flipht

Sure, Jan.

There's a great book called The Dictator's handbook that explains why the Russian oligarchs couldn't give less of a damn. There's a YouTube video called Rules for Rulers that does a good recap of it, and the overall political theory behind all of it is Selectorate theory.

The long and the short is that as long as resources are available to the elite, and as long as they have enough to keep their underlings satisfied, the only time you have real unrest is when the dissatisfication from the bottom outweighs the resource allocation from the top.

Which they've done a good job of preventing by keeping the populous off balance and unable to organize.

It would have worked better in Germany too if we hadn't had the USSR in the corner sucking the marrow from the sections they were in charge of.

They do that with humans because it's harder to just get away with killing us.

For whales? They'll just try to revive the whaling industry.

Even if that's true, it is not a reason to work someone to death.

He was in a penal colony. Places not known for adequate food, medical care, or reasonable work protections.

No one is saying that someone shot him in the head. He died "naturally" because the body cannot sustain in that environment indefinitely. And who put him there, and why?

As long as people are out in the wild trying to give cover to regressive fascists, we'll never see the end of this shit.

The take is actually grounded in history.

The US has notoriously bad spy craft when it comes to Russia. We spent literal decades believing they were an equal power, spending vast sums on defense to make sure we didn't fall behind. The government funded all sorts of "studies" but anyone who questioned the narrative got blackballed, and the people who kept getting that work just parroted back what the generals wanted to hear.

And then the iron curtain fell and the Berlin wall came down, and we saw the state of their military...and it was abysmal.

We are seeing the same thing with their basic war capabilities right now. Ukraine has been able to hold them off, more or less, for two years using mostly NATO cast off equipment and sunflower seeds.

There's a pretty good book that goes over a lot of this by Anne Jacobsen called The Pentagon's Brain.

This. The "just go through the steps!" people are ignoring that one of the steps is approval, which can and will be denied if it would cost them more than they could expect to recoup.

Girl scouts may be wrong here, but they're still by far a better organization than the boy scouts.

There's something to be said for the skills that are taught and the overall purported ethos, but like the Catholic church, you absolutely cannot trust them to not cover up heinous shit that they'll allow to continue forever.

If you do, make sure you're present all the time and be aware that predators have found a home there since their inception.

Elie Wiesel said something similar.

https://www.ipl.org/essay/Essay-On-Neutrality-PCBW3QTTU#:~:text=The%20statement%20by%20Elie%20Wiesel,protect%20themselves%20and%20their%20people.

Cool. So you don't actually want to know why people found your initial comment gross. Well, then all I can tell you is that if you do not like how people react to what you say, keep the distasteful parts inside thoughts. Good luck in all your future endeavors.