Please read the article you yourself

Buddy, you can try reading past the first paragraph. There’s an extended back and forth in the interview discussing the violence around these bases and their broad unpopularity.

Deleting Roblox and installing Factorio

You’ll thank me when you’re older, kid.

Well, how about we just try it first

Nobody in the United States has ever tried to vote against a fascist dictator?

instant armed combat

Who do you think is actually organized an armed uprising against Trump? How do you think they’re doing it “instantly”?

The presence of Ray Arnold the Chief Engineer

Two IT guys

Jurassic Park was operating with a skeleton crew at the time

The opening scene - a working class schlub dragged into the Velociraptor cage because the transport protocols weren’t up to the task of containing a dinosaur - illustrates the core conceit of the movie. That humans and their modern technology simply aren’t ready to contend with a far more primal and powerful animal kingdom.

The hurricane flushing everyone off the island illustrated a major vulnerability. But the premise of the movie is that this park was never going to work precisely because the people running it were consumed by their own hubris and incapable of seeing the full extend of risk at play.

Nedry has a whole team working on the park’s IT system.

A team he’s undercut and sabotaged in order to afford him the opportunity to steal Hammond’s embryos. The subsequent movies are all around various mega-corps trying to seize control of the island and its bounty of dinosaur specimens and failing time and time again. The issue isn’t merely that they’re cheap, its that they’re all greedy, myopic, and self-destructive.

Hammond was not stupid enough to trust the entire park’s computer infrastructure on just one guy.

He was stupid enough to get locked out of his own systems by trusting a skeleton crew to manage the park during a hurricane. But that’s just the kick-off of the story. Crichton could have written it differently - an engineering problem that the hurricane exposed, dinosaurs that outsmarted the security, the EPA coming in to shut the park down Ghostbusters style, animal liberation activists trying to free the dinosaurs - and ended in the same place.

In many ways, Jurassic Park is a retelling of King Kong. Just swap out the big monkey for a big lizard. But the core of the story - the belief that humans can turn these primal forces into an entertainment commodity revealing man’s hubris - is tied up in Hammond’s belief in his ability to control the uncontrollable.

Nedry is just an example of one more thing Hammond can’t control.

There are people in literally every country that wants foreign influence or bases out, that proves nothing

You don’t think an enormous population of foreign military resulting in high rates of unprosecuted sexual violence and organized crime demonstrates anything about the state of politics in the host country?

So you believe people in Korea, Japan, and the Philippines at the highest levels of power just… want this for their people? Or do you think they’re so beaten down they don’t believe in their own capacity for self-defense?

Random, but did you know an alternate name for Russians where I live is “occupiers”?

I mean, you keep coming back to Russians, as though you think they’re a different species.

I guess you’d call them, what? Orks?

Is the violent occupation of conquered territory only a problem for you when the occupying army is Slavic?

Germany, definitely. We’ve had that country inundated with bases for nearly a century

Brother, this isn’t Pravda

why?

Because investors will cut you a blank check now that we’re in the middle of an inflationary hype cycle

Excited to see a “No AI” aisle at Best Buy that looks like the “Organic” section of the grocery store

Congress declares war. Not the executive branch

Congress authorized enormous discretion to the president under the NDAA and AUMF. There’s no actual need to declare war in the modern era.

Congress declares war, not the President.

Congress has already authorized the President to deploy military units at the president’s discretion, per the AUMF which renews biannually under the NDAA

Japan Taiwan Philippines South Korea

Are client states under the occupation of the US military. They aren’t worried the US might fall to act. They’re worried the US might act to remove their leaders and replace them with more pliant ones.

Nuclear proliferation will follow

Why would an occupied territory hosting US nuclear weapons build their own nuclear arsenal?

Why would the US allow them to do so?

Aren’t things like Article 5 basically a ride-or-die pact that obligates member nations to come to eachother’s defense?

They aren’t self enforcing. Someone at the Pentagon actually has to give the order to mobilize

The analogy I’ve always heard is “living inside the fence” versus “outside the fence”. And how your perceived position shapes how you behave politically.

But I also see this painfully naive assumption that Democrats are actually for looser immigration policy or that a democratic administration won’t end in your wife/kids getting the old heave hoe.

In the end, it’s just two Have Nots arguing which plutocrat would trickle down on them better. There’s no reason to vote for Trump, but no reason to vote against him either. Doubley so when you realize your vote isn’t even impacting the election’s outcome.

If every Republican had a crystal ball and could know with perfect certainty whether their immediate family would suffer from Trump’s immigration policy… he would still be president today. The margins were too wide and the deck was too stacked.

It is tragic what is happening to their parishioners right now, but the bishops can only blame themselves.

No shortage of liberal bishops who promoted like-minded candidates. Everyone from John Kerry to Joe Biden got a healthy windfall of support from the Catholic community at-large. As a consequence, Dems have historically been very squirrely on their support/opposition to abortion, with “Pro-Life” Democrats being a significant chunk of the elected bureaucracy.

The biggest opposition to ACA in the first two years was from these very Democrats - folks who twisted and squirmed at the prospect of extending the wrong kind of health care to the wrong kind of people. This wasn’t a “Catholics brought this on themselves by electing Republicans”, it was “Democrats allowed misogyny to fester within its party under the cover of the Catholic vote”.

In the same way, Democrats have historically demonstrated a chronic unkindness to migrants and their families whenever they saw an electoral advantage in kicking people while they were down. This dates back to the Clinton Era of the 90s, when Bill ran to the right of Bush Sr on immigration and won California on the anti-Mexico vote. Catholics who were staunchly pro-immigration ran around backing migrant-friendly(ish) Republicans like Bush, Rubio, Romney, and Kasich only to get their backsides blown out by Trumpism.

I’m a little tired of pretending people just don’t understand what is going on. Conservatives are fucking liars. They lie about their beliefs. They lie about their understanding. They feign ignorance at the horror and buy into nakedly fake conspiracy theories and artificially generated images/videos. To quote Upton Sinclair

It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.

The common denominator across the conservative movement is industry of employment. O&G, FinTech, Sales, Real Estate, Automotive, MLMs… If you find a staunch conservative pundit, you’re going to quickly discover one or more of the above puffing up their financial sails.

Religious Right figures know full well that their religious leadership differs from their political leadership and they don’t care. Their dioceses are funded with the money from extractive and exploitative industries. Their churches are built with blood money. And they’re going to defend that money far more zealously than they defend some random asshole from Chicago promoted to the highest office via a conclave of foreign fucks most of them couldn’t pick out of a crowd in full uniform.

The current level of cognitive dissonance has been a long time in the making.

It isn’t dissonance. Its a pronounced divorce between the local churches and Rome that’s been widening since Vatican II. As Catholicism spreads across the developing world and shrivels in the imperial core, the so-called Catholics find their economic future and their religious faith at odds. And they aren’t flinching in response. They’re going all in on the money.

Two-State Solution has never been viable for the same reason Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan have never been viable outside the sphere of Israeli influence. Any state that isn’t aligned with Israel is targeted for a combination of assassinations/bombings and infiltration/regime change.

Why would an “independent” Palestine be any different? A popular government would never be allowed to rule. At best, you’d have an Egyptian style military dictatorship or Jordanian monarchy which rules the public with an iron fist. At worst, you’d have a Libya or Yemen, where the native government is merely a proxy for the Israelis to continue their genocide of the local population.

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