Odysseus also raped a witch at sword point and had a 7-year affair with a nymph. Homer thought the Bronze Age was puerile, certainly, but his vision of the future was still horrifying in a different way.

This is an actual problem with the video gamification of war. Namely, people think it always involves casualty counts and the "biggest" wars (in terms of manpower and materiel) are the most significant. If the PLA peacefully occupied Taiwan tomorrow, it'd be a bigger win than the Korean War.

It’s an important distinction! There are Stephen Miller Republicans, who thrill to the idea of a white ethnostate backstopped by cathartic mass violence against minorities. And there are Bush Republicans, who think the former group is faking it for votes, and can be safely handed the keys to the car

DHS needs to get nuked from orbit

Greenland is indigenous Scandinavian soil and has been ever since Erik the Red settled there in 985 CE. The current Inuit inhabitants arrived *after* the Norse.

It’s like listening to America after five beers try to talk itself into leaving its wife and kids.

Yeah this is basically correct. If you're even a pound overweight, the government shouldn't pay to treat your heart disease, if you drank one beer in your life, the government shouldn't pay for your liver. Perfect alloy of Republican rugged individualism and Los Angeles hot girl crunchy granola.

every Pacific naval encounter in WW3 will be the USS Golden Trump, Glorious Harbinger of Antiwoke American Dawn versus six identical copies of the Type 055 We Built This Yesterday supplied by a ship that does nothing but make birthday cakes for the other ships

Part of it is also that JD Vance just genuinely loathes Europe. He sees it as a font of depravity and the origin point of social democracy. Other Republicans have felt the same way, but they at least recognized that the Continent is also a very useful piece of borderlands on the US's periphery.

A complementary pathology is that there's the perception that erring on the side of being too naive is somehow far worse than erring on the side of being too cynical, despite the fact that overly cynical predictions are wrong *all the fucking time*, wrong in just as consequential ways too!

It's a byproduct of the public's (and not just the US public's) romance with innumeracy. There's no difference between accidentally accepting $50 concert tickets and gleefully soliciting a $50 million dollar private jet - they're both bribes!

I mean we’ve just had to deal with like three years of DoD hyperventilating about “THE CHINESE ARE GONNA BUILD A NAVAL BASE IN GABON!!!” and here we are literally abandoning diplomatic connections with Gabon!

It is perhaps worth noting that the official propaganda film shown to the troops in 1943 and made by Frank Capra ("Why We Fight") features the line: "Moses, Mohammed, Confucius, Christ: all believe that in the sight of God all men were created equal."

Extremely unpopular opinion on this website I’m sure, but the next line is “they know that victory for us means victory for religion. And they cannot have that because the world is too small for both Hitler and God,” and we could also use some of that energy.

xi jinping is a chemical engineer by training

Chamberlain laid out his explanation for why aggressors had to be stopped at the same time he pledged Britain would defend Poland in early 1939. Those reasons are as equally applicable to Russian aggression against Georgia and Ukraine as German aggression against Austria and Czechoslovakia:

For much the same reason, most Americans were unwilling to die for the people of Ethiopia in 1935, the people of Spain in 1936, or the people of China in 1937. But these things have a way of coming home.

Make Nearer my god to thee the new navy song

The thing where Trump names everything after himself isn’t a funny little quirk but an incredibly reliable indicator that a leader is in fact a dictator. It doesn’t happen in any democratic society, no sane leader does it

By the above logic, Vance should be welcoming in legions of Christian immigrants from Ethiopia, Honduras, and other devoutly Christian countries. It's the fastest way to keep the US from secularizing:

It's important to recall this is not just a free speech issue or about bullying or anything so trivial as that. This is straightforwardly child pornography, a form of content that is illegal to make, distribute, or possess that comes with a 99.1% sentencing rate and an average of 9 years in jail.

Whatever else I might say about them, Nigeria, Rwanda, Uganda, and Somalia all have long standing and mostly warm relationships with the United States. Nigeria and Cote D’Ivoire are keystones in West Africa. All of this is incoherent from a strategic standpoint (because this isn’t about strategy).

Yeah I mean who the fuck needed to compete with China and Russia in Africa anyways

Palmer Luckey has hitched his wagon to a movement whose sole national defense policy is blowing anyone above a certain melanin count within 1,000km of the US to smithereens. This is the sort of delusional optimism that would make Dr. Pangloss say "maybe you ought to lower your expectations a bit."

I understand why on the surface this might seem an infuriating thing to say. But the *truly* infuriating thing is people who deny it is happening, since what they are essentially saying is that they don't believe asylum seekers need housing and should continue to live on the street!

To put this in perspective, the German Bundesarchiv if laid out end to end would stretch for 530 continuous kilometers and comprises 6.4 billion pages. Only a mere 52 million of them have been digitized, or around 0.81%

They're both terrible, Vance seems less likely to rip apart the global economy (tariffs) and the foundations of American power (research, science) but more likely to actually attempt regime consolidation. Better if he can be removed, much worse if he can't.

Frankly even this sort of abhorrent sentiment is a straw man. The actual question is whether or not you think liquidating the children of falsely accused "subversive" Communist party members was appropriate as happened in the Great Purge of 1937. And if you believe so, you are not human.

It really does impress me how the conservative foreign policy power structures literally have zero beliefs at all, if (insert D here) was what Trump was doing, they’d all be going ape shit about how they’re not taking the China challenge seriously

"Our hearts grow as our population crashes, leaving no one to take care of them when they go into cardiac arrest." An aging nation of unhealthy geriatrics should not be happy about deporting its future caretakers.

Unbelievable though it sounds to modern Americans used to thinking it as a beautiful Nordic paradise, Scandinavia very much used to be considered a backwards undeveloped hellhole unfit to mix with Anglo-Saxon stock.

Whiteness was at the time one of the more *inclusive* concepts in history, it's why we no longer shove the dirty Norwegians in the back rows of churches and don't lynch Finns.

The most iconic image of the 1970s is a gas station that says "even license only today" owing to the Arab oil embargo, the fact that this has been forgotten is bizarre.

The PRC had to bludgeon hundreds of millions of people into learning one dialect of Chinese because nobody was speaking the same thing. Half the country couldn't understand Mandarin in the early 1950s. That's before you get into the ethnic divides:

This is a viral false claim and Moody's deliberately mangled their math to get some eye-popping numbers, the top 10% makes up around 23% of spending and this is unchanged since a decade ago:

China graduates almost as many engineers every year (1.5 million) as the US graduates students in total (2.1 million). Perhaps more importantly, of those US graduates only 6% are in engineering. In China it's around double that. The *only* way the US can catch up is immigration.

I think this does appear to be the main thing that’s happening with economic sentiment over the past five years. Everyone knows you’re supposed to be sad and mad, it’s impossible to be in contact with popular culture and not glean that. So when you ask people how they feel that’s what they say.

Many Internet Marxists sadly use the exact same logic regarding economics that Republicans use about crime statistics. Crime must be up, because I saw a crime reported on the news. Wages must be down, because my friend got laid off.

Unfortunately this thesis is mostly just hindsight bias. It would make more sense if 20 years after the War to End War in 1918 there hadn't been an even bigger war in 1939. Or that within 30 years of the 7 Years War ending in 1763 the Napoleonic Wars hadn't broken out.

an article published on NetEase has exactly the value of a blogpost by a random American. The only thing it tells us is that the opinion hasn't immediately been flagged for censorship, which is not particularly unusual.

I know he's going to keep on about this until he's in his glass coffin in the mausoleum/being pushed out of a window, but Russia signed the Russia-NATO Founding Act after NATO expansion was announced. A few years later, Putin floated the idea of NATO expanding to include Russia.

The lesson the industry took from that incident was "we need to hire more bodyguards for our executives.". Nothing has changed, it was a pointless murder by a purposeless young man.

Given how radioactive the Republican brand is with young people (again) it makes sense there'd be a lot of cranks among those who *did* identify that way. This is still terrible though.

Yeah the issue is just straight up "nobody is funding the academic humanities and nobody *has* funded these positions since 2010."

I think the “good times make weak men” thing is not entirely wrong, they’ve just time-shifted it one cycle too far. These are the good times; they are the weak men

In practice the bill probably should have just banned TikTok with no recourse, but that probably would have been tossed by the Supreme Court and would have been much more unpopular with the general public.

That's mostly because the industry itself likes to promote AI as a replacement for creativity in order to break into non-software markets (it's already doing well in software). People are just inclined to believe any marketing they see around this product, it's an ad VP's dream.

Credible OSINT watchers do not do this, people need to stop with this nonsense.

The China Hawks are all frauds, you just wanted an excuse to do Yellow Peril shit

The fact that it's a new app that will be *retrained* may be a problem. The entire point of TikTok is the absurdly engaging algorithm and the feed people have already curated. Also the underlying algorithm will still belong to ByteDance, so like it or not, the PRC still has massive influence.