Likewise, if not for Hexbear I would living in a bubble of people roughly my own age and completely cut off from younger people, who (especially but exclusively comrades here) are very cool and good. I despise when older people hate “the youth” and have promised myself I will never become like that.
Ooooh dang, that’s pretty good.
And on top of that, they can always write down the value further due to “impairment” like obsolescence. For example, maybe a specific missile costs $1 million and it is straight-line depreciated for 5 years. After 3 years the book value is $400k. However, they can just say “we have a new missile that’s better so this old missile is obsolete, the value should only be $100k” then they can write down the book value even further.
Also, if they use FIFO inventory accounting, only the oldest stuff on record is used EVEN IF IT ISN’T physically the oldest stock. So if the costs of the equipment get more expensive every year then what’s counted as being given to Ukraine has the lowest value, even if in real terms they are giving them the newest stock.
8.9k upvotes. If there was ever a comment that convinced me Reddit is astroturfed / an op, this is it. Because they are objectively wrong. Or at least intentionally misleading.
They’re focusing on the fact that the valuation equipment changed and ignoring what that actually means. Sure, by itself it doesn’t affect US taxpayers. But the point is, the military says they overvalued it by $2, so that allows them to send $2 billion more worth of equipment. That’s additional stocks of weapons that ostensibly have to be replaced, which is paid for by tax dollars.
And while it’s not provably corrupt, it strains credulity to think this was not done in order to ship more weapons. Revaluations of this kind are much much more likely because someone wants it revalued, i.e. corruption.
I don’t remember why it took me a like a week to sign up. I kept checking the lifeboat discord for news. I think I missed it by a couple days. I made an account but didn’t like the name so I came up with this one.
This was Obama’s slogan, because he would always call out issues but then act like he was powerless to do anything.
Biden’s strategy is to act like problems don’t exist and actually it’s the people who are wrong, the economy is doing great. To say otherwise is to imply you actually support Trump.
The typical American probably thinks that, outside of Hong Kong, everyone lives in extreme poverty in shacks. Or at best, in very small apartments in massive plain concrete buildings that look like prisons.
Just last week, I was talking with a coworker who didn’t realize South Africa had paved roads.
Maybe I’m thinking about this too hard, but is this actually a bit self-deprecating? Like, the gamers and the women both have their backs to each other. The women seem to be completely oblivious to the presence of the men, and vice versa.
Angela Davis is very cool, I wish I knew more about her. Apparently one of her heroes is Joseph Weydemeyer, my all time favorite obscure communist.
Yes. J Arch Getty - a legit Soviet historian who is a lib but is still very fair to Stalin IMO and generally very USSR-friendly - once said that Furr understands the material in the archives, but he just comes to really weird conclusions.
I think Furr is fine as long as you know you’re getting an apologist more than a historian. There’s a place for that. Furr himself admittedly (on the Proles pod) he thinks Stalin did nothing wrong. If you approach history from that angle you’re going to have blind spots. IMO skip Furr and go to Losurdo.
To be honest, I think the real switch is from when video games went from being in person only (arcades and consoles) to online (so you can play with anyone in the world). I think when video games are something you can only play by yourself or with friends, it is so fundamentally different of an experience than gaming today. And the corollary with this: that you could really only talk about video games with people you know, instead of via forums and Reddit.
This all makes sense to me, what I am trying to square is what’s the thinking in Berlin while all this is going on? Why do they make the choices they do? With the benefit of hindsight, why would Hitler ever even consider getting on Britain or France’s bad side? We know Hitler wanted his Lebensraum to the east, it seems like it would be straightforward to just hash that out with the eventual “Allies”?
The best answer I have is, Germany and the US/UK/France ultimately were never on the same page. I think the Allies wanted Germany to invade the USSR, but kind of in the way they want the Ukraine/Russia war in the present to grind on as long as possible. They wanted to use Germany to wear down the USSR. Best case scenario for them is for both Germany and the USSR to essentially destroy each other, so you eventually get two weakened states beholden to western hegemony.
That said, I can’t help but wonder how much the irrationality of fascism comes into play here. And I hate to ascribe irrational motives to anyone, even fascists… I have a hard time with any other explanation for a lot of the diplomatic and foreign policy choices the Nazis made.
I deeply love LotR but I re-read the trilogy a year ago for the first time as a leftist and as much as I hate to admit it, there’s definitely racism in the book. I don’t think Tolkien was consciously white supremacist or anything, but he was a product of his place and time, and early 20th century England was dripping with chauvinism towards non-white people in that time. He may have felt bad about portraying the orcs as one-dimensional but afaik he never regretted portraying the “evil men” in explicitly orientalist or brown terms.
But I definitely think Tolkien’s socio-political views are wildly contradictory. As much as he seems to love monarchy, afaik he never spoke out in favor of actual monarchs like Elizabeth II having any real power.
No, I don’t think so.
Bush’s “rehabilitation” is based on Americans’ relationship to the invasion of Iraq. At the outset, most Americans supported the invasion, over the years, as victory wasn’t exactly swift and decisive, most Americans turned against the war and Bush, by extension.
But Americans don’t actually understand why the invasion was evil. They just know “Iraq war bad”. If you could do a Vulcan mind meld on them, what you probably discover is most Americans eventually turned against the war for reasons like “we didn’t win right away so why are we there?” and “everyone around me is against it now too”.
So by not being tethered to any principled anti-imperialist or anti-war stance, over time Americans have really stopped caring about Iraq - and Americans in general don’t give a shit if their military kills a million people in their name on a good day. Since the Iraq war no longer carries any significance for Americans, their reasons for disliking Bush kinda go away too. They can’t remember why they didn’t like Bush. So they see him painting pictures of dogs and sharing candy, and that’s the only thing that sticks in their brains. The same dynamics just aren’t there for Trump, totally different situation.
Btw I don’t agree that W has been rehabilitated by liberals at large. I know plenty of them IRL that still hate W. I think it’s more an “independent” or centrist thing, or libs on Reddit which is no way indicative of real life.
Not the final straw, but the first thing that shook me out of “capitalism is great and leads to the best outcomes thinking”… in the span of a couple weeks, I took a flight on Frontier Airlines and a train ride on Amtrak.
If you’re not familiar with Frontier… it’s one of the airlines that has “cheap” tickets but they get you on a lot of small charges. Flight was miserable, mainly because the flight attendants were kinda pushy about selling beverages and snacks. And more than once, they got on the PA and you were forced to listen to their sales pitch for the Frontier credit card. All around miserable experience.
Then shortly after I took my first trip on Amtrak - the US’ government supported train network. People always shit on it but it was actually kinda nice. Affordable ticket, comfortable easy to get on/off compared to flying. There wasn’t a bunch of ads plastered inside the cabin. Overall a very nice experience.
It seems small but up to then I had a firm belief that the private sector always did things better than the public sector. Losing that helped shake other things loose later on.
Chicago is a pretty good one, as long as you’re not talking about winter. Some good museums and downtown is nice to walk around. Depends on how long though, you might get bored after a few days. If you go to a baseball game, be sure to see the White Sox and not the Cubs.
I’ll plug San Francisco. Ignore what the chuds say about it. You can go any time of the year. And sure, it’s lib city but none of that should matter if you’re talking about just taking a trip. It’s the most beautiful big city in the US, bar none. Better Chinatown than Chicago. Great for walking around because they have good public transit. Marin County (other side of the Golden Gate Bridge) is achingly beautiful, as is the drive down the coast. And if ALL expenses are paid then Napa is great even if you don’t like wine, they have some of the best food anywhere in the country there.
Do not in any circumstances spend more than 24 hours in Las Vegas.
I’ve actually been thinking about this since Awoo brought it up in a couple threads earlier today. I think it would be really useful to have something to counteract the Jordan Petersons out there. The right actually is out there trying to recruit disillusioned young men, and succeeding with their bullshit masculinity.
The thing is, there are fellas out there who could do this and already have some fame. Hasan, JT, Hakim, Yugopnik, Felix, Matt Christman, etc. Problem is, these guys either dont seem to want to carry that mantle or they are just disembodied voices behind a podcast mic.
Ironically, the best person we had who could talk these young men out of toxic masculinity was a woman (Contra). But she’s a lib now and only makes videos once every two years with titles like “Spectacle”.
Are you ok with fiction? Ursula K LeGuin’s The Dispossessed is a fictional account of an anarchist society. It’s also a very very good book as I know more than one person who is neither an anarchist nor a communist and they loved it, since LeGuin is such a gifted writer.
All my Frogs and Toads, gone…