I feel like there's enough information leaking through here to infer what happened -- why would they stay quiet, with no defectors; "a range of events"; etc -- but I'm too stupid to put it together.
Any guesses?
Looking back into this a few days later: some people went to a strip club
Much less interesting than I was imagining.
What specifically is the case against Bellingcat?
I've seen a lot of nonspecific innuendo about them especially since Elon Musk's "psyop" accusations, but then what seems like one of their main guys volunteers this apparently unprompted (which is the first I've heard about it despite following the Belgorod raid all day, including through pro-Russian sources), which seems at odds with the idea that they're so tied up with western intelligence agencies.
The New Yorker has published a 9000-word article rehabilitating Shane Gillis (archive), the comedian who was prominently fired from SNL in 2019 after clips surfaced of him making racist remarks against asians.
(almost immediately after being announced as part of a new cohort including the first asian cast member, the shitstorm centered on a clip which included him saying the word "chink" on his podcast (original instigating tweet, offending clip, full episode), and he was fired 4 days later)
(fwiw, this was in the context of doing an implicit impression of "the kind of guy who would say that"; but he's said "worse", about even more protected groups, in ways which would require even more discernment than this to escape, which is already impossible enough that he didn't ever publically attempt it)
That they attempted to bring Shane Gillis into as hallowed an institution as SNL in the first place was remarkable and seemed to me at the time like it could even have been an early sign of a potential vibe shift (at a time which absolutely did not have a lot of that). He was explicitly intended to be red-tribe outreach, and as far as I know SNL has not attempted anything like that again since.
That he even lasted 4 days at that level of shitstorm in a cultural place so far behind the lines is remarkable, and there is all kinds of kremlinology you can do at any level of suspicion about how deliberate or coordinated any of it is about how that went down.
Similarly with this rehabilitation.
bro
10mo ago
AK-47
While moral culpability is certainly part of the question (I think the answer is easy enough to be uninteresting: you are right), my question is literally which parts were in the plan?
Which parts they implicitly expected would happen, vs which parts were explicitly in the plan, vs what instructions were propagated to the men, vs what actually happened.
Between any two of those, surely not all, surely not none.
Effective altruists wrote the semiconductor export restrictions
Is there anywhere else a public discussion of this is happening besides that impenetrable tumblr thread? This seems incredibly significant.
What an absolutely fucking wild thing to off-handedly drop as a polemical jab in an off-topic subthread lol
The K-pop invasion of the west was suspiciously closely preceded by the height of popularity of the competitive SC2 scene, which was of course extremely heavily Korean, with the most prestigious tournaments being Korean productions in Korea often with a heavy K-pop presence (most prominently a song that goes "GG GG baby baby baby").
I think this is underexplored.
Warning about Ryan Routh: he is not, and never has been, associated with the International Legion or the Ukrainian Armed Forces at all. He is not, & never has been, a legion recruiter. He is misrepresenting himself and lying to many people.
Though it does seems he was in Ukraine at some point
Wild claims on his twitter seem consistent with him being a high-agency crazy:
#pnhhaiti I have thousands of Afghan solders that wish to serve for the Haiti national police at cheap wages. 1000 with passports ready to fly.
<200m away from al-Ahli Hospital (the one from 2 days ago)
Same church 1 week ago: "Posts falsely claim Israel bombed historic church in Gaza"
Is the new season of Star Trek: Picard worth watching?
For the type of curmudgeonly old trekkie who had to stop watching Discovery after 1 season because it was genuinely too hurtful to see that done to something he loves, and has only experienced any of Picard through the noble sacrifice of the Red Letter Media reviews?
I stopped watching the RLM reviews halfway through this season because it seemed like it might actually end up worth watching the show, but the problem is now I can't check in to see their final verdict without having it spoiled.
Here's a couple other people who had anything to say about him before today (you have to manually click "Search" unfortunately), all on the /r/volunteersforukraine subreddit. As a cautious heuristic I'd consider any random person who had anything at all to say about him before today to be more credible than any random person who has anything at all to say about him after today.
Bonus from that search: here's a reddit account of his that nobody else seems to have found yet.
He was also in a NYT article in March 2023
The thing about western volunteers in Ukraine, which is a scene I've looked into before, is that anybody can just show up and do and claim whatever, it's all incredibly ad-hoc, and it massively disproportionately attracts high-agency crazy people.
I linked xcancel because it's currently a functioning way to read twitter without an account, it's a straightforward mirror of twitter. I've never encountered popups on it, though it has a single layer of bot check redirect thing that kicks in on new visits or every few hours of use.
bro
1yr ago
Jesus christ lol. Are you being deliberately obtuse? I am asking "was the guy aiming for the specific person he hit, or just firing wildly into the crowd", "did he leave the house in the morning intending to shoot up that mall or did he see it on the way", "was he trying to start a race war, or to impress Jodi Foster". Not as a leading question but because I want to know what literally happened.
Surely it's all about the site's contents as AI training data. This and the Reddit shit. It's silly to try to discuss this with that unmentioned or as an afterthought.
The dynamics between Putin, Prigozhin, and Shoigu/Gerasimov make zero military sense.
But they make a great deal of sense from the perspective of regime preservation.
This is now the most logical frame through which to analyze the Ukraine War IMO.
I now think this is the likeliest scenario.
Putin wants to wind down the war, Shoigu/Gerasimov to be the scapegoats for Russia's territorial losses, and Wagnerites the enforcers against the Z extremists who don't get the memo in time.
Though he seems to be considering it more straightforwardly 3h later (not necessarily at odds with above)
Does he have an account here? @akarlin
RWA:
Option 1: It's a PsyOp to cover up a serious Russian offensive
Option 2: We're going to WW3 with NATO
Option 3: It's real & Putin is using Prigozhin to get rid of Shoigu
Option 4: It's real & Wagner has actually begun a coup d'etat
Option 5: It's behind-the-curtain negotiations & gets nipped in the bud before it escalates
Though of course this is only the dregs of pro-Russian commentary that makes it into english.
His Twitter lists have some familiar posters on them, and he follows SSC on Substack. Viewed as one big jumbled pile at once, his online detritus reads as much TED-pilled as ted-pilled, but it might be informative to see when several of the slightly more suggestive bits of it were actually from. He went quiet online 5 months ago.
Has anyone encountered any information at all about this photo?
edit: That photo may plausibly have been one of the photos being discussed in this clip, as having been taken by a (local law enforcement, rather than Secret Service as asserted in that tweet) sniper inside the AGR building overlooking the roof:
"I believe the sniper that seen these and sent the pictures was right inside this building [...] if you go to that window that's open, and yell for Greg, that's the sniper that sent the original pictures and seen him come from the bike, then set the bookbag down, and lost sight of him. He's the one that sent the pictures out, I don't know if you got the same ones I did."
edit: NYT article
What are the least unbearably cringe examples of the "We're X, of course we Y." meme?
I've only ever encountered them with the extreme selection bias of being reposted on Twitter as ragebait, but it's really hard to imagine any that wouldn't be. Surely there are less awful examples that make retards keep thinking it's a good idea. Like how did this meme not die at birth?
On War Tunnels (6 minute video; mild practical speculation by an American who fought in tunnels with the Kurds in Iraq and is now a military advisor in Ukraine)
The video is not super content-heavy, but the general point to consider here is that people may be massively overestimating what Israel can do on the ground even if they take the gloves off.
Gaza's like 4x as dense as Stalingrad.
That PDF is 400 pages long and not text-searchable, but it's obvious from the order of magnitude that this must be something like "every recorded medical event in tens/hundreds of millions of people" and completely meaningless without comparison to base rates.
It took having been reading every post of yours for like 3 months leading up to that one (sidenote: lol) to have had even the slightest chance of barely beginning to understand what the fuck you were talking about, at the time. 7 months of lost context and cognitive decay later, there is no chance I am ever getting there again. I'd need it spoonfed to me like an idiot.
It seems extremely implausible to me that the Yuddites are only pretending to be suicidally hopeless and their real motivating goal is eternal tyranny, rather than that, rightly or wrongly, eternal tyranny is sincerely the only alternative they see to certain doom.
How many tokens are in Twitter? How many new ones are generated per day? What proportion are they of humanity's total output? What are they worth?
I just made my first comments on the site, and, from checking in incognito, they did not appear publicly at first. This was the case for both a top-level comment in the CW thread (which stayed invisible for hours, overnight), and a reply (which stayed invisible for a few minutes).
In both cases, the comments only appeared publicly after I reported them myself (as in pressed the "Report" button on the comment, and submitted one to request they be "approved" or whatever the mechanism in action here is), but also in both cases they appeared publicly within seconds of reporting them. So either the mods are extremely on the ball in responding to reports (but up-to-hours off the ball in approving new comments unprompted), or it was the act of reporting them which automatically caused them to publically appear (which leaves it frustratingly unclear what would have happened to them if I hadn't self-reported them).
I doubt I would have been singled out/shadowbanned since I hadn't done anything yet, so I assume it is representative of the (new?) user experience. It is off-putting.
It would help to know what the intended behaviour is here and what to expect.
Which aspects of what happened were intentionally part of the plan?
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