ABigGuy4U
15d ago
It is extremely common for states to launder cyberattacks through non-state actors. Most of the cyberattacks you see attributed in the news to China or North Korea or the Russian GRU are actually committed by affiliated hacker collectives, not the countries or intelligence units themselves.
ABigGuy4U
15d ago
This site is a lot more bearish on Trump than it was a few months ago, but that’s because people on this site hold an unusually large amount of stock, unlike most Americans. Unless there start to be actual bread-and butter negative effects on the economy that the middle and lower classes participate in, no one is going to care. It’s the reverse side of the coin of all those “why are the people living in cardboard boxes and eating rats so unhappy about the great economy?” articles you saw during the Biden administration.
ABigGuy4U
15d ago
All 4Chan boards have been down since Monday evening in an apparent cyberattack. Rumors circulating the 4Chan refugee community in the Down Detector comments section indicate that the site was penetrated by hackers approximately one month ago. The damage inflicted was extreme. Statements by 4Chan’s (strictly unpaid) janitorial staff indicate the site could be down for weeks. Hope is rapidly dimming that the site will be back at all.
There are a number of both ideological and state actors that could be responsible for the attack: the Israeli Mossad, the Ukrainian SBU, the American Central Intelligence Agency, any number of Democratic Party functionaries. But at this time the provenance of the attack is unknown, and no one has taken credit.
What is also unknown is the political ramifications of the Id and meme generator of the internet being abruptly taken offline. Almost all memes on the internet originate from 4Chan and without it, the wellspring of internet creativity and culture will die with it.
Also unknown is what the effect will be of hundred of thousands of Chan refugees migrating across the internet. 4Chan is well known as a containment unit and gulag for the most dangerous ideological elements on the internet. The level of weaponized autism that stands to escape can only be equated to a earth shaking digital Chernobyl.
The final unknown and most troubling question is whether coffee is in fact good for you.
ABigGuy4U
16d ago
The fact that my ridiculously, hyperbolically small percentage is still worth $5000 says a lot.
ABigGuy4U
16d ago
Well if it’s such a terrible blow to society why don’t they liquidate .00001 percent of their endowment to cover the costs of these research programs?
ABigGuy4U
16d ago
I don’t know what the Ivy League is so worried about anyway, their endowments are equivalent to the GDP of a small country and they make more money every year due to their exorbitant tuition fees.
ABigGuy4U
17d ago
I’d argue Steel Battalion (2002) probably counts. It is maximally, offensively realistic. It requires a $200 (in 2002 dollars) custom controller with dozens and dozens of buttons and a throttle. Just starting your tank requires a 10 button startup checklist sequence. The area of the screen showing the actual gameplay is the size of a postcard, because you are looking out the viewing slit of a tank. If you don’t successfully punch out of your burning tank (that has its own molly-guarded button), you die. And enjoy the digital afterlife buddy, because the game is automatically wiping your save file if you do. It all combines to make a game that’s borderline unplayable not because it’s broken but because it’s so uncompromisingly committed to the experience.
ABigGuy4U
17d ago
Yes the ones that are siphoning off percentages of US/EU aid money. Even one percent of two trillion dollars is a lot of cheese.
ABigGuy4U
17d ago
That wouldn’t really change anything though. Syrskyi or Budanov would be put in charge and the war would continue.
ABigGuy4U
18d ago
It’s a satanist terrorist organization. There’s an episode of an open source intel podcast called Popular Front that has more information on them. It is extremely un-Monty Python.
nor in the civil war.
In the North you had copperhead southern sympathizers, including legislators who were openly trying to gum up the works of the war effort. One of them even shot the President. You also had the New York Draft Riots of 1863, the largest and deadliest civil disturbance in American history.
In the South you had a draft dodging rate higher than Vietnam, an organized armed uprising against the Mississippi government, and a big chunk of Virginia seceding from the mother state and rejoining the Union. You also had areas like Maryland and Kentucky that were effectively neutral and who’s loyalty were only controlled by which side had troops in the state.
ABigGuy4U
20d ago
The media propaganda machine claims that the US will experience a "brain drain" - a term usually applied to third world countries - because of recent DOGE cuts: https://www.reuters.com/world/scientists-us-harried-by-trump-cuts-turn-towards-europe-2025-04-11/. Of course, the DOGE cuts are necessary to reign in the huge deficit and just as importantly, to stop funding DEI programs and worthless research, like the "tuna" research cite din the article. Just like my taxpayer funds do not need to go to funding transgender surgeries in Honduras, they don't need to use my money to study tuna for "sustainability" reasons. Of course, the EU being EU, they want to hire some of these people for no other reason than to spite the US. There hasn't been any actual investigation into whether they need a tuna researcher; as long as they can dunk on the US and pat themselves on the back, they'll do that.
For anyone who wants to know what OP wrote before he deleted his post. Certain 4chan-isms about the nature of OP readily spring to mind.
ABigGuy4U
20d ago
This is a common problem in many countries. Sometimes I think people living in failed states and dictatorships and banana republics have a better idea of how political power works than citizens of stable first world countries. People in first world countries tend to the think of the law and the constitution like the laws of physics, or a magic spell. You just say it and if it’s constitutional and legal it magically happens. People living in the more rickety countries are painfully aware that laws and political orders are something that various people have to actually carry out, and they aren’t always going to.
ABigGuy4U
20d ago
I think he means proscription in the sense of “here is a list of people that all TRVE ROMANS have a civic duty to kill on sight”
ABigGuy4U
21d ago
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.
ABigGuy4U
22d 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
23d 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
23d 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
24d ago
but based on a bundle of multiple commodities.
That was the plan for the (still hypothetical, possibly defunct) BRICS dollar.
ABigGuy4U
26d 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.
It’s safer to try and convince some schizo cutout to do it and hope he succeeds than to risk using someone competent who can actually be firmly connected to Ukraine. If you look at CIA assassination manuals from the 1960s they actually talk about this, and techniques for convincing a mentally ill political radical to try something.
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