mega-celebrity that the mono-culture ever produced. She got in right under the line, just before social media fractured the attention economy into a million little bubbles. I don’t think it’s possible for any new pop star today to reach that level of name recognition.
ABigGuy4U
7d ago
Even if it is that’s not normal. In previous generations it wasn’t just taken as a given that old people would become enormously fat as a matter of course.
I’m saying the Solemani thing ended up getting overshadowed by COVID happening shortly after. That’s part of why it had no effect on the election.
For context, Ukraine's 'antagonisation' consisted of existing as a sovereign state that wasn't under the Russian boot.
What do you think would have happened to Mexico in 1983 if they had decided that they just had to be a member of the Warsaw Pact, and host Soviet military bases and SCUD missile installations? What do you think is happening to Venezuela now?
I don’t know if you’ve read many of my other posts, but I’ve criticized US policies of needlessly antagonizing Russia and China a lot specifically because it increases the likelihood of that happening for no particular gain.
ABigGuy4U
7d ago
For a bizarrely chronologically similar parallel, reference the Soleimani raid over New Years in 2020. How did that go for Trump's re-election?
It’s a difficult comparison to make, given that the combination of the ‘Ronavirus and the George Floyd riots was such an unexpected and overwhelming black swan that quickly swallowed up everything else. It’s easy to look back at it and declare it a big nothingburger, but it was basically an order of magnitude bigger than 9/11 and the LA riots combined.
I think it’s a few things.
•The first likely window for an invasion was the Cold War. Kennedy’s handshake deal not to invade Cuba meant that Cuba wasn’t going to be invaded for the last 30 years of the Cold War. Even if Washington doesn’t value honor, nobody wanted to pick at that scab after the nuclear near miss in ‘62, and several other fronts of the Cold War were more important anyway.
•The next likely window for an invasion would have been in the 90s, after the USSR fell. But no one had any appetite for major military action in the 90s, and Cuba wasn’t engaging in any particularly theatrical genocides that would have moved the US to action.
•The third likely window for an invasion would have been during the post-9/11 paranoia spiral. But Cheney’s priority list was Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Syria, and North Korea, and the Iraq boondoggle meant that he never even managed to finish the top five, much less cleaning up the D-listers.
•After that there was a pretty big phobia of wading into regime change, and Cuba just kind of kept lumbering on due to inertia.
ABigGuy4U
8d ago
That’s because of Cuban exiles in Miami-Dade County. Florida was a critical swing state in American electoral politics and Miami-Dade county was critical for winning Florida. Any party that normalized relations with Cuba would have lost the White House for the next 25 years.
There’s a directors cut then an extra special directors cut with the animated Tales of the Black Freighter sections added (this is the only version I watch, without the pirate stuff you’re losing the backstory and motivation of one of the most important characters).
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