It's not a fantasy. They are living it.
The US is not a weak country, its not poor in terms of capital or resources, it is not small or isolated, and it is not incapable of innovation. Far from it, it's number two in most of these areas, number 1 at least in terms of capital. It is also a deeply unequal country that is unable to face down even one of its contradictions.
Latin America is a truly awesome place if you're already rich. And so is the USA.
And they present as a great result apprehending some minor drugs, small amount of money (4600€), and a knife.
it would take Rio police 400 officers assaulting 5 different favelas to apprehend this much. i salute to the motherland
The funny thing is that when that website said 'these developers favor battery life' I was like, oh so that's why I like my xiaomi.
giving a whole new meaning to Santa Maria
I mean, they are trying to look cute so they can get those sanctions dismantled sure. But would persecuting local christians really offend Israel?
this is worse than gamers
this is hoi4 players
Even if we agree that everything I listed was predictable all along (which I don't think is fair, I mean there's Israel being an expansionist Apartheid state, and then there's the rest of the civil war proceeding as it did), it doesn't change anything I said. If you're making estimates on Dec 6th you aren't gonna be like 'it will be 1.5 million displaced people assuming the SAA folds without fighting a single battle'. You'll say 'considering the ongoing battles and the potential for further escalation, we estimate up to 1.5 million displaced people at this moment'.
Things did change though. Looking at maps from December 6th we were seeing attacks on Homs and rapid advances of the southern uprisings towards Damascus. The Israeli invasion was not really in the cards, the SNA/SDF battle over Manbij had not yet begun and it was entirely possible that SAA loyalist forces would make last stands in Damascus or Latakia.
If we were to broadcast potential for displacement from today it would be a different beast. You're talking about uprisings in the north-east, potential entry of the Turks into SDF territory and the eventual ethnic cleansing that Israel is going to do. But all the major population centers are under control of a single faction now. The numbers would have to be different than back then.
If you straight up assume that Jolani's government will turn into the Taliban at some point, then the numbers would be way higher than 1.5 million too.
there goes DOGE
good to know, i thought this was literally just a twitter poll
do you think the generically named Polling USA, USA Polling twitter account is up to something
is the speedy tree growth a property of the soil, location, or of whatever we plant in there? if i plant a fruit do i get a tree that gives out instant growth seed versions of that fruit?
because if so i'd like to patent 1 day growth date seeds.
government officials should start rugpulling international investors somehow. just fuck around with those zeroes. hell, i think (don't quote me on this) that institutional investors mostly use bots to allocate funds anyways
i hereby charge this man with terrorism
Hell you don't even have to pick and choose. You can do both in the same stretch of land. Solar is well positioned to make good use of land even before animal agriculture dies off.
He already made this thread, surely he knew what he wished for.
I think that at this point its more like canon (the games) or fake (the books), or ultra-canon (the tv show).
What if a user that claims to be Palestinian says "let us have this" when the Palestinian Authority are killing Hamas?
You'd start by not accusing them of being western leftists that don't know what is happening on the ground. Then you wouldn't dismiss their lived experience out of hand. If a normal Palestinian who is subject to all the cruelty of apartheid and mass killings goes as far as try and hope for rapprochment with Israel, then that's indicative of the brutality of the regime and it would be callous to dismiss the despair of its victims out of hand.
But let's focus on Syria instead of Palestine. After decades of mismanagement followed by 10 years of misery, sanctions and the inability to rebuild, at one point, immediately after the takeover at least, the new syrian government could and did represent a measure of hope. It would be counterproductive to pretend otherwise.
We can both watch a video from Justin Podur on Syria and agree with its central theses. If we then interact with a normie and make simple claims, they will just point to, say, the celebrations across Syria after Assad's fall or the mass graves being uncovered and will dismiss us as psychotic. We should get ahead of that instead of just saying 'haha Libyanification has Begun!' or making Al-Qaeda memes. It comes across as callous and disinterested in the people of the region as anything but pawns on a chessboard, cycling back to that initial comment about not dismissing people out of hand.
Being right is not enough. You have to come across as more than that, otherwise you'll be open to accusations of not only being wrong, but delusional, malicious or worse.
shame on the mexicans and the caribbean peoples for not injecting some SOLID BRIGHT COLORS onto these suburban neighborhoods
The latest from Justin Podur talked in depth about one aspect of the Syrian War that IMO has become a bit of an elephant in the room. This is one war where sanctions played an important role, albeit with massive caveats.
There was a civil war that ruined the country, and then a part of it was occupied. That part was permitted some rebuilding and was supplied by the occupying force. Either financially (Americans buying the SDF's oil in the northeast) or directly (Turks sending their oligopolies to rebuild and supply the local economies in Idlib and Afrin). The portion of the country that remained under control of the central government more or less failed to rebuild - wether that's an indictment of Assad's government, Russia's and Iran's financial werewithal, the power of the sanctions themselves, or all of the above is up for discussion.
The truly bleak statement from Justin is that while the sanctions architecture might create a real demand for acquiescence, the moment the country bends the knee slightly it doesn't get rewarded for it. Western policy seems all stick, no carrot. Assad is gone. Yet Syria went from being bombed 3 times a week by the Israelis to 300 times in 3 days. The entire security infrastructure of the country is just gone. And still the Europeans and Americans are dithering on wether they'll even remove sanctions imposed on a new regime which, by and large, is giving them everything they ever asked for and then some.
So in my view this is a cautionary tale to the likes of Venezuela and Cuba. Juan Guaidó could have taken over the former and turned PDVSA into a Chevron subsidiary. Something tells me the Americans would still never forgive these countries for mildly inconveniencing them.