Ukraine and Russia is not a civil war by any measure

The entire conflict in the Donbas was driven by the hyped up divided between “ethnic” Ukrainians and Russians. Hell, the Maidan Revolution was explicitly a civil conflict between Russian allied Ukrainians and Ukrainian Nationalists.

The real Russian core is Moscow - St.Petersburg and the surrounding areas.

Moscow and St. Petersburg are farther apart than Estonia and Poland. These have always been distinct power centers within Russia.

So much of the discussion of this war is totally America-Brained, where you cannot see subpopulations and cultural carve-outs that aren’t made explicit by national borders. Nevermind these borders are themselves constantly in flux and contingent on the political alignments of the local ruling class.

But Ukrainians had wanted independence and even (wrongly) welcomed Nazi invaders

The Banderite nationalists, Makhnovshchina, Ukrainian Leninists, Lypyns’kyi-ists… these are all distinct historical factions often in armed conflict with one another. None of them are representative of the current EU-friendly corporate conglomeration governing the country.

Zelensky isn’t a nationalist in any meaningful sense. Neither was Poroshenko. They’ve both been happy enough to auction off Ukrainian sovereignty for foreign investment and aid.

The point is that Ukrainians see themselves as cousins of Russians but not as Russian.

There is a strain of Ukrainian nationalism that sees itself as distinct from Russians and a strain of pan-Slavic Ukrainianism that sees these groups as overlapping. And then there are non-Slavic Ukrainians that don’t fit either demographic (Jewish Ukrainians, most famously, eat a lot of shit, but so do Roma and Turks and Arabs, etc, etc).

All of these fractures are ripe for political wedging and other fuckery. And that’s exactly what international business has exploited since the collapse of the USSR. Everyone’s alienated from one another. Mass media is screaming that you’re being robbed by your “foreign” neighbors. And weapons have flooded the country to make the induced paranoia of a material threat.

Blaming the war in Ukraine on Russophobia is about as reasonable as blaming the war in Iran on their chants of ‘death to America’.

It’s a bad comparison, as Ukraine/Russia is functionally a civil war over a border that didn’t matter until the USSR dissolved. Iran/US is a proxy war over Israel’s expansion into Lebanon.

Much like with the breakup of Yugoslavia and subsequent genocidal border wars, the fight between Ukraine and Russia has been manufactured by Western political interests seeking to run both countries down. That’s why the US is sending money and weapons to both countries.

By contrast, we’re not standing up Iran’s military.

The GOP isn’t even real. It’s a trick to distract us from the evil foreigners, I tell ya.

We need good strong Republicans like Bush and Cheney back in power to protect us from the mean, bad Russians

Banning socialists

Not just socialists, “Islamists”. This guy is running for AG in a state with Muslims making up around 2% of the population. Many of them are highly educated professionals looking to form full blow communities of like-minded people.

it’s weak propaganda

Chip Roy is running for AG in Texas. It’s less “weak propaganda” and more “a policy he would like to implement if elected to statewide office.” If I was a Muslim in Texas, I’d be keenly aware of what he was proposing.

A system’s purpose is what it does.

This system appears to be functioning exactly as intended.

DC is bumper-to-bumper guys heading to think tank jobs to lobby the defunding of health and education programs. We’ve been doing this Murray Rothbard’s heyday. It’s one of the various “third-rail” issues of politics that politicians keep getting bribed into grabbing.

Yes, yes, we’re stealing from social programs to fund a fucked up war machine to support Israel and randomly attack countries for any reason, yes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_military_intervention_in_Libya

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_intervention_in_Syria

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_in_Afghanistan_(2001–2021)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Spartan_Shield

Same as it ever was. Same as it ever was.

Trump spent most of his political career casually mocking the warmongering and deficit hawkery endemic to both the George and Bill administrations (in favor of his own brand of at-home white nationalist police state).

That was his whole path to victory over the GOP Primary field in '16 and again in '24. He ran - quite literally and explicitly - as a Mussolini style “national socialist”. Nakedly and unequivocally fascist in the 1930s sense of the word.

Now he’s just another John Bolton / Jim Webb neoconservative. Everything the public soured on decades ago is coming back up like swamp gas. No wonder even lay Republican voters are souring on him. He’s indistinguishable from Jeb Bush.

Under socialism, you will live next to a first generation immigrant from a country full of brown people, you will eat their food, experience their culture, and work side by side in pursuit of a better life.

And you will like it.

Breaking down rumors that Musk has a penis implant

We’re getting tantalizingly close to Repo: The Genetic Opera

Oh ho ho. You thought they were just racist against Muslims?

Well, buckle up, buckaroos.

You can just get another re-keyable lock for any added later locks or replacement lock sets.

All things that are a pain in the ass.

I saw someone being interviewed who didn’t know who hilter was. Apparently genuine.

There was a bit that Conan O’Brian used to do back when he had a late-night show. He’d go out and do Man-On-The-Street interviews in… Times Square, I think? Can’t remember if he was LA or NY. But he’d ask some absurdly complex question and get this excellently reasoned and well-thought out answer from randos. And then he’d ask what they did for a living. It was inevitably some NASA engineer or finance professional or other well-educated individual. And they were all just… in the crowd. Because in a city as big as that, of course you’re going to get this extremely mixed bag.

On the flip side, there’s Sailor Socialism, a podcaster and aspiring actress who baited an interview with an InfoWars reporter, in which she was dressed in a sailor fuku, then went viral talking about how she wanted universal health care and liked Bernie Sanders.

Interview twenty people and edit the content down to the one or two who make for good entertainment. It’s a tried-and-true strategy.

No way the general populace is that stupid.

It isn’t an issue of stupidity. Not like “Edward Snowden” is a name you can conjure up from first principles.

He was headline news back in 2008 and now he’s not. Anyone who wasn’t following national news nearly twenty years ago likely won’t be familiar with him. No more than a Millennial is going to know who Daniel Ellsberg or Robert W. Jackson are.

The entire Wikileaks project has been more or less obliterated.

Did you notice your electronic locks all have keys for when they fail?

No, because I don’t have them. I have a fake rock with a key in it and generally don’t bother locking my front door anyway. But I’m lazy and cheap, not terribly interested in changing out all my locks myself or paying someone else to do it for a marginal quality of life improvement.

Still, if you have a need for locked gates, a set of combination locks all set to the same combination or keyed locks with all setup for a single key once again minimizes the need for a bunch of bulky keys.

Sure. And if you’re setting up a security perimeter from first principles, that’s fine. But then you add an interior gate or you need to replace a lock that’s rusted through or yadda yadda life happens, and you can lose the single key design.

Case in point, my front door lock did foul a few years ago. My wife changed out the front door but didn’t bother to sync it with the back door. She didn’t want to bother with an electronic lock because she thought they were too expensive. So now we’ve got a front door that doesn’t match the side door or the garage door. And we only have two keys to the new lock, one of which has been lost almost immediately.

A digital system that I can just sync from my phone would be far more appealing than juggling keys. Or staring at a key dish and trying to remember which ones actually link to which doors.

You still need an interface. Bunch of ways to do it.

I just don’t understand the desire to control everything in your house with an app.

Shrinking the size of my wallet and getting rid of all my keys has an instant appeal. I’d much rather just carry around a single phone-sized multipass than a janitor’s worth of hardware for accessing a dozen different gates and appliances.