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956 Worldwide

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Everything posted by 956 Worldwide

  1. Not as deep as you’d think. Once you get down 1-2 levels that starts becoming apparent. They are grabbing really junior people who have no idea what they are doing to serve at the assistant and undersecretary type levels. They aren’t known quantities either. A lot of this, outside the meme appointments, is evidence that no one serious wants to be a part of this.
  2. I spent the worst year of my life in Karachi. China has little reason to want actual escalation and many reasons not to; they are delighted to get some data on how well their systems work against a fighting opponent but zero reason to want an actual war. The United States also has zero interest in this spiraling. And while miscalculation and face-saving can lead to some bad outcomes, both India and Pakistan are calibrating here in rhetoric and action. I still thing a slow wind-down is most likely.
  3. A phrase keeps popping up. It prevents me from feeling sympathy. “Everything right.” “The right way.” ”We did everything right, we worked and tried to save money.” ”She did everything right and tried to immigrate by the rules.” ”I did everything right, I wasn’t a lazy government worker, I was doing an important job.” No acknowledgment that they got duped. Of course no reflection that they let emotions and frustration overcome human decency. No, the complaint is simply that the cruelty missed the target. They just want someone with better aim. Fuck them. Stay out there on the wrong end of the shooting range.
  4. Disabled, not able to work, voting for Trump.
  5. 956 Worldwide

    LBGTQ

    Good news everyone, the new surgeon general nom is all about “sound medical evidence basis” cause that’s what we are doing now.
  6. True and they also use spouse batterer psychology all the time. “At least he didn’t hit me today.”
  7. “Warfighter” has been around for a while but it took WhiskeyLeaks to turn Pentagon cringe into mainstream cringe. &nbsp
  8. 956 Worldwide

    LBGTQ

    Over the past few years a lot of cranky “Christian libertarians” have fallen under the sway of nut-job anti-American Russophiles. That’s not what we have here, although he’s been doing an impressive job posing as the former to seduce people into becoming the latter.
  9. Lithuania’s former foreign minister has similar thoughts. There will be a lot of lurching and spasmodic outbursts because that’s just the way this administration is. But there’s also a growing acceptance that the rest of the world can’t be cowed and browbeaten into submission when a primary isn’t at stake. The bad news, of course, is that cracking down at home to offset concessions you have to make abroad is the well-trodden autocrat path.
  10. Wait a second, cuts to early childhood education were not supposed to affect kids named “Tanner.” There must have been some error.
  11. In the European context the problem of LNG has long been a problem of terminals, which cannot be turned on overnight and for which there needs to be a demand. Germany only finally brought their first online in 2022 after the full-scale invasion. NS2 basically existed as a canard to prevent Europe (specify Germany) from building out alternate infrastructure and to keep themselves on cheaper Russian pipeline gas. It’s a longstanding foreign policy failure all around but an honest reading is that the Germans wanted to delude themselves and it’s unclear if any pressure could have brought them around absent the forcing event.
  12. Vance gave some unusually measured and in some places even conciliatory remarks in an interview for the Munich Security Conference leaders’. Really a contrast in tone to basically everything coming from his office. - Acknowledged that Russia is asking too much in negotiations and taking fewer swipes at Ukrainians - Almost statesman-esque in the comments on NATO spending, framing it as a goal we all agree to and that the real question is how to get there quickly - Even some soft-pedaling of his hostile and antagonistic February speech where he raged out over alleged censorship; instead talking about the need to balance security and values with rights. My sense is that someone told him that this administration is racking up Ls and they need to get positive movement from Europeans on trade and at the NATO summit since there’s basically no domestic appetite to have pointless food fights with Europe.
  13. Somehow, I don’t think that a “bi-gender” sign would be acceptable either.
  14. I was struck by this passage: Which one is it, do we have plenty of potential housing that just needs to be unlocked via zoning or do we have an artificial shortage of housing because monopoly builders aren’t building enough? Maybe it’s locale dependent but these paragraphs aren’t teasing that out and instead presenting two directly conflicting arguments.
  15. Hanania is an interesting one. I sense he really enjoyed the feeling of tittering at transgressive quips in the salon with all the other “intellectuals” of the alt right but he got turned off when it all broke contain and became Joe Chud grunting racisms. His ethos seems to be more aesthetics than anything. I tend to agree that these people need to do significantly more before anyone respectable helps them launder their image.
  16. “She changed all those cult passwords but also was never identified with the cult,” that is some solid Ana tap dancing.
  17. Well, it’s not even the real verse but a loose and fairly questionable paraphrase: “In their hearts humans plan their course but the Lord establishes their steps.” For better or for worse what exists here (as everywhere) is a set of folk beliefs and not a real attempt to grapple with pre-modern wisdom poetry. Which, it needs to be said, was not written in the first case as the Literal Word of God. The whole Literal Word of God take on the 66 books of the Protestant canon is itself a bit of folk religion that sprung from a certain place and time.
  18. Honestly if we go this route then what needs to be acknowledged is the British role in all this, which is not sufficiently appreciated by either Americans or Russians. The Soviets fought a desperate war of choice after trying to collude with the Germans. The British fought by themselves and with obstinacy across oceans and the non-continental theater for several years despite having every opportunity to sit it out. The Royal Navy and the British in North Africa are why Germany wasn’t a true empire that could have choked the USSR out in 1941. There is no lend-lease to save the Soviets without the Royal Navy. And for that matter they were at least as critical to Normandy and the strategic bombing campaign. For that matter they did basically all of the Enigma cracking and anything in U-571 was also done by the British. Anyone looking for who stepped up needs to start with Churchill.
  19. Excellent post, and thank you for the link. It’s maddening for anyone passingly familiar with the Hungarian experience to see it repeated here, especially as the playbook has been explicitly copied from Orban. Orban has neither protected democracy or deliver on the stated goals of his anti-liberal program (increased birth rates, rising equality, increased security). He has delivered cronyism, corruption, and culture war distractions and it turns out this is what Americans really crave too.
  20. By all strategic measures the United States was the victor of the war. It emerged with the fewest losses, the most credibility, and it built a world order and economy that benefited itself and attracted the wealthiest and most valuable allies to its side. The “losers” on the battlefield aligned themselves with the United States, accepted its primacy and even internalized the values and principles it espoused as their own. The Soviet Army defeated the German army on the battlefield. It gained sullen and deeply antagonistic territory ruled by brittle puppet regimes. The choices it made in the wake of its battlefield victory discredited its ideology and hegemony and directly led to its eventual destruction as the USSR and the collapse of its influence and prestige. To bring it back to Trump’s America, for some reason a big chunk of our country has adopted alien Russian pathologies and neuroses as their own and has decided to surrender complete American victory for no reason other than petulance and a poisoned information environment.
  21. LMFAO at Ana trying to play a misogyny card while defending the Trump admin. Your trolling is really slipping when you’re drunk man.
  22. Well, they also started the war and didn’t actually liberate any of the places they fought so I’d say the honor of doing heavy-lifting was well-earned. Everyone’s favorite counter factual is “what if Hitler doesn’t do Barbarossa?” Mine is “what if the USSR doesn’t help Germany carve up Poland or even makes it clear that attacking Poland is unacceptable along with the Western Allies.” They’d have had a whole-ass country between them and the Germans and Germany’s options in the West would have been far less-certain without Molotov-Ribbentrop. But honestly Hitler not invading the Soviet Union is far more realistic than Russia or any of its permutations not behaving like a predator and trying to make friends with the worst people in the world. I get why no one considers mine.
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