To add an actual thesis to Mushroom’s unhinged screed, I would steelman it as:
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Ukraine has a decent chance of continuing attritional warfare until Russia gives up.
-
Even if part or all of Ukraine falls, it performed a valuable service in keeping Russia from advancing further into Eastern Europe.
I don’t think either of those theses are inherently ridiculous (especially not the second one), but they both rely on Russia really being as banged up as Mushroom thinks they are. Which who knows. I know for a fact that previous popular estimates of vast Russian men and vehicle losses were quietly and sheepishly exposed as bullshit by all the actual intelligence agencies that were keeping track (CIA, SIS, Mossad). I am really looking forward to reading some assessments of the war 20 years from now when it’s not a live political issue.
ABigGuy4U
52m ago
Meanwhile, the Ukrainian Energy Minister siphoned off $100,000,000 of aid money and fled the country, always a good sign that the war is going well.
ABigGuy4U
1hr ago
Aircraft carriers usually have regular Catholic mass, I don’t know about ships with smaller crews.
The specific issue that he picked seems like bullshit TDS nitpicking, and given the vlogbrother’s passive aggressive approach to politics I am not surprised. But the overall point is well taken. The Framers did not design the legislature with this level of partisanship in mind, and the system is starting to break down. And I think he’s right that the imperial presidency is as much of (or more) the result of congressional breakdown as it is the ambitions of the individual presidents themselves. I am pretty bleak about the prognosis of the American government.
ABigGuy4U
16hr ago
You'd need to have a priest there to perform the consecration.
Real life naval vessels have chaplains on board so this would not be a stretch.
ABigGuy4U
20hr ago
He may be talking about theories that the vaccine was used to introduce a dormant gene-targeted bio weapon but I’m not sure. It sounds like he comes from a high-censorship site like Reddit where you have to speak in riddles to avoid being banned.
I think he’s referring to two things:
- The significant evidence that COVID was genetically engineered, and the sketchy circumstances of its origin. Jeffery Sachs has spoken about this at length, and about how members of the scientific community that were reporting on the likely man-made origin of the plague were shouted down and suppressed.
- Various governments using COVID as an excuse to try and roll out all sorts of different authoritarian measures (lockdowns, quarantine orders, travel restrictions, mask mandates, vaccine passes, crackdowns on “misinformation”).
ABigGuy4U
1d ago
I still suspect there was probably cooperation with the CIA, hence why they never did anything about this massive security breach.
ABigGuy4U
1d ago
the prospect of a permanent Democratic majority in the USA due to demographics and such.
I think this was actually plausible, it’s just that Democratic strategists badly misread the thesis of The Emerging Democratic Majority and so they fumbled the ball. The thesis was that if Democrats could maintain the Obama coalition of minority voters and college educated suburban white voters and white working class voters, they would have an unassailable majority. The party seems to have misread this as “minority voters=win” and told the rest of that potential coalition to go to hell.
ABigGuy4U
2d ago
artificial wombs
I think some people are under the mistaken impression that we are living much, much further in the future than we actually are. We barely understand how these systems even work, much less how to recreate them. It’s like Romantic era scientists thinking we’re a decade out from creating life because we got a dead frog’s leg to move by shocking it.
Reject Bladerunner, RETVRN to Mad Max
ABigGuy4U
2d ago
Also everyone has 2028 in the back of their mind, and the various sub-groups of the Trump coalition are starting to jockey for pole-position in the post-Trump vacuum. And given the possibility that the Democratic might actually just collapse (the recent races were promising for them but it’s no guarantee of survival), it makes seizing control of the GOP especially important.
I was recently watching a new TV miniseries, Death by Lighting it’s about President Garfield’s assassination. This was during the Reconstruction era when America was basically a one-party Republican state. One thing that struck me was how vicious the intra-party jockeying was back then in the absence of a robust opposing political party.
ABigGuy4U
3d ago
No, but the timing and location do seem a bit eyebrow raising to me. It reads as a direct and proportionate retaliation for the bombing the day before. Or possibly that both bombings were a Machiavellian attempt by a third party to spark a conflict.
ABigGuy4U
3d ago
That’s what concerns me the most, in the event of any major conventional attack there could be significant pressure to “use or lose” the nukes, especially since Pakistan’s are pretty forward-deployed compared to India’s.
ABigGuy4U
3d ago
No, but it was only a few days long. I think ending the shutdown over fear of what a prolonged suspension might lead to is not unreasonable.
ABigGuy4U
3d ago
I don’t necessarily take the Pakistani government’s claims at face value either. But to some extent it doesn’t matter what the truth is, just what the government thinks or claims is the truth. It certainly would not be the first time a country went to war on paper thin evidence.
ABigGuy4U
3d ago
The French and Russian revolutions both started as what were essentially bread riots. I think a lot of the Motte falls into let-them-eat-cake-ism and doesn’t realize how serious a problem a SNAP/EBT shutdown could be. Most of the lower enlisted rungs of the US military are on food stamps. Most Walmart employees are on food stamps. It’s not just 300 pound welfare queens spending EBT on hair extensions.
ABigGuy4U
3d ago
And all the actual wonks are busy writing white papers for CRS and the Rand Corporation, not shitposting on a Silicon Valley Harry Potter fan fiction enthusiast’s forum.
ABigGuy4U
4d ago
The eternal India-Pakistan conflict is heating up, again. A car bomb at a tourist attraction in Delhi killed 14 people yesterday. Today a car bomb in the Pakistani capital of Islamabad killed 12 people. India and Pakistan are both blaming each other for the respective attacks, and credible open-source intel accounts on Twitter are reporting large mobilizations of troops heading towards the border.
To me it seems that relations between the countries have been on a downward slide for the last ten years. While I’m not certain that this particular incident will be the big one, the increasing regularity and intensity of the skirmishes is on a worrying trend down.
This doesn’t come at a good time for Pakistan, which is increasingly having a hard time holding its western mountain territories against the Taliban. India has recently been cultivating ties with the Taliban, seeking their own proxies of militant crazies to counterbalance the ones Pakistan has in Kashmir. In the event of a war Pakistan could find itself sandwiched between the Indian army and the Taliban forces in the mountain regions.
Counterintuitively, this kind of lousy poker hand could make Pakistan more likely to seek a major conflict. There are many, many conflicts throughout history that were instigated by a party that was in a bad situation, because it’s better to roll the dice now before your position gets even worse.
And of course there are probably 400 or so fission weapons between the two, in the several-hundred kiloton range. I believe the subcontinent is the single likeliest place on earth to see a nuclear conflict start, more than Eastern Europe or the Middle East.
ABigGuy4U
4d ago
There was a car bombing in Delhi this morning, near an old British fort that now serves as a tourist attraction. Casualty counts have been rising over the past several hours, now standing at about ten dead. Indian authorities are treating the explosion as a terrorist attack. Indian army units near the Pakistani border are mobilizing, and the Pakistani army has just been placed on high alert. While the body count of this attack is fairly low compared to other notable attacks, the location seems highly inflammatory. I’m not great with geography but I believe this is effectively a suburb of the national capitol. I can’t help but feel another border skirmish or worse is on the way.
Are you takin the piss or are you deadass?
On god bruh, unc is deadass. Shit is not bussin, that shit is low-key sus AF. Gyatt.
Three of the top level comments this week devolved into long threads that were entirely just navel-gazing about Motte rules and decorum. Then this one comes along and it just immediately turns into an inquisition about whether it’s bait with no actual substantive discussion of the topic. I don’t know much about James Watson and I would have liked some actual discussion about his life, work and pet theories regardless of who started the thread. If the “bait” is so fine grained that you need a fifty page analysis about it whether or not it’s bait, it’s effectively become a pointless distinction. Meanwhile the discussion gets slower and more sclerotic every week and there are fewer and fewer top level posts.
ABigGuy4U
6d ago
- Ban everyone interesting
- Site dies because it’s boring and everyone is scared to post
- ??????
- PROFIT
They are quite suspicious about AI, but that’s more over fears about what it could turn into than what it currently is now. The vast majority of evangelical conservatives aren’t going to side-eye you because you shared a meme that was made with AI. That said, I would suggest that anyone in Silicon Valley who is very concerned about existential AI threat start making outreaches to evangelicals, because they are probably the group most likely to listen.
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