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atomheartbevo

Certifiably Surly
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Everything posted by atomheartbevo

  1. As for Philly, if they go there next, that means they've given up on Minnesota, but it's also pretty fucking stupid because it is an election year and Pennsylvania is considered a swing state (Trump won it by single digits), and Trump would be giving Josh Shapiro a national platform if he runs in 2028. Trump voters growing more frustrated in crucial swing state of Pennsylvania | Opinion
  2. Yeah, and ICE will way over-react and kill a bunch of people. And probably get really paranoid and start asking around about firearms/looking up who has firearms. We will see how the 2A people respond.
  3. My 10 year-old and my middle-schooler can spot fake AI bullshit. My 70+ year-old parents cannot, nor can my 40- and 50-something and up cousins. Which is why there are so many medical spam phone calls.
  4. Nothing new, the fringe MAGA were drinking raw milk (and getting sick of it) before Trump came along. They'll come back after they make their TikTok videos.
  5. It absolutely reeks of somebody who saw some really bad polling numbers taken by an internal/private organization that he trusts, and it sounds like he's trying to tell MAGA not to trust the polls and that everything is fine and everybody loves him and he's smart and going to give them checks. On that last bit, if the Supreme Court stops him on the tariff stuff, yeah, checks ain't coming. Trump can't stop the elections, for reasons that have already been laid out and he doesn't even have the manpower (they can't even control fucking Minneapolis) And I think people who focus on Trump trying to physically take over or stop the elections are forgetting something: The GOP can dump a fuckload of money into social media and email campaigns that push misinformation/disinformation to get his base out. It's worked before, and he's got Elon Musk (even if Twitter is not the biggest social media platform) on his side. And Trump has CBS on his side, and at times it sounds like CNN. It is far cheaper and easier to blast messages out to tens of millions of people digitally than it is to try and fuck around with the 100,000+ voting precincts, and the 125,000+ voting locations in the US. It's not the ballot box we have to worry about, it's the fucking inbox of our parents' email accounts, Facebook messenger accounts, fake ads pushed onto social media, bots trying to shape discussions our MAGA family/friends are in, etc., not to mention the amount of robocalls will go way up. Because the Trump campaign will have access to databases built up to help them identify likely voters and what their fears and desires are. It's far more precise and predictable and legal than confrontations over the ballot box.
  6. Yep, and the artwork looks fantastic.
  7. Given that Musk fucked around with the IRS, etc., I doubt anything he promised is going to happened. And he promised the concept of stimulus checks if you asked him now.
  8. We keep getting played so much by our former friends and foes. One of these days we are going to wake up and find out some Nigerian prince emptied the US Treasury.
  9. AI exists to give us Tai Chai commercials aimed at men over 50.
  10. Lesson learned: When Trump talks shit about you, don’t dance around on stage.
  11. Russia losing more men than its able to provide. Zeihan beat this drum since the start, but it’s starting to be more noticeable.
  12. Yeah, I wouldn't be surprised if the Texas numbers are real - plenty in O&G are not happy that he wants to throw $100 billion of taxpayer dollars (including those O&G companies' tax dollars) at fucking Venezuela because he wants $50 a barrel. Plenty in agriculture have been hurt by his policies and/or DOGE. Plenty are probably worried about losing their workforce (and toss in the construction industry). They won't say it publicly on their socials, and in the voting booth, if they show up, they'll probably still pull that R lever, and they'd probably like to vote for Texas politicians who look out for Texans, including the various Texas companies that are being hurt or will be hurt by $50 a barrel or the removal of the workforce or whatever. But MAGA straight-up controls the primaries for Republicans, so they'll get MAGA idiots who will gladly tank the Texas O&G industry to appease Dotard.
  13. atomheartbevo replied to Zavala's topic in Daily Texan
    Long text from the former CEO of reddit, from March of 2025, that's getting reposted around, in terms of what we get out of our investments and alliances and how Musk and Co. fucked up a lot of stuff (USAID, etc.), and it's very profound now in the wake of the last few weeks. https://x.com/yishan/status/1906592890845028405 The original architects of American global power did something very clever that no other empire had ever done before: they deliberately hid the instruments of their power. Specifically, they institutionalized the hard power of the post-WW2 American military into a "rules-based international order" and the organizations needed to run it. These include the UN, IMF, World Bank, NATO, and numerous philanthropic NGOs like (as has been in the news recently) USAID. The reason they did this is because repeated use of hard military power is fragile and self-defeating: it engenders resentment and breeds defiance. The British learned this and used prototypical methods of institutionalization in the declining years of their empire, but their American successors perfected it. (If you don't understand how this works, I will link a post in the replies explaining how one example works - NATO) The more sophisticated rivals of the US obviously know what's up, so they try to oppose or circumvent these institutions, but obviously the institutions are backed by hard power in the end. It sounds fair enough to say "if you don't abide by the 'rules,' we will invade you." It works well enough because it it sounds more fair to say that than "if you don't do what we tell you, we will invade you." Rival governments aren't fooled, but a lot of their ordinary citizens are, and combined with media dominance and control of the reserve currency (economic dominance), it's enough to keep everyone in line. An unanticipated problem seems to have arisen: It turns out that if you hide the levers of power, your own successors may have trouble understanding them. Especially if you failed to educate them, or let various cultural forces undermine the indoctrination of your elites. With that happening, once the new generation of elites gains power, they don't recognize that the complicated weird control panel you built that doesn't seem to do anything but costs $10 billion a year to maintain is actually how you're controlling everything around the world and they take it down to save money. All because you did too good a job hiding the levers of power. Soft power isn't "soft." It's real power. It's just soft because it's hidden. I don't know how to solve this problem because I think hidden levers of power are definitely better, but you have to train a priesthood generation after generation to understand them, and that kind of thing corrupts itself too. Open power is much more honest, but no one likes it and it's hard to hold on to. ------------- What the US gets out of NATO You institutionalize your power so that it becomes more efficient to wield. All entities who develop or acquire hard power tend to institutionalize it. If you don’t, you have to continuously exercise your power nakedly while wielding it, i.e. “do X or I will use my power to hurt you.” This also engenders resentment and breeds resistance. Institutionalization takes advantage of the human mind to conform to rules out of habit. An institution is just a set of rules. You make them up. So you make up a bunch of rules that say things like “if you do any of these things, the institution says you must be punished [and it will be enforced via my power]” or “if you do this, you will be rewarded by the institution [where I will be the one to dole out the reward]” and most importantly “if you want to do X, you must do it according to process Y [which happens to benefit me and not threaten my other interests].” This obscures the threat of naked power behind a set of “fair” rules. All institutions and rules have existed like this since the dawn of civilization. They are a way of telling the people who are being dominated when and how they can expect their rulers to act, what tribute they must pay, and what protection from competing rulers they will receive. And, many people conflate consistency with fairness, or at least familiarity, so it reduces resentment at being dominated. At the end of WW2, the US ruled by way of military supremacy over Western Europe. NATO was an institution that used the threat of a competing ruler (Russia) to say “if you conform to our rules and do things our way, we’ll protect you.” By and large Europe conforms to US-led cultural and economic wishes, and the US even lets them shirk their military contributions because by doing so, it keeps the other countries weak (vs competing rulers) and dependent on the US for protection. Yes, they are freeloaders. This is by design. The best way to dominate someone is to provide them free protection and material comfort (turn them into a freeloader), and then they become dependent on you and you can control them. If you think Europe isn’t controlled by the US, it’s because you’ve probably grown up in a world where that was assumed. As a contrast, a developed country that isn’t controlled by the US is China, and that’s so bizarre to the typical US experience that many Americans consider China an enemy when it’s merely just not under US control. That’s what it looks like. Western Europe, on the other hand, allows the US to put military bases on its sovereign territory which, if you think about it objectively, is pretty much the greatest act of submission a sovereign country can commit. And it does so because it’s done under the guise of NATO (“we’re all in this together… uhh even though the US runs 90% of the show”). So the benefit to MY COUNTRY is that NATO lets the US be completely in charge of Western Europe without looking overtly like it’s in charge, and do what is in effect what used to be called colonization by maintaining military bases in foreign territory (imagine how this would look to any country prior to 1900) and all sorts of cultural and economic dominance besides. It has been able to maintain this dominance system for DECADES now without any of the countries getting mad (getting mad for real constitutes kicking out the US military bases, not whining about freedom or other crap). Incidentally, the World Bank and IMF and other institutions like this all serve the same purpose. They are largely run by the US, and used to control everyone else who participates by obscuring US hard power behind - and here it is - “an international rules-based order” because getting to make up the rules (because you have the hard power) sets up a system where everyone else plays by YOUR rules, the ones that benefit you. We nearly blew all of that up over just the last few weeks - we are keeping our bases for now, but holy fucking shit we really fucked up.
  14. What air defense in Russia doing? Killing Russians apparently. Russian air defence missile hits own apartment building | news.com.au — Australia’s leading news site for latest headlines
  15. Let's not refer to Russia as an "International Power" when a huge chunk of their navy was destroyed/bottled up by a nation that doesn't have a navy, and when they are sending their soldiers into battle on fucking horses.
  16. And Rush Limbaugh. Rush Limbaugh spent countless hours on the air warning of the feds randomly stopping people and demanding their papers.
  17. atomheartbevo replied to Zavala's topic in Daily Texan
    Hopefully he doesn't discover there's a lot of ICE on top of those minerals.
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