domain:doyourownresearch.substack.com
pigeonburger
5m ago
Please tell me more about Costco. What do you like about it? When you see the inside of Costco, are you blinded by its majesty? Paralyzed? Dumbstruck?
My (european) wife's reaction upon entering Costco for the first time could have been described as "awestruck". Like within seconds of entering and seeing the inside, she knew she loved it and that it was one of the best places on earth. And that's just inferior Canadian Costco. I can't imagine what American Costco would do to her.
FtSoA
5m ago
If they go slowly, nationalistic, actually brave Ukrainians will feed themselves to the grinder till there's no one left. A sudden collapse caused by a major offensive would result in far more troublesome people later.
Well at least you're conceding that Ukrainians do not want to be Russians. Is your take that Putin does not want to conquer Ukraine entirely (whether in the immediate term, or mid-term). Did he ever want to? Grinding the Ukrainians down is time-consuming and expensive just to take a few provinces.
ISW are not serious people.
I don't think that's nearly enough evidence to establish that claim.
At the very least, air defense situation.
I meant more of a "in terms of timeline" sense. "Fast" implies we should see things shift "soon." If the air defense situation is deteriorating for Ukraine, then that is evidence in that direction.
The guy who wrote it served as a combat arms officer for a few decades. It wasn't written by Parsi.
I am aware. But I trust this one guy's analysis a bit less than the consensus by default; particularly if he works for an outfit with a clearly identified agenda with some moron like Parsi in senior management. I'm not a Russia/Ukraine specialist. I am an Iran specialist. And I know Parsi is a moron.
he says he believes Russians have better ISR
Well, that isn't true overall, so long as the Western powers are supporting Ukraine on that front.
You seem to be denying that Ukraine is doing better on anything, even with the typical defender's advantage. But, again, if the Russians are consistently outclassing the Ukrainians in artillery, aircraft, missiles, drones, ISR, manpower, equipment, tactics, loss ratios, etc. then why is the war dragging on like this? This is some Iran-Iraq War shit with more drones and fewer prayers.
Based on initial expectations, Russia's performance has been very embarrassing ever since the initial ham-fisted offensive. I definitely thought Ukraine wasn't going to last long without immense, immediate support from the West.
We're at nearly 3.5 years now. What will things look like at the 4-year mark? I'd guess much the same by default, because I don't know either side's breaking point, or if a ceasefire will be established, or just how much support the West will give Ukraine. The defense-advantaged nature of the battle makes it unlikely either side will make a sustainable major offensive breakthrough at any given point.
ChickenOverlord
6m ago
I guess the Chudin didn't make the joke clear enough: https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/2883054-nothing-ever-happens
BreakerofHorsesandMen
Sweet Sejenus
8m ago
This would work great if his name is Jerome and he winds up having all daughters.
RoyGBivensAction
Zensunni Scientologist
13m ago
I've seen that naming system in person. It works out poorly when FiveHour IV has multiple run-ins with the law and the other FiveHours get arrested for his warrants because a roadside cop can't be bothered to sort it out.
Tree
17m ago
For example, I read somewhere that 80% of people under 20 in Belgium are not Belgian, effectively that means that that nation is over.
I don't think that's correct. Some limited version of that statement may be true for brussels:
In 2020, among those aged under 18 (of Brussels residents), 83,9% had at least one parent of non-Belgian origin and of those 60,1% of non-European origin (including 37% of African origin). wiki
2rafa
18m ago
There is no magic breaking point at which things get so bad ideologies necessarily start changing. Maybe something happens, maybe it doesn’t, there are scenarios where Biden ran in 2016 and won, where Trump is still a TV host. Tiny things can change the trajectory. I do expect that the situation will vary between Western European countries, perhaps even significantly.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
18m ago
Obviously FiveHour Jr, FiveHour III, FiveHour IV, and FiveHour V, in birth order. Then you just call them all FiveHour without the suffix, for maximum efficiency when calling your kids.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
18m ago
When I expressed interest in having a custom house built, my mother nonjokingly suggested that it might be nice to have a house whose interior looked like a Costco warehouse's, with exposed electrical conduits making diagnosis of problems easy. My design has a "flat" (1:12) roof, but no exposed conduits. Still, the wiring should be easy to access through the suspended ceiling.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
19m ago
Trump Derangement Syndrome: The refrain from Biden and his handlers throughout the process was monotonous. We need to beat Donald Trump, Donald Trump is uniquely dangerous, Joe Biden is the only one to beat Donald Trump in an election (there’s a good chance he retains that honor forever). Democrats convinced themselves that Trump was so uniquely evil that they had to throw out all sense of decency to beat him; this kept them from beating him. Democrats convinced themselves that voters would reject Trump so thoroughly that it didn’t matter they were running an empty shell of what was left of Joe Biden; this destroyed voter trust in the Dems as a whole and cost them the election across the country. The Dems lost the plot completely due to TDS, and started to think they could or should do things they never would have thought of otherwise.
I think this in various forms is why democrats won’t be winning anymore. Not so much that it’s TDS, but that the entire strategy of their politics is negative, not just because they don’t like Trump or the Republicans. They’re negative in the sense of *negative space”. We aren’t evil like those guys, those guys want to do [insert evil thing here]. But that’s not a vision. There’s nothing to build toward, no city on the hill, no “once we do these things your life will get better.” Republicans, whether you agree with them or not, absolutely have an idea of what they want, why they want it, and how it’s supposed to make the median person better off. It might or might not work, but they absolutely have a plan, and furthermore a plan to actually do what they said they wanted to do. So when people go into the booth, they know if they vote Republican, Theres a actual agenda that’s supposed to help them, where a democrat mostly is going to thwart that plan in favor of the status quo. If you’re looking for change, you want republicans, even if you’re not completely sold on what those changes are, at least it’s not the stuff you already know doesn’t help.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
24m ago
When you see the inside of Costco, are you blinded by its majesty? Paralyzed? Dumbstruck?
Yet the shoppers managed to evade your security, drive to the sacred Costco, and desecrate it with their filthy footsteps!
KMC
25m ago
They control an entire congressional district. None of the Somali Muslims I've seen have married whites, they're all paired up with their own ilk, and that especially applies to the younger generation.
AlexanderTurok
Alt-MSNBC
29m ago
I have respect for the value of work. I do not agree with this notion that digging.a ditch with a shovel is "nobler" than digging a ditch with machinery, which is itself more noble than writing software for the ditch-digging machine. That's poverty fetishism and third worldism.
For an orderly and stable society to function, the scholar-gentry of the Empire had to give a level of respect to the masses who fed and clothed everyone.
Conservatives and the far-right never seem to have this respect when the person who picked their fruit or sewed their underwear is an immigrant or a foreigner.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
32m ago
Nobody is popular enough to win a major party nomination without pretty particular circumstances coming together. Maybe Dwight Eisenhower.
TitaniumButterfly
33m ago
Somalis don't "control" anything.
They have substantial influence in many local elections and a tendency to vote for their own. Such a voting bloc can easily end up in control of all sorts of important positions even while remaining a minority.
They'll breed with the whites in two generations
Interbreeding between the two is negligible and Somalian IQ is low enough that even after some mixing the hybrids will remain an underclass. What's more, the whites they're likely to mate with are in turn the lowest-quality and lowest-status whites, so they wouldn't even be mixing with the average.
This is ridiculous hyperbole
Disagree.
magicalkittycat
33m ago
? Well, you won’t find out about it here, instead you’ll get seventeen people telling you separately about how they couldn’t believe how OLD Biden looked when they met him…Except that time after time we get people telling us not that he looked old, but that he looked older. Meaning, it wasn’t a mistake to vote for Biden in 2020, when everyone with a calendar could tell you how old he would be in 2024; it just happened out of nowhere, and there’s no way you can blame the Democratic Party for it.
Well yeah, Biden was plenty coherent in 2020. He was actively campaigning and participating in debates. He was old, but not mentally gone and reflects more on a general political problem where we keep electing seniors. Trump is 79 now himself, and he'll be even older than Biden when his term is up (and if we count his sometimes stated desire to try for a third term, he'd be like 86).
And it is a general issue, just last year there was a sitting congresswoman found in an assisted living facility! https://abcnews4.com/news/nation-world/texas-congresswoman-who-last-voted-in-july-found-living-in-assisted-living-facility-kay-granger-dallas-fort-worth-republicans-democrats-congress-term-limits
At these ages decline happens fast and you can go from perfectly coherent to a drooling mess (or even just dead, as the Dems keep learning from their seniors dying in office) but I think there's not much to change this as long as olds are the main voters and rich olds are the main money movers in politics.
A note on the "so who was actually in charge?" question:
The deception that Biden's posse engaged in rankles me, but I think that Biden's level of competence didn't really matter much when it came to the well-being of the US. The global US/Western order can run itself just fine on autopilot for years. The President and the Sec Def could both be literal pieces of wood and nothing particularly bad would happen to the US. The US doesn't face any significant foreign threats that need any kind of quick, decisive thinking. The US is so powerful that to even have a foreign policy is largely a luxury for it, not a need. There are some urgent things that need deciding occasionally, like should the US bomb Iran to stop it from getting nuclear weapons or not, but all that stuff can also run on autopilot or be farmed out to foreign protectorates like Israel. Note that no US Presidential administration for many decades now has pursued a fundamentally different foreign policy from any of the other ones, Trump's included - the foreign policy differences between GWB, Obama, Biden, and Trump are minor in the grand scheme of things. There is a well-established foreign policy consensus that requires only very minimal executive steering. The only actual threat that the US faces from overseas is getting nuked, but the mechanisms by which the US prevents hostile minor countries from obtaining nukes is, I think, pretty well-greased at this point and can largely run itself.
A note on Bernie:
Bernie winning the first three primaries in 2020 was an artifact of the particular order that the primaries are done in. Even after he won those first three primaries, I thought that he would get destroyed in the South and on Super Tuesday. He has just never been popular enough to win the Democratic nomination without pretty particular circumstances coming together.
zoink
36m ago
Advantage of being in a deep red state. They tried to diversify it by sending Muslims and Congolese but the state just doesn't have as much welfare as the blues so many left after the Fed resettlement money gets cut off, and trump cut off the refugee pipeline. I don't see nearly as many as I did 5 years ago. TitaniumButterfly commented on Sacramento, that's where a lot of our Muslims went. Thank you Blue states for your service.
shoeonfoot
38m ago
You sound European? I don't know what kind of problems y'all have over there, but my Asian and Hispanics friends in southern California are just as American as me and I won't let anyone tell them otherwise. Right-wingers who went them gone from the country or to feel less American have no place in politics.
2rafa
38m ago
It isn’t just but it is mostly. We’ll see how things are under a future Democratic administration but for now the situation is still vastly preferable.
shoeonfoot
40m ago
Were you uncomfortable?
TitaniumButterfly
40m ago
No doubt, and I'll be first in line to complain about him, but this place still maintains a standard when it comes to outright name-calling.
TitaniumButterfly
42m ago
Who said it made me uncomfortable?
What about my comment made you uncomfortable enough to feel the need to say something?
professorgerm
You shall love your crooked neighbor, with your crooked heart
44m ago
If there's one criticism of Harris that's untrue, it would be that she's insufficiently ambitious.
Surely the anecdote about Biden telling her "no daylight, kid" and Harris agreeing to put that albatross on her neck displays either a lack of ambition, or a degree of loyalty to a ship already 9/10 sunk that overrode the ambition.
Maybe this is the key. Female roommates.
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