Like… I am not going to say I am NOT surprised.

But it really does make sense if you look at history as a whole. Catholicism has largely always been characterized by a religious third party meddling in politics, economics, and the legal system. When they have a critical mass of Believers, they are a force to be feared. When they don’t? They are a nagging voice that world leaders are expected to kiss the ring of.

In this case? Somehow the catholic church is NOT the most evil voice in the room which… is a whole level of fucked.

But England broke with the pope centuries ago. And people forget that the US was “founded” by protestants. Or that the country is basically controlled by evangelical christofacists (another flavor of protestants). Like… it is STILL a big deal that JFK was openly catholic.

So… in a lot of ways? This is one fallen empire that pissed away its soft power getting mocked by the figurehead of a falling empire that pissed away its soft power.

Pointing out that the US spends massive amounts of money on military spending is just a fact. https://www.nato.int/content/dam/nato/webready/documents/finance/def-exp-2025-en.pdf is the official NATO write up of this from last year and the only countries that outspend the US (as a percentage of their GDP) tend to be the countries that are where The War will kick off Poland) or… countries with other things going on

And keep in mind that is in terms of GDP percentages and how massive the US’s economy was for most of that period.

The “conservative” talking point is not: “The US spends money on war while the EU spends money on healthcare and actually giving a shit about its population”. It is “The US spends money on war so you should do whatever we want”. Its also worth understanding that The EU did not spend that money anywhere near that altruistically but it doesn’t change the situation that the EU/NATO finds itself in.

Because when that military is increasingly likely to be the aggressor? You need to rapidly start making guns and revisiting what is required of your populace. People have exploded over Germany recently more or less codifying a standing policy but… there is a reason politicians are looking at their conscription laws.

Look. We all live in a content bubble. But if you actually want to understand the world, rather than just get angry in ways that are convenient to influencers and politicians, actually look at statistics and respond to facts. Rather than getting pissy and screaming “fake news” because you don’t’ like what you saw.

Because, to be clear, I REALLY don’t fucking like how broken the US is because of how much it spends on the military.

Yes… I said that the US was the military might of NATO. I did not say that was the only reason we have a truly massive military.

If all you are able to do is build tangential strawmen then… do yourself a favor and just go post on chatgpt.

You talk about GDP percentage, as if every country had a similar GDP per capita, and could this afford to spend similarly

Where did I ever say this?

The reality is that the US had more then enough money to both fund its military and fund its social programs, but it chose to instead fund the military and the already wealthy.

Which changes absolutely nothing from the perspective of NATO

Not a one sided deal to the disadvantage of the US as Americans seem to be made believe by Trump and his oligarchy.

Where did I ever say this was a one sided deal?

If you think we ‘happened’ to keep a large standing army just because we were defending Europe.

Where did I ever say that?

Because, for decades prior, the US was the military of NATO. The US pumped massive percentages of its GDP into maintaining a standing military while most of NATO focused more on social programs with comparatively minimal military spending.

And threats like russia wouldn’t attack out of fear of having to fight said militarized nation. Whereas now there is a very clear window where the nations that might stand up against them are rebuilding. “Fortunately” russia is stretched pretty far by a failed invasion of Ukraine but… go read the wikipedia article on how their previous invasions of Ukraine went.

Welp. The Internet as a whole is real broken. But Lemmy is very rapidly taking the cake for THE place where you can never discuss anything and the only responses are people who are incapable of having a conversation and are just angry that you didn’t say what they wanted to hear.

Dead Internet Theory looking increasingly not that bad. Or, better yet, prioritizing different social media where people respond to each other rather than the voices in their own heads. Somehow… we managed to actually leap frog reddit on the way down?

A better approach is to always run any software like this in a container/VM.

For piracy this is particularly important as you can very easily set it up so that it can ONLY communicate over VPN. So if your VPN goes down, you stop sharing.

My “primary” is qbitorrent+gluetun over proton (port forwarding). For Soulseek I have that go over the same tunnel but don’t bother with port forwarding.

I do my nonsense on a server in my basement. But you can run a docker compose stack on a Windows desktop if you really want to.

Its one and the same.

They don’t have any more (or less) credibility than the us government has. If the Iranian regime says something about how the war is going, assume it is a lie by default.

It is just in this specific case, what they say tends to line up with what third parties are corroborating.

Again. Fascist regimes lie. They don’t HAVE credibility as a result. That doesn’t mean everything they say is a lie, but it does mean everything they say should be verified by third parties.

Nobody said they weren’t

Iran doesn’t have “much to gain” from insisting they defeated The Evil United States and that no matter what the US throws at them they won’t give up the Strait?

The US is still, technically, the muscle of The Western World… at least right now. Saying that you withstood them (and all signs are that Iran has) is a HUGE “win” for a regime. Both in terms of making sure the people who were rebelling a few months back know they have no hope and nobody will come to save them but also to look strong in case any of the other superpowers want to back them up as a puppet regime.

And a LOT of the claims the Iranian regime have made have been rather suspect over the course of this war. A lot of it is “fair” murkiness when things were even more chaotic. But even their recent missile attack in the Indian Ocean is a mess of carefully leaked verbiage as each side decides whether they want to call it a failed attack or a warning shot. And I want to say the US/Israel started as the former before pivoting to the latter to try to convince Europe to join them.

We are all aware Iran sucks, but you seem to be clinging to the “the USA is fighting for democracy” BS that was stale a decade ago

No. I am not. Again. It is incredibly obvious you view the world as good versus evil. You cannot look at an event without deciding who is the good guy and who is the bad guy and you ignore whatever facts get in the way of that. A LOT of people do that. It is a symptom of the infantilization of so much Western media. But that isn’t real life and all you are doing by the constant “gotta hand it to them” nonsense is literally caping for murderous bastards.

Because, like I said,

This is two evil fucking regimes going to war for no apparent reason.

There is no strawman. I was literally responding to

Iran has more credibility than the orange pedophile

In this specific situation? Iran’s official line is more likely to be correct. If we were to look at things tomorrow, that very well might flip around. If you consider being correct in the moment to be “credibility” then… you probably should reassess your decision making skills.

Regardless: To quote the great one

issuing correction on a previous post of mine, regarding the terror group ISIL. you do not, under any circumstances, “gotta hand it to them”

…

They are a regime that has imprisoned and murdered civilians by the thousands. They didn’t like TO YOU because you weren’t paying attention.

Look, I realize we all want clear good guys and bad guys. And your favorite influencers LOVE to play on that to get views for their twitch channels. But this isn’t even a case where “Well, Hamas does a lot of evil things but they are morally justified in my opinion”. This is two evil fucking regimes going to war for no apparent reason.

Trust third parties. Trust facts. Don’t trust fascist fucking dictators.

Fascist dictators lie.

Just because you like the lie you are hearing doesn’t mean it is more likely to be true than not.

I am inclined to agree with the official Iranian line on this specific topic. But that has less to do with what Iran is saying and more to do with what I have gleamed from the OSINT community and third party news orgs.

I would not at all go that far. Iran’s regime is horrendous and they were murdering and abducting civilians by the thousands for the past year or two. They are just as in need of a propaganda win as fuckface.

Remember everyone: Just because one side is an asshole doesn’t mean the other isn’t one too.

Does nordvpn provide the option to just use wireguard or openvpn? Because that is almost always your best bet on linux, regardless.

https://gist.github.com/bluewalk/7b3db071c488c82c604baf76a42eaad3?permalink_comment_id=5075473#gistcomment-5075473 looks promising.

Awww. Don’t worry. Nobody is saying putin could ever be bad. He is everyone’s friend and the most heroic and ethical person in any possible conversation.

Now go back to sleep. The grown ups are talking

Any succession plan for a dictator is a mess. That is why they are very rarely “concrete” in the sense of being formally announced.

But a significant percentage of those who would have had a claim have likely agreed already. Allegedly this was a big effort last year.

Whether the chosen successor is any better is… very questionable. But, like with any regime change, we are either looking at ramped up atrocities or a reprieve for the populace as the successor keeps their head down for a few years.

Part of that has been that:

Under Biden, we were worried about actually going to war with russia and needing them ourselves. Under fuckface, we are worried about them being used against russia.

But a big part of it is that… patriot missiles fucking suck. So does the Iron Dome. Intercepting even “normal” velocity missiles is really hard. Let alone high velocity ones. It is just that israel has a lot of reason to shape propaganda to pretend they are insanely effective (for their own military industrial complex needs) when it is mostly about getting people into bunkers the second you think there is incoming fire. And then you just don’t really report on why so many construction contracts just hit the market.

And you see this when we deploy patriot missiles elsewhere. Off the top of my head, I want to say the official numbers put the Iron Dome at closer to 80% effectiveness. And patriot missiles… there have been engagements where that number might be closer to 0% than not. With recent use mostly juicing things up with aircraft and drones (MUCH easier targets).

And considering that Ukraine’s government benefits from reminding people how evil russia is? They aren’t going to be pretending the anti-missile tech is better than it is.