The reason conservatives don’t like research is that to truly take advantage of it, you need a strong university system, and a lot of students.

And universities are breeding grounds for leftist ideals.

Education in general moves people to the left, but universities take that to 11. And that’s why conservatives hate it.

That’s not exactly how it works.

Most research is based around understanding the universe. Often called Blue Sky research (Why is the sky blue?).

Now that’s a very broad category, so you break things down into something more manageable. Like the lifecycle of a specific insect, or the behavior of crowds in shopping centers during holidays.

The point being that you can absolutely tell someone what to research.

Now, you are correct in that you cannot dictate the results of research.

Except that you can, and it’s the second type of research.

Goal oriented research, or maybe practical research? starts with a goal or a problem. Like a disease. The goal is a cure or prevention. How you get to that point doesn’t matter as long as you do, but in practice the way to meeting that goal is going to be more research centered around understanding the goal or problem.

Now, all that said, pure Blue Sky research has a guaranteed return on investment. NASA estimates that their return is 3-1. 3 dollars back for every dollar of their budget.

All that said, there is no ethical reason to constrain research topics or even to reduce spending on science.

Or maybe some Russian State backed programmers have tried to slip in backdoors in various key systems, numerous times. Including one that almost went live on millions of machines.

I like vector pinball as well.

One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.

Did you know that Nelson Mandela was the leader of a literal terrorist organization?

He ordered attacks that killed people. That’s why he was in prison.

And every one forgave him, and even voted him into power.

All because South African Apartheid was fundamentally evil.

Israeli Apartheid is orders of magnitude worse than the South African version.

There’s actually some merit to this statement.

In the late 1940s, the philosophical arm of the Lehi terrorist organization literally plagiarized Nazi race science with Aryan scratched out and “God’s chosen people” subbed in.

What is 2C-B?

As a teen, the main question I had was, “can I make a pipe out of this?”.

Now that I’m old, the question is mostly “why the hell is this still illegal on a federal level?”

It would have made shit so much worse, but is a sign of weakness in Putin’s rule.

That’s why Putin is so murder happy right now. He’s having to reconsolidate his rule.

Ukraine was a massive fuck up for Putin. He believes in the bullshit known as color revolution.

So he thought he’d pull one in Ukraine. A few years of some soldiers fucking around in the East, then he’d walk in and be welcomed.

Which is fucking stupid.

But Putin has long since killed anyone who would tell him that an idea is stupid, or that people don’t work the way a paranoid, backstabbing KGB trained psychopath thinks they do.

No, Putin fucked up hard due to the dictator trap.

Now he’s scrambling. He’s been killing off rivals and opponents at a breakneck pace the last few years, all because his position has never been weaker.

And he barely managed to diffuse a coup attempt.

He had to use treachery to do it, so the next time, the coup leader will not back down.

No, Putin is desperate to pull out some sort of win in Ukraine, because anything else is the end of his rule, and likely his life.

Yeah, while there are dozens or possibly hundreds of flavors of “wicca”. The first tenent is almost always some variation on “do no harm”. Normally phrased something like “as it harms none, do as thou will”… Which is odd phrasing for something written in the last century.

The main exception is those who follow Crowley. His whole deal was “do what thou will shall be the whole of the law”.

Crowley was mostly in it for the shock value.

And again, Crowley’s “ancient wisdom” is newer than the invention of photography. We even have recordings of him speaking.

He hired Joel Kaplan over ten years ago.

Kaplan was a Bush toadie who participated in the Brooks Brothers Riot that stopped the recount in Florida in 2000 letting the corrupt jackasses on the Supreme Court to steal the election for Bush.

Kaplan has personally exempted right wing “news” sources from Facebook’s truthfulness standards.

There were actually several zionist military groups. The Irgun, the Haganah, and the worst of the bunch, the Lehi.

And they did more than bomb a single hotel. They were a bunch of evil assholes who massacred villages, which is what started the first Arab-Israeli war.

The Lehi hated the British so much that they repeatedly tried to join the Nazis in WW2. The death camps were common knowledge among Jews who escaped Germany, and yet, the leaders of Lehi still wanted to join Hitler in fighting the British. They also really liked the Nazi writings about wiping out “inferior races” but decided that since they were “god’s chosen” they swap the races around a bit and put Arabs at the bottom.

And in 1980, the surviving members all got medals issued to them by the IDF for their role in helping to found Israel. Issued by the surviving (second) leader, who was the Israeli Prime Minister at the time, and was Netanyahu’s political mentor.

Israelclaims that was Hezbollah’s plan.

A claim used to launch a massive military strike on a neighboring county.

I’d call that an unprovoked act of war.

Israel calls it a normal day. Because they pull this shit all the time.

There’s a reason Israel has no allies in the region.

Did you know that Nelson Mandela was a terrorist? Seriously. He was a terrorist leader. He co-founded uMkhonto weSizwe. A anti-apartheid terrorist organization.

And the IRA. Terrorists that lived their car bombs.

The US military has explicitly used terrorist tactics in war.

As for Hezbollah… They were founded when Israel invaded Lebanon to act as a resistance force. Since Israel still holds Lebanese territory Hezbollah still has a reason to exist.

It also doesn’t help that the IDF has been launching air strikes and assassinations in neighboring countries since the 50s…

Which really makes the IDF the true terrorist organization here.

The war in Afghanistan was lost the moment Bush switched gears to invade Iraq.

He pulled resources out that never went back, and then Obama did the same to fight ISIL. And then Trump pulled even more out just because.

As the years went on, more of the security was offloaded to a corrupt interm government that never quite managed to become self sufficient.

When Trump did his pull out, he got Congress to pull funding. That funding was all that wa keeping the Afghani military going.

Then Biden had to finish the pull out, and he did not stick the landing.

Also bonus fun fact. The Taliban is very likely going to start the world’s first Water War. They’ve been damming and diverting rivers that their neighbors rely on.

That makes it worse, not better.

Again, the context is important. Mostly that the Tunisian military refused to step in and support Wasalo, eventually forcing him to flee.

Asad on the other hand, is still very popular with his own ethnic group, and draws heavily from them to staff his military. Iran’s help just made things worse.

The start of the Syrian civil war had nothing to do with anyone except the Syrian people being pissed off at living under the most restrictive police state in the Arab world. There were protests after a mass arrest and subsequent torture of 15 teenage boys who had spay-painted some anti-government graffiti on some walls around the city.

Assad cracked down on the protests hard, which led to people saying, “fuck this shit, time for a revolution”.

Iran started helping Assad, and then the US started helping the rebels. And yeah it’s a shit show now. But no, it would have kicked off without outside help.