The contortions of GOP talking points have to square the circle of genocide and the lead-in to Trump’s First Impeachment.
This is not to say they will not try.
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Agree on this. Russia is not, and will never be, the cash cow that the US and EU provide for the Chinese manufacturing sector. I believe China will tread carefully here.
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That’s an interesting thread. Not sure I agree with the inevitability of the author’s conclusion, but it’s one possible outcome. One we should hope for.
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Or, will they get out? Perhaps they are just being taken out of sight where they can be put into slave labor or simply liquidated. This is a very ominous development.
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Way OT: Justice has finally arrived for the odious Kim Davis.
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Amazing that countries so huge and in China’s case wealthy and successful are obsessed with the need to re-possess comparatively small pieces of land they haven’t controlled in decades. For all that they have going for them and for all the actual, real challenges they face, this is what most concerns them, kind of like a guy worth 20 billion being obsessed with overtaking the guy who’s worth 25 billion, as if that actually mattered in a non-psychotic way. This is all a form of psychosis, really, of the collective and nationalistic sort, OCD taken to monumentally insane levels.
And that’s the fundamental issue facing both humanity and individual societies, that may well ultimately destroy the world, people or groups that feel left out, demeaned, looked down on or lesser, and for whom, no matter how much they objectively have and however well they’re objectively doing, are nevertheless singularly obsessed with these real or perceived slights and inferiorities, and go to psychotic lengths to address them.
Whether malcontented and resentful Trumpies who just couldn’t stand the idea of a black president or liberal female president or more than a token number of recent immigrants in the US or the most limited of gun regulations and whatnot, or ridiculous Chinese ultra-nationalists obsessed with repossessing Taiwan, or Israeli Likudniks obsessed with restoring the territory of Biblical Israel, insane ISIS cultists intent on “purifying” Islam by literally killing any who’s not just not Muslim but their kind of Muslim, or these insane and evil Russian ultra-nationalists who, instead of building up their country from the ruins of the USSR, steal from it blind and then try to misdirect from their corruption and failures by trying to recapture a country that hasn’t been Russian for over a century. It’s all the same evil and crazy shit. And if we don’t do something about it, eventually one or more of them will destroy us all, with WMD. We can’t just fucking “look forward”, until we’ve dealt with these “look backward” nutjobs.
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The issues now before the jury are how much the plaintiffs will get in compensatory damages and whether or not they should be awarded punitive damages, Gartland told CNN.
There damn well better be punitive damages.
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The GOP and the old USSR share the same dogma:
The Party is Always Blameless
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Mariupol is a largely Russian-speaking city, and the invaders have been told to expect that most of the residents support Putin’s invasion and are glad to be “liberated” from the “Ukronazis” who are in control in Kyiv. My strong suspicion is that these “evacuees” will be interrogated to find out which ones are loyal Russians and which ones have thrown their lot with Zelensky’s Ukronazi gang. A test, in other words. Those who reveal themselves to be anti-Putin, and thus traitors to the Russian Motherland, will almost certainly be “disappeared”–never to be heard from again.
Also note: pro-Putin Chechen fighters are being unleashed on Mariupol. Their standing orders are to “punish” even those Ukrainian fighters who accept their “guilt” and surrender; for those who refuse to surrender, the penalty will be even worse.
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I agree and I sure hope we’re right. I can’t see that Xi gains anything with another world war - he’s doing fine right now, though he’d love to own Taiwan. He’s gone this long without taking it over physically; I think he’ll wait a little longer.
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It’s a sad day for us all when the guvmint jackboots take away our religious right to mistreat people we don’t like. I mean, wasn’t it Christ who said “Fuck the gays/Jews/Mexicans, stone them if you have to, they’re not really human anyway”?
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Xi has a little Pandemic problem right now. He’s not expanding anywhere for a while.
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Does anyone ever get to leave a gulag?
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Heh! Lavrov actually tweeting a truth? Who’d a thunk it? Recent bloviating from him has been word salad lies my cat could see as “untruths”. For the first two weeks of this insanity Lavrov claimed there was no invasion and that civilians were not being harmed by Russians. It takes an epic effort to deny the realty on the ground for Lavrov to lie that plainly.
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There’s nothing like going to war to distract from domestic problems.
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This whole Taiwan thing appears to be a basically psychotic obsession that certain Chinese ultra-nationalists have that they just can’t let go. No matter how rich and powerful they and China are, without Taiwan they just feel empty and defeated. How does one fight this sort of obsessive psychosis? It’s like the psycho who shot John Lennon. Absolutely no reason to do it but he just HAD to do it. Same with Ukraine, although there I suspect that Putin was also trying to misdirect from his own failings as Russia’s leader, bolster himself politically, and capture Ukraine’s valuable resources and arable land.
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You can check out anytime you like but you can never leave a gulag.
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O/t Shame you can’t shame the GOP
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LarFoutLouD
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