Like all totally innocent parties, it’s all “There’s no evidence of that!” and “You’re exaggerating for no reason!”

Specifically:

“The Polish side once again failed to present evidence of the Russian origin of the objects that entered Polish airspace (and there is no reason to expect that it will), and completely groundlessly accused Russia of provocative actions.”

and

The Russian Ministry of Defense had earlier said in a statement that it had not planned to target anything in Poland and that it was willing to consult with its Polish counterparts about what happened.

Totally normal lol. Not “this is what happened,” but “we’re willing to consult about what happened.”

Somehow I think the reaction to this will be totally different than it was when a gunman killed Melissa Hortman and wounded John Hoffman.

Yeah. I mean it’s not a competition. They can both be horrifying things that need to be stopped.

“And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?… The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin’s thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If…if…We didn’t love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation…. We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.”

https://www.inmateaid.com/information/inside-the-world-of-ice-detention-centers-what-happens-after-an-immigration-arrest

https://wearemitu.com/wearemitu/news/alligator-alcatraz-migrant-detention-conditions/

I wasn’t talking about CECOT exclusively. The Gulag was a whole nationwide archipelago of various small-scale detention facilities, which parallels what Trump is doing more or less to a T.

Every so often, something hits me that makes me think I need to get the fuck out of here. Not just because of the political situation (although that is a factor, I think that “stay and fight” is probably the right answer there). But it just seems like overall the culture and the people and the nature of the place is setting itself up for a massive collapse which there is not a lot of way to prevent… even in times of no real external threats, and right now there are some big ones of those looming.

I think part of the point is that bombing the negotiating team that you’re saying you’re trying to get a “ceasefire” with, and then just straight-up claiming “Yeah we had every right to do that so fuck you,” is a new low even by the standards of geopolitics.

And then a further point is that they are not a superpower, or even a regional power like Iran. They’re relying solely on US support to get away with shit like this, where almost all countries of their size would face serious consequences of some sort for it.

I honestly have no idea why anyone here on a visa would still be here at this point. I get that it’s not easy to uproot your life on a dime, but also, it’s not that easy to go to a modern Gulag with no hope of release or due process, either.

Haha yeah I am super exotic traveler, clearly

One of the best meals I have ever had in my life was some ceviche from a little hole in the wall place in Honolulu. Never had tiradito but I assume it is top tier.

How in the world is Mexican / South American food not on this list yet?

1. Mexican / Colombian
2. Probably Thai

It’s a wild indication of how far things have fallen apart that for so many decades, “the US isn’t going to do any crazy fuckery and it’s safe to host this vital transnational infrastructure there” was working fine.

Also, completely agree. IDK where the UN should be hosted going forward, but it sure as shit should not be the US.

Also hundreds of thousands in America. I’m still seeing ads for ICE on YouTube.

their role is to facilitate conversation, not control it.

Broadcast it when someone opens up the mod controls, put it on the site banner, print it on a T-shirt.

It’s actually really valuable even when there is an objectively correct answer, to let the people who understand that correct answer speak with the people who think something else, and let everyone just work things out. Just shutting down anyone who has the “incorrect” opinions right away out of the gate, and telling them they’ll be banned if they keep it up, is some culty nonsense.

There are a lot of mods who think their job is to remove any opinion that they personally disagree with, in order to keep the conversation “correct.”

The fact that your opinion here was objectively the correct one is just icing on the cake (and for some reason that additional irony is commonly seen when this mod philosophy is involved, I honestly have no idea why.)

I won’t say PTB, since it looks like cooler heads prevailed and everything’s fine now, but in my opinion this mod should be scheduled for some additional training or something. IDK, maybe it gets boring if you have the mod controls and it’s a little exciting event whenever you get to jump up and start using them, I don’t really know. Anyway glad it worked out.

Again, none of this means China’s appeal has increased

It’s more America losing than China winning.

Sounds great! For the nth time, it sounds like we agree on pretty much everything you just said. I think your extensive lectures need to be directed at the person I replied to, not at me.

So you stopped reading at “Trumpian Fascism,” 4 words into the message, and decided to miss “will make China look good” and all the other stuff that I was disagreeing with? Glad we got that sorted out lol.

I agree with what you’re saying now, still just not sure what it has to do with public opinion polls in Korea or “make China look good.”

See that all makes sense. What the other guy said was what I was pushing back on.

Oh, I can certainly believe that Hyundai would do this. My thought process actually went something along the lines of:

1. Oh that’s pretty fascinating
2. Wait, I feel like this is exactly the type of propaganda that would get spread on social media, I think this person should dig into the source of their story and make sure it wasn’t some kind of lying that they had believed
3. Oh they said it was firsthand knowledge never mind
4. Wait WTF I’m on social media right now
5. Also their explanation for “Hyandai” makes literally 0 sense
6. Ooooohhhh… yeah.

I think if the explanation for “Hyandai” had been “oh my bad lol” then I wouldn’t have really felt any particular strong skepticism, but that aspect pushed it over the edge to me.