No_one
Underemployed Slav. Likes playing Factorio.
User ID: 1042
No_one
3d ago
But I can’t say I ever expected Ukraine to come out on top.
Given the pushback I've been getting here over the last years, there's a good few people who expected it. One would think so, except it's apparent the entire military procurement sector in the West is vastly more corrupt than in Russia.
No_one
3d ago
Funny, short video from the province of Airstrip one. Savage in that breathtaking way only those people are capable of.
No_one
4d ago
Same thing essentially, there might be some biochemical downside but a tablespoon a day is far below typical intake in a western diet so..
No_one
4d ago
This is an unwarranted response, I think.
I'm generally suspicious of CS_CA but he's right here.
No_one
4d ago
Yes, it's a morass of propaganda. Some things, such as social media casualty counts done by the other side using an open methodology allow us to glimpses of how things are. E.g.
https://meduza.io/en/feature/2023/07/10/bring-out-your-dead
Other things - like pre-war information etc also.
And then you've got the amputee numbers:
upwards of 20k. There's another article saying 'around 50k' by some amputee charity person.
That's 200k dead if we assume Ukraine is slightly worse at casualty care than US in GWOT. (~6 KIA per amputee).
No_one
5d ago
Endgame ?
This or next year, Ukraine folds and accepts territorial loss and permanent neutrality (Finlandisation- no NATO, no EU membership). NATO is ran by idiots simply wasn't able to provide the armaments necessary for victory. Might be some fun (meaning FPVs into NATO political leaders) out of this when Ukrainians with their half million dead are going to be given no rebuilding assistance [1].
EU (specifically the centrist fraction of EU parties) is mulling a union-wide draft law, supposedly voluntary at the start, so recruiting at most 10% of age groups. So there might be remilitarization. It's required in the mid run anyway because America is likely going to go down.
Russia reforms their military procurement in preparation for WW3 (new defense minister looks up to the task) and will probably take over the Baltics out of pure vengeance when US hegemony collapses following the China war. It's nice real estate, but I guess most the young people there will flee and Russian hydrocarbon funds will go to pay for those pensions too.
[1]
"On the question of NATO's role in the reconstruction of Ukraine after the war. The first thing I will say is that first of all, you need to ensure that Ukraine prevails. Because unless Ukraine prevails, there's nothing to reconstruct in a free and independent Ukraine.
We must be able to help Ukraine prevail because it's important for Ukrainians. But also because every day this war drags on, of course, the more destruction and the more expensive, the more resource demanding it will be to do reconstruction afterwards."
No_one
5d ago
At this point, I don't understand why Ukrainians simply refuse to move when 'recruited'. Unless they start killing them, getting a beating is preferable to getting blown up, and they can't maim recruits because that'd defeat the entire point.
No_one
5d ago
People don't want to talk about the war because
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by and large, the west is losing it because of bad procurement, industrial output and planning
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despite their skepticism about particulars -wokism, governance, I'm betting most people here are in favor of US hegemony and see the countries involved as somehow 'theirs' - something like the nationalist delusion. No, they aren't. The countries belong to people who have power and influence in them - and that ain't you unless you're a billionaire with an entire department of lobbyists and a prominent position in CFR etc.
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it's a rather gnarly affair, entirely possible there's been up to half a milion dead by now, 3/4 of that Ukrainian. I'm basing that claim on the estimates of amputees being 25-50k according to press quoting charities, and the amputee/KIA ratio being certainly somewhere between 6 (GWOT) to cca 30 (WW1).
So, it's perfectly clear why we aren't talking about it.
No_one
7d ago
replica at one’s mercy, an infinite horizon of choice without responsibility or constraint.
What % of people find those games appealing ? That does get incredibly boring, fast.
from a young age I always preferred linear, narrative-driven games as opposed to open world sandboxes. My favorite games were games that were devoid of choice, games that robbed you of the ability to make a choice
I have, at times, suffered what seemed to me like episodes of minor existential horror contemplating the 'world' of narrative driven games like say, Half-Life 2. The protagonist exists in what is, essentially a linear corridor, and he can only move forward. Whatever he may want to do, there's nothing he can do but move forward.
Fuck your art. Games are older than art, and good games are the difference between life and death. Philosophy, meanwhile, is mostly confusion.
No_one
7d ago
In this day and age, shooting someone with the heart attack gun and getting away with it is vastly harder to get away with.
You can do it on journalists, Breitbart looks like a bit sus case perhaps.
No_one
7d ago
Why'd you need to assassinate politicians if you can
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ensure only the right ones get elected
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get rid of them by non lethal means that make them out to be crooks, not martyrs
Spilling blood is way too risky. It's the laziest, dumbest solution.
Lethal chemicals are not that hard to procure and blow darts are not that hard to mount to drones.
Poisoning people isn't easy, blow darts are not very useful, and politicians have security. Modern tech makes a successful getaway hard to pull off.
At the moment, yes, drones and explosives probably afford a fair chance of getting away with it, especially as they can be guided through cell phones unless your target is Putlet, of course or possibly the US president.
However, anyone smart enough to cobble together such a drone understands you don't affect an ecosystem by pinching off a single flower.
No_one
7d ago
Is it real viewership, as on youtube where people seeing 3% aren't counted, iirc you have to view most of it, or fake viewership as on Twitter where a view means someone scrolled past a post or video ?
No_one
7d ago
Eurovision is one of the things I'm definitely going to edit out of my perception once doing so is possible. I'd like to wholly forget it exists.
No_one
7d ago
70% of Europeans believe that there are too many migrants.
It could very well be that people dislike Muslims and Arabs so much that they'd favor Israel just because of the recent very loud and obnoxious activism on behalf of Palestine.
Cold be 3.
No_one
7d ago
pretense of largesse towards compliant minorities.
Pretense? Tuvans and Chechens both seem very favoured, moreso than ethnic russians.
Biden, the dementia case isn't nearly as consequential as people running his administration.
Why are we even talking or pretending a person who needs a chest sheet for a press conference matters??
The people running things aren't sane (the title IX reform) or competent.
No_one
14d ago
Why? He's a Mexican. You think if he grew a beard and went into Mexico and became a normal person with a normal job, he'd be in trouble ? Or you know, that he'd be widely recognized in the US offline if he changed his looks a bit ? Guys can always grow a beard. If it worked for a war criminal who was actually a fugitive, in a country one fiftieth the size of the US, not just out of favor, it should work for Nick.
Or that he couldn't get hired in the US in a red state by someone who isn't affiliated with America's ideological police, the misnamed 'EEOC' ? , so any small company ?
No_one
14d ago
but probably not make national news.
Wasn't there a case of someone merely rating classmates making national news? I have a dim memory of such. At a university iirc.
No_one
14d ago
I doubt he’s consciously repeating what they want him to though.
I think you're not serious.
His followers are effectively a horde of shit-flinging monkeys, a staple of jokes "name the jew" types. He sometimes says sensible things, and then tars them by 'jokingly' talking about holocaust denial, which while might be attractive to lower IQ Americans incapable of understanding human nature, is laughable to people with more experience or people who lived in the region, like Europeans.
Yeah, there's a remote possibility that his ego doesn't prevent him from just fading away, changing his name and not harming his cause, but I rather think he's playing a role for the FBI because they need him to play a role.
No_one
15d ago
It's probably true. In Czech, I believe someone wrote an entire play or at least a short story that's a 'tautogram'. Every word in every sentence starts with the same letter.
We also have political songs with actually good lyrics and non-cringe politics (Karel Kryl). Kryl was pretty pissed with Stalinism, but his later work seemed to be generally aimed against high modernism too.
Peter Watts' Echopraxia
It's not that he doesn't want to write people or can't. His first novels(the .. eventual tetralogy*) had thorough characterisation and imo pretty good one. Although I suspect in some ways he was pretty much drawing on past girlfriends and writing about things related to himself...
The entire book is deliberately written in a sort of minimalist style, sometimes verging into almost something like scripture. (especially the last chapters) I didn't really like the style though I sort of admire he pulled it off. Still liked the book.
*it's not bad reading though if you're squeamish, the third book does sometimes veer into what might be fairly described as torture porn. It's only a like a chapter or two though.
Phlebas is acknowledged as one of his weakest Culture work, I believe. Player of Games as one of the better ones. I didn't find any of the books too preachy though. And they aren't really 'communists' in any real sense. It's more of a thoroughly post-scarcity oligarchy with a number of unsolved questions..
Iain was a bolshie, true, but at least the books are good reading, and the preaching / lib-mindedness is at worst present, but not central.
Personally I don't mind long-winded books that are universally acknowledged to 'need an editor' if the writing is fun enough.
I really liked "The Algebraist". Not a culture book at all, and even though it's mildly political, you can hardly accuse the message of being communist. Any human except maybe the most reactionary/hierarchical types would concur, I believe.
Fearsum Endjinn is pretty decent. I liked 'Against a Dark Background' though it's a bit rougher.
He was a good to very good writer... 20 years of writing after work, followed by twenty more years being comfortably well off while writing for a quarter of a year, at most.
Well, pancreatic cancer is no joke. He was dead within three months of diagnosis.
You'e talking as if developing replicator technology and getting as far and as fast off from the rest of you humanity wasn't the default position of every person with an ounce of self preservation.
People are insane these days due to being disconnected from actual material reality. It's going to get far, far worse with more wealth. Either we get thought control and become some weird hive mind, or people will be getting ever more insane because they can and because our minds were not designed or evolved to cope with modernity.
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