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956 Worldwide

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Everything posted by 956 Worldwide

  1. “I’ll stop drinking if you confirm me to be SecDef” was an incredibly alcoholic thing to say. And his whole stance of “it’s not a problem and never has been but I’ll stop to make all these buzzkills happy” makes me concur with Bates. If he had said “I have a problem but even as I’m being confirmed, I’m also working with professionals for the appropriate diagnosis and recovery plan to commit to” it would have been far more mature and reassuring— but would have cost him the nomination.
  2. I have to say that it seemed like Hegseth was in a flat spin but shit seems to have simmered down in terms of an endless stream of rank incompetence broadcast straight to journalists. I’m assuming that Wiles scared him into shutting the fuck up and they installed some OG MAGA-world minders in the executive suite.
  3. Vlasov’s Army was an interesting one. But all these folks knew one or the other was going to kill them so they got out in front.
  4. GOP Rep just retweeting shit from Sputnik, what a time to live.
  5. Making any foreign policy issue a central plank of a campaign is a terrible and losing strategy. The only real foreign policy election in our lifetimes was 2004. Support for addition arms and sanctions for Ukraine has never dipped below fifty percent nationwide and has always claimed even a substantive chunk of GOP voters but they lined up behind the guy who wouldn’t do it. Other messaging will win out.
  6. Someone is either in a lot of trouble or no trouble at all depending on whether they are career or political appointee. Actually, there will for sure be a career person found at fault. https://www.npr.org/2025/08/16/nx-s1-5504196/trump-putin-summit-documents-left-behind
  7. What a weird way to tell the world that you’re really stupid.
  8. In Munich Hitler dressed up demands for the Sudetenland by appealing to the demands of the local ethnic German population and their alleged self-determination and desire to unite with Germany. In fact, the Sudetenland was home to Czechoslovakia’s well-designed and maintained hill country defensive positions which were integral to the smaller nation’s strategy to defend itself and buy time while waiting for Allied assistance. The Czechoslovaks had been investing in a modern and capable military. At Munich Hitler was handed Czechoslovakia’s defensive lines and Czechoslovakia lost any faith in Allied assistance. It was defenseless when Germany decided to take the whole thing, which was the plan all along. Extremely strong parallels here for what Putin wants in Ukraine and why.
  9. Putin appears to have accomplished what he came for: Trump drops calls for the killing to stop and decides his timeline is no longer in effect; no consequences on the horizon for Russia; and Putin’s core demands are still miles away from what Ukraine can possibly accept for a true peace agreement. Setting the stage to walk away and blame Zelenskyy.
  10. Early returns on Alaska are: not much. The vibes from Trump were cranky, sullen. The delegation didn’t eat together, no questions at the press conference. He’s distancing himself from it, putting the ball back in Zelenskyy’s court. He’s clearly tired with this whole thing and wants a way out and will likely end up lashing out at Ukraine since they are the ones who will respond in some way.
  11. The jersey is ass. The word mark is huge and the numbers don’t match anything else.
  12. Georgia Tech is not using any navy, opting instead for grey and gold. The uniforms are just fine but schools need to use their colors. We should have left grey alts in 2018.
  13. I think the issue is that, as @Hank Kingsley has pointed out, this isn’t a strategy. In the first instance, there aren’t enough poor and blue collar Americans to win national elections. Second, even if they were, the issues are different. Why are you poor? Were you born into generational poverty and shitty schools and never had a chance? Were you middle class and then the factory in town moved to China? Did you graduate with a CS degree and now no one is hiring? Trump appeals to parts of the poor and blue collar all the time, that’s what the tariffs and bringing back manufacturing schtick is all about. You can (accurately) say it’s all BS and hypocrisy and a sham but you can’t say he’s ignoring that sector and their issues. He’s all about them and it was likely key to the win. If step one of your plan is “create a class consciousness in America” then it’s time to ask if the plan is really to win an election. Otherwise, the question is HOW are you going to appeal to the working class.
  14. There’s a post two above me calling him the blueprint.
  15. I seriously question the wisdom of using a successful ranked-choice NYC primary as the blueprint to win competitive first past the post general elections nationwide.
  16. Dems also need to take a page from the recent GOP guidebook: No one criticizes the nominee, no one criticizes the party, and once in office, no one criticizes the president. Argue for your stance. Criticize proxies when needed. Criticize (carefully) policies while treating it as a given the nominee/party/president will come around. But never, ever, ever go on tv or the internet and let voters think there light be a reason not to vote for the nominee.
  17. One thing the Democrats need to do across the board is implement some message discipline and demand that their talking heads eliminate criticism of “America” or “the country” or different systems and instead make every critique as personal and targeted as they can. This is something the GOP does very effectively. The GOP never talks about the need for “America” to reckon with its failings. They say awful things about America, but blame the lib cucks. Dems can do this too. Instead of “America must atone for its sins of racism and discrimination” try “Neanderthal assholes are ruining our beautiful country with their racism.” The first bit leads you into a fruitless debate about whether America is really a racist country and will alienate people who might otherwise vote for you. The second only alienates self-identified Neanderthal racists and that small group isn’t voting for you anyway. Instead of a critique of “capitalism,” try attacking “greedy billionaires who are ruining markets.” You can then make the same proposals for solutions, it’s all just targeted at groups that most voters don’t like or identify with. I think some Dems are getting better about this but still fall short because it’s intellectually dishonest (a bit) and confrontational. But whatever, we are trying to win. It’s very crafty because it basically allows most people to tell themselves they aren’t part of the problem set you’re talking about. No one wants to feel called out by an elected leader.
  18. As a coach, I would one hundred percent rather have my athletes playing a second sport. So much benefit to having most players doing that, more than you’ll likely get from the 18 practice spring ball schedule.
  19. “Male sperm count is down across the board.” ”I don’t put my sperm on a board, I have an old Bon Jovi shirt for that.” Fucking lost it. I cannot remember laughing harder in recent memory.
  20. This is, I think, the best chart that shows what was/is going on in DC WRT crime and how residents feel. This will be TL; DR post. You’ll have to zoom in. The red is carjackings, the yellow is murder, the orange is DC’s “violent crime index.” Up front: It’s not true that DC is in the throes of the worst crime/violent crime wave ever, there was a drop in 2024, and there’s no reason to federalize the city. There’s some things that are absolutely true though. 1. It’s absolutely true that crime in DC right now really and truly is significantly and notably worse than it was not that long ago and well within memory of most residents and a complete reversal of the success story that got started in the late 1990s. It is not vibes or perception, it’s real. Those numbers represent bodies and horrifying victimizations and it is a quality of life issue for the entire city. Residents have every right to want to get back to mid-2010s DC and we are nowhere close. 2. Lots of cities around the country saw crime spikes associated with COVID and unrest around 2020s; DCs was both more dramatic and has lasted longer. 3. DC is not the most dangerous city in the country; places like Memphis or Baton Rouge have bigger problems. At the same time DC is more like those cities than it is say, NYC or Boston and that’s an issue for the national capital and aspiring Tier 1 city. We for sure want to be more like NYC than St. Louis. 4. Carjackings represent a particular problem because it’s crime that impacts civilians who just want to go about their lives. A year or two where a gang turf war gets out of hand is terrible, but the risk to most law-abiding people is pretty low. With the spate of carjackings all of the sudden people with no nexus to criminality are being victimized in pretty terrifying and brutal ways with few mitigating options aside from “don’t drive.” That’s not sustainable and it’s going to cause blowback. 5. The carjackings have gotten better but it’s still ridiculously, stupidly bad. Everyone knows who is doing it— a small (like, a couple dozen) number of minors probably account for about fifty percent of that number. And you can also look at a heat map and see that there are much fewer in Maryland and basically zero in Virginia even though it’s five minutes away. The reason is obvious, your ass will get locked up in those states and if you read the reports you will see that a substantial number of teen carjackers actually come in from Maryland specifically to do crime because there has been almost no consequences as long as you did it in the district. 6. Beyond the numbers, DC is a lot smaller than people realize— it’s about 700k people and a really small footprint. You can do a lot to avoid the disorder and risk but again, it’s not NYC and the crime is happening close to you almost no matter who you are. 7. I honestly don’t know why the “violent crime index” is out of whack with the murders and carjackings. That’s something to dive into. It’s safe to say that the level of petty crime and non-violent crime and “takeovers” resulting in property damage and malicious loitering has also gone noticeably up than where it was not too long ago and that also got people pissed off. Putting special officers in the metro has made that experience a lot better but it’s also completely fair to say that it was a step that came too late and only after a lot of denial. Anyway, the National Guard aren’t going to fix the problem and I am concerned that all this will do is spike the forward momentum to address the issues that had finally happened, because this will give a lot of ammo to the irresponsible wing of local politicians to continue doing nothing.
  21. There is an important flip side to this: if they don’t follow orders half-assedly, this admin will find someone to follow them enthusiastically. Letting some feds in uniform wander around Georgetown for the cameras is a pretty decent outcome to this shitshow. They know what they’re doing here.
  22. I haven’t seen a real internet message board meet to fight challenge in some years now. This is the MAGA I’m here for.
  23. Aesthetics of Oppression would be a great band name.
  24. Lol, I loved this tweet from Markwayne. You do HVAC contracting in Tulsa big dawg, let’s calm down.
  25. All of Trump’s gripes about Zelenskyy and ideas about how Ukraine should behave are simply reflections of how Trump himself thinks and behaves. And bad news, it reveals how Trump can (and does) treat America. Trump is frustrated when Zelenskyy says the Ukrainian constitution won’t allow him to surrender land because he has never viewed the American Constitution as a binding commitment he has to adhere to and can’t imagine why Zelenskyy would. He can’t understand why Ukrainians would fight against a much larger and stronger enemy at great cost to themselves because he would never do anything but surrender. He cannot understand why Ukrainians would refuse to surrender towns and cities to brutal Russian occupation in exchange for self-preservation because he does not care about America and would gladly hand over American land and souls to Russia or anyone if it meant he came out ahead. it’s all just a mirror of his own personality disorders. Someone for whom literally everything is transactional.
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