ABigGuy4U
13hr ago
Especially given that digging into the Lockerbie bombing shows a lot of weird stuff as to the provenance of the attack.
ABigGuy4U
13hr ago
That election is reason both parties are so afraid of contested conventions. The Democrats came out of that with George McGovern, who got absolutely wiped out in one of the biggest electoral landslides in American history. After that, both parties quietly decided that candidate selection was too important to be left to the voters.
ABigGuy4U
13hr ago
That's how I see that going. Someone sanity-check me.
I think you are mostly right, but I think the structure of the machine you’re describing is a bit different. It’s not a linear chain coming down from the White House, and the White House isn’t the one controlling it. For foreign policy, the locus of control is the State Department and CIA (but I repeat myself) and then other entities emanate out from that locus like spokes on the wheel.
So in your hypo, some group deep within the State Department looks at the numbers and maps and decides that conquering Ecuador is vital to America’s geopolitical interests. Suddenly, the President starts getting alarming security briefings about Ecuadorian weapons of mass destruction and imminent Ecuadorian aggression. The media gets their marching orders and starts running two articles a day about how the Ecuadorian President May actually be Satan. The NPCs take the lead from the both the White House and media and pretty soon you have people burning Ecuadorian flags on the street and demanding war.
The second thing is that the October 7 attack and the subsequent invasion of Gaza is the first major hiccup in the machine, where the gears seized up and the NPCs in the colleges and on the streets didn’t perfectly spin along with their state department orders. That might just be a one off thing. Israel-Palestine had been a culture war issue for over half a century, and people had much more baked-in preexisting opinions about it than they ever did about Ukraine or Iraq. So it was significantly harder to just beam their NPC programming right in to their heads and send them off. But it could also be a gin that the control machine is just generally breaking down. I have a theory that the fervor over Ukraine War was supposed to be a whole-of-society thing in America, not just a center left neoliberal cause celebre. It’s just that the programming ended up being rejected by large sections of the American populace. I see evidence of that and I keep meaning to make a post about it.
Chris Langan is a college dropout turned nightclub bouncer and part-time rancher. He received some negative media attention due to his negative opinions toward interracial marriage and his endorsement of some loopy and questionably antisemitic conspiracy theories. He is also possibly the smartest man currently living on the planet with a (disputed) measured IQ of 174.
ABigGuy4U
2d ago
Taiwan is a democracy full of Han Chinese
Taiwan is undergoing its own ethnic speciation event. Increasingly, if you were to call a Taiwanese person “ethnically Han Chinese” they would bristle in the same way a Ukrainian would if you called them Russian. That’s part of what’s leading to some of the friction between the KMT and some of the other parties.
I wouldn’t necessarily say that their assessment of Pakistan was wrong. They knew Pakistan was unstable and unreliable, but it was a much better option to keep Pakistan a nominal ally and de facto neutral, then to let them tip over into being an adversary.
ABigGuy4U
2d ago
I think it can be difficult for Americans to understand, because in the immortal words of a great hero, “you have big ocean”. Unlike Russia or China, America has basically never faced an existential foreign threat since the Revolution. It’s only existential crisis since then was a civil war, and barring a nuclear conflict its only potential future existential crisis is a civil war. Even the Revolution was a form of civil conflict. Because of that, Americans don’t really have that deep gnawing insecure feeling of “I need to keep my borders secure lest the Mongels/French/Nazis/Japanese rape and pillage my homeland.”
This is a bit tangential to your actual question, but it’s a point I’ve never had the opportunity to bring up here. People forget the extreme degree to which Detective Mark Furhman wrecked the prosecution’s case. It’s often remembered and reported that he took the Fifth Amendment when he was cross-examined, but no one talks about the fact that he took the Fifth when asked if he planted evidence in that specific case. That’s huge. It’s a giant red flag to the jury when the lead murder detective won’t answer whether he literally framed the defendant. Now I suspect OJ actually did do it, and that Furhman was just paranoid about his already looming perjury charges and was just Fifth Amendment-ing everything. Or maybe he engaged in some fairly standard (at the time) touching up of the scene to strengthen the case, like moving the glove to a more incriminating location in the alley, or daubing some of the victim’s blood onto OJ’s Bronco. But if I was a juror, the fact that the lead detective can’t say whether he planted evidence is pretty much already enough reasonable doubt for me to acquit. And when you keep that in mind, a lot of Cochran’s loopier theories about preservatives in the blood samples and the glove not fitting suddenly start to sound a lot more plausible and carry a lot more weight. Please keep that in mind before thinking of the jury as a bunch of dumbasses.
Also I highly recommend Season 3 about the Monica Lewinsky scandal, I thought it was very underrated. Clive Owen should have won an Emmy for playing Bill Clinton, that’s a role that’s very difficult to play without turning it into a Saturday Night Live sketch. And Beany Feldstien might initially seem like poor casting for Lewinsky but she does an amazing job.
ABigGuy4U
2d ago
Take Noble House by James Clavell as an example.
It’s funny you mention that, I just recently watched the miniseries adaptation with Pierce Brosnan. The TV version is pure 80s soap opera cheese, but also a very interesting look at a time and place that no longer exist.
ABigGuy4U
3d ago
So skeptical, in fact, that I tend to think there's an ulterior motive
It’s the same “legalize another 20 million illegal immigrants and then we’ll stop illegal immigration, we promise :^)” song and dance that Democrats have been doing since the era of Ronald Reagan. The first part always happens and then second never seems to materialize. That in turn incentivizes millions more illegal immigrants because they figure that if they can hang on long enough they will eventually get citizenship.
And even the most-ironclad, loophole free law you can write is useless if the administration isn’t going to enforce it.
ABigGuy4U
3d ago
Nerve agents are technically a WMD, and cyberattacks technically aren’t. But crippling an entire nation for weeks, causing billions of dollars in economic damage and probably hundreds of connected follow-on deaths is a lot closer in effect to a WMD than poisoning one guy in a restaurant.
ABigGuy4U
3d ago
Also it allows you to demonstrate that you can hit NATO generally, while demonstrating that on a rather timid non-central NATO member, and not one that would blow their top and massively escalate hostilities in response. Like France or the United Kingdom. @MadMonzer
ABigGuy4U
4d ago
To be fair, a lot of Fleming’s writing was considered unusually puerile and trashy even contemporaneously.
It stays pretty close to the plot of the source material. The only major changes are geopolitics updates (LeChiffre is a terrorist financier rather then a KGB agent), and making up excuses to actually have action scenes. This makes it pretty rare among other Bond movies, which usually range between loose adaptations (Goldfinger), very loose adaptations (Moonraker) and “we just grabbed the title and made up our own plot” (most of the rest of them).
but Epstein is the only example they can point to
The Dutroux Affair? The Finders Cult? The Emperor’s Club VIP Elliot Spitzer scandal? The McMartin preschool case? The DC Madam scandal and her subsequent suspicious suicide? I forget the name but there was also an incident during the Troubles where MI5 was using child abuse blackmail to force Northern Irish politicians into taking a more hardline unionist stance.
ABigGuy4U
5d ago
Isn’t it a little weird how The Last of Us is basically doctrinaire progressive in every other way but then a large part of it’s premise is based on a famous right-wing conspiracy theory about FEMA being covertly designed to seize dictatorial control of the United States in the event of a major crisis?
ABigGuy4U
5d ago
It makes sense when you remember a lot of bonds are purchased by companies, organizations and trusts and not individuals.
ABigGuy4U
5d ago
My favorite part is the end where Chinese AI sells out China, assists a grassroots Chinese pro-democracy group affect a coup, democratic elections are carried out and everyone lives happily after.
It sounds like something Peter Zeihan would say after accidentally ingesting DMT.
ABigGuy4U
6d ago
Do we have reason to believe it's higher than the rate of priests at the hypothetical church you might join?
Yes. The rates of abuse documented among teachers are far higher than clerical abuse rates and the intense focus on the latter and not the former is a politically motivated one.
ABigGuy4U
6d ago
Also Pakistan was included in the first wave of outsourced western manufacturing, before China was a big player in that. A lot things that are now made in China were made on Pakistan. That’s mostly gone to China now.
ABigGuy4U
7d ago
Shutting off the river is a very big deal if it stays that way. They didn’t even do that during the 2019 war IIRC.
It’s not our fault that AI generated slop-Walz is just as serviceably mediocre as the real thing.
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