China might have a 2 year window coming up where it’s even possible to invade Taiwan. Their military has modernized a lot, but they probably aren’t quite to the point of being able to pull it off. At the same time, they are looking at a demographic cliff from the long term implications of the One Child policy.
It’s possible this window as already closed. That said, authoritarian regimes have started wars before that were terrible ideas.
Eeeeehhh, if you just look at numbers of boats, yes. The US Navy has far, far more experience, though. Drones are also going to change the game in ways we’re only starting to see with the Ukraine War. With that, the answer might be “everyone’s boats are sunk now”.
China probably couldn’t gain air superiority over Taiwan, and without that, an invasion will fail. That will be true even if the US ends up losing more boats.
Cause and effect are a little twisted here. Trump was already undermining NATO during is first term by saying European members should spend more. They didn’t agree at the time, but the Ukraine War proved that Europe really did need a more domestic MIC, and now they are.
Trump wasn’t saying it in the first place because he thought it would help NATO.
It’s also convenient that churches tend to be de facto segregated by race. We’re not racist, we just setup institutions that happen to work in racist ways.
It’s also convenient that churches tend to be de facto segregated by race. We’re not racist, we just setup institutions that happen to work in racist ways.
Funny that they’re all in entertainment.
You’ve been experiencing a cult of an idea. The Republican party has transformed into a cult of personality with no clear successor.
There are cults of personality that have successfully transformed into a cult of ideas. Mormons and Scientology are examples. However, in each case, the person at the center fostered a clear successor, and that successor was able to make it last in the long run by centering around ideas. Scientology still has that successor around (David Miscavige), but there isn’t really a specific person in charge of the LDS. Not in the same way. Their leadership is now interchangeable, but replacing their ideas is a harder sell.
Trump has no successor, and isn’t interested in fostering one. It’s not JD Vance; nobody respects him, including Trump. It’s not Musk; he made the mistake of trying to be more popular than the boss, and he’s not a natural-born citizen, anyway. It’s not Peter Thiel; he prefers to be the power behind the throne. It’s not any of Trump’s adult children; they’re nothing but spoiled rich kids. It’s not any of the people in his cabinet; they’re all plebes using booze and cocaine to get through the day. It’s not Tucker or Matt Walsh or any of the other right-wing commentators; they’d just eat each other trying to get on top.
Oh, no, they’ll devolve into infighting. There won’t be enough shared ideals and actions to sustain Republicans as a political force. There will be fringe groups that linger on for a while. After almost three centuries, there are still two people left claiming the Shaker tradition; that’s a group that forbids sexual relations even for procreation, so you can see how they’d have trouble gaining new members. But they’re not a religious group that anyone really cares about, either. That’s how MAGA will go eventually.
See also, Knitting Cat Lady, who is a former member of the Children of God cult, then the US Army, and then got a masters in organizational psychology around cults.
Fracture to irreverence where the component pieces eat each other. There is no future for the party after Trump except as various fringe groups claiming to be the “true” party.
Channels aren’t doing that because they want to. YouTube has a lot of rules, some of which are written down. They do it because YouTube has flagged them in the past for demonetization on the issue, and they can’t afford to do that too many times. It can also impact your ability to do livestreams.
It’s on top of a pile of issues that’s making YouTube content creation non-viable for everyone.
That would probably happen as part of a narcissistic collapse. In the most extreme cases, it may trigger suicidal reactions.
That would have some significant medical ethics issues. She nearly died. Do no harm, and that’s regardless of the patient’s political ideology.
Don’t take it too seriously.
Clarence Thomas apparently said that white liberals were just as racist to him, they just did it in a more sly way. So he joined the side that made him the most money.
I can’t totally say he’s wrong.
Iran might be a fucked up theocracy, but they can generally be counted on to behave like a rational actor. More so than Trump can.
Well, then keep shooting, homophobes.
Probably cheats with duplicate cards in Commander. On the upside, she keeps duplicating One With Nothing, so nobody calls her out.
Not necessarily a nepo hire, but they are scraping the barrel.
Project 2025’s playbook was to fire all the existing people in the federal government and replace them with Trump loyalists. To that end, they created a list of pre-vetted replacements.
Problem is, those people are vetted for loyalty first, and competence a distant second. Also, a lot of them likely have jobs already that are more lucrative than a federal position. In other cases, their circumstances change in the months in between vetting and the offer becoming concrete. So even though they may have a few thousand people on the list, a big chunk of them aren’t going to accept when the time comes. Those that do aren’t necessarily going to be qualified in any way.
What may be surprising here is that they’re scraping the bottom so quickly. You’d think out of several thousand possibilities, they could find someone more qualified than this guy.
This tends to be destructive in the short term, because incompetent people are making important decisions. In the long term, it’s one of the self-defeating factors of fascism. A system just can’t work this way, but it can destroy the rest of society before it implodes on itself.
The claim that the Psalms are just poetry is going to be heartbreaking to anyone that cites them as prophecies about Jesus
That’s completely fine. The early Christians went to great lengths to try to say “this bit here was prophecy, and here’s how our guy fulfilled it”. But nobody was viewing those passages as prophecies before then. It was all marketing for a weird little offshoot of Judaism on the fringes of the Roman empire which happened to take off centuries later.
It was a talking point that Trump had in his first term. He tends not to let go of bad ideas once they get into his head.
At the time, people didn’t take it seriously. With the Ukraine War, Europe feels like it has to now. But it’s going to be domestic production, not paying US MIC companies like Trump was thinking.