mozz

mozz, 6 days ago

Absolutely without fail, the arc is:

• We're so strong that no one can stop us
• Might makes right
• Buddy you better not mess with me, we can ruin and throw aside like garbage anyone who displeases us
• Ma they throwin me aside like garbage, please help, it's not fair

Somehow they never get the idea that maybe there's a better way, that they might not always be able to count on being the fuck-er and not the fuck-ee.

mozz, 7 days ago

Every single American who isn’t living in a yurt is carrying or wearing or interacting with made-in-China merch, most of the time as they go about their day.

mozz, 7 days ago

The Chinese are pursuing a very weird passive aggressive strategy here that I do not at all understand.

"Surely if we spray water at the other boats and run our boats into them and jump on board the opposing ships with poking weapons like some kind of Maori tribesmen the rest of the world will get sick of it and go away and give us what we want i.e. full control of the South China Sea, without us having to actually start a war about it"

I really don't understand. I can't even say for sure it is a bad idea, because like I say I just don't understand, but it seems unlikely that it's going to produce the impact that they seem like they want it to produce.

mozz, 7 days ago

But they do this shit with the US too. Their fighter planes play the "I'm not touching you I'm not touching you" game with US aircraft right up until the point it turns into the "oh no I did touch you and now I'm dead and my airplane is falling apart in fiery chunks and your airplane is crippled what an exercise in futility that whole thing was" game.

Like I say, I won't even say that that didn't impact US policy in some way similar to what they wanted. I don't know that it did but I don't know that it didn't. Overall my main reaction is just wtf are you guys doing why is your strategy like this.

(I do of course suspect that they will not try to play the firehoses and spear wielding game with the US Navy. Just some similar version of the same type of tactics.)

mozz, 7 days ago

That "China/Taiwan" is just kinda thrown in there without even an asterisk or anything

(Actually I guess leaving Taiwan out of the legend entirely would have looked like an accident or something, and having a separate color for it would have been a huge deal and they'd have started to get phone calls, and so they just shrugged and put that down and said you know what it's not a perfect world let's move on)

mozz, 7 days ago

Acting aggresively, but in a carefully crafted way to avoid an escalated response. The message sent internally that the other side restrains themselaee not out of reason, but fear.

That actually might be it. We can't look to people in our own government / own country like we're anything other than the boss and everyone knows it, but also, we definitely don't want to pick a massive fight with another nuclear armed power and our biggest trading partner for literally no reason at all. And so, let's play this stupid fighter-plane-chicken game with them and spin it at home like we're out there telling them what's what.

IDK if I buy it. It sorta makes sense.

It's hard to square that, though, with actually fucking up the sailors on Filipino ships in a way that seems like it should demand some kind of response. Maybe the orders were to just be pushy in a non-escalational way and things got out of hand on the ground in a way that for-real wasn't intended?

mozz, 8 days ago

The polls are absolute shit. You can draw a little bit of a conclusion that if Biden went up by 2 points, that probably means that wherever the real answer is, it might not be crazy to think it went up by somewhere from 1 to 3 points because of something that happened. That part may be worth being slightly happy about. But whether that real answer is +2 like they say, or -10, or +20, modern polls actually can't tell you, and all these people that are telling you they can, are lying. In my opinion.

Source: I looked through the methodology they actually use for this polling and found it to be dogshit, and then looked up a few polls for recent elections and found that the poll differed from the actual result of the election by an average of 16 percentage points.

mozz, 8 days ago

There absolutely is a border crisis, just not the type that the right is claiming there is. For the most part, it roots back to a sudden wild spike upwards in the number of people coming into the country, which causes two big problems:

1. There's a huge backlog of asylum / deportation cases which means people stay in custody in racist and oppressive overcrowded prisons
2. We're rate limiting the people coming into the country (see point #1), which means a lot of asylum seekers who are trying to do it legally wind up waiting for months (maybe years now, IDK) on the other side of the Mexican border, basically just living in a big, dangerous, squalid, crime-ridden open-air field with no facilities for life, and no job, no medical care for anyone no matter how young or old, it's fuckin dangerous

Then, add to that that the whole agency in charge of the border police is for the most part made of racist people, and then add overcrowding and shortage of resources, and it's fuckin bad for the people who are winding their way slowly through the system.

Biden is unable to fix the problems, although (aside from the racist police) they do have legislative solutions, because the Republicans block anything he does, even when he tried promising to do some cruel or racist things as a compromise in order to get them to also agree to some badly needed things (mostly, increasing ICE funding so they can at least house the people they have in better conditions, and increasing the number of judges to process cases so people don't wait for a year before their case is heard).

And, any time he tries to do anything about it, e.g. reducing the rate of people allowed to come across the border or increasing funding for ICE, everyone on the left as far as I can tell thinks he's just being cruel on purpose for no reason and gets really mad at him.

mozz, 7 days ago

I’ll ask you, then, the same thing I have asked a few other people who have made this same assertion: what should Biden do, then? If presumably we can agree that it’s bad people waiting in ICE custody for over a year for their cases to be heard, then what solution to it should he pursue, that you wouldn’t then criticize as cruelty?

mozz, 7 days ago

That's awesome -- an actual answer. I can work with this. Follow-up question: Why is "nothing" the right answer to this and this? Why would you describe hiring more judges as deliberate cruelty?

I do actually agree on some of the actual cruelty things he tried to offer the Republicans, as a compromise, but that's a very small minority of the things this administration has tried to do about the border, and when they did it didn't happen anyway. The majority of what they're doing as far as I know has been things like hiring more judges (i.e. obviously the right thing to do) or limiting the number of people coming in the country (which was an attempt to deal with problem #2 which also worsened problem #1, but it's hard to see it as some villainous act, to me, given that problem #1 exists).

mozz, 7 days ago (edited 7 days ago)

Interesting. So, if you want to clarify that "the only action he can take is deliberate cruelty" doesn't apply to hiring more judges, and that you think hiring more judges isn't deliberately cruel, then cool -- obviously, I agree with you about that.

If you want to seize on that one sentence to pretend I'm engaged in bad faith and flee the conversation at this stage -- and not engage with anything else I said or asked you -- I won't stop you. I think actually it's probably a good idea tactically for you to do so. Cheers.

mozz, 7 days ago

I know, right? It would be insane to claim that trying to hire more judges is an exercise in deliberate cruelty. I am glad to have you as an ally in this assertion, because there are lots of people who are claiming all kinds of weird things about what Biden's attempting to do at the border and why.

Anyway, like I said, I won't keep you; I'll go and sealion somewhere else I guess.

mozz, 8 days ago

The vast majority of people do not know enough about the world to be able to work out what they're receiving from the news is or isn't bullshit, and wouldn't have the mental tools to be able to work it out if they did have access to it. Their choice is between accepting what the news and social media are telling them, or else living in an incoherent jumble where all points of view are equally invalid and suspect and they are left with no idea at all of what's going on.

They actually get really uncomfortable in the landscape of "let's work out what is going on by subjecting these claims to criticism." It's disorienting for them, like upending of a bedrock unanimous-consensus world view that has been projected very sternly at them out of the TV. Like the introduction of something subversive and obviously wrong that they are going to let into their brain, and then they'll become wrong, too.

I actually can think of only one time when I was able to talk someone into admitting that the overall picture he was telling me probably wasn't true even though the internet had told him, and it took over an hour, and then he instantly followed it up by saying -- I am only slightly exaggerating -- that he was going to keep believing it anyway because holding onto it made him feel better.

Honestly, I'm somewhat surprised that American elections are still as connected to reality as they currently are. Their outcomes are like 25% connected to the reality of the candidates, where I would have expected more like 5.

mozz, 8 days ago (edited 8 days ago)

"Well, he tried to kill the vice president and many congress people because he lost the election and wanted to seize power anyway and they wouldn't help him. Also, he got dozens of CIA agents killed by just handing over top secret information for no reason at all to our active enemies during a shooting war. He stole, he lied, he got people killed, he put Hispanics in concentration camps, and during a second term he wants to do it all again, but with less guard rails of the people who were able to stop him doing much much worse the first time. He wants to shoot protestors and have the military seize the voting machines. He wants to do away with term limits and make it illegal for the media to criticize him. He wants to put all his enemies in prison. He wants a nationwide database of any woman that gets an abortion. It's literally impossible to even list what he has done or wants to do without missing something so grave that it would disqualify any other human being on the planet, but there are so many that they begin to blend together and you can lose sight of how terrifying they truly are individually."

"But wait, now you're telling me he fucked a lady who wasn't his wife and lied about it? Well, in that case, I gotta tell you my mind is pretty much made up about this guy then."

mozz, 8 days ago

Good old TV ads

Everyone knows! That is the way

mozz, 7 days ago

Because modern technology is so efficient that it creates an absolute endless firehose of resources and power which could do more or less anything, but the criteria that go into selecting who's going to be in charge of making decisions, and who keeps the bulk of the profit, are often a bunch of semi-random crap. So you wind up with people sitting on top of billions of dollars born of profits from donut-making, who have no real idea of what to do with the rest once they've kept most of it for themselves and their friends, and so they buy advertising with it.

Some advertising is quite effective; the leading edges of its technological development are targeted and refined to a terrifying degree. But there's also an incredible amount that's just noisy ineffective crap, basically an illustration of Sturgeon's law in the form of an expensive and irritating waste of energy for everyone involved in the process.

mozz, 8 days ago

First rule of getting bullied is never get mad and explain why the bullies are wrong

Just spend a little bit to hire a private investigator to follow one selected member of the NRSC around and video them eating at fancy restaurants, telling racist jokes with lobbyists, buying hookers, IDK what the hell Republicans in Washington do but I'm absolutely sure that if you followed them around you'd find something. Total up what their dinner bills are for the month and illustrate the total. Ask them who that blonde woman is. You know, just kind of follow the data. Then put all of that into a campaign ad.

The final segment of the ad can be you, sitting up on top of some of your farm equipment, panning around and showing your farm, and saying "When I'm not in Washington, this is what I'm doing. In Washington I drive a car. You caught me. The big problem here is me and my bleeping Prius. Hey assbleep: Get back to work. Quit having fancy dinners."

Then at the end is you getting in the Prius and driving away, with a voiceover "My name's Jon Tester, and I approve this message."

You could rotate around among different members of the NRSC every month or two, if you wanted, and try to make a little viral sensation that would build your name recognition.

mozz, 8 days ago

Oh, absolutely you should. I'm just saying that the way that you do it matters.

If you just say "hey you hurt me, that's not fair, you shouldn't do that anymore" and leave it at that, then there's a certain type of person that will start to look down on you because of it. I don't agree with it either but it is sadly how quite a lot of people seem to operate.

mozz, 8 days ago

You know those monster movies where two of the characters get in a heated argument, and in the background the horrifying creature they kind of knew about (that the stress of is part of what is leading to the argument), is coming into the frame, slowly and silently getting closer to them while they are distracted?

In this case it is labeled climate change

mozz, 9 days ago (edited 9 days ago)

Having to grovel for money and spend a lot of your working life strategizing how you can extract enough money from rich people, to pay for your next campaign, is a far too large part of every single congressperson’s agenda.

It’s not optional and it is time consuming and humiliating and it automatically puts a bunch of power in the hands of rich people instead of voters. It’s for real a little bit confusing to me why the congresspeople don’t put a stop to it (publicly funded elections).

mozz, 9 days ago

Maybe. The way I’ve heard it explained is that it’s time consuming and humiliating for almost everyone though. Here’s the first random story I could find. I’m clearly missing something, though, since they clearly aren’t putting a stop to it, so maybe you are correct and it’s only the scrubs that have to go to the call center.

mozz, 8 days ago

And get to tell junior congresspeople to get out and bring in $18,000 a day for you and your friends to use to elect more friends to office, which you then use to enrich yourself on a scale that makes the $18k/day look paltry.

I don’t know for sure but I can buy it. It would explain a lot.

mozz, 9 days ago

The whole concept is I think just completely made up.

I've exhausted for the day my digging-up-reports patience, but somewhere there is a UN report where they looked in some detail into the theory that Hamas was rounding up random people and having them just stand around perfectly still right next to Hamas during fighting, so that the poor IDF would be tricked into shooting them which they hated doing but they had no choice. At least in the case they were looking into, they found that no, of course they are not doing anything like that, Israel is just telling outlandish lies about where all these dead civilians came from.

I won't say it never happens in any form. But to me it comes across like those comedy action movies where the bad guy grabs a hostage and the good guy grabs his own hostage from some random passerby. Like, ha ha! If you shoot at me, you'll also kill this random Palestinian lady! And we know that's like kryptonite to the IDF!

mozz, 9 days ago

I honestly don't care if the Arab world stomps them flat.

Standard disclaimer, this isn't an attempt to excuse Biden's support for Israel which is and has been unconscionable. But that being said:

I think the possibility of Israel being stomped flat is part of the calculus that underlies American support for them. They're surrounded by powerful enemies like Iran, and a whole unanimous coalition of nations full of military and political leaders who go to sleep at night dreaming of the lifelong stamp of heroism that would stem from being part of the holy alliance that finally wiped them out.

Whatever crimes against humanity their "defense" forces commit and are committing, the TV scenes of Arab soldiers gunning down fleeing Israeli civilians, ripping down the flags in Tel Aviv amid burning corpses, taking city after city, fighting a 20-on-1 dogpile of a war that would end with Israel erased from the map forever, guilty and the innocent alike, would get played on American TV in campaign commercials for 50 years. If it happened under Biden, the Democrats wouldn't win another election for at least a generation. Probably more.

And it could happen. The world is not a nice place. Part of running the State Department is dealing in horrifying outcomes like that, and it happens every year in a few places across the globe, to people we haven't taken pains to make friends and allies of (and sometimes even to people like the Kurds that we have).

We used to love like brothers and sisters various leaders all over the world who did genocidal things like Netanyahu, and I'm sure we still do, but it's not an everyday thing now like it was in the 80s and 90s. But there's some kind of crazy disconnect that fuels American support for Israel. There's a popular theory on Lemmy that it's simply because Biden is evil and loves genocide, and certainly AIPAC is a part and simple racism and lack of care for dying civilians in the Mideast is a part, but to me I think one of the powerful drivers is the fear of what might happen if the rest of the Middle East ever got the idea that they could try to fuck up Israel and the US might not be there to make sure it didn't happen.

Let the accusations commence. Like I say, I'm trying to explain, not to excuse, and besides nothing in any of that above would have stopped them having the CIA snatch Netanyahu three months ago and deliver him to the Hague in a rubber sack with a note that says "We still love Israel but this guy can get fucked."

mozz, 9 days ago

"What's the matter, tough guy? Don't they have a right to fight their enemies? Don't they have a right to defend themselves, with or without international support?"

mozz, 9 days ago

The IDF is far better equipped than all the other countries in the region

Individually, probably so. Collectively?

There's a fuck of a lot of countries there. Some of them (Saudi Arabia) have bigger militaries than Israel even individually, and some of them (Iran) have lots of land and people and some certain amount of money, and lots of alliances with lots of rowdy guys with guns and rockets.

Israel and MBS and the West being all buddy buddy with each other and fuck what 99.9% of the people in that part of the world think about it, is one of those things that can change.

it's just funneled there to keep the military industrial complex happy

I won't at all disagree with that. All the homies love big weapons packages. Whatever else is going on in the world, throwing over a hundred billion dollars to weapons suppliers is always a popular decision in DC.

and kill Palestinian children as a byproduct

I don't at all believe that killing children is affirmatively a priority in Washington. I think that depending on the nationality of the children, it can be an acceptable item on the balance sheet to be factored in against other priorities. 😢

mozz, 8 days ago

That variety of "Christian" certainly exists in America but I don't think they are as powerful as they used to be and I don't think they are in charge of the State Department (I mean... not currently, at least.)

mozz, 8 days ago

https://mbin.grits.dev/media/0b/a2/0ba225dea892093cec3ee8fe28ff333df66d3cfca85c2b6c08bf71b6de705274.webp

Okay done, I looked at a map

Now what?

mozz, 8 days ago

You are correct. I wasn't trying to be super accurate about it, just trying to make the point, but Lebanon is an important omission.

mozz, 8 days ago

It's absolutely true. I'm just talking about how the US may be viewing the realpolitik of the situation and their interest in it, not saying anything about if it's just or unjust. If you want my judgement about it, Israel did it to themselves this situation, yes, 100%.

mozz, 8 days ago

Hence why I said not currently

mozz, 8 days ago

You broke the code yes

😢

It is changing slowly but that doesn’t do anything for someone whose child is dying quickly, right now

Part of it is just the news. They would present it VERY differently and in a much more compelling fashion than they present what’s happening in Palestine today. But that’s only part. The average American also cares far more about white people and countries that are “our friends” than they do about people who are neither of those things.

mozz, 9 days ago

The key part, as it was in Hitler's time just as it was in the original design of the American system way way way back when, is media

When media functions as a means for people to determine and communicate what's going on in the world and in government, voting can serve the people as a way to keep tyrants or bad actors in check and away from the levers of power

When media can be corrupted through sufficient exercise of power, those guard rails stop working, and all the democracy in the world can't stop someone powerful from taking over the levers and doing horrifying things with them

mozz, 9 days ago (edited 9 days ago)

UN report about sexual violence on October 7th, Haaretz isn't exactly the best source to use for this

TL;DR Although it doesn't in any way excuse the currently occurring genocide, and honestly I also wish she was as upset about 100 things from Israel's side that we are supporting instead of 1 thing from the Palestinian side that no one is supporting, she's not wrong.

"War crimes are wrong no matter who does them" shouldn't be a difficult moral dilemma

mozz, 9 days ago

I wondered why you linked to screenshots instead of the actual report, so I found what I think is what you're linking to. Here's the context of your screenshot:

The Commission found indications that members of the military wing of Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups committed gender-based violence (GBV) in several locations in southern Israel on 7 October. These were not isolated incidents but perpetrated in similar ways in several locations and by multiple Palestinian perpetrators. The acts documented by the Commission reflected clear abuse of power by male perpetrators and a disregard for the special considerations and protection of women’s integrity and autonomy granted by international law.

Hamas military wing rejected all accusations that its forces committed sexual violence against Israeli women. However, the Commission documented cases indicative of sexual violence perpetrated against women and men in and around the Nova festival site, as well as the Nahal Oz military outpost and several kibbutzim, including Kfar Aza, Re’im and Nir Oz. It collected and preserved digital evidence, including images of victims’ bodies displaying indications of sexual violence, a pattern corroborated by independent testimonies from witnesses. Reliable witness accounts obtained by the Commission describe bodies that had been undressed, in some incidents with exposed genitals. The Commission received reports and verified digital evidence concerning the restraining of women, including hands and sometimes feet of women being bound, often behind the victims’ backs, prior to their abduction or killing. Additionally, the Commission made assessments based on the position of the body, for example images displaying legs spread or bent over, and signs of struggle or violence on the body, such as stab wounds, burns, lacerations and abrasions.

The Commission has reviewed testimonies obtained by journalists and the Israeli police concerning rape but has not been able to independently verify such allegations, due to a lack of access to victims, witnesses and crime sites and the obstruction of its investigations by the Israeli authorities. The Commission was unable to review the unedited version of such testimonies. For the same reasons, the Commission was also unable to verify reports of sexualized torture and genital mutilation. Additionally, the Commission found some specific allegations to be false, inaccurate or contradictory with other evidence or statements and discounted these from its assessment.

I also linked to a much more complete UN report elsewhere in this thread. I don't know how the two reports relate to each other though.

mozz, 9 days ago

Do you have some kind of superpower that involves looking at documents and seeing only the parts of them that you want to see

I'm not interested in a back-and-forth, but as one last comment, I'll quote excerpts from the lengthier of the reports:

12. Based on the information gathered by the mission team from multiple and independent sources, there are reasonable grounds to believe that conflict-related sexual violence occurred during the 7 October attacks in multiple locations across Gaza periphery, including rape and gang rape, in at least three locations.

17. With respect to hostages, the mission team found clear and convincing information that some have been subjected to various forms of conflict-related sexual violence including rape and sexualized torture and sexualized cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment and it also has reasonable grounds to believe that such violence may be ongoing

mozz, 9 days ago (edited 9 days ago)

I just looked around a little bit for some kind of indication of how the Patten report relates to the report that has the screenshots you're sending, and I honestly couldn't find anything.

What report are you even linking here, that you're calling the legal investigative UN report? I was able to find a draft version which I linked to down below, but I'm not even sure what you are referencing here, when it was created, or how it relates to the Patten report. It looks from reading the first bit, though, like it was gathered from open sources, remote interviews, and asking Israel's government for information which obviously wasn't very productive. I.e. a lot less thorough than what they did for the Patten report.

Why are you saying the Patten report has been surpassed by the report you're sending screenshots of?

Edit: They didn't want to answer, for obvious reasons, but someone else figured it out

mozz, 9 days ago (edited 9 days ago)

I know I said I wouldn't get drawn into the back and forth. I really don't want to. 🥲

But I just wanna posit a little thought experiment:

---

"Hang on -- were you the one sneaking into the shop after hours and fucking the stuffed animals?"

"There's no hard evidence of that! Not that exists in a fully accredited legal document! The follow-up report completely discredited the

---

I'm still -- completely seriously -- wanting to know what report you are even citing in these screenshots. Like I say, I found a random .doc somewhere that is clearly a draft version of that same document, but it wasn't even immediately clear to me what it was or when it was produced. And, why you say it supersedes the SRSG-SVC report instead of the other way around.

mozz, 9 days ago

Okay, so you don't feel like revealing where you are getting the screenshots or what that report is. Got it. I was just curious in case I had missed something. Carry on.

mozz, 9 days ago (edited 9 days ago)

Got it. So it makes sense now -- reading it now it looks there were two reports, one with a general overview of war crimes of all types committed by all sides during the conflict, and one much more in depth with a particular focus on sexual violence committed by Hamas. And, of course, there's not any contradiction between the two or sense in which the one that's an overview invalidates the one that's more specific and detailed. E.g. the overview one says among other things (placed in among of course an absolutely massive list of crimes by Israel):

V. Legal Analysis

5. The Commission found that acts of sexual violence were committed on 7 October in Israel, including at the Nova festival, on road 232, at Nahal Oz military base and kibbutzim Re’im, Nir Oz and Kfar Aza.

VI. Conclusions

10. The Commission identified patterns indicative of sexual violence in several locations and concludes that Israeli women were disproportionally subjected to these crimes. The attack on 7 October enabled perpetrators to commit SGBV and this violence was not isolated but perpetrated in similar ways in several locations and by multiple Palestinian perpetrators. The Commission did not find credible evidence, however, that militants received orders to commit sexual violence and so it was unable to make conclusions on this issue. However, inflammatory language and disbelief around sexual violence, observed with both parties, risks silencing and discrediting survivors, further exacerbating trauma and stigmatization.

... which agrees in literally every particular with the Patten report, including the conclusions it reached and which conclusions it didn't reach (or stopped short of or said it wasn't attempting to analyze.)

I mean, I wasn't really in any doubt that what Linkerbaan was saying was a bunch of made up crap, but I am glad to be able to understand the context of the two reports and what actually happened.

mozz, 9 days ago

Pro-Russia social media accounts amplifying stories about divisive political topics such as immigration and campus protests over the war in Gaza.

They forgot discontent about the economy. Also, the key factor of (sometimes, but not always) linking all three topics directly to Biden even though his actual record on all three could be summarized as "not Bernie Sanders but also several standard deviations better than most Democrats, like actually to the point that he's trying to help, and several miles or several hundred miles better than Trump"

"I care how migrants are treated, and that's why I can't vote for Biden over Trump" is, if you take a second to examine the reality involved, all you really need to see to know that the person you're talking to is motivated by something much darker and more dishonest than actually caring about what happens to migrants

The volume of posts, articles and websites that Russian-linked operations produce is being boosted by artificial intelligence — another new factor that sets 2024 apart from previous election cycles.

I am constantly curious to maybe find some poster on Lemmy that's actually literally a bot, or whose answers are being generated by a bot. I haven't done it yet. I wish glitch tokens still worked.

mozz, 9 days ago (edited 9 days ago)

That's honestly a pretty fair point. I've done the same type of thing during times in my life when I interacted with a ton of different people.

Side note, I have heard that part of what's required of a person for them to have success in politics (at least during the pre-Fox-News era; IDK if this still holds true in today's wholly blow-dried artificial electoral landscape) was this: You have to actually care about the people you meet. Like on this unnatural level; to want to get to know them, remember their kids and their favorite sports teams, be excited to talk with them and remember the connection you had with them even if it's been years since you've seen them. And you can't fake it. It has to be just genuinely because you're that type of person.

John Mulaney told a story about how his mom went to school with Bill Clinton, and met him one time and interacted with him, and then went up to shake his hand at a campaign event literal decades later when he was running for president, and he instantly said, "Hi, Joan! Good to see you" etc etc something like that.

Like I said, to like an unnatural level

mozz, 10 days ago

2019:

Ukraine: We need some fucking Javelins
US: Here’s nothing

2021:

Ukraine: We need some fucking F-16s
US: Here’s some Javelins

2023:

Ukraine: We need some fucking artillery shells
US: Here’s more nothing

2024:

US: Hey we got you some F-16s

mozz, 9 days ago

I'm not trying to say they're not giving aid. They're keeping Ukraine alive, and God bless them for it.

The point that I'm making is they have a habit of waiting months or years before they give the type of aid that's required, and don't really seem to be making a crash priority about it, in the way they would if Americans were dying by the thousands and cities being destroyed. Zelensky actually specifically said that they didn't seem to want to give enough aid to "win" particularly, just enough not to lose, and sometimes specific types years after it was the specific type that it was needed (F-16s being an example).

Looking at American politics, I can kind of understand it, in that we have one wing that's specifically trying to sabotage Ukraine and make sure they lose, and one wing that's trying to fight to get them the aid that's needed, and they're fighting a pitched battle. On the other hand, looking from the Ukrainian side, I can sympathize quite a lot with the viewpoint that fuck all that, IDK what you're talking about, we're dying out here can you please just fucking help us.

mozz, 9 days ago

Fair point also

Not really directly related, but one of my favorite takes on it is from "Sky Over Kharkiv" by Serhiy Zhadan, some commentary on the day to day, from an ordinary Ukrainian watching his country full of normal people get dumped wholesale into a sustained hot war. Here's his take on Ukraine's mentality, as compared with the US's and Russia's:

And I'd like to make another point. I was rather skeptical of the current government. I was struck by one particular thing. The elections of 2019 brought a lot of young people to power -- not my peers (I'm a far cry from being young) but a bunch of political youngsters who didn't belong to dozens of parties or hadn't worked for all kinds of shady cabinets of ministers. "But why do these young people," I thought, "act like old functionaries from the Kuchma era? Where did their childish urge to make a quick buck and flaunt it come from? Why aren't they trying to be different?" Thing is, I personally had the chance to do what I still consider rather constructive, useful things with a lot of them -- everyone from ministers to mayors and governors. Nonetheless, I'd look toward the Parliament building and ask myself, "Why aren't you trying to be different?"

Now [in wartime] with the naked eye you can see them trying to be different. Advisers, speakers, ministers, negotiators, officers, mayors, and commanders -- these forty-year-old boys and girls whose generation has been dealt the cruel lot of having to stand up for their country. And this applies no less (and possibly even more) to the millions of soldiers, volunteer fighters, and just regular people pitching in, people shedding the swampy legacy of the twentieth century, like mud falling off new, yet well-chosen combat boots. Young Ukrainian men and women -- that's who this war of annihilation is being waged against. And then, in contrast, are the heads of Russia, Belarus, America, and Germany. The first two are old delusional geezers from the past century who look a lot like old Russian armored vehicles, but they're old. And they're Russian, which, in itself, does little to recommend a vehicle. Then there are the latter two -- they're cautious office clerks, retired capitulators who aren't brave enough to admit that they, too, are involved in what's going on.

Emphasis is mine

(And, I just wanna make it clear that I love that America is supporting Ukraine in the war; I'm not trying to talk any shit about the aid for Ukraine or its genuineness. Just I feel like even now there's still a disconnect between views of the aid on the US and Ukrainian side and I want to stick up for the Ukraine viewpoint in that)

mozz, 10 days ago

And thankfully for Aldrin and Armstrong, the real Apollo lunar landing experience didn't suffer from the same issue.

How could you pass up the opportunity man

Let me help:

", and, in fact, was so well programmed that it was able to adapt and overcome some totally-not-its-fault hardware problems during the last few minutes of the landing sequence to keep the computer running, and land the spacecraft correctly."

Short summary: A radar system on the first moon lander had an undiscovered design flaw that meant it flooded the computer with interrupts it wasn't designed for, at the exact wrong time, all the way down from T minus 3 minutes to T minus 40 seconds before it actually had to touch down on the moon. That left the computer without enough processor time to keep up with all the real-time-sensitive duties it was tasked with -- notably including flying the fucking spacecraft so it landed on the surface, right side up, in the right place, instead of, say, just falling down and slamming into the moon at a tenth of a mile per second.

So when this flood of interrupts happened, the guidance computer was programmed such that it was able to detect that it wasn't keeping up with its stuff, for some reason unknown to it. When it realized, it had been programmed to save all its navigation data, reboot itself to a clean state, reload the nav data, and then signal to the astronauts hey I don't know what's going on but I got a problem guys I need some help. It happened a few times as those final 3 minutes clicked down, which gave enough time for the astronauts to talk to mission control and sort out some version of what was going on, and they were able to reduce the computational load on the computer by shutting down some stuff they didn't need it to be doing, i.e. stuff other than flying the fucking spacecraft as I mentioned. And then, happy again, it landed them on the moon, having kept up with everything well enough in the interim to keep the lander doing exactly what it was supposed to be doing.

Basically, its hardware failed it, three minutes before landing, but it was unbothered and kept going and landed successfully on the moon. It is for that reason a legendary piece of engineering. To me at least. I like this stuff.

Here's another article, also quite good, about another instance of the Apollo guidance computer being awesome beyond any type of reasonable expectation, a few missions later.