BRICST’D’VE’MST

“Mom, not fair!”

You’re advocating for imperialism.

You mistake analysis for advocacy.

If Mexico started making military and security agreements to host Chinese security assets on our southern border, I wouldn’t be surprised if the US took military actions to stop it. I’d fight that decision, but I’d understand why the US made it.

I simply want the deaths to stop. It is looking like the only path to that is Russia having control over the eastern parts of Ukraine.

Who would have guessed that sovereignty is violated by war?

This conflict did not begin in 2022. The western conceptualization of it did, because the preceding events make their current narrative look illegitimate. US foreign policy is to instigate events like these in neighboring states of other regional powers.

Let’s not forget the US violated Ukrainian sovereignty by interfering in a coup to overthrow Yanukovych in 2014. Was Ukraine sovereign when the US gave intelligence to Svoboda loyalists so they could hunt down the former head of state? Was Ukraine sovereign when Victoria Nuland was ruling out candidates for subsequent heads of state?

I wish for Ukrainians to live happy, healthy, and long lives free of interference by foreign powers. I understand this to be impossible at present. They will never have an independent state or foreign policy again, regardless of who wins this war.

You wish for Ukrainians to continue to throw themselves into the furnace to beat Russia. They will have just as little sovereignty, but far more dead Ukrainians.

I feel so sorry for Ukrainians, especially those who wanted none of this.

The president can only exercise policies to execute those laws.

From: https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/presidential-actions/2023/02/23/memorandum-on-united-states-conventional-arms-transfer-policy/

If the United States determines at any time that a transfer is no longer in accordance with United States foreign policy objectives, national security goals, or legal obligations, the United States may cease the transfer of or future support for a transferred defense article or service.

Biden could act unilaterally here.

This is elementary school civics in the US.

Yes, and he needs a declaration of war to go to war. 🙄 Just because your education ended with an elementary school reading of the constitution, doesn’t mean that’s how the country operates in practice.

“Checks and balances” exist in name only. Sure the supreme court or congress could strike down new social programs, but war and spy powers exist independently from the legislative and judicial branches.

Quite possibly. My comment wasn’t intended as a refutation.

No they won’t. My favorite projects aren’t Google projects.

This is a hallucination. Russia doesn’t want a destroyed failed state on their border. Nor do the want to govern Ukrainian language speakers. Israel wants the land and the removal/death of its inhabitants.

Once peace terms are agreed upon, Russia will keep, rebuild, and govern in the Russian-speaking eastern regions.

Russia doesn’t want a NATO-friendly government on its borders. Peace will occur when either Ukraine has no soldiers to fight with or agrees to not align with NATO in negotiations.

Almost like being ruled by a government you don’t like is preferable to dying. Sending weapons only prolongs the war resulting in more deaths.

Ukraine will run out of soldiers before running out of weapons. Since you hate cowards so much, surely you will volunteer to help fight against condemning them to tyranny, right? Right?

Representative bourgeois democracy is hard isn’t democracy.

This relies on the assumption that Trump wants to commit more genocide.

I don’t think Trump will enable more genocide in Gaza than Biden. In fact, I think Trump will withdrawal all support for Ukraine and Israel to focus on starting to genocide the Chinese.

American democracy hasn’t existed since the white man showed up.

The neolib centrists need the right to guarantee their power. The left is the only group threatening that.

Biden is the fucking commander in chief.

This only didnt happen because Americans feel no empathy to help non-white children and families.

When the US congress deems there to be a genocide, the truth is always the opposite of their conclusion. If the Holocaust was going on today, congress would rule unanimously there to be no genocide.

Lol at basically citing the CIA as your source.

You can’t even get on Reddit in China

Oh no, the horror!

Signal or other encryption

Weird, that’s how I kept in contact with my family when I was there.

It has nothing to do economic prosperity or anything like that

plugs ears LA LA LA LA LA

China is an authoritarian government who doesn’t want to lose control.

wet_fart_noise.flac

You’re both completely wrong. This is the narrative the five eyes and three letters need you to believe.

More important and more funded than domestic spying, US intelligence exists to facilitate regime change. The objective is to have both dragnet and targeted surveillance to obtain leverage (for strategic leverage, blackmail, or comms interception) over foreign political, social, and business leaders so they can maximize the unequal exchange between the US & developing countries.

Keeping Africa, South America, the Middle East, and South East Asia from developing through political and social instability not only prevents them from competing with US exports, but more importantly keeps their economies dependent on natural resource exports, which they need to sell for cheap because they are dependent on technology imports.

China as a manufacturing powerhouse threatens these unequal trade arrangements by supplying these undeveloped or developing countries with manufactured goods and technology, and thus is one of the primary targets of US covert regime change operations. (Also why you see news media crying bloody murder about China’s “dept trap diplomacy”). Much of this also applies to other developing powers that resist being imperialized or oppose US geopolitical goals like the USSR/Russia and Iran.

So purpose #1 of the great firewall is to prevent the US from controlling its social and technology sphere and using it to cause instability.

Purpose #2 is economic protectionism for China’s high tech sector. China knows that as long as it remains primarily industrial / low tech manufacturer, it will always be threatened by US intervention.

By moving to high tech, China can eliminate its reliance on Western technology imports, eliminate threat vectors for adversaries to slip in, and let other rising nations like Vietnam, Brazil, Malaysia, and Mexico take some of the heat off them by outsourcing its manufacturing there. China also gets to benefit by having cutting edge tech that will benefit its public health, increase education levels, strengthen its military, and form the basis of its post-industrial economy.

China “enforcing the official narrative” insofar as controlling public opinion is of far lower importance than denying the west avenues to destroy its society. China is incredibly diverse and a quick peek into Chinese social media reveals no shortage of western culture fetishizers, religious quacks, conspiracy theorists, anti-vaxxers, capitalist enthusiasts, shit talkers about political figures, and people pushing back on “the official narrative”. VPN usage is widespread. People read, share, and meme western news and social media.

Yes they censor posts, no they don’t do that great of a job at it…because the goal isn’t censorship, its about denying the West the ability to exploit discontent to destabilize the country.

See also:

• Tibet in the 50s & 60s (notice the gap here, when the US thought China would be a useful bludgeon against the Soviet Union & allies)
• Student protests in 1989
• Honk Kong in 2019
• Xinjiang when the US was in Afghanistan
• Taiwan tensions and weapons sales ramping up now

All of these being natural internal tensions exploited with great effort and to great effect by the US through mass media campaigns, radicalizing extremist and separatist groups, weapons transfers, and direct involvement in helping people commit violence.

And the US isn’t Russia buying $10 million worth of Facebook ads and running not farms, this is the most developed, most funded, and most sophisticated intelligence apparatus in history. One so large, people with an interest in politics and spying, cannot name all the publicly known agencies without missing 5-10.

You can quote me on this, if the US were to fall in the coming decades, the firewall would also fall within the year. Though, I suspect the US will just languish with internal infighting once the petrodollar loses reserve currency status and China takes the firewall down around 2035 once there aren’t powers posing a credible threat to its security.

I’m not sure, probably? I gave up on trying to setup the -arr suite in my cluster because I was having issues with sharing PVCs.

But I’d like to get everything playing nicely soonish. I was hoping for something all-in-one because each of the -arr apps has so much to configure, and there’s a ton of interchangeable parts in the space, and I’d rather not have the cognitive overload of all the decisions and have a config that just works™

Ik I’m late to the party, but I think this would be soooo much better than Wikipedia for finding useful information on niche or controversial topics.

Instead of being limited to Wikipedia’s contributors and having to accommodate or guess their biases, and have a terrible, incomplete “controversies” section on every page, you could browse the same page across instances whose biases are much more explicit and see what each group determines is most important about the topic.

Instead of having to find a single mutually agreed upon article where each “faction” has their own set of issues with the content, you can now browse pages that each of those factions feel best represent their POV, and use the sum of them to form an opinion where no information is omitted.

Obviously lots of instances will have complete bullshit, but it’s likely enough that you will find instances that have well-sourced material from a diverse breadth of viewpoints, and can pick an instance that federates to your preferred criteria for quality. Misinfo will exist regardless, and if they get it from a federated wiki, it will probably be at least marginally better quality or better cited than the Facebook or Reddit posts they were getting it from before.

It would be useful for the “what does X group think about Y” aspect alone.

There’s also nothing stopping diverse, consensus-based instances from popping up. Or lots of niche academic instances with greater depth on their areas of expertise.

Does anyone know of an all-in-one Helm chart or Kustomize manifest that has jellyfin bundled with all the -arr applications?