My ancestors are smiling on me, Imperial. Can you say the same?

Yep. The Romans fucked themselves sideways doing this a few times. You can have all the soldiers or you can have some farmers and skilled laborers. You can’t have both.

Imagine Vietnam-era US, but it was willing to sacrifice every warm body within its borders to win.

Like the US, I think Russia is on a collision course with failure. But they’re going to take it a lot farther before waving a white flag. So much so that it will take the country decades to recover.

And Ukraine won’t be looking too hot at that point anymore, either.

That’s one rustled Jimmy.

The disease is unlimited money in politics.

There are billionaires who were already radicalized to this level. They’re just pouring their fortunes into bringing everyone else into their fold, too.

Remember 15 years ago when Republicans finally stopped going after LGBTQ folks, and how that slowly started to erode after Citizens United? It is not coincidental. There are evangelist billionaires whose only concern in the world is a regressive future, and that’s bad for everybody.

No no.

See, we ran the Numbies.

China Numbies Go Down.

Numbies supposed to Go Up.

China is doom.

/s

This strain of brainworm never ceases to amaze me. I’m not a tankie, either and I hate the mainland with a passion. But counting China completely out when it’s clowning the rest of the world on infrastructure right now is just plain mouth-breather stupid.

Probably whatever it did to him when he survived being shot.

You ever watch Requiem For A Dream?

He’s a pick-me. It’s still Jesus.

The Syrian rebels took out a Russian airbase using nothing but gliders made of balsa wood strapped with improvised explosives and/or incendiaries.

Took out a multi-million dollar airbase with a few hundred dollars worth of materials.

I dunno about you, my dude, but the only people I’ve seen fucked up by antifascists were not saying that they didn’t want to bake a gay cake.

But I’ve seen the people who didn’t want to bake a gay cake be called pieces of shit who should do better. And I think that’s just called social consequences.

This is where I tend to disagree with Marx as well.

Capital is a fantastic book full of scathing and prophetic analyses of capitalism and its innate degradation of value and connection.

The Communist Manifesto is a book with some good ideas but some implementation that I find flawed. And that’s not a knock on Marx-- critiquing problems is a significantly easier prospect than offering solutions.

But a lot of Marx’s proposals for the implementation of Communism are rooted in authoritarianism, even if their end goal is the dissolution of the state and capital. Also, for an ideology versed in the formation and interdependence of worker communities, the Day of the Rope is kind of antithetical to establishing solidarity and mostly serves, I believe, as masturbatory schadenfreude.

But hey, I’m willing to fix some of the stuff that doesn’t work instead of throwing more fuel into the machine that over-harvests people and our planet to the point of destruction.

I really like this nuanced take, btw. Thanks for posting it.

Tell that to anarchocommunists.

I’m sure it will be news to them that they will want to hear.

I believe the island of Lesbos is in Greece.

Vicodin Visigoths.

The Wheels On the Bus on loop and full blast is part of my shock and awe strategy.

Taiwan’s position is no longer that it is the rightful ruler of China. That notion died with Chiang Kai-shek and nobody with a shred of a brain truly believes it.

The PRC won the fight over who “legitimate China” is when the UN gave them the seat for China. Also, one of these is an international superpower and the other is Taiwan.

This mostly correct.

But the US isn’t responsible for Taiwan’s increased interest in independence. Taiwan is.

After the Sunflower Movement and witnessing what happened to HK, young Taiwanese are overwhelmingly in favor of independence. So much so that independence has become all but stated as the platform of the DPP. The KMT is now the pro-unification party, but outside of the last mid-terms, they have been getting slaughtered in elections and had to tone down their pro-China rhetoric.

Status quo is definitely still the overall majority, but that is going to change with demographics and the next generation overwhelmingly favor independence.

As they should. China was not the first owner of Taiwan, and over the course of Taiwan’s history, their control of the island was relatively short. This is not even speaking of the Indigenous Taiwanese who are always left out of the conversation about Taiwan and have never been citizens of China or had Chinese heritage.

It also “arbitrarily” has its own currency, government, military, flag, infrastructure, foreign policy, trade deals, etc.

And anybody who knows the history of Taiwan and doesn’t perceive it to be an independent nation is willfully ignorant.