"In 1962, the USSR secretly tried to install nuclear-armed missiles in Cuba. After the U.S. imposed a naval quarantine, it withdrew. Soviet leaders saw the retreat as “bordering on humiliation.” The U.S. won wide praise for deftly managing the crisis."

Oh, is that what happened, The Hill?

Because I recall reading/learning that after Castro overthrew the US-favored assclown Batista in a popular revolution, the US via CIA and other secret orgs funded the gathering together of ex-Cuban, now American, counterrevolutionaries, who had fled in the wake of Castro and Che cracking down on those pieces of shit. Eventually this resulted in the somewhat comical Bay of Pigs failed invasion of Cuba by the US- oh I mean by the American ex-Cubans working with CIA money and backing... but not the US official sanctioning. Classic. Btw if the US gov say they'll pay for all your shit but won't go as far as openly claiming you if shit hits the fan you can be sure shit is about to hit the biggest fan and you are about to die.

Anyway, the US had also conveniently and brazenly placed Jupiter missiles with nuclear payloads inside Turkey within easy striking distance of the Kremlin and Moscow. A massive provocation which the US would never tolerate in a role reversal (proven immediately after!).

So the Cuba and USSR work out a plan to move nukes, secretly, to Cuba so that the next time the US decides to start fucking around they can lean back and go "oh? What do you think about these big boys?" This effectively gave Cuba full protection from further US invasions because that would result in nuclear missiles landing in the continental US. It also allowed the USSR to be on equal footing again, with a counter to the US's Turkish nukes. Win-win.

US: "Cuba and USSR consent, yes, but didn't you forget to ask someone else?"

The United States caught wind of the nukes and, somewhat understandably, but also in a fully hypocritical fashion simultaneously, flipped its fucking shit. They were talking about invading Cuba still anyway and I guess just sort of "tanking" any resulting nuclear fallout to send a message of strength to the Soviets/world (ie that the Americans are fucking insane and willing to die in nuclear apocalypse before allowing Soviet victory. Not the first or last time this happened!). Luckily this all did get resolved basically only because the Soviets finally blinked, probably because they knew the Americans were actually insane enough to die. Of course the promise with Kennedy, before his brains got splattered all over his wife, was that the Soviets openly withdraw their missiles and the US would also withdraw the Jupiter missiles. Pretty sure the latter did not happen... the US got a little distracted, one might say.

So, the suggestion that the USSR was the aggressor is fucking imperial propaganda. No other term for it. You can argue the Soviets made mistakes, whatever, but to frame them as the ones to cause the crisis is purely and fully a lie. Unless you're into victim blaming (the US is).

I also don't think the withdrawal of the Soviets, who had gotten concessions from JFK, was seen as embarrassing for the USSR more so like "holy fuck, the US is batshit insane... this is worse than we ever imagined." After the US military and intelligence reaction to events.

Again, imperial propaganda framing absolute bloodthirst and an objectively insane reaction based on a chain of events begun by an over reaction to the overthrow of a dictator. These right wing warhawk types think that immediately smashing the "withdraw right the fuck now or we will invade you, nukes be damned!" at the first slight reaction to your actions... is good?

They still act like this btw. Eg the retaliation against "Iranian-backed" MENA region militants recently. The US is doing a fucking genocide in Palestine, bombing Yemen again, and threatening the entire region. Three military die in a place the US never belonged to begin with and immediately everyone with Col or Gen in their name is screaming to the sky about nuking Tehran.

Dogshit, batshit country

I was wondering why I felt sad all year

Thanks for summing it up

Liberals unironically get pissed all the time about people saying "we didn't execute enough Nazis" and "we should've executed every single person who participated in enslaving black people after the civil war." They legitimately lose their minds over it, and the only reason I can assume they do so is because somewhere deep down they know they would have joined the Wehrmacht (I'll be nice to them) and served the Nazis. They know they would've be a white hired worker for a plantation owner and held down slaves while they got punished for trying to escape or not picking cotton fast enough or whatever.

And off topic, but kind of not, in Band of Brothers (show about the US Army 101st Airborne during WWII) Maj. Dick Winters, the main protagonist pretty much, a man that's represented as and, I suppose probably was, a "moral" man as far he didn't gamble, swear, commit adultery, drink alcohol or smoke, etc. But he did volunteer to be an officer in the war against Nazi Germany and not only that he volunteered knowingly for the airborne paratroopers who dropped behind enemy lines and did all the video game shit Americans, and the world now, know all about. This guy was, from whatever I know, a "good guy." WWII being pretty much the only foreign involvement that America has been on the right side of.

And how did the show end in the last like 15 minutes? He accepts the surrender of a German officer, higher ranked than him (compared across armies). And the officer offers him his sidearm in a symbolic way reminiscent of "old wars" where the head generals or king or whatever present their sword and bend the knee. Then this guy who just spent like 18 months blowing away Nazis, like a fuckload of Nazis, stands up and says "you may keep your sidearm, colonel." And then the colonel nods and goes to attention before saluting the American major who returns the fucking salute.

Then there's a goddamn another scene where a Nazi German general is surrendering but refuses to surrender to an enlisted person so Winters sends a respected American Lt. to handle the formal surrender. And they let this guy give a speech to his whole company to the tune of "you did your duty and I hope you go and live long lives now."

Incredibly long side route there, but that just shows how liberals are in the most extreme example. They had to show "honor in defeat" of the Germans. Why? I dunno. They love it though. They love that shit about institutions and "doing your duty" and if your duty was participating in a genocidal government's blood and soil war campaign to conquer all of Europe and the USSR? Well, so what? You can't say that general should've been shot! He was honorable! Those plantation masters were good southern gentleman! Look at Robert E Lee! So respectful!

I really hate liberals and this last week has made me realize and see what I always knew, but I can't make excuses at all anymore. They're every bit as bloodthirsty and nationalistic and racist and everything else as the conservatives. They just don't like to advertise it until they "have a reason" but oh boy, give them a reason and they're signing up for the Wehrmacht. First in line to do their duty...

Wikipedia still has up Nazi propaganda in regards to the "Holodomor" with old or cherrypicked or outright false statements from sources calling it a genocide when in fact it's widely recognized as, basically, a fuckup of Soviet policy under Stalin. Not genocide.

The "double genocide" shit is Nazi propaganda and yet Wikipedia legitimizes it. Any ignorant person who googles it after reading "derp derp Stalin killed 10 kazillion people!" Would find themselves quickly on a webpage "confirming" that false belief.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor link for anyone curious.

Wikipedia can be decent for some stuff, but while shit like this remains on the site, I dunno, it can't be trusted in many regards.

What if I told you... that's a feature, not a bug?

It's far too much to type and way too philosophical for anyone to give a shit about, but, tldr: the US (and arguably the world) is on a freight train speeding at absolute destruction. No one in power is pushing the stop button. (In the US) one party is (sometimes) pushing a slowdown button but the other party is always slamming any button they can find that doesn't say stop on it. They know where it leads, and this is what they want. Everyone "knows" the current institutions and systems are failing, but the only politically relevant (so, in the US, not the actual left) force with power is the far right wingers who desire destruction and their only resistance is the left and right wing liberals in the middle going "noooo the institutions!" but no one actually cares about the institutions, besides other liberals. They lack any ability though, due to their political ideology, to actually fight for the beloved institutions. They can only rely on the powerful far right to "come to their senses" and stop pushing the death button. Unfortunately for them, the far right will not stop without someone stopping them- forcefully. And since the far right and liberals effectively eliminated the far left and even the center left for the most part... there's no one to counter that far right fascistic death drive.

But you don't even need that accurate assessment of things to understand the situation. Just know they want to abolish public education, medicine, doctors, anything related to "science" broadly, any non-Christian religions, non-white people, LGBTQ+ people and anything tangentially related to gay stuff (imagined or real), etc. pretty much infinitely.

These people are the proto-Nazis of our time. Not everything will align perfectly, but it doesn't have to. They want to burn medical information, they want to destroy what they see as "perverted secular society" burn it all away and cleanse the land for some great rebirth of a Christian Nationalist theocracy where white men are elevated above everyone and your white male status plus property owning status is all that matters. I know this all sounds cliche and overstated at this point... but they keep proving it true every chance they get.

The worst part is that ultimately they're the only side making progress towards their goal because their goal is aligned with the way things are going and must go. But the difference is we can arrive at that destructive moment, whenever it is, and come out the other side in some Christian theocracy nightmare world or something much better than we can currently imagine possible. As it stands right now, that nightmare vision seems to be the only viable conclusion. Which is rather depressing...

Meanwhile, under capitalism… everything seems fine! Pay no attention to all those homeless people slowly dying on the streets as a warning to the others to never get caught slippin’. Pay no attention to the formerly commonly-owned public works in Eastern Europe and now-Russia sold out from under the people to capitalists at the insistence of other capitalists and now left to rot and serve as something to “warn” ignorant westerners about while they ignore their own crumbling infrastructure.

But hey, the grandkids of some weirdo right wing Soviet citizens who came to the US under dubious circumstances told you communism is bad. So, hey, what can I say against that? Truth? Facts? Objective reality?

“No, no. You don’t understand. These grandkids of a piece of shit said this thing happened and we have to throw away all dreams and hopes of anything better.”

A friend I had many many years ago said to me once:

“Reddit is just 4chan with a condom.”

Wise words that have only sweetened with time.

Some moron just rebranded a logo worth who knows how many possible billions to… just X

Some people are just fucking dumb as hell

Jesus Christ, just reading about Microsoft developing something called Moments made me nope out of that article.

Obv there’s worse things in this world, but goddamn it if Microsoft isn’t reclaiming its crown slowly. I think people forget/zoomers never knew, but Microsoft was once, rightly, one of the most hated corporations on earth. They were taken to court, in the United States!, for monopolistic practices. You gotta be doing some insaaaaane shit to get hit with that type of case in the US post-Reagan administration.

Microsoft’s name was basically equivalent to dogshit from the mid-90s until maybe the mid 2000s. Maybe 2010? Hard to put a finger on it. Windows 7 certainly did a lot to get people to calm down from a steady hate-boner.

I just wish, I fucking WISH, that if MS is gonna do this weird “make your pc your phone too! Dur hrr!” shit that they’d offer a Windows Lite ™️ edition where you can opt out of the little stupid assistant thing. No, Clippy, I don’t need help, fuck you very much. Let me opt out completely, without having to fuck with reg editor and CLI, from all types of ads, tracking, “offers for free shit,” all that shit. Just provide a barebones OS, let me add the programs I want, stop popping up telling me the .exe is a trojan sent to murder my dog just because you want me to download shit from your precious proprietary store, just stop all that shit. Something akin to Windows XP or Windows 7 type era. Neither OS was perfect and certainly many features in modern OSes are nice, but the simplicity found in them just because at the time they kind of HAD to be simple in order to function, is something I’d love for MS (and Apple too for that matter) to embrace.

But since none of that will happen, the next best thing I can hope is developers start making more and more programs run natively on Linux distro. Linux has come very far in my lifetime and I’m honestly excited that I can now use Linux basically for everything and only keep Windows installed as dual boot for a few specific tasks. I just hope it keeps growing in coming years. Hopefully demand from gamers for the steam deck and such drives more and more support for Linux. I can you one thing though… if my Windows updated and tells me “set up Moments! Click here!” I’m nuking that shit from orbit immediately. I don’t care what it does, I will never use any of that shit Microsoft packs into Windows. Probably sounds grump old man or whatever, but I just refuse. Stop adding dogshit no one asked for! This goes for basically all devs! Rant over, but I’m still pissed!

“Your honor, my defense rests on one simple principle: you can’t defame the dead. Elon Musk killed Twitter last week. That is all.”

But on a serious note, Elon is a fucking baby however these cases typically get tossed out basically instantly for being baseless. His intent is likely to make future researchers or just non-anonymous people everywhere never speak the MEAN truth about his stupidity or suffer bullshit law suits. He has the infinite money, it’s not like he cares if a court orders he pay all the fees for wasting time. Normal people can’t accept that risk though or the time off work to deal with it. Basically, he should face imprisonment for a long fucking time to deter HIM from this bullshit. Or, I dunno, seize all his ill gotten capital, I dunno.

That 74 is kind of tricky and my vision is “normal”

This reminds me of a time I was taking one of these colorblind tests. The person administering it was flipping (way too fast) through the numbers and I was reading them fine. A trickier one came up which I could very clearly read, like this 71/74 one, and I said (because fucker was flipping way too fast) “71… no, 74 actually.” He marked it wrong. It felt like a real life Seinfeld incident after that where I kind of stopped the whole test and was saying basically, as nicely as I could, “hey. I said 74. Mark that correct.” MFer didn’t even vocalize a response. I can’t remember but I think he did like two more numbers, said I passed with whatever number of tests with one incorrect. I had to get my eyesight examined after that (this was for some pilot shit. Like a physical) and I told the doctor and he kind of shrugged it off too like “you passed it. It doesn’t matter.” IT MATTERS TO ME GODDAMNIT

Thanks for triggering this random traumatic event from over a decade ago.

“This guy lost like $30B under a year. I wanna be just like him!”

How fucking stupid are these people?