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Cake day: July 6th, 2023

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  • There’s a great book called The Dictator’s handbook that explains why the Russian oligarchs couldn’t give less of a damn. There’s a YouTube video called Rules for Rulers that does a good recap of it, and the overall political theory behind all of it is Selectorate theory.

    The long and the short is that as long as resources are available to the elite, and as long as they have enough to keep their underlings satisfied, the only time you have real unrest is when the dissatisfication from the bottom outweighs the resource allocation from the top.

    Which they’ve done a good job of preventing by keeping the populous off balance and unable to organize.




  • The take is actually grounded in history.

    The US has notoriously bad spy craft when it comes to Russia. We spent literal decades believing they were an equal power, spending vast sums on defense to make sure we didn’t fall behind. The government funded all sorts of “studies” but anyone who questioned the narrative got blackballed, and the people who kept getting that work just parroted back what the generals wanted to hear.

    And then the iron curtain fell and the Berlin wall came down, and we saw the state of their military…and it was abysmal.

    We are seeing the same thing with their basic war capabilities right now. Ukraine has been able to hold them off, more or less, for two years using mostly NATO cast off equipment and sunflower seeds.

    There’s a pretty good book that goes over a lot of this by Anne Jacobsen called The Pentagon’s Brain.







  • So first off, I’m taking this at face value and want to explain why this might not have read how you intended. Second, I am not trans, so others may have another opinion with more weight, but I want to try to explain so that they may be won’t have to do the emotional work of responding.

    The trick, for me, is how much space and time you give, and in what order, and how much evidence is available to support it. Your comment began with suppositions and theories, we don’t have much (if any) evidence for drugs or self harm, and it’s an equal quantity to the good stuff you were saying toward the end.

    Could suicide or drugs be a possible cause? Sure. But so could an exotic parasite, or the wrath of God, or someone sneaking into their house and poisoning them. But we don’t have any evidence for any of that, and spit balling it as a theory takes away from the concrete facts that we do know: they were assaulted, they sought medical care for the assault, and their condition worsened over the next few days in a way that seems to be related.


  • Been a death cult. Any pro-life stance they have is to create more soldiers for the forever war.

    They don’t believe anyone should have a decent life, because then they wouldn’t be driven to die to get to heaven.

    They don’t want to provide education beyond what’s needed to believe your pastor regarding his interpretation of the Bible. If you want education, they want to force you into the army for, you guessed it, forever war.

    They worship a god who begat himself just to sacrifice himself to himself, to “save” us from the sin that he orchestrated. And every one of their policies mirrors this “logic.”

    There are Christians who believe that Jesus is the embodiment of God’s love, grace, forgiveness, charity, etc. But they’re not the ones in control of the churches, or any of the “seven mountains.”