Imagine living in a country of mental patients where if you insult their favorite storybook character, they have this burning urge to kill you.

Nervous anti-Harry Potter noises

What kind of profit wants people to die in their name for an insult?

We’re seven levels deeper than “What did the Prophet literally want you to do?” Because a lot of this is seen as a very secular form of treason, subversion, or other form of espionage. Iranians are deeply paranoid, particularly of “Western” influences, because the state leadership believes it is used to cultivate double-agents for the purpose of sabotage or counter-revolution.

In some sense, it’s like walking into an airport with a big t-shirt that reads “Dis Guys Da Bomb!” and getting tackled by security. The thing they’re responding to isn’t a banal fashion choice.

It is a shame it is not both, evil but just really bad at it.

Well… when you consider how badly they cocked up the Iran War, how badly they mangled their trade policy with Asia and Europe, how bungled their coms operation has been, how much money they’ve pissed away on publicity stunts that poisoned people to their brand, and how well groups like the DSA have done in their wake, it could be argued that they’re both evil and bad at it.

But, at some point, you give a pack of sociopaths the world’s largest military and police force and they’re going to do some damage. Even if they bungle the execution, it’s going to hurt Venezuelan fishermen and Gaza refugees and Minnesota EMTs far worse than it hurts anyone inside the actual halls of power.

seizing Starlink from Elmo has a place on the list

Democrats were falling over themselves to suck up to Elon prior to 2016. I don’t see anything in the cards to suggest they won’t start sucking up again as soon as they’re in the majority.

Start doing shit like that

There’s no money in it. There’s no glamour. You won’t be able to go out like Krysten Sinema, dining out in Silicon Valley wine caves full of AI Art with your fucktoy ex-marine bodyguard, if you try and pick a fight with the richest people in America.

You’d need a party with principles to butt heads like that. Or, at least, a party that could plan more than one election cycle ahead. The Dems simply aren’t that party. Not under Schumer/Jefferies, anyway.

Incompetent or Evil

Either way, maybe Ukrainians need a better solution than this dogshit service.

you can’t even comment on an attack by a hostile nation

The hostile nation is the host nation. The calls are coming from inside the house.

Reactionary Media is the UK’s largest international export. Everyone loves to throw a fit over Vladimir Putin. Nobody wants to acknowledge Rupert Murdoch, Robert Maxwell, Jonathan Harmsworth, or Paul Marshall.

Same with the damned yankees. You’re choking yourself to death on home grown AI slop fresh off the Mark Zuckerberg Shrimp Jesus Machine, but it’s evil foreigners who are to blame when you elect a new Ronadl Reagan.

Certainly, trading the promise of future fuel for dollars right now has a bunch of uses.

Russia is currently importing gasoline, due to domestic shortages caused by the war.

Even if the US could buy it’s way out, I don’t think Russia has enough to sell

Definitely crooked.

But cooked? Not holding my breath.

having a tantrum

Is reminding you of the questionable history of Apollo Global a tantrum?

What they lack in technology they make up for in brutality.

That’s how surveillance works

It absolutely is a national security issue!

Tell it to Volkswagen

That is until you consider Tik Tok

Wasn’t the big concern with TikTok entirely around how people were talking about the Palestine Genocide while US controlled social media had effectively blacked it out?

China is undoubtedly the worst followed by the US and Russia.

I doubt it. Russia doesn’t have the infrastructure or the manpower to compete with a modern surveillance state. And the US doesn’t operate alone, it’s part of the Five Eyes network, including Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom. Nevermind NISRF.

Part of what makes the US network horrifying is how many other countries are blithely along for the ride.

DON’T CRITICIZE CHINA

We put a machine with a radio in a room and the radio continued to try and function.

This is why we cannot import low priced, high quality foreign made electric engines.

if any other countries product was doing that, you’d have a fit

Why? It’s the same tired story, used to scare people who know nothing about communications technology. It’s all about making “Buy American” a national security issue.

If Brazil or Italy or even the dreaded Russia was being accused of this, why wouldn’t we stare sideways?

its doing the exact opposite of what was promised

I mean, remind me again why I’m trusting autos.yahoo.com on their reporting? Isn’t Yahoo a subsidiary of Apollo Global Management, a company with deep ties to the Epstein human trafficking cartel?

they do not connect to the internet. yet, they still attempt to connect to Chinese servers

Via?

Okay, but China Bad

They stole elections in Chile, Columbia, and El Salvador, just for starters.

But there was a huge uproar over Nicaragua cancelling elections when faced with alleged systemic manipulation and fraud. It’s just easier to believe a Leftist Government is Cheating than to acknowledge that the bourgeois in these states are stacking the decks.

they were just minding their own business

You think that’s what happened in 2003?

After the U.S. invasion, the Coalition Provisional Authority under Paul Bremer banned senior Ba’ath Party members from government jobs and dissolved the Iraqi Armed Forces.

This mass dislocation of soldiers became the root of opposition to US occupation and eventually the core of the ISIS movement.

Incidentally, also a group the United States clumsily expended in their efforts to harass Iraq’s neighbors.