please notice me, Xi senpai 🥺

If past precedent is any indicator, they’ll just deport the guy anyways and not give a fuck

Generations, more like

You’re debating a tankie, so rhetorical fact-based argument is not going to yield positive results.

That’s not how IADS works.

Also, the Ukrainians have more than enough air defense capacity to massively maul any aerial force that attempts a north-south transit of the country. Russia has been keeping their sorties almost entirely over airspace they control, as a result. The strikes you have been seeing them do (against Ukrainian military and civilian targets) are almost exclusively executed with standoff weapons like cruise missiles (of which “kamikaze drones” are essential subtype), glide bombs, and SRBMs. Russian stealth doesn’t really work, and they’re super nervous about losing their supposed wunderwaffe (e.g. the dozen or so Su-57s they’ve made over a couple decades)

It’s a bit of an indirect approach, but we technically have that - for offshore quakes at least

We wouldn’t be giving them an airstrip in the middle of Europe, because all the countries around it (except Ukraine) are in NATO, and there is no path to the sea that is over a non-NATO country. And the ruskies demonstrably do not have the capability to fly across the entirety of Ukrainian airspace unmolested.

Legislators? Too busy?

That’s a great joke - particularly given how much vacation time they vote to give themselves.

• I agree that the seizures are deeply inappropriate and almost certainly illegal. The strikes, doubly so.
• the USCG actually deploys overseas from time to time - for instance, they were a part of the international force that was off the coast of Somalia a few years back to help defend against the rampant piracy and hijacking.

Tangentially, I’m curious to see how ticket sales crater from international visitors compared to years past, due to our the absolutely unhinged customs/border policies the regime has introduced (and is actively making more extreme).

As a unitedstatesian, look into the wildly changed and extremely invasive entry/visa requirements before you consider visiting. If I were in your shoes, I wouldn’t - and I say that out of respect for privacy and human rights, not any sense of xenophobia. Shit is getting very weird here in a very bad way, if you’ve not been paying attention.

Unitedstatesian here: that “elbows up” strategy really is going to be your best bet going forward. You should start treating our government as a potential/likely adversary.

I mean… yeah. Any agreement that he’s ever made is built on sand. It’s kind of his whole thing. He’s a con artist. Also a narcissistic psychopath.

It’s not fear mongering. It’s a real area-denial weapons system capability that the PRC initially deployed in 1991, and upgraded the terminal weapon into a hypersonic glide body in 2015. Lob a few of those at a CVN and it’s probably going to the bottom of the ocean.

If the Biden admin was the first time the seriously looked at and understood that threat… well, that’s a bit insane, because the PRC has had that capability since the mid 2010s, and it’s only gotten more effective.

Cool I guess we’re doing piracy now 🤦‍♂️

Tbh the fundamentally fragmented, federated model the fediverse uses as a core design element does seem like it’d be far harder to centralize and comprehensively corrupt.

Look into Peter Thiel. He’s one of the most influential and strategic players operating in the shadows of the regime, and he’s been at it for well over a decade - probably closer to two. And he is one heinously evil motherfucker - personally, I consider him to be an enemy of humanity in general.

For me: a big component of it is a sensory thing. My brain does NOT like it when I can feel roughness on my fingers or hands. The best I’ve been able to do is just keep a bunch of good glass nail files around the house and in the bags I use and travel with, as well as some cuticle trimmers. That way I just trim and buff things out until my brain is like “mmmm yes this is fine, carry on”, and it’s way less of a compulsion.

But stress also often triggers it for me, and that’s harder to buff out :(

It’s insane that we defined a bunch of the things he and his circle are saying as “white supremacist stuff” back in the decades following the civil rights era, and now I guess we’ve decided as a society that that’s just an okay thing again?

I want off this ride, it’s not fun anymore :(

More precisely: tell your government/ legislative representatives to ignore our government. Dialog with a bully is generally not going to end constructively.