Quite the opposite. He hates Anthropic and keeps trying to find a way, any way, to damage them. Those attempts keep backfiring, though. It's the internal image of his international misadventures.

There's some other kind out there?

I also linked that someone an investigation into allegations the US mined the pipes at Baltops '22, and also a video of Biden threatening to make the pipe go away. Here's another one, placing the US Navy directly on the crime scene at the right time: https://weltwoche.ch/daily/us-...

For shits and giggles, also this: https://x.com/TheInsiderPaper/...

But my point is not about that. My point is that what is "well known" has been changing in time. First it was x, then it was y, and now it is z. There is no reason to believe it will not be something completely different in the future, and therefore, no reason to get invested into what the current official truth is. We will know for sure only if and when the archives are opened up to historians, somewhere in the second half of the century.

Until then, whatever the truth is that is on offer at any time, caveat emptor.

That's the thing: it isn't. Those are monetary movements that exist only on paper, not realized. Company A "invests" $x on company B, which invests $y and $z on companies C and D, with C then investing $p back into A and $q into D, with company D then investing $r back into A and $s on B, and B also investing $t on A, etc. It's a Ponzi scheme, but in the form of a maze rather than that of a pyramid.

The purpose of those movements is to leverage stock prices. A company valued at $hundreds of billions that gets re-evaluated at $trillions due to all this paper-shuffling sees its stock prices rise. Executives and shareholders profit by exchanging their overvalued portfolios for actual money, and whoever is left with those shares on hand when the bubble pops and the market crashes (read: pension funds) loses.

The last prediction I saw on this said people are likely going to see half their lifelong retirement savings disappear almost overnight when that hits, all the while the billionaires who sold at the right moment will see themselves catapulted into almost trillionaires, with a few becoming outright trillionaires.

Democrats wouldn't let those companies die either. Can you imagine all their hawks being content letting Microsoft, Apple, Oracle, and Nvidia cease to exist, and with them the global leverage those companies provide the US? No, they're all "too big to fail" no matter who's in charge. That's pretty much a bipartisan thing.

The problem for Russia is they're running out of money. Even with suicidal infantry being cheap, those still need lots of equipment and logistics to keep going, and there's nowhere else to source all of that from, whether from within or without. And it isn't like Russian pseudo-allies are really helping.

China, in particular, is double-dipping on them by demanding that oil and gas it purchases from Russia be sold at extraordinarily low prices, with the exact same heavily subsidised prices Russia sells them to its own population, while at the same time selling everything Russia needs for military use at the highest price it can charge. Russia cannot say no to either demand, so that's depleting Russian coffers even faster than they expected. And it isn't like China minds Russia becoming weaker due to this strategy. The more dependent Russia becomes on China, the easier it'll become for China to, someday, demand Russia give back all the Chinese territories the Russian Empire took from them when China itself was weakened during the 19th century.

Ukraine, on the other hand, has developed its military technology in-house, and with such a high level of competence, it's now exporting it and even building drone factories in other countries, countries that are in turn becoming heavy customers of Ukrainian tech and dependent on it for their own military uses, which in turn is paving the way for that technology, that doesn't depend of people on the ground walking toward the meat grinder while making it even more of a meat grinder, to advance at a faster and faster pace.

At this point, there's little Russia can do that'd turn things around other than going nuclear, and even that isn't guaranteed to go well for Russia, as Ukraine has very likely been preparing for that contingency for the last four years. If anything, going nuclear would precipitate the entire world attacking them.

And then to China taking back its former territories even earlier than they expected to.

Tyrants in general, from Putin to Trump, Xi to Kim, and everyone in between, practice seeding waves upon waves of contradictory lies mixed with a handful of truths with the very deliberate goal of causing exactly that emotional reaction: exhausted cynicism. They promote contradictory lies at home, so their people become accustomed to the notion that factual truth is hard or even impossible to achieve, and then convince their populations to generalize that cynicism so that they also start believing it's the same everywhere. That generates apathy toward politics in general, and by extension mistrust of those who are genuine in their activism, the latter being "felt" as nothing but agents of so many hidden interests, actors faking conviction in exchange for under-the-table benefits. People tune out and, as the saying goes, if one opts for neutrality in a dispute where one side is more powerful than the other, then one's siding with the powerful against the weak. And tyrants absolutely love that attitude: it's a huge factor in them maintaining their power unchallenged.

There are ways out of that. The heuristic I personally follow is to side with the weak side in any direct dispute with the powerful unless I have access to extremely trustworthy information showing that specific case is one of the very, very rare instances in which that doesn't apply due to extreme circumstances.

Hence, in Ukraine vs Russia I'm with Ukraine, because Ukraine is the weak against the strong and Russia is the attacker. Were it NATO attacking Russia, or China attacking Russia, I'd be with Russia. Were it the US attacking China, I'd be with China. Were it China attacking India, I'd be with India. India attacking Pakistan, I'd be with Pakistan. And so on.

Ditto for internal contexts. A Christian government in a Christian-majority country against small religions of minority groups, or against LGBT+ people? I'm with these. Muslim fanatics in Islamic-majority countries attacking Christian minorities? I'm with the Christians. Chinese attacking Falun Gong cultists or Vatican-loyal Catholics? I'm with both of these. Etc.

Take the side of the immediately weak against an attacking directly immediately strong, and you will rarely be on the wrong side of that specific dispute.

You're welcome. I only act aggressively in discussions when I'm attacked first, or the other deliberately acts with intellectual dishonesty. If that isn't the case, then my rhetoric may be at times ironic and even sarcastic, but it's always serious and on topic.

US will have won the war when the Strait gets reopened on their terms. As it currently stands, the world is running into an oil shock, with a side of helium, aluminium, sulphuric acid, and to top it off with a famine coming next winter, urea.

But thank you for the name calling.

I don't really pay much attention to people with Russian names, they are usually simps for either Russia or US. I mean it does help to know how the other side sees the issues, but that does not take much effort. And some simps can still be invaluable sources of information, if you can stomach the biases, not that I mean the particular one.

In any case, I take it you cannot fault my argument, so you go for me instead.

China probably is going to end up with all of Russia east of the Urals, and probably without a shot being fired. Siberia already has countless millions of Chinese farmers who have crossed the border in search of a better life. Russia on the other hand lacks the population to fill the space, so there's really nothing they can do about it.

If you haven't paid attention, pretty much all of the US foreign policy debate in the last decades has been about which one of China, Russia, Iran and North Korea should US get over with first. While the US is on the war path and has it in for them, those four are going to stick together and have each others backs. Divided, they will fall, united, they will stand.

They can and did hit whatever they wanted, but they still lost the war.

Not entirely certain, many see him as too soft on Ukraine, and hardliners are gaining ground.

Would Zelensky win in Ukraine today? Not entirely certain, many are fed up with the war he represents.

Would Trump win in US today? Not entirely certain, many are tired of his bullshit. But even though most people know he never says a single word of truth, most still believe everything he says about Iran and his Epstein war there.

This is how it works. When people get to choose between the enemy, and their however imperfect leader, they are going to choose the latter, and rally behind them. Much like this conversation here. Whatever disagreements people might have with their government or it's prosecution of the war in Ukraine, when I criticize it, everyone still mans the barricades.

That's impossible. Narcissistic egos cannot understand the meaning of "no".

If Russia wins? Yes, since it'll be the same dictator governing both countries.

Yep! Chaos, followed by a unified Empire (the Roman one), followed by chaos, followed by another unified Empire (Christendom in its different imperial incarnations), followed by chaos, followed by the currently newly forming unified Empire, followed by chaos, followed...

The current incarnation is following the "perpetual peace" playbook as devised by Kant. 300 years to start reaching fruition, but such things take time.

The key sentence being "for the time being". In your list I'd only kind of agree with Iran not being expansionist. Putin has declared many times he wants conquest, having followed closely Dugin's "foundations" outline. China indeed isn't expansionist in the same sense, but in classic Chinese fashion it wants to be surrounded by wholly vassal states.

That means little. Russia, Belarus and Ukraine all claim descent from Kievan Rus, but they've culturally diverged within that common ancestral origin. And yes, as a good Russian propagandist I know you toe the (Duginian) line that Ukraine doesn't have its own distinctive culture because ${mythopolitical_nonsense} and therefore "should be" this and that and the other thing, whether willingly or by force. Ukrainians clearly disagree, so more power to them.

I thought they would fall quickly, too, and I got a lot of shit for it back in the day. Here's an example of the mainstream thinking back then https://www.nytimes.com/2022/1...

Turned out Ukraine was more prepared than we thought. Well the US had been preparing them for it since Maidan, arming and training, and building up the army. But the basic war math is that Russia has three times the recruitment pool and had six times the materiel before the war, and has had made bigger advances in production than the West. This basic math says that Ukraine can not hold out indefinitely, and so does them running thin on manpower for about two years already.

To propose that Ukraine can not only win, but to also reclaim Crimea, as was the popular idea back in the day, is to propose something that can neutralize and flip around Russian advantage. Despite regular news articles about the next big thing coming in to turn the tides, nothing of the such has materialized so far. It is my understanding that at least some in DC sincerely thought that Russia was going to crumble and go into a regime change based on the sanctions alone. Considering sanctions have never achieved that, instead always unifying and strengthening the resolve of the sanctioned country, this is... wild.

As to the half-swastikas, I suppose you mean the Z. I don't particlarily care about the nazi allegations on this or that side. Every population has Nazis and what you want to do with them is to put them in the army so you can extract some value out of them instead of wasting resources on them by converting them into a prison population. They kill enemies, good, they get killed, also good. But if you want to talk about nazis, you need to talk about the Azov brigade, too, with them having the wolfsangel as their insignia, and with their members having left behind an ample trail of swastikas and SS symbols worn in media.

Now if you cannot understand why Russians would rally behind Putin in war time, well I'm sure you understand Ukrainians rallying behind Zelensky, Americans rallying behind whoever their president is at the time, and so on. There's nothing to understand there, really, and I take statements of such to mean that primarily one does not want to understand. But there's more to that in the particular case of Russia, which was commonly understood in the US back in the time giants like Kennan roamed the earth. A big part of the Russian psyche, identity, and validation for their existence, is their regular collective suffering in the name of the fatherland. Most importantly in this context they suffered under Napoleon and under Hitler, and now under Nato, and they do view this current war as a repeat of the previous two by Nato in general, and the US in particular.

If you cannot understand what movitates the enemy, well Sun Tzu put it like so:

The West has collectively decided that he who tries to undertand the enemy is with the enemy, and there we have it, a stalemate at best.

The US Navy was placed at the crime scene long time ago. Now there's also this https://www.europarl.europa.eu...

But the particular data point is not the most important part of my point, which is about the walk back from the absurd original statement no one in their right mind should believe, to a more reality-based one that has to concede it was some sort of "us" who did the bad thing. Admitting to this all at once would cause outrage, so you have to do it in small enough steps, a common pattern in all of our war reporting.

Now as to the Nato lake, do you want to say that Nato's ability to know what is going on on the Baltic Sea is a development that took place during the last four years? On the very sea that is one of the three strategic axes of the entire alliance? Come on.

Ah, there's no need for that. Ukraine learned to be like Afghanistan, a land where Empires go to die. Even if Russia were to win, it would see no peace until it gave up, likely under the next dictator, who won't have the same commitments as the current one does to his pet projects.

Me neither, but that's mostly because the US may have left by then, or been expelled, and Europe will reorganize into its own anti-Russian-aggression coalition.

Yep. Those were lost opportunities for all the involved.

Nope. Have you seen how the regions in Russia bordering China are filled with Chinese companies and businessmen, Chinese language everything, and more and more dependence on China itself? This allows China to use the same trick Russia used in Ukrainian regions of, whenever it so wishes, declare that any kind of Russian effort to make sure China doesn't take control of Russian strategic resources is "anti-Chinese persecution", and declare a special military operation to "protect" ethnic Chinese minorities "oppressed" by Russia, thus justifying taking back to tasty, tasty cities and mineral resources.

Remember, the Century of Humiliation didn't happen only on the Southern Chinese border, but on the Northern too. And China remembers, ah, how it remembers!