Jump to content

956 Worldwide

Full Members
  • Posts

    10137
  • Joined

  • Last visited

  • Days Won

    26

Everything posted by 956 Worldwide

  1. I will fully cop to believing that refusing to believe what Russians say to each other in favor of Western technocratic explanations that we understand better is a big reason why we are all here today. The thing is that Russia doesn’t need a reason to invade its neighbors. When Russia is weak, it lashes out. When it’s strong, it takes what it can. When Russias neighbors start to get too strong, Russia gets nervous and attacks. When Russia’s neighbors are too weak Russia seizes the opportunity. Russia, contrary to Russophiles’ fantasy, is a massive and well-armed nation that has more and not less agency than all of its neighbors. The only field-tested way to keep Russia in its box is to extend the Western deterrent, clearly and decisively.
  2. “Would a real fascist do X policy” is a fools errand because fascism, its implementers, and its philosophical forefathers were explicitly anti-rationalist and uninvolved with political science as we know it. This is especially true of the economy, which Hitler was notoriously uninterested in. Franco did an about-face between planned autarky and market reforms and saw no conflict with the fascist state. Fascism is an anti-rational mood or vibe that places collective “national greatness” and the interests of a nation (inseparable from the state as controlled by a leader) above all else while completely subordinating the individual and attacking or eliminating those defined as outside the “nation”. The economy is an instrument to achieve those aims and there are no prescriptive economic policies or even political principles. Even racism isn’t required, an out-group can be selected along other grounds. A genuine theocrat or free-market zealot might be brutally authoritarian but would not be “fascist” because elevating a faith or the market above the “nation” and its leader is antithetical to fascism which identifies “national greatness” as the highest metaphysical, spiritual, and temporal value. In the past I’ve been cautious about using fascism to describe anything in the United States, preferring “authoritarian” even for DJT. But I believe that MAGA has coalesced into a fascist movement. MAGA’s instrumental and incoherent stance towards market economics and Christianity (where the latter two may be useful, but MUST be subordinate to MAGA) rhymes with historical fascism. The rhetoric about Americans being ready to suffer economic hardship to restore America is very fascist. And on the economic front, the emerging partnership between tech and MAGA and especially Musk is resonant of fascism’s relationship to industry.
  3. 1. JD Vance is lying, the protest was down at the end of his street and he had to go seek out the protesters to engage. 2. I’ve been to pro-Ukraine protests with my own children. JD should take the advice of Czech hockey hall of fame Dominik Hašek.
  4. But Anastasis doesn’t even have to take my word for it. Putin explained why he invaded for 90 minutes to Tucker Carlson, which was the perfect venue to rant about NATO and shock therapy. Instead he explained that Ukraine isn’t a real country and he took it because Russia wanted it, with references to Rurik and the Zaporizhian Sich. It’s absolutely incredible how asshole Russophiles simply refuse to let the man speak for himself.
  5. Ana has a view, common to university undergrads, that the world basically operates like a man playing billiards by himself, where the player is the United States and other nations ricochet about in pre-set courses because of what the United States does. It’s very stupid and reductive. Shock therapy and its legacy is a topic of hot debate across the former eastern bloc. It’s important to know that “shock therapy” was a set of economic and market prescriptions to guide nations towards a more open economy. The corruption, gangsterism, and political dealing that went along with it in Russia and some Soviet states (including Ukraine) was not part of the prescription, was not necessary, and was a choice made by the people who engaged in it. Former Warsaw Pact states like the Czechs and Poles went through the process too, as did the Balts, to dramatically different results and dramatically lower (but not non-existent) levels of banditry. Russia’s behavior is a choice made by Russians. Poor, persecuted Russia is not forced to march into its much smaller neighbors and take things to defend itself. It does that because for centuries it has been a predatory, expansionist empire and Russians continue to see the world in those terms.
  6. We are having the most tacky fascist takeover imaginable.
  7. Incidentally Russia’s hostility towards any successful small-l liberal neighbor closely tracks with MAGA’s anger at Canada. It’s not about trade or defense spending or anything else. The simple existence of a successful more liberal nation so close to MAGA is seen as a rebuke and potential threat to a paranoid and authoritarian regime.
  8. This is unironically as close as you can get to actual coherent Ana thought on this or any other question.
  9. Russia felt so threatened by NATO that in the half-century following World II it invaded two members of its own counter-NATO defense bloc and forced a third to implement martial law upon threat of invasion. It’s just astoundingly stupid to make the argument that Russia needs a NATO threat to invade and subjugate its neighbors, they are more threatened by their own treaty allies than by NATO. The common thread in all of them as well as Ukraine and Georgia is that Russia is threatened when its neighbors choose to liberalize internally.
  10. Modern diesel electric boats are quieter than nuclear powered submarines when submerged and running on batteries. We don’t use them because we need to perform global extended patrols across open ocean. For the German (and Swedish, Norwegian, Italian) mission a diesel electric boat is not just cheaper, it’s better.
  11. NATO is literally the only thing that has ever stopped Russia from having a war with its European neighbors.
  12. There are tensions between Rubio and Musk for sure. The communications State leadership puts out about the five things exercise have been terse and telling in their contempt for the idea that someone on the outside has any business judging the work.
  13. Well, and they also want some sweet, juicy mineral rights. Because “no blood for oil” is more what you’d call a “guideline” than actual rules. Fake libertarian/anti-neocon MAGATs are the worst. DJT does everything they claim to hate except with the subtlety of a goombah shaking down a bodega owner and all of a sudden it’s an attack on the “blob.” It’s just adult oppositional defiant disorder.
  14. There is a rational, and even ethically grounded case to be made for the U.S. to shift towards a push for a negotiated settlement where Ukraine has to make concessions. I vehemently disagree with that case, but it can be made in good faith and from a place of support for America and its values. That case doesn’t involve the following: confusing aggressors with victims, smearing a suffering nation as Nazis who deserved it, repeating Russia’s justification for its war crimes and atrocities, denying Russia’s war crimes and atrocities, projecting your own shitty and ill-informed “grievances” into the case as a means to advance your miserable politics, or apologizing for the mass gassing of people in a different war on a different continent. Yet all the people arguing for “peace” do the latter and utterly fail at the former. Because they don’t want peace, they are pieces of shit who like Russia, want Russia to win, and want America to be more like Russia.
  15. Anastasis got very angry that anyone on this board noticed what happened in Bucha and got drunk last night and revealed he supported gas attacks on civilians in Syria. There is no way to go farther down. He just really likes it when Russians murder lots of innocent people, maybe because he gets hard at when he can claim that U.S. foreign policy failed or maybe because he’s just aligned with Russia for any number of reasons. It’s really that simple and it doesn’t really matter either way— it’s who he is.
  16. I don’t know how to tell you this dawg but targeting the downtown of a city simply for its symbolic and personal value to a nation and its leader is kind of the definition of terror bombing. This is the same logic behind Al Qaeda’s constant targeting of WTC.
  17. The political party he’s bleating about won exactly one seat in the 2019 parliamentary elections. There are far fewer Nazis in Ukrainian structures than there are in America (or Russia) for that matter. Actually there are an equivalent number of Nazis in his own house.
  18. You’re right, Navalny should have just used the VGTRK against Putin, why didn’t he hire a marketing expert to tell him that. So easy.
  19. I will again refer to the GOP’s closed-loop propaganda ecosystem.
  20. Although, I do sometimes wish that Dems and Libs would play in the same sandbox on low stakes level. For instance, the recent principled decision to pull Hamilton from the Kennedy Center. The producer’s statement was thoughtful and well written (reproduced below). And completely ineffective. Instead: Wait till the paying audience is seated on opening night, then stroll out and tell everyone that Trump made you cancel the show because he thinks it is woke. Then go on TV and just call Rick Grennell fake news after he tries to deny it. Promise that you’ll look very strongly into bringing back Hamilton but not so long as Trump treats you unfairly, and then arrange for all of Bug Tussle, Pennsylvania to go see the show in a high school gym and give them free merch.
  21. That and also missing the massive closed-loop propaganda ecosystem that exists solely to affirm and reinforce GOP marketing and for which the Democrats have no equivalent.
  22. I think you are missing something here, namely that while Democrats are indeed bad at marketing, they are also stuck trying to market policies they believe will work and to operate in a fact-based vision of the world. The GOP leads with marketing and creates policy post hoc and with zero effort dedicated to making the policy a success even as defined by the GOP’s own marketing.
  23. It’s not just money that people have issues with, it’s very big numbers in general. And that’s true across the spectrum, it’s not something to be embarrassed of but it does mean that people need to be deliberate when making decisions. You can understand what say, 100,000 people looks like as opposed to 1,000. It’s a full college football stadium, while 1,000 was all the kids in your middle school on panoramic photo day. You can’t conceptualize what 1 million or 1 billion people look like, in relation to 100,000 or each other.
  24. Rest easy Americans, our enemies will never deny our proud nation access to crypto and EFTs.
Ă—
Ă—
  • Create New...