flipht

I haven’t heard anyone caring. The people who would be upset are busy with culture war screeching. I think the Biden admin did something very astute by upending Trump’s entire social policy within the last month - it gives a bunch of left leaning groups a win to attribute to him, and it pulled focus from these folks who can’t seem to maintain their anger at any one thing for more than a week.

Everyone I know who watches politics from the right is up in arms over the title ix stuff. None of them are paying attention to Congress right now.

Tongues and thumbs.

Elon would lie and give them the coordinates for schools and hospitals.

People will seriously scream that you can’t assume malice when stupidity explains it, but at the same time we have Occam’s razor - the simplest explanation is usually correct.

And if these people were stupid, sometimes they’d benefit the American people and harm Russian oligarchs. But the evidence shows close to 0 help for Americans, and every action they take aids or provides cover for kleptocrats here and abroad. The simplest explanation is that this is their intention.

Literally only people on whom propaganda is working.

That’s the problem with the security council. They’ve been using their veto to spit on the world community since the UN’s inception.

Is North Korea supplying these too, or will they just mass arrest and conscript prisoners?

Sure, Jan.

There’s a great book called The Dictator’s handbook that explains why the Russian oligarchs couldn’t give less of a damn. There’s a YouTube video called Rules for Rulers that does a good recap of it, and the overall political theory behind all of it is Selectorate theory.

The long and the short is that as long as resources are available to the elite, and as long as they have enough to keep their underlings satisfied, the only time you have real unrest is when the dissatisfication from the bottom outweighs the resource allocation from the top.

Which they’ve done a good job of preventing by keeping the populous off balance and unable to organize.

It would have worked better in Germany too if we hadn’t had the USSR in the corner sucking the marrow from the sections they were in charge of.

They do that with humans because it’s harder to just get away with killing us.

For whales? They’ll just try to revive the whaling industry.

Even if that’s true, it is not a reason to work someone to death.

He was in a penal colony. Places not known for adequate food, medical care, or reasonable work protections.

No one is saying that someone shot him in the head. He died “naturally” because the body cannot sustain in that environment indefinitely. And who put him there, and why?

As long as people are out in the wild trying to give cover to regressive fascists, we’ll never see the end of this shit.

The take is actually grounded in history.

The US has notoriously bad spy craft when it comes to Russia. We spent literal decades believing they were an equal power, spending vast sums on defense to make sure we didn’t fall behind. The government funded all sorts of “studies” but anyone who questioned the narrative got blackballed, and the people who kept getting that work just parroted back what the generals wanted to hear.

And then the iron curtain fell and the Berlin wall came down, and we saw the state of their military…and it was abysmal.

We are seeing the same thing with their basic war capabilities right now. Ukraine has been able to hold them off, more or less, for two years using mostly NATO cast off equipment and sunflower seeds.

There’s a pretty good book that goes over a lot of this by Anne Jacobsen called The Pentagon’s Brain.

This. The “just go through the steps!” people are ignoring that one of the steps is approval, which can and will be denied if it would cost them more than they could expect to recoup.

Girl scouts may be wrong here, but they’re still by far a better organization than the boy scouts.

There’s something to be said for the skills that are taught and the overall purported ethos, but like the Catholic church, you absolutely cannot trust them to not cover up heinous shit that they’ll allow to continue forever.

If you do, make sure you’re present all the time and be aware that predators have found a home there since their inception.

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Elie Wiesel said something similar.

https://www.ipl.org/essay/Essay-On-Neutrality-PCBW3QTTU#:~:text=The%20statement%20by%20Elie%20Wiesel,protect%20themselves%20and%20their%20people.

Cool. So you don’t actually want to know why people found your initial comment gross. Well, then all I can tell you is that if you do not like how people react to what you say, keep the distasteful parts inside thoughts. Good luck in all your future endeavors.

So first off, I’m taking this at face value and want to explain why this might not have read how you intended. Second, I am not trans, so others may have another opinion with more weight, but I want to try to explain so that they may be won’t have to do the emotional work of responding.

The trick, for me, is how much space and time you give, and in what order, and how much evidence is available to support it. Your comment began with suppositions and theories, we don’t have much (if any) evidence for drugs or self harm, and it’s an equal quantity to the good stuff you were saying toward the end.

Could suicide or drugs be a possible cause? Sure. But so could an exotic parasite, or the wrath of God, or someone sneaking into their house and poisoning them. But we don’t have any evidence for any of that, and spit balling it as a theory takes away from the concrete facts that we do know: they were assaulted, they sought medical care for the assault, and their condition worsened over the next few days in a way that seems to be related.