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.

Being dominated in a consensual way, takes a sort of self awareness and acceptance of your own weaknesses.

Trump lacks any self awareness, and has likely never been part of consensual domination.

For this year at least, it’s too late to replace Trump on the ticket. Unless they replace Trump with Vance. That would comply with the rules. Sort of. Trump’s name would still be on the ticket. But Vance would take lead, and would pick a running mate.

There are two major factors that would keep this from becoming a reality. First is Trump will never step aside in favor of someone else.

Second is that Vance has negative charisma.

That’s some blatant Russian propaganda there. Blame NATO twice for Russian imperialism.

The “Russia had to invade a sovereign nation because they were talking about joining NATO to prevent Russia from invading them” logic has some holes to it.

The fact that Russia has invaded their neighbors 14 times since the end of the cold war tells you why one of their neighbors would want to join NATO.

Also, remember that time that Russia shot down a commercial airliner? The Ukrainians sure as hell do. That was the true beginning of the invasion, which is why Ukraine was in talks to join NATO.

And yes, people have the right to defend themselves. But the Israeli government has locked down the anti-terror propaganda, because Hamas is pretty vile as far as organizations go. It’s why Israel let Hamas grow and become powerful, and why the Israelis paid to keep Hamas in power for the last decade or so.

As long as Israel can point at Hamas, they have just enough of an excuse to claim their ethnic cleansing is actually just an anti-terror campaign.

Hamas is a full on terrorist organization, not that all terrorist organizations are bad. Or rather, there are some causes where a terrorist organization is the appropriate response. John Brown tried it. So did Nelson Mandela. But Hamas is a religious extremist terrorist organization. One that has distasteful views, and was sort of put in place by Israel for those views.

You see what I’m getting at here? Hamas is fucking evil, and Israel has mostly succeeded in making Hamas the face of Palestinian resistance against Israel.

I doubt many of the original leaders of Hamas are still alive, but that doesn’t matter either when Israel can just lie and say that whoever they kill is Hamas. It’s a bit maddening, and I doubt there’s an answer to it all except for the other Palestinian resistance groups to step up their social media game.

There was no economic or rational factors. The only thing that makes a lick of sense is the irrational.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/03/putin-dictator-trap-russia-ukraine/627064/

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2022/3/24/22982864/vladimir-putin-russia-ukraine-war-brian-klaas

Those are a warm-up, but then you have the purges since the invasion began.

https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/the-purges-in-putins-shrinking-inner-circle

Putin has sort of been the butt of jokes for years for killing anyone who looks at him funny. He’s a KGB stooge, who made his career out of backstabbing and paranoia. His entire inner circle were afraid to tell him the truth, because he would kill them if they did.

He’s never been “savvy”, he’s just been willing to kill as many people as necessary to secure his own power.

The classic authoritarian dictator who throws people out of windows for saying no. And whose vaulted military had body armor made of cardboard, because the corruption was so ingrained that every single level was accepting bribes and stealing shit.

I’m surprised that they’re still going, but Russia has shown the world that they’re a third rate military, at best.

As to Palestine. It doesn’t matter what the resistance movements call themselves now. Israel will just say they’re Hamas, and no one likes Hamas. There are good reasons not to like Hamas, they’re religious extremists who want to kill all Jews.

And for decades, Israel has funded Hamas behind the scenes, while coming down extra heavy on any other resistance movement. And now it’s all paid off for them because they can just claim that anyone they kill was actually Hamas.

https://www.timesofisrael.com/for-years-netanyahu-propped-up-hamas-now-its-blown-up-in-our-faces/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2014/07/30/how-israel-helped-create-hamas/

This tactic of creating the perfectly detestable opposition has been used in quite a few places. For example, Greenpeace gets a lot of money from oil company heirs. Specifically the Rockefeller family.

I doubt anyone from Hamas, or Greenpeace, ever took orders from the people giving them money. They were given the money with no strings attached, because they were already jackasses. The money just extended their reach.

Everyone knows Putin invaded Ukraine because he’s a dumbass dictator who started to believe his own propaganda. It’s the dictator trap. Putin surrounded himself with backstabbing yes men by literally killing anyone who wasn’t.

As to Palestinian resistance. I don’t think Hamas is a good resistance movement. For a whole host of reasons. Which is why the Israeli government has been propping them up since the 80s.

An unsympathetic resistance movement can do more to damage a cause than not having a movement at all.

From now until the ethnic cleansing is complete, Israel will call any resistance movement Hamas, regardless of their actual name or beliefs. I’m not sure how to fight that… I don’t think anyone really knows beyond screaming the truth everywhere we can.

It didn’t work in the 1920s in Europe. But maybe with the Internet… Likely not though.

The main reason to electroplate things in gold is that corrosion resistance.

The thinner the coating, the better. Mostly because gold isn’t a very good conductor.

Copper is one of the best conductors available. But the corrosion is the problem. It’s nonconductive.

Also a fun fact. Stainless steel is a better conductor than gold. But gold is slightly easier to use in electroplating.

Some of them have the power of of a million mass shooters. Some of them have the power of a very long neck. Seriously, there an X-man with the codename Longneck because he has a very long neck. He’s never once helped the team in the field, because he’s completely powerless unless he wants to look over toilet stall walls while pooping.

He does have longer arms to match his neck, but that’s it. I guess he can easily get stuff off a high shelf…

And pointedly he cannot blend in as a normal human, so his introduction to the team was them saving him from a lynch mob.

I’ll add in, Ranked Choice is a bad choice. The “edge cases” mentioned in the post can happen in any and every election using the system.

If Ranked Choice were the only option besides what we have, it would be a slight improvement, but there are far better options.

STAR is simple, and does everything that RCV claims to do, but actually fails to do.

Something to keep in mind for the push to reform voting laws after this election.

It actually is thanks to the permanent apportionment act of 1929.

The size of Congress needs to increase with the increase in population. But it’s been fixed at 435 for over 100 years even as the population has more than tripled and we’ve added two states.

Are those houses then listed as corporate rentals? Because that’s super common.

Republicans cannot replace Trump. He’s got the party by the balls. His daughter in law is the chair of the party.

He’s also funneling all donations to the party into his own pocket.

When Trump loses, the Republican party will implode under all the fraud. I’m all for it.

The NYT was shitty long before that. They famously did not cover the Holocaust. Not the run up, and not even during the war.

When the camps were liberated, Americans at home had no idea who was in the camps.

The owner of the NYT was later asked about their failures in covering the Holocaust and the buildup, and said with a shrug “the NYT didn’t really cover the Holocaust”.

As a note the owner of the NYT was Jewish. But didn’t want to be associated with poor Jews.

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.

Don’t get me started on Ordinal vs Cardinal voting systems… But the TLDR is that Ordinal is great when you have two options, and shit when you have more than that.

STAR is the best voting system I’ve found so far. (Still looking for better, but STAR is pretty good)

We don’t need an amendment. We just need to get rid of a few openly corrupt supreme court justices.

Because as has been shown, precedent can be ignored.

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.