Oh ho ho. You thought they were just racist against Muslims?

Well, buckle up, buckaroos.

I saw someone being interviewed who didn’t know who hilter was. Apparently genuine.

There was a bit that Conan O’Brian used to do back when he had a late-night show. He’d go out and do Man-On-The-Street interviews in… Times Square, I think? Can’t remember if he was LA or NY. But he’d ask some absurdly complex question and get this excellently reasoned and well-thought out answer from randos. And then he’d ask what they did for a living. It was inevitably some NASA engineer or finance professional or other well-educated individual. And they were all just… in the crowd. Because in a city as big as that, of course you’re going to get this extremely mixed bag.

On the flip side, there’s Sailor Socialism, a podcaster and aspiring actress who baited an interview with an InfoWars reporter, in which she was dressed in a sailor fuku, then went viral talking about how she wanted universal health care and liked Bernie Sanders.

Interview twenty people and edit the content down to the one or two who make for good entertainment. It’s a tried-and-true strategy.

No way the general populace is that stupid.

It isn’t an issue of stupidity. Not like “Edward Snowden” is a name you can conjure up from first principles.

He was headline news back in 2008 and now he’s not. Anyone who wasn’t following national news nearly twenty years ago likely won’t be familiar with him. No more than a Millennial is going to know who Daniel Ellsberg or Robert W. Jackson are.

The entire Wikileaks project has been more or less obliterated.

glances at the traffic that’s been driven away

shrugs

It’s more often the reverse. You’ll see accounts in hexbear-adjacent servers posting “Why Stalin Was Worse Than Hitler” tier content, getting banned, and then coming over to .world to scream and cry about how they’ve been censored by the mean Tankies.

They are authoritarian left

Oh? What authority do they posses?

If you search the instance for ‘Ukraine’ you will see them saying Russia is the good guy

https://hexbear.net/search?q=Ukraine&type=All&listingType=All&page=1&sort=TopAll&titleOnly=false

shrug

Hexbear banned me just for posting a meme of Bernie Sanders kissing Vladimir Putin with the caption “Tankies ❤️ Dead Palestinians”.

I don’t care how much money they raise. They are monsters. Inhuman, vile, irredeemable filth. Anyone who doesn’t let me post in their community is the worst kind of pond scum.

Reagan had really done us dirty

He definitely kicked the county while it was down. But a big part of the US Golden Age was being the last economy standing after WW2.

The end of America’s economic dominance was inevitable, as old colonial powers re-industrialized and newly liberated post-colonial states gained control of their natural resources for domestic use.

By Nixon, American global dominance was sunsetting regardless of our domestic policies. That’s why we gave up the gold standard and adopted the Petrodollar as a globalized economic strategy. We couldn’t just import everyone else’s gold and sell it back to them at a premium anymore.

The buildup begin in '21. Although I’ve had people yell at me for suggesting the war didn’t actually start in '14.

Age verification that will, itself, be quickly subverted and spoofed. And which they won’t bother to manage internally, because that’s hard

$1500/mo

Only available in Chattanooga, Tennessee.

I hate the US and Russia equally

If I were a native or neighbor of one, I might hate it more than the other, merely due to proximity.

I dont think anyone is saying we should invade Russia.

I seem to recall a bunch of anti-Russia hawks saying exactly this when the invasion happened in '21. The US, the EU, the rest of the Asiatic continent - they were all told they needed to team up and crush Russia, once and for all.

Now that the US has collapsed into a fascist regime marginally sympathetic to Russian white nationalism, the Keyboard Commandos of Reddit don’t really expect Cheeto Mussolini Von Putinkisser to take the fight to Moscow.

But I’ve also heard (1) Putin is senile / infirm / on death’s door and regime change in Russia will come any day now and (2) The Russian military is absolutely on the brink of collapse, so another year or ten of drone skirmishes will be the end of the entire Russian armed forces with a bit of patience. Just a few hundred more billion to Ukraine will be the end of the Russian army absolutely for certain guaranteed. So we never really needed to invade directly, just finance an endless parade of mercenaries to get the job done.

90% of the world online scammers and hackers

It’s crazy how these major tent poles of the modern internet - Facebook, Google, Twitter, and Microsoft - are all centered in the United States, but never bare any responsibility for the malicious traffic on their networks.

They’ve got concept art in the article.

if you provide enough dark energy

“How much ya got?”

“Well, it’s a purely theoretical substance. But theoretically we’ve got more of that than all the regular energy in the known universe.”

and shape it into a specific configuration

I want to say that’ll be the easy part, but I guess it really depends how abstract of a shape we’re talking about and how malleable dark energy ends up being.

Active or dorment?

traveling back in time is not mathematically disallowed by the general relativity.

Moving mass backwards through time isn’t strictly mathematically disallowed. Idk what it’s going to look like when it arrives, though.

What does a Tachyon even look like?

Western corruption is starting a company to produce y and when a government orders x of them, x are delivered

Well… not always.

The initial contract award called for the combat-ready tankers to arrive in August 2017; the first arrived in January 2019. In the years that followed, the KC-46 program was beset by further delays, including production line problems that regularly stalled deliveries and an underperforming vision system. That system is years behind schedule and expected to come in October 2025.

and

Broken Boeing airplanes are going to the military thanks to corruption and bad decisions

Increasingly, the US model for contracting is to take money, outsource the work to a bunch of bargain basement contractors, pocket the profits, and then fail to deliver the end product.

Also R&D is priced in because it’s all done for the sake of making profit and must be recovered through the unit sales.

Again, this is something of an open question. The engineering of a given retailed unit is priced in as part of the unit rate. But the bluesky R&D is, as often as not, performed at the university level and then arbitraged through the private sector or simply stolen from rival militaries / companies / individuals through espionage and laundered through the private sector.

The Octopus Murders, on Netflix, tackles the anatomy of this kind of government-backed swindle with regard to the development of early iteration database technology.

The real difference between more Socialist/Communist models of corruption and the Western Capitalist style tends to be in the legal canonization of the corrupt practices. You really got to see this in the post-Soviet liberalization of Eastern European economies, as mafia cartels were supercharged by western financialization and eventually subsumed the entire federal apparatus of ex-Soviet states. What was considered a criminal black market prior to 1991 became the standard for managing the economy a decade later.

Probably (my guess) with the AI set to “if you lose connection, try to hit any humans in this area”

What could go wrong there?

Which one of these two do we think is going to run out first?

Setting aside that this is largely wartime propaganda horseshit - both militaries are relying on conscripts and mercenaries, both are heavily invested in cheap long-range drone artillery, both are saturated in “Victory is just around the corner” propaganda which has degraded support for their civilian leadership - Russia has 5x the population of Ukraine. If this really is just a Bodies-In-Spaces conflict, the Russians can drown Ukraine in their own blood over a long enough timeline. Ukrainians still need someone to fire those bombs and bullets, ideally before Kiev looks like Tehran.

But then nobody is “winning” this war in a material sense. Putin is shedding what political allies he has as the war drags on - Romania, Hungary, Turkiye, Syria. Zelensky is fully fucked the next time Ukrainians bother to have a domestic vote. Both of their economies have tanked, with further economic pressures coming from the conflict with Iran and the climate change threat.

The issue isn’t whether one runs out first. It’s how long the political leadership can drag this forward before someone pops them and brokers a settlement that ends the bleeding. Netanyahu is in a similar position in Israel, with endless war being the only excuse he has to stay in office. And domestic revolt might be what brings all these governments down long before the actual wars are ended.