Commonwealth of Independent States. It’s basically Wish.com EU, but Russia-centric and with them calling all the shots.

God I fuckin hate orangeboi.

For what it is worth, as an American, I consider this development to be a fucking embarrassment.

Yeah - I tend to downvote stuff that’s aggressively dogmatic, especially if the user is being a combative asshole about it, but simply offering an alternative hypothesis is, in my book, not grounds for getting ratioed.

It’s frustrating to see @lauseta@piefed.social getting that treatment. It discourages open discussion and makes this place more of an echo chamber, which is absolutely a bad thing.

FWIW, I don’t like that you’re getting downvoted swamped either; you’re simply expressing a hypothesis for discussion, which is why many of us post here.

I would like to point out that in the excerpt you quoted from me, “at this point” is doing a lot of heavy lifting. I expect we will learn more things about more players in this whole clusterfuck saga in the coming months and years. And it is very important to point out that Russia did run a ton of influence and cyberattack operations in support of the orange campaign all the back from 2015-16, and hasn’t really stopped. And that the lineage of the FSB and the parallel tactics to the KGB that I’m sure they quietly employ should not be trivially dismissed, even if there’s no overt evidence of it at the moment.

That’s the thing with “great power” geopolitics, both now and in the Cold War - there’s an absolute fuck load going on behind the scenes that the vast majority of us are generally not privy to until (at least) well after the fact

I would really not be surprised to eventually learn that he was working with both Mossad and the FSB. Enticing politicians and public figures into extremely fucked up compromising positions was a bread-and-butter tactic of the KGB during the Cold War that they commonly used to try to get leverage on people. The FSB is just rebranded KGB under the Russian Federation instead of the Soviet Union.

That said: at this point, from the data released thus far, it does largely appear to be Mossad-driven. But time will tell the full story. Hopefully.

It’s a big club and you ain’t in it. And evidently the club is also for fuckin’ (as a verb, not an adjective) kids.

HSI is very much a part of the problem here.

I admit I worded my comment vaguely because I was rather tired and wasn’t sure how I should express the nuance I feel around that. But to fix that:

In my experience, going from a reasonable, mutually healthy level of intimacy to one party just completely lacking interest is essentially never the core issue in play, but it is an exacerbating issue. For instance, with my ex, who I was with for five years: for the first couple years, things were pretty great. Then she ended up slipping into perhaps the worst long-term episode of severe depression and video game addiction I have ever seen in my life. I’m talking 12-14h at least a day in a KRPG, completely withdrawing from IRL social interaction (including with me, for the most part) and supplanting it with constantly being on voice chat with the various clans she was a part of over time in the game. Mind you, I enjoy gaming myself, and have struggled with overdoing in the past as well, but never to this extent in terms of length and severity. And despite trying to find numerous ways to help/support her, encouraging her to find different and better therapists and psychiatrists, and figuring out how to rebalance her meds - including offering to just be on the phone with me for 30 seconds at the beginning of the call and just saying “I give permission for my partner to discuss this stuff with you and try to find a better solution because my mental state prohibits me from doing that right now”, being effectively unable to make any motion in a positive mental health direction. To the point that it got so bad that I became severely depressed and began aggressively self medicating, eventually to the point that I realized staying in the dynamic would probably kill me, in a very literal sense. She would barely come out of her room for dinner towards the end, and I was absolutely not about to get her to just let me “use” her for intimate gratification when the chemistry was completely gone and she was gonna just lie there like a fish - I’d have felt like I was assaulting her, and I refuse to do that.

So: no, it shouldn’t be the grounds for a divorce (or partner separation, I happen to not give a shit about marriage outside of the context of tax benefits, but I take a committed partnership very seriously), but it can and should be considered an exacerbating circumstance in a relationship that has extremely serious, long-lasting problems that essentially put everything into a death spiral.

Also: I’m sharing this for context and nuance as an explanation of my opinion. I’m not asking for or desiring feedback or constructive (or otherwise) criticism or judgement. Me explaining this is an infinitesimal fraction of the lived experience of it, like you saying your partner is “pretty cool”, when there are myriad shades of nuance to a partnership. It is a closed chapter of my life, and I am better for it.

Overall, I think this is a good idea.

My thoughts on the part about removing refusal of intimacy as justification of divorce are more nuanced, however - and partially informed from anecdotal experience.

…what…?

This is an example of how we should be using ML. Specialized agents that are trained for very specific goals that are otherwise incredibly tedious, expensive, and inefficient to explore. Not fucking psychosis-inducing chatbots and propaganda generators.

The regime has made overt commentary and motions of hostility toward Canada, and has vociferously stated a desire for lebensraum in Canada, Greenland, and other neighboring countries. When they talk about neo-Monroe doctrine, they’re really talking about neocolonialism. They’re “joking” until they’re not. It’s an established pattern and practice with the regime, now as well as in the first stint they had.

I do actually think 2b-e are all applicable here.

This is… uh… maybe not the best place to be requesting asylum in these days.

That would just be racism.

What a year this month has been

I do think there’d be more than a few mutinies and refusals to follow orders all across the board. Perhaps even to the level of the president trying to nationalize (for instance) the Minnesota National Guard, and their commander responding with a hearty “fuck you, eat shit”.

Also, aside from the absolute, categorical failure of French strategic planning and leadership at the start of the Second World War, the Free French forces significantly contributed to a ton of campaigns during the war. Not to mention: WW2 was a divergence from the norm for France. Before, and since, they have been and still are a strategic military powerhouse, are able to punch far above their weight, and have pointedly maintained a serious domestic defense industry - which, nowadays, is showing very clear and obvious benefits.

I get that they’re taking advantage of people coming from developing countries… but seriously, at what point will everyone start to be like “hmmmm maybe I should rule out that Russian job offer because they’re just gonna shanghai me into military service”?