The crisis is over
That’s the thing. It isn’t.
US sanctions Texas
I wouldn’t go that far because they’re fucking awful but I would say that we can’t impose feminism or gay rights by military force and that’s not what we were doing in Afghanistan anyway, aside from some photo-ops in Kabul.
I’d also say critical support to the Taliban for ending the opium crop and ending the practice of pederasty among the elite. They also seem to be good at fighting corruption.
They’re fucking awful to women and I can’t even imagine what being gay in Afghanistan would be like, just awful. But that doesn’t justify the invasion at all because the invasion wasn’t able to reform that and in fact it wasn’t even trying anyway so pointing to the horrendous treatment of women and LGBT+ is liberal idealism that should be ignored.
So critical support to the Taliban for keeping the west out of their society and now that they’ve achieved that goal I hope they fucking die.
UK MI6 to send 100 Ukrainian fighters to Africa and counter RussiaAJ
It’s cheap because it’s not Americans dying
So Ukrainian politics are basically patronage networks. Political clans based on networks of corruption more than anything else, but also generally aligning along regional and ideological lines. Regional identity, ideology, and very high levels of corruption all blur together.
Political equilibrium is achieved by duplicating political power centers and rotating control of these power centers through the different criminal clans. So for example the SBU is one power center (basically the FBI or CIA, successors to the KGB), and the national police overlap in their powers with the SBU, and then there is another overlapping body which “fights corruption” etc. Control of law enforcement means there is a choreographed Mexican standoff with each criminal clan having the power to come after the others.
So power is split between the clans but so is the ability to make money. Public infrastructure and the opportunity to extract money belongs to one minister, military procurement to another, etc so in the same way that police power gets split, so is the ability to extract money via corruption.
The clans horse trade for the balance of power and money that they feel they need and occasionally they kill each other because they’re mafia.
Reforming this system is nearly impossible because reforming one section, mounting an anti-corruption drive in procurement for example, means directly attacking one of the criminal clans that control the country.
The popularity of Zelenskyy was due to him being an outsider, or at least perceived as a political outsider, who wasn’t part of this sclerotic network of criminal gangs. Since he was outside the political equilibrium of corrupt clans there was a belief that he could actually reform this system. (As an aside, he was also fairly popular in the east since the criminal clans that were aligned with the east had been exiled and the associated political parties had been banned, and Zelenskyy promised to implemented Minsk II so he saw broad support across the country.)
This system of multiple patronage networks competing for money and power results in a kind of equilibrium. A Mexican standoff. It’s nearly impossible for this political system to change course because any change of policy means one clan wins and another clan loses. This locks the system into a kind of consensus. You don’t come after me and I won’t come after you.
Add into this the USA and the EU playing favorites by favoring one group over another. The US funding one political service (eg “anti-corruption” institutions being aligned with one criminal faction) means that some clans become closely associated with the US. Other clans respond by strengthening their hold on other power centers such as the SBU to stymie the other clans from becoming dominant. This is part of why you see such a proliferation of various militias and why when the militias are officially integrated into the national guard they retain autonomy because these militias are the armed vanguard of one clan or another.
Another symptom of this system is that political parties are very transient. Most only last for one or two elections. Each political party is really an adhoc grouping of interests for that specific election, they divide the ministries as spoils and make sure everyone important gets their piece, and nothing changes.
The result is that actually no one is really calling the shots because you can’t steer this ship. Any change of course means one group will lose influence and power, and either they need to be compensated for this or they will resist it.
Ukraine should perform under the flag of Bandera
It is though. You can look at so many measures from perception of democracy among the citizens, the degree to which power is devolved to the local level most answerable to the community, and the turnover of elected officials being far higher than western democracies which usually feature politicians with what amounts to lifelong tenure.
People actually think China is still run the way it was back in the 1960s because their world view is formed from memes. It’s a democracy and a more vibrant one than what we usually see in the west.
But someone will reply to this with a meme about social credit without realizing they don’t earn Reddit gold here.
I can just see him tossing paper kitchen towels into the fires and still getting better optics than any other politician
This sounds to me like a high pressure campaign to get the guy to sign a plea deal and avoid a trial, but they are dressing it up like the Australian government are stepping in to help him.
Democracy is when The People Decide if trans people should exist but the tax rate policy is written by the rich
It seems pretty plausible to me it was a buk fired by separatists supplied by Russia that shot it down, but I don’t think it’s plausible they intended to shoot down a passenger jet so it’s a case of tragic negligence in a war zone, which should have been foreseeable by Malaysia airlines and Ukrainian air control that permitted the flight path and the reported alterations to the flight path.
And the contributory negligence of flying a passenger jet through an active air war seems the greater part of that negligence to my mind, even if it was legally permitted to fly at 33,000 feet when the no fly zone was 32,000 feet when Ukrainian Air Force planes had been operating at that height that’s the element of criminal negligence to my thinking.
Also the reasons why it’s course was changed and the reports of Ukrainian jets shadowing commercial jets as a form of cover and camouflage is also a factor that has been overlooked.
Basically the most plausible explanation as I understand things is that it was a Russian supplied missile fired by the separatists but I think the discussion of culpability doesn’t stop at that single fact.
Brave Ukrainians just found new uses for a shovel
Uh you had to make that the title now the Hexbears have arrived 
Serbia, Libya, and Afghanistan were all defensive operations.
Oh so like some kind of “social credit score” or something curious
He doesn’t miss misses often but not this time
2021 articles predicting Chinas imminent collapse that didn’t happen then either and a YouTube blogger
Solid.
It actually keeps collapsing and rebuilding itself from scratch every two weeks such is the power of Dengism
