u/PhilipTheBucket

I'm happy they blew up a bunch of Russian planes.

I'm not happy that this is the new face of war, and there's very little that can be done to prevent it or defend any target that someone wants to attack in the same way.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9fa9lVwHHqg

Fuck 'em up

This is pretty much always the result of widespread bombardment of civilian cities. It *seems* like it would result in people suing for peace, and if you have a certain type of psychopathic version of how to interact, it seems for that reason like it would be a good idea. But it just doesn't work. Even if you kill a huge fraction of people in the country and reduce a bunch of their cities to rubble, what they want to do is fuck you up even worse in retaliation, not suddenly become submissive and hope you will stop.

Ukraine's not even retaliating in kind, just hitting military and strategic targets inside Russia. Anyway. Fuck 'em up.

It's like this in the US too. Everything that comes out of the recruiter's mouth, and probably a lot of what's written on the paper you sign, is absolute bald faced lies that will get you killed or crippled. It's just how it works.

IDK about other countries but that's what I am familiar with.

Little late guys

But what the fuck, I’ll take it. Now see if you can snatch Netanyahu and put him in The Hague where he belongs. *That* would be a solid start.

Romania is not the priority, just like the US is not the priority for Trump and France is not the priority for Le Pen.

Most times of state-created suffering do not feel abnormal to most people.

Milton Mayer interviewed a bunch of German civilians after World War 2, and most of them remembered the concentration camp years as good times and had a positive view of Hitler. Only the professor among them really even had much awareness that anything important had been happening during that time; most of the others were just concerned with issues of family, their work life, their economic situation, and so on.

“And trust me, I know tyranny.”

Yeah. That's the way. Maybe one physical switch for "answer call and enable mic" and one for "enable camera and open camera app". And, if for some reason you want to, you can exit the camera app with it still turned on, but the normal recommended process is to flip it back closed when you're done which takes you back to the home screen. (And, if being in the "wrong" position when you want it, if you exited the "wrong" way the last time, serves as a gentle reminder to be better about your data security.) I like it.

I rememeber downloading a little 20-second audio clip of some interesting radio traffic, and I think it took about 15 minutes to download.

Phones need *way* more physical switches on them.

One for camera (maybe for mic, not sure how that would work out with the "phone" aspect for any of those deviants who still use their phones for voice calls), one for GPS. Maybe we could add one for USB data, next to the port. Actually even better for the camera would be a little slidey plastic cover like the old SGI webcams. One for a kill-switch that stops all battery power so it's not pinging towers while it's "off".

IDK, it seems kind of silly that the solution to this particular problem is not hardened phones for defense personnel of which no ability to transfer data over the cable whatsoever would be a fairly good early step (one among many). There are lots more malicious chargers in the world other than Chinese vehicles. In general phones are just a nightmare.

What the fuck are you on about?

The USSR imploded because it was a corrupt and violent kakistocracy

I don't know that the US had anything to do with the coup, but it didn't work anyway, and they were much more friendly with the anti-coup people than with the coup. I could be wrong but I thought it was by hard-liners who were opposed to Gorbachev's reforms and wanted to keep the USSR together back according to its old principles instead of liberal reforms.

Nobody sponsored ultranationalism in Russia except by accident. The IMF and BIll Clinton sponsored gangster capitalism, which took off like gangbusters and defined the gruesome arc of the next several decades of Russian government. It's one of the great sadnesses of the late 20th century, the promise of what could have been for the Soviet people in the wake of mostly peaceful anti-communist revolution simply getting replaced by more misery.

Fuck the nato. Fuck putin.

Lol

Is that really so far off though?

Yes you fucking cretin

Notice that the one US president who actually has been building concentration camps and operating the Gestapo, shares with you a strong dislike of NATO.

yes, assuming Trump’s goal is to have more manufacturing in the US, tariffs will

Destroy domestic manufacturing by enacting insane tariffs on the raw materials it depends on, without any nontrivial increase in manufacturing to counterbalance the pain, even in the long run.

This type of command economy “might makes right” stuff can fail *catastrophically*. As recently as the 1990s, there were people starving in North Korea by the hundreds of thousands (at least) because someone decided that enforcing his will was more important than listening to people who even on the most rudimentary level knew what they were doing.

I mean, if I am more qualified at recognizing horseshit than The Guardian is, that’s a problem. It’s weird to me that you are classifying this view of how Trump operates with respect to things like tariffs and whether or not he is a total moron as a matter of opinion.

I’ve seen them get other things about him wrong before, too. They were super happy about how Trump was finally going to lay the hammer down on the Israelis and create peace in Gaza:

https://ponder.cat/post/1323549

There were a bunch of Lemmy commentators in there, too, saying more or less that it *was* super easy, Trump had made progress with his tough negotiating, and this was just evidence that Biden hadn’t been trying to do it. Since that happened, Isarel’s occupied roughly half of Gaza and resumed killing at scale, and also starting doing the same a little bit in the West Bank. They’re also not letting any food in.