Americans had every chance to NOT VOTE

The conservatives scream at the liberals for ruining the country and forcing them to adopt Trump. The liberals scream at the indies for refusing to back their milquetoast pos candidate, because margins are thin and a handful of people can maybe sort-of flip a state. The indies scream at the non-voters for refusing to get off the bench and support someone outside the two-party system. The non-voters ignore it all, because there’s no real political engagement, just an endless cycle of hype and recrimination and betrayal every two years.

But, like, ya’ll got your eight years of Obama. And then you got your four years of Biden, even. Through all of that, Donald Trump was very nakedly and notoriously doing crimes. He was taking flights on the Lolita Express all the way back to the Clinton Era. Nobody investigated him. Nobody prosecuted him. Nobody refused his campaign donations.

And let’s not forget, Trump was a creature of the Clinton Campaign. He was a close personal friend of the Clintons, especially after Hillary took the NY Senate Seat. And he was the stalking horse intended to humiliate and dethrone Jeb Bush. Worked brilliantly!

What choice did lay Americans have in any of this shit? What were the alternatives? President Ted Cruz? Soviet Premier Jill Stein?

They could have just stayed home instead.

Lots of them did. Lots of them still do. Non-voter is still the largest voting denomination.

The USA deserve the fall of their empire

Absolutely agree. But Trump’s just the means toward that end. The US has deserved to fall for my entire life. And for a great many lifetimes before that.

As it stands, all we’re really suffering is a marginal diminishment of Superpower status. We’ll “fall” to the level of Japan or Germany or Brazil. Far less than we deserve.

People elect a representation of who they are.

They don’t, though. They elect representations of who the parties are. Sometimes. Other times, the representation fucks up in the middle of a debate and gets dragged off stage to be euthanized. Then his second-string understudy steps up and delivers some of the most lackluster campaigning since Mondale, effectively handing the election to a man who has spent the bulk of his political career underwater on favorables.

South Park chokes itself on its libertarian farts, but one thing they got right was the “Douche and Turd” metaphor. Genuine popular politicians - from Jesse Jackson to Bernie Sanders - never seem to make it to the final lap. Popular election winners never seem to have enough Electoral College votes to become President. Election counting systems never seem to function as advertised, forcing the SCOTUS to decide elections on the voters’ behalf.

This shit is rigged seven ways from Sunday. The voters are at the bottom of the list of people deserving of blame for their reps. As often as not, the candidates they produce are a reaction to even more loathem options on the primary ballot.

Americans love to tell one another that Muslims are barbaric child-raping uneducated rubes.

They really don’t like being reminded that they killed dozens of little girls whose very existence defied their racist caricatures of the Iranian people.

It’s incredible to see come to fruition, but we definitely had advanced prothetics speculated in the 1970s.

The Patch was hypothesized in 1988 and first documented in 1997, by a passing yacht racer. Research on the patch began in earnest in 2009.

Estimates on the size are still nebulous, as it continues to expand and shift. But I doubt anyone in the 1970s was predicting a patch of trash twice the size of Texas would appear in the Pacific Ocean over the next 50 years.

They had that in the 1970s

Ah, I’ve seen this take posted a few times sincerely.

kapow!.. he’s front and centre in a fight that’s he’s clearly ill-equiped to even interact with.

You say that like artists - especially Irish artists - haven’t been front and center on agitating against the Palestinian Genocide for years now.

He organized tour full of pro-Palestinian activists, ffs. Mackelmore isn’t some new figure, either. Jumping on popular leftist initiatives is kinda his brand.

If Sheeren had formed a band with Greenpeace, would he be blindsided when they started talking about the environment?

Like, I’m half inclined to give him some credit just for putting this thing together. Better to have it implode on you than to never tour at all.

Did Ed suicide bomb his career in the name of Palestine? Maybe

A Beginner’s Guide to Stalinism

Unanimous consent is intended to discourage countries from Brexit-ing over being a chronic minority member.

If anything, it’s worked against foreign influence in the long run, as EU member states have an incentive to spread the love equitably. If leadership was partisan, like in the US, you could easily have a “fuck all those Blue states for voting against me / Red states deserve what they get” situation, which very nearly broke up the ECB in the wake of the '08 financial crisis.

Putin only has to hijack one government

Putin has less pull in Hungary today precisely because Germany and France had to invest resources to win it back in the last election cycle.

If you had a rump Eastern Europe that Western states could piss off with impunity, they’d be awash in Nigel Farrage types by now.

Doesn’t help that Canadians have made a solemn vow to never build another house for less than $1M.

Meghan Markle would be popular with non-Whites.

Saying shit like this is what makes so many people disgusted with the Monarchy

Ukraine is not really application of the flypaper theory since Russia took the initiative in invading Ukraine.

Ukraine has been a playground for espionage and special operations since before the collapse of the USSR. The invasion came in the wake of a decade of civil strife following the Maidan Revolution. And that was, itself, following a decade of Russia influence on then-President Viktor Yanukovych. A man who was installed to roll back the 1996 constitutional reforms, which were imposed as part of the western Shock Doctrine model for post-Soviet state integration. And you can trace it back from there.

History didn’t begin in 2022.

The West did not draw Russia to invade.

The EU states were hoping to employ a combination of economic carrots and sticks to align Ukraine with its allies in Bulgaria, Romania, and Poland. The Russians - having had success in Crimea and Georgia with direct military intervention - decided to flip the chessboard and start throwing punches, after their friendly governments kept getting pushed out of power through West-friendly civil uprisings.

But the end-goal of EU interference in Ukraine was to advance the US-sponsored ring of anti-ballistic interceptor missiles inward towards Russia. And the presumption was that this would neuter Russian long-range artillery without provoking an all-out fight across the European member states. Ukraine (and Estonia and Latvia and Bulgaria) were always supposed to operate as a buffer zone to absorb any Russian ground attacks.

Ideally, it was never supposed to go this far. But to say Emmaneul Macron and Merkel / Sholtz / Merz want an air war west of Ukraine is absolute clown shoes.

Especially now that the Iranians have proved how porous and inefficient America’s anti-ballistic interceptor shield has become.

It is debatable whether the UK and France had the military capability to stop Hitler

You can debate absolutely anything, sure. But post-WW1 UK/France were squarely in a Trans-Atlantic economic depression in the 1930s. Even if you want to argue they could have mustered the physical capacity and projected it east of Germany, presumably by way of… where? Fascist Italy? there was zero domestic political interest in kicking off a second European land war.

What you’re totally forgetting is 1917 Russia, where the Tzarist government had collapsed on itself and imploded into a full communist government entirely on the back of Lenin’s anti-war movement and conscripted soldier’s revolt. Meanwhile, you had Spanish Republicans in a guerrilla war with Franco’s fascist officer corpse right next door in Spain happening at the same time as Hitler pushed on the open door of Czechoslovakia.

What Western Europeans and American Atlanticists feared more than anything was domestic communist uprising. If anything, Hitler moving east and squashing Soviet parties between Germany and Russia was seen as favorable to western interests.

You mistakenly thought I said use Ukraine as a fly paper. In response I said Europe would prefer that it be the fly paper.

I didn’t think you said that. I think Ukraine is the obvious fly paper in the analogy. Europe very clearly is not, nor does anyone outside of the continent wish that on themselves.

The UK and France thought that letting Hitler have the Sudetenland would appease him

That’s historical revisionism.

They had no capacity to keep Germans out of Europe. This wasn’t a choice they were making, it was an excuse for their impotency.

What I said was that Europe would prefer that Russia attack it rather than Ukraine.

That’s an insane thing to say, both on it’s face and based on the last four years of Europeans very strategically avoiding direct confrontation with Russia.

Then the combined forces of Europe would be able to defeat Russia.

Napoleon on line 1. Hitler on line 2. They are both eager to discuss what you have in mind.

The UK and France gave Hitler the Sudetenland

It wasn’t theirs to give. The Sudetenland is in Czechoslovakia, a country that didn’t even exist until 1918. It was full of Austro-Hungarians who were some of the first foreigners to explicitly align with Nazi Germany.

The UK and France weren’t in a position to stop him, any more than they were in a position to stop the proto-fascist war hero Gabriele Annunzio and a rogue force of Italian mutineers from seizing the Adriatic port city of Fiume in 1919.

Might as well claim Obama gave Putin Crimea. Or that Bush gave him South Ossetia and Abkhazia.

The Donbus had similar problems. It was populated by a large number of Russian nationals who were getting propaganda pumped into their brains from across the border. That was kicking off domestic insurgency, which Ukrainian nationalists were eager to squash.

Europeans had neither skin in the game nor influence in the region. All they were willing to do is send mercenaries and cheap military equipment over the border. And we know how that worked out.

Nobody wanted an all out war with Russia.

Modern journalism is just sixty part-time reporters standing around a photocopier.

The Battle of Dien Bien Phu used the flypaper theory in that the French attempted to draw the Viet Minh into attacking Dien Bien Phu where the French thought they could destroy them.

But they failed. And their defeat was so horrifying for the French public that the government lost its civilian support and was forced to withdraw from Indochina as a result.

If Ukraine is Europe’s Dien Bien Phu, that doesn’t look good for the Europeans.

War between Europe and Russia would be destructive but Europe has to decide a solution to Russia’s hybrid war against it.

I have no idea how Russia and the rest of Europe can reconcile after the last decade of relational decay. But I have to assume there’s some path back to peace that doesn’t run through a Ukraine-style missile exchange that stretches all the way to the Atlantic. There’s no world in which Moscow trading ballistics with Berlin, Paris, and London ends better for humanity than one without it.

Getting into Berghain with a doctor’s note.

https://www.kyivpost.com/post/7741

Per the language of the legislation itself

“Pornography is vulgar, candid, cynical, obscene depiction of sexual acts, pursuing no other goal, the explicit demonstration of genitals, unethical elements of the sexual act, sexual perversions, realistic sketches that do not meet moral criteria and offend honor and dignity of the human by inciting low instincts.”

So this appears to be a relic of the '00s culture war, spilling into Eastern Europe with the fall of the Soviet Union.