Yeap, I’m a product of an interracial marriage who is currently in an interracial marriage with someone who is openly bisexual, in the reddest state in America. I’m probably going to be pulling the rifles out of the attic for a good cleaning this weekend.

I haven’t read this book, but I’m pretty skeptical of how they define nonviolent resistance and what makes a revolution “successful”

The Iranian Revolution, 1977–1979

5. The First Palestinian Intifada, 1987–1992
6. The Philippine People Power Movement, 1983–1986
7. Why Civil Resistance Sometimes Fails: The Burmese Uprising, 1988–1990 Case Study Summary

Are the revolutions they are principally utilizing, and that makes me think this book isn’t exactly the most academically honest study around.

The Iranian revolution had battles in the streets and plenty of deadly clashes with the Shahs regime. It also led the the largest political massacre in the country’s history.

The Philippine People Power Movement

The yellow revolution funded militant groups, featured a helicopter attack on the president’s compound, and only didn’t devolve into a massacre of civilians because a marine commander refused to participate in the wholesale slaughter of tens of thousands of people.

The First Palestinian Intifada

Led to the deaths of over a thousand civilians and is a precursor the the genocide we are currently witnessing.

The Burmese Uprising

Started fairly similar to the Philippine uprising, except their military commanders were perfectly fine massacring civilians, with a death toll of 3k-10k people…

I am willing to give this a read, but I would also suggest other people read “Setting Sites” by Scott Crow as a counterpoint.

That’s an incredibly reductionist and ahistorical explanation of how the Nazis overthrew the Weimar Republic…

Not to mention incredibly dismissive to the thousands of people who were literally battling brown shirts in the streets of Berlin leading up to the burning of the reichstag .

The Nazi didn’t rise to power because people had a defeatist attitude, it’s because the Nazi murdered their opposition, were perfectly fine with intimidating voters, and were backed by corporations and a significant portion of the population who blamed socialism for the economic slump of postwar Germany.

If you truly believe this, I highly suggest reading “The Death of Democracy” by Benjamin Hett. Phone calls aren’t going to sway the opinions of someone who fundamentally doesn’t think you should be alive.

It may be a holdover from an aging stereotype. Not sure how the kids nowadays perceive east Asians, but in the 90’s it was definitely the cause of a lot of the fights I got into as a kid.

There’s a better video of a guy who is pretty clearly involved in organized crime, front kicking him in the chest, and then beating the shit out of his two friends by himself.

I’ve been waiting for him to go to Korea. A lot of western people still think Chinese, Japanese, and Korean people are a homogeneous bunch of meek doormats.

Korean culture is polite, but also very very angry if it’s not reciprocated. Plus, every dude grew up with a national sport that involves kicking people and then they have to go into the military.

This dude got assaulted by random Korean dudes like 4 different times and streamers put out a bounty on his head. The hilarious part is that the news stations and police are protecting the identity of the people who assaulted him, but have made him public enemy number 1.

I’m guessing they believe that the real estate collapse is a 4d chess move to entrap private equity. I’m also guessing they don’t realize the largest real estate developers in China are already state owned entities…

SOE are owned by the state, but they are operated just like any other profit seeking organizations, and thus are not immune to the same problems with private equity we have in the west.

My dude, this is what happens when you create an ethno state. Especially when you purposely conflate ethnicity, religion, and nationality into one stigma which you create organizations to define and police.

Antisemitism as it’s currently defined is in part a byproduct of cognitive dissonance applied at the geopolitical scale. You cannot claim to define Jewish people by both ethnicity and religion, and then claim there are Jewish people who are not not religiously motivated.

Oh because it’s all just for optics.

Hey, that’s a highly reductionist take. When did super charging the military industrial complex become “just for optics”?

Without funneling billions of dollars to corporations like RTX, this would be a very wildly unamerican conflict.

Depends, but most of the time with NDA they don’t prohibit you from talking about how an accident happened. They just don’t allow you to assign liability/responsibility to the company.

The victim and the family of the victim kinda fell over themselves to make it clear that they don’t blame the company, despite the fact that they were so negligent.

To be fair, they may have signed an NDA as part of their workers comp agreement. The prosthetics he has are pretty rare to see on people, as most private and socialized insurances won’t cover microprocessing knee units.

The vast majority of the time when you see a high end powered knee unit on a guy that young, it’s because they had a workers comp case, or they got them at the Walter Reed veterans hospital.

The knee looks like a Genium x3, which alone can bill for around 100k. His prosthetic feet bill for around 10k a piece, and then there’s probably another 50k for custom sockets.

Even if he did harbor a grudge against the employer, in his position it would be difficult to rock the boat and potentially be on the hook for his acquired medical cost.

It’s unfortunate, but I’ve definitely had a patient who was successfully sued for losing their leg at work. Word to the wise, don’t get hurt on the job in Kansas.

Eh, for a country that’s not in Europe, let alone NATO, they’ve done more than most. South Korea’s main goal is to counter North Korea’s geopolitical agenda. They’ve had laws on the books that prevent them from openly giving lethal aid to countries for decades now.

They are allowed to, and have circumvented this rule when N Korea gets involved, but they’ve done it in a tit for that manor. Sending shells through third parties to vicariously give lethal aid when N Korea “secretly” supplies Russia with rockets and shells.

This escalation from Russia and North Korea will likely be met by an escalation in a similar tit for tat manor. I don’t think they’ll send actual troops to Ukraine, but it wouldn’t surprise me if they ramp up shell production, as well as making the K2 tank factory go brrrr.

If you don’t work for Samsung or SK Group you are lower class.

I mean, that’s just factually incorrect. South Korea has a fairly large manufacturing economy, a lot of my family are shipwrights and make really decent money. The other half of my family works for banks and for the government, none of them are considered low class.

South Korea does have a pretty brutal work regiment, but they also have very aggressive trade unions who aren’t afraid to go on massive and often violent strikes.

old friends who do work for those Chaebols will stop associating with you.

According to who? I mean you may stop seeing them as often, but that’s just because the work culture often extends out of office. It’s pretty traditional to go out drinking or eating with your coworkers, but that doesn’t mean people stop associating with their friends who don’t work with them.

Not to sound too Korean… but, that’s kinda the social repercussion of electing war criminals, then the children of war criminals, and the grandchildren of war criminals to lead your country.

Modern Japan is a weird poly-sci experiment examining what would happen if you took guns away from a fascist government.

Islamic fundamental extremism didn’t really find its way into Afghanistan until the 80’s. It was transplanted by the Saudi government who were in part supported by the United States as a way to counter the Soviet invasion.

If you actually ever get the chance to meet an actual Afghan family, I think you would be surprised of how kind they generally are, hospitality is a cornerstone of their culture.

I think it’s important to realize that the cultural identity of the Taliban to America isn’t actually based off of Afghan culture, it’s based off of the Saudi, and that the Afghan people are the real victims of this .

Right now Brent Crude is just 71.28. Oil prices are going down.

Yes, and as soon as it gets cold oil the price of oil will rise once again. It’s not like countries are divesting from fossil fuels any time soon.

Additionally Russia does not have the technical ability to fix all of the refineries that Ukraine has been blowing up nor do they have the ability to fix all of the upstream production problems being created.

Russia isn’t a technologically deprived nation, and they have one of the largest oil producing and refining operations in the world. They may not be able to repair the damages with imported parts as they would have 5 years ago, but refining tech isn’t exactly a new science, or particularly complicated.

Productions of raw products is dropping fast](https://ycharts.com/indicators/russia_crude_oil_production)and those declines are going to both continue and accelerate.

If you examine that chart for the year it seems bad, but if you just click on the scale of 5 years, it’s pretty much just average. The important thing to look at is exports, which have been rapidly increasing.

O&G is not going to be propping up Russia’s economy for much longer.

I think that’s a bit optimistic given that the West is hesitant to actually enforce the embargo, and are equally hesitant to divest from the fossil fuel sector.

We just don’t have the spine to actually give an ultimatum of “you can do business with the US, or you can do business with Russia” to countries like India or China. That would be putting the interest of the nation and democracy in general, before the interest of private profit.

The Russian economy cannot handle the strain of the war, and they can’t keep the economy up by being at war.

Unfortunately, the collapse is very slow. Their national wealth fund is currently their bread basket, and that is maintained by their energy exports. With the price of oil being so high, they should be able to sustain their current economy for a couple years at least. There will be shortages, especially in areas where they were reliant on imports.

However, from what I’ve read, oil would have to drop to around $60 a barrel to spur an economic collapse swift and bad enough to make the war unsustainable. That or the EU and US would actually have to militaristically enforce the energy embargo.

It’s insane how many Russians have volunteered to die for a few thousand dollars, for the past year. But allegedly it’s getting way harder to get volunteers for the Russian military.

This is mainly a byproduct of transitioning to a war time economy. Before the mobilization they had a fairly large labour glut, now that they’ve geared to war time production they’re having labor shortages.

The detrimental aspect to this transition is that they’re going to have to rely on conscripts for their soldiers as they were already experiencing a really harsh population decline.

The most dangerous part of this whole war won’t come for Russia until the war ends, regardless of victory or defeat. Their population decline coupled with the retooling of their domestic economy isn’t something that can be undone without major consequences. So they’re either going to have to continue the war footing to maintain their economy, or face an economic collapse similar in scope to the USSR.

Lol, not everything is a logical fallacy…

If I had made the original assertion and then moved my position on the matter… That’s moving the goal post.

When someone disagrees with the underlying premise of your assertion, it’s just a rebuttal.

In 2023, Sarkozy’s attempt to appeal the decision was denied and he has been banned from holding public office for three years and but will still have the option of serving his sentence from home with an electronic bracelet.[182]

A slap on the wrist ten years after you’ve retired isn’t going to persuade anyone not to do crime for a bunch of money and power.