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Small-Scale Question Sunday for August 24, 2025

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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This has led to what is today a democratic system where the president and ministers are superficially interchangeable but decide nothing because they're all controlled by intel services from behind the scenes with pedophile porn blackmail on every statesman.

Well, Trump actually has pedophile porn blackmail on himself, and everyone knows it, but he seems to be getting along pretty well. I think the truth is a bit more mundane than that- there's simply no pressure to do anything effective outside of the inertia of conservatism bureaucracy, so it just drifts that way. Even though those in the bureaucracy might be empowered to make decisions, the question of what decisions to make becomes difficult, so "advance the kingdom of Jesus [or his modern equivalent, LGBTesus]" becomes the default.

The trick about the American state is that they legitimately are both competent and significant enough on the world stage for that competence to be meaningful, unlike every other state except for maybe Russia, China, and I guess France.

mercilessly culls its elite preventing corruption and is thus impervious to being infected itself

The US doesn't need a service to do this, mostly for HBD reasons. The thing the US population (this is an English heritage thing) is easily corrupted by are the promise of 51% attacks, where half the society + 1 person forces their own corruption on the other half minus one. It's "democracy", you see- and the demos is just as corruptible as the kings and nobles of old (which is why people who know they're doing wrong hide behind "but The People make the rules"). BLM is a particularly salient example of this. So is Brexit, for that matter.


As for 'schizo nonsense', this is the Russian political MO and has been since at least Tsar Alexander, if those Historia Civilis videos are at all accurate. He doesn't actually understand this (due to having a particular/modern political bias), but openly absurd and inconsistent bluster and back-channeling and threats of force and just bog standard J. Jonah Jameson-ing is just kind of how these guys work. It's an unstable stability, if that makes any sense.

The obfuscation the Russians employ is that you can't even figure out what their kind of dishonesty actually is. If you can predict the manner of a man's dishonesty (or more properly, his interests), you can plan for and bargain with and manage him. It makes sense, then, that confusing how others would predict the manner in which you will be dishonest today could be a valid negotiating strategy.

It makes sense that Trump, being accustomed to that style of negotiation, would find it easier to work with a person whose entire concept of statecraft is (by some geographical-social necessity) basically just that, in contrast to his own empire's provinces who negotiate in that stereotypically feminine way where everyone pretends they don't have authority over anything (to say nothing of the Chinese, who have 2000 more years of experience in that negotiation strategy).