ABigGuy4U
10d ago
I wonder if it's a product of the average age being higher than I thought.
“BOOMERS could be here, he thought. I’ve never been to this message board before, there could be BOOMERS anywhere...”
ABigGuy4U
10d ago
Controlling the minds of normies is extremely valuable. Elon Musk didn’t buy Twitter for the money. He bought it to use it as a mouthpiece and more importantly to keep it from being used against him
My friend had an important insight: there is probably a rightist/reactionary equivalent to this.
I’ve seen news articles about former Taliban fighters who are disappointed because now that they’ve won, they have to do boring office jobs in Kabul. Someone even made a version of the tankie poet meme, with the fighter clutching his AK and saying “I don’t understand, I thought I was going to die a glorious martyr’s death?” While a grinning soyboy orders him to “draft the fucking Excel spreadsheet!”
ABigGuy4U
11d ago
Your schtick of acting like Israel is the only country in history to ever do naked conquest as opposed to simply being the most recent one is getting stale.
Israel’s only real crime was getting founded just a couple of years after that type of thing became unfashionable.
ABigGuy4U
11d ago
The “West” has done the kind of thing Israel is doing within living memory.
The most obvious historical analogy is 9/11 and the Global War on Terror. Ironically nobody wants to use that one. Free Palestine types don’t want to because it shows that Israel’s response isn’t particularly unique and that America has glassed half the Middle East in response to terrorism before. Pro-Israel types don’t like it because it’s a reminder that what Israel is doing is probably a terrible idea in the long run.
the other two had settler populations with homelands to return to.
10 to 25 percent of the Jewish population of Israel has citizenship elsewhere and that’s disproportionately held by the wealthier upper strata of the population. Given western polices toward family migration that could probably expand to 40 percent in a matter of months. About one percent of the country’s Jewish population left the country in 2024.
ABigGuy4U
12d ago
Florida and many other states have a mandatory two-semester Holocaust class.
I think it’s even simpler than that.
• Soviet Union: US ally in World War II
•Nazi Germany: US enemy in World War II
In the parallel universe where 400,000 brave American boys died holding back the red tide of Bolshevism from overrunning Western Europe, and there was an awkward alliance and later Cold War with Nazi Germany, the t-shirt situation would probably be reversed.
People forget that internet culture has been around since the Republic of Letters in the late 17th century.
It’s not just the chemical structure that makes it bad, it’s the corn lobby. The price of corn syrup is driven down by government farmer subsidies. You can put massive amounts of corn syrup in everything at a scale that wouldn’t be affordable with cane sugar.
You’re just spewing nonsense and buzzwords instead of making an argument, and then pivoting between different items of nonsense when challenged. It’s not a “grasping claim”, elections have been cancelled, elections remain cancelled for the foreseeable future, and no one from the State Department seems unhappy with that. Which makes my original claim way way way up at the top of the stack, before you started your pony express Gish Gallup, still entirely valid.
Rubio has not, to date, taken any position on the urgency (or infinite delay) in Ukrainian elections.
So the policy of the State Department didn’t change at all. That’s not very surprising given that the policy of the State Department hasn’t changed in 75 years. Which makes your diatribe about Blinkin as skid row wino irrelevant. You’re twisting yourself into a knot to explain away the fact that Ukraine is a military dictatorship with US approval and encouragement.
ABigGuy4U
13d ago
90 percent of the people on the Motte got their entire knowledge of communism from one PragerU video they watched 10 years ago.
ABigGuy4U
13d ago
Why the word "Materialist?" That Marxists do not believe in God seems unimportant to me.
Because back in the 1850s there were a lot of non-materialist philosophies so it was actually a meaningful distinction.
ABigGuy4U
13d ago
I don’t know how you can observe the last 3 years of war and think Russia would roll over a NATO country
Most NATO countries are geographically smaller and less well well equipped than Ukraine, and have fewer troops.
The Soviet Union had no western style prisons, only the work camps. If you were a murderer, rapist, thief or gangster, you went to the same gulag complexes that the political prisoners went to. That’s where the scary tattooed Vor V’Zakone that later became the Russian mafia came from. That’s part of why being in a gulag was so hellish, the company wasn’t great.
ABigGuy4U
14d ago
You’re trying to have it both ways. You claim that Antony Blinkin and the State Department do not speak for Ukraine, then you turn around and list all the ways that they have MASSIVE LEVERAGE over Ukraine. So which is it? Are the documented statements by official representatives of the American government that Ukraine will have elections when they have Crimea (read: when pigs fly and the sun rises in the west) a legitimate statement of policy of not? Why should I ignore the rantings of Ukraine’s very rich, very influential benefactor that could scotch their war effort on a whim?
ABigGuy4U
14d ago
Opposition parties remain banned, the press is still under government control, the Verkhovna Rada re-passes the martial law declaration every 90 days with the precision of a metronome. There are no plans for an election in the near future. I’m not seeing any stunning Ukrainian rebuke of what Antony Blinkin said.
ABigGuy4U
14d ago
You can be as pedantic as you like, but it’s something NATO is genuinely concerned about.
ABigGuy4U
14d ago
In a press conference Antony Blinkin stated that Ukraine wasn’t going to have elections until all its territory is recovered, including Crimea. In other words, Ukraine is never going to have elections again. My point is, Zelensky isn’t going to call elections and the US State Department isn’t going to lean on them to either.
ABigGuy4U
14d ago
I meant that if all of Ukraine falls you have Poland abutting Russia and Belarus to the east and Russian Kaliningrad to the north.
ABigGuy4U
14d ago
Yes probably, when I say freezing the conflict I was being a bit unclear. I’m including solutions like giving away the eastern half and making the remaining rump swear neutrality, not just a Korea style freeze. Anything that could stop the conflict without getting Poland encircled.
ABigGuy4U
14d ago
when we've been able to help hold back Russian forces for this long while barely even lifting a pinky.
Two trillion dollars, 20 percent of all existing Patriot systems, several dozen western and Warsaw Pact fighter aircraft, 700 Soviet pattern tanks donated by former Warsaw Pact NATO members, 250 NATO standard tanks donated by Western European NATO members, 100 modern MLRS systems, hundreds of tube artillery pieces, and 2000 light armored vehicles isn’t a Herculean effort, but it’s not “barely lifting a pinky” either.
But those are all still interventions that most people under 50 aren’t going to need. So people are still going to feel ripped off because they can’t see where the money is going.
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