Ok

Because you can’t “program it to not attack China”. That’s such a wildly vague statement and system goal as to be essentially impossible to fulfill.

You can degrade or impair or disable certain systems in response to specific stimuli (e.g. a “kill switch” transmission/signal [that is itself a bit of a misnomer]) - like for instance, activate a radio beacon to diminish stealth (counterplay: wire cutters), or to offline external system integration/datalink (counterplay: none, it’s proprietary, closed source and largely classified), or any other number of things. It’s generally pretty hard to completely offline/mission-kill an airframe electronically (outside of an EMP, and even that’s not guaranteed when you’re talking about hardened, mil-grade components), because they’re specifically designed to be extremely resilient and fault-tolerant.

Source: I worked in defense aerospace earlier in my career

I understand what you’re saying, but I’m talking about stuff like what happens in the beginning of Ministry for the Future.

So while I understand what you mean, it’s not actually that simple.

Honestly China’s weapons exports are probably going to absolutely skyrocket, now that Russia is… preoccupied, and the US is busy pissing literally everyone off. Sweden and France will probably see pretty big gains too. Korea and Poland too, for armor

Good job Russian citizens who are standing up to Putin

I am fully resigned to the fact that we’re going to see catastrophic climate alterations within my lifetime

Justified Russophobia (there are many more examples across ten centuries from all over the Baltic states, central, southern, and Eastern Europe, and Eurasia to boot).

Command economy vs imbeciles, wcgw 🫠

Oh, was it? If that was the only justification… yeah. Seems like a straightforward play.

It is honestly a shockingly myopic call from them, I agree

It’s also crucial to point out that the chain of custody of “his backpack” was utterly fucked - the cop in question apparently started searching the bag at the McD’s, then just chucked it in her car, drove back to the station, and “continued the search there”. Riiiiiiiiiiiiiiight.

Combine this with how DESPERATELY they tried to portray him as a super dangerous criminal, as well as how some of the surveillance footage of him is like… kinda obviously not him, and I’m extremely suspicious that he was just a guy who fit the description and they pinned it on him.

But also, even if he actually did it, if I were on the jury, I’d vote to acquit.

Oh, I’m so sorry - is it serious?

Oh - I didn’t by any means intend to say the US has no culpability in the war. We absolutely do. A huge contributor to the active phase kicking off in 2022 was the US and the UK essentially abrogating their parts in the Budapest Memorandum - specifically, their guarantees of territorial integrity and sovereignty to Ukraine, in exchange for Ukraine surrendering their nuclear weapons to Russia (which Russia repaid by, of course, doing a shadow invasion in 2014 and an active/open invasion in 2022).

I blame Obama and Merkel for doing fuck-all in 2014. I believe Obama was interested in doing more, but Merkel dug in her heels because of that sweet, sweet oil from Nordstream I (and the at-the-time potential for NS II). She is never to be sufficiently damned for being a core enabler/useful idiot in this clusterfuck of a war that Ukraine is being subjected to. There are not a lot of politicians who fell further in terms of my respect for them than Merkel.

Better than Four Seasons if we’re being honest

Add this to the list of things I’m thinking now that, if you had told me a year ago, I’d have assumed you were utterly insane:

• I genuinely hope large sections of the US military mutiny against the federal government over lack of pay

Uh… no…?

Before the war started, Biden’s administration executed one of the most shrewd and incisive applications of intelligence sharing and publication to categorically disprove not only Putin’s smoke screen of “we’re totally not planning on invading Ukraine”, but also pretty much their entire casus belli.

After the war started - and before the current regime took power - there was a frustratingly long period of time where the US more or less hung Ukraine out to dry, and we only started seriously supporting them (in a similarly frustratingly piecemeal and nannying fashion) pretty far into the active phase of the war.

There’s an argument to be made that the Biden admin’s policy towards the war was aimed at bleeding Russia out; while I agree that there’s something to that with regard to the outcome of that policy, I honestly think Jake Sullivan (Biden’s NS advisor) being such a categorical limpdick with infuriatingly outdated worldviews, particularly with regard to Russia, was the primary driver of why things were so stingy and halting for so long. The attrition was much more an effect of that hemming and hawing, and much less the actual intent - at least, until towards the very end of the administration’s tenure… at which point leaning into the attrition strategy was blindingly fucking stupid, considering the incoming regime’s obvious predilections.

I don’t think it’s coherent to try to tie the Biden admin’s policy - frustrating, myopic, and stuttering as it was in many ways - to how the current regime is trying to orchestrate things, for several reasons:

• Orangeboi is still kind of obviously super Russophilic for deeply suspicious reasons
• Orangeboi et al have an extremely transactional, zero-sum, and kissingeresque worldview, and are demonstrably quite frustrated that Ukraine isn’t acquiescing to being treated like a nice little obedient pawn
• Orangeboi personally dislikes Zelenskyy, and orangeboi is notorious for letting petty personal disputes dictate his actions, and is further notorious for holding the most insanely stupid and spiteful grudges far beyond the bounds of logic and reasonability
• Orangeboi detests his political opponents, to the point where his regime is disassembling pretty much every single thing not associated directly with him, simply out of spite and animosity

they put at war the EU in Ukraine

Oh wow yeah, that must be why we’re seeing all the Bundeswehr and Armee de Terre and Wojsko Polskie and so on casualties in the war as they fight against Russia.

Except that’s utter bullshit and none of it is true. What the fuck are you smoking?

I don’t disagree that the current US regime is doing its best to undermine EU unity, but at the same time, don’t parrot idiotic and patently false Kremlin talking points.

Can I have opaque what a religion is?