freagle @ freagle @lemmygrad.ml

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3 yr. ago

It was only 70M, nowhere near half of Americans.

America must end for the world to heal. If it happens in these 4 years, it'll be super painful because no one is prepared. But it has to happen some one or another.

Don't exit the scene. We need you.

I'm sorry. The military build and use promised by Trump? Have you been asleep for the last 4 years? For the last 24? The military build and up and use has been nonstop under every single president since Reagan.

Hanging is probably more humane than lethal injection

Your definition of "force" sounds like "anytime I am uncomfortable". Someone made a choice to invent slang, someone else picked it up. Not using youth vernacular as a youth often results in mockery. Someone brought in a loan word, others chose to use it. In business or political spheres, failing to adopt the style of the times often led to mockery, ostracization, or diminished station. None of that is force. It's all just choices.

You think suffering consequences for misgendering someone is aggressive but you don't think suffering consequences for being a "square" is aggressive. When we raise young people in the sales professions we tell them to get interested enough in sports to be able to talk about it to build rapport. Same for TV. There was a time when if you didn't watch TV you were cut out of conversation regularly.

Aggression is when bigots beat transpeople to death. Not when trans people ask to be respected through use of language. Aggression is when neo-nazis block access to drag storytime, not when someone asks you to use the pronouns they have chosen for themselves.

If you haven't read anything about how gender is a system of control I would recommend starting with any of bell hooks' work on patriarchy. Here's a short PDF summarizing some of the legacy of colonialism and its impact on gender-nonconforming people. https://www.ohchr.org/sites/default/files/documents/cfi-subm/2308/subm-colonialism-sexual-orientation-cso-ilga-world-joint-submission-input-2.pdf

And finally, you don't care that much about trans people. That's the insight. You need to start seeing everything else you're saying through that lens. You're not rationally correct on each of your points, you're justifying your emotional position. The reason we are having this argument is because I do care about trans people and we can argue about the use of language, which makes you uncomfortable, to advance the relationship. I can get you curious about the topic, I can share things you wouldn't have heard before. The debate is the point. It's a social evolution, and one of the ways we are doing it is through language. There are other ways, like fashion, literature, drama, academia, sexual relations, legislation, court cases, public spectacle, conflict, solidarity, etc. But it's all evolving and there are people actively pushing that evolution in a direction that allows themselves to be safer being who they are as opposed to afraid for their lives on a daily basis.

It's clear that you don't understand the value of speculative analysis and thought experiments. That's OK. Just stop engaging.

Language evolves because people force it to. It's not a natural organism independent from our choices. We choose taboos, we choose meaning, we choose pronunciation, we choose loanwords. It's all evolution. The idea that it's "forced" is ludicrous because no one can take words from you nor force you to use them. Your words are your own and no one is capable of stopping you from speaking them. But, if you choose not to respect the wishes of others, you will suffer consequences.

The reason some languages have a gender binary is often because that society forced a gender binary on people to control them. There are plenty of non-Euro languages that have no gender binary built in. Language is an active participant in social oppression and changing language is an active countermeasure to that oppression and indeed a tool in shaping future society.

Inventing entirely new pronouns is no more ridiculous than inventing yet another television show character or yet another tiktok dance craze or yet another romance novel or yet another $15/month subscription service that does the same things other service do or writing yet another magazine column.

We put effort where we care. That's how we work. Where you put your effort shows you what you care about.

They aren't referred to as "preferred pronouns". That concept doesn't exist. They are just pronouns. The pronouns for this person are x, y, and z. There's no preference, just a declaration.

What in the actual fuck are you smoking? Russia does not have the military size required to launch more wars. The CIA reports have been quite clear that Russia has no intention of taking and holding Ukraine. Ukraine is so fucking hard to defend due to the massive open plains that supply chains have to go through.

The idea that Russia would press Ukrainian soldiers into a pan-European expansion makes absolutely no fucking sense except in the fantasy world of Western liberals who can only understand the world through the good/evil lens.

So check this out:

Russia was trading with England when Napoleon, Emperor, decided to blockade England. Russia continued trading with England despite Napoleon's demands to stop, so Napoleon built an army and marched it all the way East across Europe. It invaded Russia across the Ukraine border, because it was the strategic weak point of Russia, and that war is considered one of the bloodiest campaigns of history. Millions of Russians were killed. Russia won, but at great cost.

Years later, the Third Reich emerges in Germany. Hitler wrote a book about the communists being the biggest threat to Europe's way of life. He claimed he would invade Russia and make all of the slavs live on reservations like the Americans did to the indigenous peoples, create an apartheid state like the Americans did to the blacks, and build the new continental European empire with the spoils of war. He built an army and marched it all the way East across Europe and invaded Russia over the Ukraine border, because it's the strategic weak point. It was a terribly bloody invasion. Millions of Russians died. Russia won, but at great cost.

After the Russians defeated the Third Reich by marching all the way to Berlin, defeating 80% of the Nazi military, the USA nuked two Japanese cities with large civilian populations, and then took over the Korean peninsula from the Japanese empire, where it proceeded to bomb the half of Korea that was adjacent to Russia to the point where there were literally no more structures and Koreans were living in caves. The USians built NATO and staffed it with the same Nazi officers that just went on the war path to invade Russia, and the USA worked with the Catholic Church to save many Nazis officers and give them safe haven throughout the world via Operation Paperclip. Through NATO they also built a vast network of "leave behind" armies that were built around Nazis and Nazi sympathizers across Europe that they could activate as resistance fighters if Russia ever invaded - Operation Gladio. They build a vast network of proxies through which they fomented uprising, coups, and what we now call "color revolutions" to threaten the USSR. And most importantly for this conversation, they not only launched a bunch of proxy wars with the USSR through various proxy states but they also built a transnational nuclear-armed military in Europe that had no democratic accountability to any people. Using this transnational nuclear military they deployed nukes everywhere in Europe aimed at Russia.

In 1992, after the dismantling of the USSR, Russia met with NATO and Bill Clinton to talk about how to maintain peace now that the USSR was gone. The Russian position was that Russia's national security could not be considered separate from Europe anymore, like the Iron Curtain strategy position, so Russia committed to building mutual security. One aspect of that mutual security was for everyone to respect MAD and not make attempts to create nuclear first strike capabilities. Another aspect of that mutual security was that Russia needed to protect the Ukraine border, over which it has been invaded multiple times before with great loss of life. There was a discussion about not expanding NATO Eastward for 2 reasons: 1) because putting nuclear capabilities around Russia is a component of undermining MAD and 2) putting an army on the Ukraine border made it possible to invade Russia again.

NATO made statements about not expanding Eastward, but no firm doctrinal commitments. And when they did expand Eastward, Russia didn't fight back. They appeased the West as they built nuclear capabilities all along Russia's Western border. They appeased the US when the USA funded neo-nazis and terrorists. The USA vetoed every vote to condemn the celebration of Nazis, but Russia just took it. And that's their choice. So we don't need to bother with it.

But Bill Clinton said that NATO will never be in Ukraine back in 1992 directly to Russian leaders, and as soon as that meeting was over he told his military staff to start building a plan to get NATO into Ukraine.

For the last 30 years that's the context that Russia has been dealing with. Starting with Bill Clinton taking NATO and saying it's a defensive alliance only and then proceeding to use it to devastate Yugoslavia, the last socialist state in Europe. This defensive alliance dropped depleted uranium bombs from aircraft into civilian cities. They destroyed Yugoslavia with a defensive, while Russia was listening to the empty promises of Bill Clinton and NATO ringing in their ears.

In 2014, when there was a coup in Ukraine, it could have just been some standard political unrest. But John McCain and Victoria Nuland were literally in Maidan Square. John McCain was on stage with Right Sector saying it was a great day for democracy. Victoria Nuland was caught in tape discussing who would be the next president of Ukraine. And the day after the Ukraine government agreed to work with the protestors demands, the Right Sector stormed the capitol with guns drawn, forcing the sitting president and government to flee the country.

Russia correctly saw this as a US-guided situation that was part of the historical process of eventually bringing Ukraine into NATO to fully encircle Russia and break it's national security. So it reacted and invaded Crimea. After Maidan, Ukrainian neo-nazi militias that were tied to the history of Operation Gladio began killing ethnic Russians in Ukraine, with back channel US support.

And in 2022, Russia said they saw military activity on the border, significant enough that it could not be ignored anymore. Was it missile systems? Was it missile defense? Was it rapidly deployable units? We won't know until the dust settles, but Russia invaded and this was it's stated reason.

You can keep pretending that Russia invaded Ukraine for resources, but Russia has never had any intention of invading and holding all of Ukraine. In the assessment of the CIA, not only does Russia not have the capability to do so, it knows it doesn't have the capability to do so and the CIA has clearly identified that it has never been a strategic goal of Russia to do so.

The real reason has everything to do with national security, and if you study history, it becomes painfully obvious that this is the case.

It's a thought experiment to analyze specific variables. Whatever we assume as given for this experiment is not what we're trying to understand. If we assume our understanding of physics is accurate for this thought experiment, it allows us to focus on the behavioral variables in the geopolitical, military, economic, and economic dimensions. I am not interested in a thought experiment that identifies what are the possible areas of new physics that could be implied from this thought experiment, all though a deeper analysis might indicate that specific new physics might result in specific behaviors of states and we need to itemize them as additional thought experiments.

Remember that this is a thought experiment. I am using the word "assume" like we're doing geometry in math class. Assume the triangle XYZ has one angle of 60 degrees. Why would you assume that? Because it's useful when doing an analytical exercise.

In the larger context, I don't assume our physics is accurate, but I'm not interested in speculating on the ways in which it's inaccurate for this thought experiment.

It's an intellectual pursuit like analyzing the situation in Ukraine or analyzing decisions before the FTC or analyzing a football league

I am not talking about speculative fiction and what could happen. I am talking about taking your hypothesis - that alien contact has not happened at all - and attempting to build a steel-person argument against it.

This is how we got the cryptoterrestrial hypothesis: 1 assume UAPs are alien ships, 2 assume our understanding of physics is accurate, 3 assume that aliens wouldn't fly all this way for nothing, what could be a possible explanation for 1 and 2? This the cryptoterrestrial hypothesis is born and now we can setup experiments to gather sufficient evidence to close out that hypothesis.

I am looking for something similar with regard to the theories of alien contact resulting in an arms race. The best way to defeat any ridiculous hypothesis is to steel-person it.

Such disgustingly deliberate word choice when China hasn't dropped bombs in, what, 60 years? The bombardment is happening in Gaza, not the fucking tech sector

What the hell do you think this country was supposed to stand for when James Madison said that government's role is to protect the opulent minority from the majority, when the revolutionary war broke out around the time England started considering outlawing slavery, when Thomas Jefferson kept slave girls in his bedroom and raped them daily, when Thomas Jefferson lobbies to end the slave trade because it would make his breeding plantations more money, when Mount Rushmore was carved into a sacred mountain out of spite for the indigenous, when the US government killed all the plains buffalo because they had a treaty with the Lakota people that included the term "for as long as the buffalo roam the plains", when the USA without question invaded Vietnam in an attempt to maintain the French colony against the Vietnamese people's desire for liberty, when the USA told Japan not to vacate the Korean peninsula where they raped and tortured people for years so that the USA could take over the colony on their behalf, when the USA took over The Phillipines from King Phillip of Spain and built a brutal occupying military police force so effective that they brought it back to create the State Police system that was used to continue violently breaking strikes when local cops started feeling bad about killing their neighbors, when the Philadelphia police department dropped an incendiary bomb on a housing in a black ghetto because it couldn't arrest some of the people inside it, when the USA imprisons more people per capita than even the height of the Soviet GULAG system when it was housing Nazi POWs, when the USA votes every single year at the UN against the banning of the glorification of Nazis, ....

What do you think this country fucking stands for?

Many of us, myself included, are a bit tired of ignorant people arguing with us as though they aren't ignorant. People who are clearly ignorant do not have a position to argue from except propaganda and vibes. And it's patently obvious who is ignorant because each person who is ignorant when they argue about a topic use the exact same talking points over and over again.

The things you said about Taiwan are things that have been said for years now. They never change. They are repeated ad nauseum. They are part of the big lie. And no matter how many times some of us study the issue and then share what we've learned, another person shows up, sometimes a whole clusterfuck of them, and just unashamedly parrots talking points they got from the same sources the last clusterfuck of people got them.

On this topic, and many others, the debate isn't about facts at all. It's about opinions, values, morality, ethics, and often violent intervention and those things are all based on false beliefs and ignorance. So when people come in saying "Taiwan deserves independence and the USA should protect them", it's not a problem of you need to learn so much as you're willing to come in here and tell people that you support violence on the basis of some narrative that you have not examined, have not spent time researching, and have not struggled through the difficulties of learning about. If you came in arguing facts, the conversation would be very different, but you, like many of us raised in liberal society, lead with vibes that we delude ourselves into thinking are facts.

It's exhausting. Apologies for being harsh with you. I highly recommend learning more.

What a ridiculous position to hold, and my god the brainworms you must have based on your exchange with @yogthos@lemmygrad.ml

Russia actively responds to threats and has been doing so for quite some time. First, it took Crimea. Then it sent lethal support to the Donbas. Then it sent mercenaries into a bunch of countries in North Africa fighting against the West. Then it launched an SMO to militarize the border with Ukraine. Then it attacked Western Ukrainian infrastructure. Then it built an Africa Corps. Then it created economic alternatives to the West. Then it materially supported the West's adversaries. Then it made a change to its nuclear protocol. Then it launched an IRBM.

Russia responding to Western salami slicing with its own salami slicing. Just as the NATO escalations are nuanced, so are Russia's responses. NATO countries still live in peace because they have not declared war on Russia yet. Every time they make another thin slice of the salami, Russia finds a way to respond that is just as thin. However, Russia launched the capture of Crimea and no one could stop it. Russia launched the SMO to secure the Ukranian border and no one could stop. Russia worked to support decoupling of Africa from the West and no one has been able to stop it. Russia is working with partners to work around Western economic dominance and sanctions and no one can stop it.

The Russian military has not made many mistakes and it has not been strategically inactive. From this, we have to conclude that Russia understands its own limits, and I don't think anyone, especially Russia, believes they can or need to fight all of Europe. Likewise, I think Russia is aware, as NATO is aware, there is no way NATO could defeat Russia. The risk, therefore, is that NATO chooses to engage Russia in a long-term war of attrition, and that risk is very very real. Russia's strategic imperatives are therefore 1) to not become encircled, 2) to maintain counter-intelligence supremacy, and 3) to avoid a protracted war of attrition with NATO.

1. is why Russia took Crimea and subsequently invaded Ukraine
2. is why Russia is being judicious with deploying its technology and why it is operating in Africa
3. is why Russia is supporting the opening of additional fronts in Africa, building material support with military powers aligned against the West, building economic alternatives to the West, and most importantly, not giving the West sufficient casus belli to launch an all out war of attrition

You're requirement that for Putin to be strong he must be irrational is ridiculous.

Ukraine is free to determine that NK, China, and Iran are all parties to the war due to their material support of the Russian operation. Ukraine can decide to declare war against those countries. They can go and prosecute that war, if they so choose.

Russia attacked Ukraine because of threats to Russian national security. The "legal framework" or "rules based order" that allowed NATO countries to create those threats to Russia created the conditions under which Russia had two choices - follow the rules exactly and let their belligerent opponents (the North Atlantic empire) continue to build up the threat level, or break the rules and protect itself.

This is why for years the conversation around Russia has been a debate between people who say a security framework must guarantee security for all, on the one side, and on the other side, people who said we only need to guarantee our security and we can threaten the security of others and they can't do anything about it.