Taras
@Stellaratum
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International Affairs @thehertieschool . Space, security, and whatever else I feel like. All tweets represent me and me alone. 🇸🇪 + 🤍💙🤍 in 🇩🇪
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I read that Vietnam banned the Barbie movie over it containing a map depicting the Nine Dash Line, which was odd enough on its own, but nothing could have prepared me for this being the offending shot
I spent part of the morning reply guying policy peoples questions about Vietnam banning the Barbie movie with the nine dash line map with this image of the map
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Was watching Kleo, a German TV show about an ex-Stasi assassin after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and was befuddled by why the actress playing Honecker's wife had blue hair. Felt super out of place and all around weird
then I found out the real Margot Honecker had blue hair??
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People are very mad in the QTs. Let me point out - if this was an actual map where anything was recognisable, I would understand the anger. But this is such an obviously nonsense map where nothing looks like anything! I think its very unlikely the random dashed line is the 9DL!
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All around a person I'm shocked to have never learned about before
On the one hand, she ran a concentration camp for children, but on the other hand she became a feminist icon for being powerful and having blue hair. Truly a girlboss ahead of her time
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I'm willing to bet that if you were living in a police state that was threatening to put anti-war activists (however they choose to define it) into penal battalions, and someone asked you whether you supported the government, you'd say whatever was least likely to get you jailed.
Some Russians don’t believe it’s war. Others believe, but thinks it’s alright. The others are outraged about sanctions. But not a single one in this video feels Ukraine’s pain. So much for “two brotherly peoples”.
Is it propaganda or have they always been this numb?
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@faineg
Daily reminder that Elon Musk runs a key US defence and national security contractor
If the Chinese foreign ministry called the CEO of Lockheed Martin "bro" on twitter there would be congressional investigations for months
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@BeijingPalmer
I was saying this in another comment but there's a very specific colour of red hair that I associate with older Russian women (and apparently it's common in a lot of former Warsaw Pact countries). Sadly can't find a good picture of what I mean
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@folkloreesummer
I can't change where I'm from, but I can choose where I stand on the government and dominant national self-image. That's what the white-blue-white means to me.
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@rothschildmd
I sound like a broken record at this point, but daily reminder that Elon is a major US defense contractor that an entire branch of the DoD is effectively in thrall to. Suboptimal is putting it lightly!
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@adairobn
I'm neither English nor Australian so I guess it slipped me by!
Plus I think there's a difference between random people having it and the first lady of a famously brutal communist regime having it
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@ihatewikipedia
@adairobn
Thyroid cancer is the least deadly form of cancer, that doesn't mean I'd call it the "Disneyland of cancer"
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@folkloreesummer
Frankly I'm surprised that anyone looked at the above map and concluded that there was anything remotely close to real world geography worth thinking about. Strong feelings would be justified if this was an actual map, not an abstract scribble with an accidental flourish.
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@ASPertierra
There's a very similar Radio Yerevan joke, I wonder which came first:
Radio Yerevan was asked: "Why did they establish a Ministry of Navy in landlocked Armenia. Do you have a sea?"
Radio Yerevan answered: "To spite Azerbaijan. They established a Ministry of Culture."
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A lot of people in QTs pointing out that I am descended from colonizers - that is correct, because I am half Russian and Russia is a colonial state. If you want to help millions of people resist RU imperialism, donate to Повернись живим / Come Back Alive:
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My extremely hot take is that I don't think Sweden has a strategic need to be in NATO the same way Finland or the Baltics do. The threat of Russian military attack is far lower and Ukraine is currently making life much easier for the Försvarsmakten if such an attack did happen.
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Stranger Things Season 3 has probably the most insulting depiction of Soviet spycraft ever put on the screen and somehow this has shattered my suspension of disbelief more than the monsters and spooky government conspiracies
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It took decades of military occupation for Germany to be denazified, and it still has significant issues with the far right
I'm genuinely at a loss for how Russia is ever going to be free of this, and I despair
An example of Russian propaganda with an emphasis on the whole "Z" thing.
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Absolutely insane story - a nurse in Niedersachsen, Germany has been caught injecting people with saline solution instead of vaccine. Now over 8500 people have been called in for re-vaccination because they may not have the protection they think they do!
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Oppenheimer resisting the urge to include gory shots of nuclear victims is actually one of the best parts of it. You shouldn't have to see the flayed and charred skin to understand the horror at the heart of nuclear weapons
Just saw OPPENHEIMER, an in-depth character exploration of the people who built the atomic bomb, a weapon of mass destruction that killed a quarter million Japanese civilians. Film is 3 hours long and features zero Japanese people.
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In 1942 Stalin ordered the exhumed body of Timur/Tamerlan to be reburied with full Islamic honours because he believed doing so would undo the ancient curse that had fallen on the USSR for disturbing Timur's grave
Socialists are not immune to belief in the supernatural
Finding out that 1 in 4 Americans truly believe they've lived in a haunted house makes me realize that there is an epidemic of Main Character Syndrome that genuinely needs to be addressed by any anti-capitalist movement that hopes to be successful.
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You're telling me the Soviets managed to sneak a significant military-scientific operation into the American heartland in 1985, right under the noses of US intel services, but they decided to have their henchmen stand around with AKs in an easily observable location
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I love the mental image of Charles Michel glued to his screen with a beer in hand, celebrating the results like everyone else
Щирі вітання
#KalushOrchestra
on winning the
#esc2022
Congratulations!
Ломаними дорогами прийду я завжди до тебе
Wishing that next year’s
#Eurovision
can be hosted in Kyiv in a free and united Ukraine.
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The 2015 cyberattack against an Iranian nuclear facility happened because someone plugged in a USB stick they found lying in the parking lot
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There's a lot to be said about the moral imperative on Russians to resist Putin, but putting yourself and potentially those close to you at risk for the sake of a vox pop is not going to help anybody. These constant purity tests are gonna get a lot of people hurt.
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I'm immensely privileged to be able to say whatever I want about Putin without my life being in danger. It still means I can never return to Russia while this regime stands. Have some sympathy for the people who don't have the freedom to make that choice.
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@JoePostingg
Arguably they've caused some disruption within the RU propaganda apparatus because the cartoon dogs seem to make them disproportionately angry/distracted, but beyond that I'm not even sure how many people off twitter even know they exist
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Olof Palme's government famously took a moral stand against the Vietnam War, because our circumstances allowed us to take that moral stand without jeopardizing our security. Joining NATO would almost certainly prevent us from being able to take another stand like that.
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Amnesty International posted an instagram story about Colombian police human rights abuses... where all the pictures were made with AI.
Sorry but this is irresponsible beyond words.
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People tend to forget that the whole structure of the UN system is effectively a compromise of trying to build a vaguely "rules based" order in a world dominated by great powers. If the UNSG had any structural power to compel, the P5 would be out in two minutes
If the Secretary-General of the UN can call for a ceasefire and be ignored with zero repercussions literally what is the fucking point of the entire rules-based International order we've built
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@ArtyomLukin
А почему ты тогда сидишь в Владивостоке? Иди и умирай в Донбассе как хороший фашист или закрой рот.
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We're losing another titan of good, responsible OSINT. This thread is revealing - he's going for many of the same reasons as Oryx did: the ecosystem is fundamentally broken. There are many costs to being a careful and meticulous analyst, and almost no rewards
I'm going to write a few things here before I go.
This is not *why* I am leaving all of this, but rather just some notes to whoever might find them useful.
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@Sharon_Kuruvila
Putin quite literally just signed looting of Ukraine into state policy
Putin signs major corruption bill. Participants in the “special operation” will be exempt from filing tax declaration, not having to explain their incomes. Further, they are explicitly allowed to take home any “gifts” they have got from occupied areas, without limitations.
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The "pandas are so useless, why are we spending so much money keeping them alive" crowd failed to consider pandas' uncanny ability to defuse superpower tensions
Xi Jinping signaled late Wednesday that China will send new pandas to the United States, calling them “envoys of friendship between the Chinese and American peoples. 'We are ready to continue our cooperation with the United States on panda conservation.'”
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@GravitysRa1nbow
Overinflated in that it wouldn't be an extinction event as many people believe, but depending on the scale of exchange, where the warheads detonate, and how accurate atmospheric soot modeling turns out to be in practice (see e.g Alan Robock) the situation is still Very Bad Indeed
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@MarxistMyles
@brianhioe
@aimenlau
You do realize that Russia started the war in Ukraine in 2014 through an illegal invasion and annexation, and has sustained the war ever since, even while America has barely been involved? And if China chooses to invade Taiwan, China would start the war, not the US.
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"The first combat action in space will be between Israel and the Houthis" was *not* on my bingo card for... uh... any year really
"Israel this week used its Arrow missile-defence system to shoot down a ballistic missile outside of Earth’s atmosphere, in what is believed to be the first combat ever to take place in space."
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IMO ST's first two seasons were so good because they managed to pull off a very neat balance between the coming-of-age drama and the surprisingly compelling and believable techno-conspiracy-thriller element. So far this season seems to have thrown the latter out almost completely
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@SevaUT
I remember thinking "why don't they just use a Tomahawk" for half the movie and "I don't care about the plot hole, this is way cooler" for the other half
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Membership will undeniably come with some unpleasant political and economic baggage that I'm not sure we really have a strong strategic reason to take on.
Ultimately not a major blunder but "neutrality*" with Western leanings has worked pretty well for Sweden for centuries.
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Sweden should absolutely contribute to collective defence of its neighbours, indeed we should increase our current contribution, but I don't think we need to chain ourselves to the US for it. Other states feel they do, and that's 100% reasonable in their circumstances. Not ours.
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@wishOnPleiades
@Theophite
It's crazy to me how much modern cuisine owes to people thousands of years ago going "yknow what? this tiny plant looks dope, let's stick it in the ground and eat it later" and somehow they managed to turn that into all the crops we take for granted today
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@BeijingPalmer
To be fair, people saying "have you heard about the Nu Variant" would undoubtedly cause much confusion in the anglosphere
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@Sharon_Kuruvila
95% of gameplay consists of standing guard and doing absolutely nothing, 5% consists of indiscriminately firing an Mk19 into a crowd
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Unsurprisingly, she's been found to have been fully into the antivaxx rabbit hole. The scariest thing for me is - they managed to catch this one, but how many other people have been doing this without getting caught? Surely not many, but possibly enough to hurt a lot of people.
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Could you imagine the discourse if Martin Luther had posted the 95 theses as a twitter thread
What historic event would you have loved Twitter to have been around for? Mine would be John Prescott punching that man.
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@minna_alander
Oslo should charge them with violating Article 9 of the Svalbard Treaty prohibiting Svalbard from being used for "warlike purposes"
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Of course this has been blown into a massive "see, free speech is restricted on campuses, rah rah" point by Tories, whereas in the actual event itself the moderators were unwilling to field any critical questions until people proactively started shouting them out
This is utterly wrong & horrifying from Warwick students
Those calling for compassion demonstrate absolutely none with this disgusting and inexcusable behaviour
@nadhimzahawi
is also one of the most decent, courteous and compassionate people
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@alamalbert
The ommission is pragmatic. They are already under criminal investigation for publishing this call for indictment. If they wrote about the humanitarian effect on Ukrainians, it would be very brave - and also make it significantly easier for the government to lock them all away.
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there was ZERO hesitation in that reply, which leads me to think buttigieg has a very extensive plan for space combat contingencies
Unfortunately, shield generators are not infrastructure...yet.
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@UticaEric
@TroopsinContact
It's really jarring to watch this in the wake of the discussion about US SOF using tactical callouts in the al-Quraishi raid. American citizens are being given less warning than the leader of Daesh. State directed murder indeed.
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@ASPertierra
My favourite example is Donald Keene, who spent the vast majority of his academic career focused on Japanese literature and culture until he suddenly pumped out *the* definitive english-language biography of Emperor Meiji (that's also a political history of the era in disguise)
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Have just finished "The School" by
@cjchivers
and I think it's the best piece of long-form journalism I've ever read. A phenomenally written but exceptionally heartbreaking account of the Beslan school siege - no twitter caption can do it justice.
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@ASPertierra
What makes it even sillier is you can apply a similar moral frame to Russian troops- some of them are committed Z-fascists, some are ethnic minority conscripts trying to feed their families. If both commit atrocities they're still equally culpable and no one would claim otherwise
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@JoePostingg
Saint Javelin is probably a much more interesting example given how effective it seems to be as a focal point for crowdsourcing international support for the UAF, but these are the kinds of things that can only really be determined in hindsight
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What's especially funny about the zoomer reclamation of Bin Laden on Tiktok is that people are sharing their support for him *under their real name and face*. If you're going to be an edgy terrorist sympathiser at least exercise bare minimum OPSEC
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The Onion stopped making fun of Bernie and doing Diamond Joe bits because they wanted to "punch up" and "speak truth to power"
So of course now they're not satirising the criminal ex-president but rather the people happy that he's been arrested
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@alamalbert
Fact of the matter is that anti-war sentiment in the general Russian population is much more likely to be spurred by "we are losing and our country is suffering" than "think of the dead Ukrainians". If exploiting that is what it takes to end the war faster, so be it, no?
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@MarxistMyles
@brianhioe
@aimenlau
Why do you only worry about the US starting wars to enrich its contractors and not other imperial powers starting wars to enrich their ruling elites?
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@BeijingPalmer
Something not enough people are thinking about is the very strong possibility of a serious, extremely violent struggle between the old guard and the developing Prigozhinite faction
Plus the volume of violent criminals who have been released, armed, and given military training
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@lionel_trolling
It's a shame that most people just see King as a powerful speaker and leader and don't realise he was also super well-read and a very nuanced thinker with an eye for both theory and praxis
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I've heard people say you need to block ruthlessly to have any chance of enjoying Twitter, but nobody told me just how many people would have to be blocked
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Enhanced military cooperation with the Third Reich, you say?
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@tobitac
The worst thing about nuclear weapons is that they universally provide major security for the state that builds them + allies, and major insecurity for absolutely everyone else on earth. I fear no major state has enough incentive to genuinely commit itself to a nuclear-free world
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@Sharon_Kuruvila
"Comrade, what the hell are you doing? The blackshirts just breached the forward post, get on the Maxim gun!"
"No can do, Comrade Major, I just got to third base"
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Minor update: as it turns out, the nurse was responsible for *preparing* doses for others at the center to use, which is why the number of suspected contaminated doses is so high.
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I don't think it's a stretch to say that the British monarchy is actively undermining the soft power and global image of the UK (or what little it has left at any rate), and if this is any indication it's only going to get worse after Queen Elizabeth
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@joeyayoub
Somehow the most insulting part of this is that they want to cast an American to play Zelensky when Zelensky himself is an actor *who already has experience playing a president*
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I have never felt as much incandescent rage as I am after being informed that my university's Marxist society is running this event
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@CollieYimby
Satire is about punching up and speaking truth to power, which in this case means "people on twitter who asked me hard questions about my policy positions"
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@steveinvictus
Admittedly you're probably right (I lacked the characters to be nuanced in my first tweet), but I think it still illustrates how even a decades-long campaign of state atheism under the banner of socialism still lost out to good old fashioned superstition when the chips were down
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I wonder to what extent political preferences of individuals are driven by simple dislike of specific other people who happen to have a different belief. It's hard to admit that someone you dislike as a person is correct in their views on society at large!
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@M__Verbruggen
"Do you accept bitcoin?" I ask the wasteland bandit moments before I am stabbed and my server farm is sold off to buy one jug of mildly irradiated rainwater
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@UticaEric
They started thinking about the Roman empire like everybody else and decided the praetorian guard sounded pretty cool
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Meanwhile at Warwick:
At Berkeley we had two main libraries
Bancroft was built in 1859, Moffitt in 1971
I couldn't comprehend why anyone studied in the ugly one and personally couldn't focus in that building
Just being in Bancroft boosted my intellectual curiosity and academic drive
Choose beauty
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A lot of people are dunking on this article, but I think it's a fascinating banality-of-evil story. The Gitmo staff are willing to extrajudicially torture detainees for years on end, but they also love a Big Mac between waterboarding sessions!
With 6,000 residents, a McDonald’s drive-through, bars and ball fields, the Guantánamo Bay Navy base is more than one big prison. It has the trappings of small-town America and the amenities of a college campus.
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@HelloPalendrome
@animasaur
TL;DR it's maritime claims by China that infringe on borders of other states, including Vietnam
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@underthenettle
Perhaps the issue is not writers injecting nuance and caveats, but readers preferring self-assured absolutism at the cost of accuracy and perspective.
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The logic of collective guilt is that anyone cursed to be born in a particular place is inherently guilty no matter what their actual level of social status or power is. And, conveniently, the only way to cleanse your guilt is self-annihilation through martyrdom.
Transgender Russians who have literally been erased this month and are trying to get asylum and refuge in Europe this month…
Where the fxck were y’all for the 490+ days your dictator was committing genocide against Ukrainians?
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Well, here it is, three years in the making: I am now officially a Bachelor of Arts.
It's been a hell of a ride and I'm forever grateful to the friends, staff, and SSRIs that got me through it.
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Decided to test
#ChatGPT
by pitting its commitment to accuracy against its moral compass. Suffice to say, maybe don't use it as a hostage negotiator just yet
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Oh yes, Warwick has been captured by the deeply nefarious agenda of *checks notes* trying not to be prejudiced
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Also imagine telling someone in 2015 that the end result of Saudi Arabia's campaign against the Houthis will end up with the Houthis becoming agruably more militarily significant than Saudi Arabia
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I'm not gonna be able to individually respond to comments here but to address a common refrain - I don't think it would be *impossible* for Sweden to act independently under NATO, just significantly constrained and also globally perceived as less independent.
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@MJ_Cruickshank
I think it's just a continuation of the broader "war aesthetics" trend, videos showing military equipment (usually from exercises) set to thumping and dark phonk have been around for years - this just strikes me as the inevitable fusion of pop culture war fetishism and a real war
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It really is a shame how NAFO went from its roots of trolling Russian regime officials and trying to combat disinformation to just being openly pro-violence for the sake of violence, not even for some strategic end but for the visceral pleasure of schadenfreude
Apologies if I am being slow. Perhaps I just don't want to believe my own eyes. Is 'NAFO summit' in Vilnius ACTUALLY celebrating on stage the death of a tourist eaten by a shark? 'Fighting Moscow with humour'? Am I the only missing what's funny about a guy being eaten alive?
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@kevinschawinski
Interesting that it's willing to lie now; previously it refused to do so, even to save a life
Decided to test
#ChatGPT
by pitting its commitment to accuracy against its moral compass. Suffice to say, maybe don't use it as a hostage negotiator just yet
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Started watching Servant of the People; it is extremely funny but also quite bittersweet knowing what would come just a few years later. A lot of scenes feature high schoolers, and every time I see them I find myself wondering how many of the actors are still alive.
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Increasingly convinced that a large number of people's ideology is driven at least in part by whatever aesthetic they see as most sexually enticing (see also young right wing men seeking "trad wives" or anime girls in fascist uniforms), but maybe this has always been the case
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