I mean didn’t this just pave the way for Rome to be ruled by one unaccountable autocrat or another for the next several hundred years?

Notifying others requires you to think of other people and value them. The US, under the leadership of a pathological narcissist, will do neither of these things.

We don’t need to switch sides overtly for our hyena financiers and industry captains to make a buck trading with Russia, giving their war economy a sigh of relief which they desperately need.

We’ll see if he can hold out if/when we lift our sanctions on Russia and start allowing the transfer of everything they need to rebuild their military hardware. Or even worse, selling them our own weapons.

EDIT: And now around three hours after I posted this, White House announces directive to drop sanctions. gg

Russia’s Admiral Kuznetsov is also very large and theoretically more able to defend itself than at least the Nimitz class…if it wasn’t a reeking shitpile that can’t even move under its own power consistently.

The reason is that they expected that carrier to sail with little backup or none at all. Meanwhile every American carrier is just the centerpiece of a larger, exorbitantly expensive battle group. They can’t afford that, so they have to compensate somehow.

I’d assume the logic is the same with Chinese ambitions here.

They DO want to be like modern Russia, earnestly. The national chauvinism, the suppression of LGBT, the violence against women, the kleptocrat oligarchs running the show, the use of the Church as a political tool, the brutal wars of spoils…the list goes on.

We on occasion have pointed in the right direction, but we have never, ever been the hero.

American Exceptionalism is something that will take decades to deprogram.

The FSB should be an internationally recognized terrorist organization.

Of course that would open the can of worms that every major intelligence agency in the world is basically a terror organization, so they won’t.

Another example of conservatives’ disdain for the poor causing them to horseshoe around into Keynesian economics.

Man I just love that our dumb fuck leaders are regurgitating Kremlin lies for our dumb fuck citizens to lap up like dogs.

Perhaps some genuine criticism could be levied at the specifics of their immigration policy, but this is JD Vance, that’s not what he’s here for.

When he talks about “shared values” and “what you are fighting for” he’s talking about white Christian dominance in Europe and defending it with the sword. The far right has long seen Europe as a failure of progressive decadence and moral weakness and this speech was a blatant expression of that.

That is why the far right rejects European countries and cozies up to Russia, because the American conservative and the Russian nationalist have quite a lot of “shared values.”

suppressing free speech

Shutting out far-right racists and literal foreign agitators

mishandling migration

Racism

and ignoring populist concerns

More racism

Feels like the New Axis is starting to take tangible shape.

As George Carlin said, selfish ignorant people elect selfish ignorant leaders.

Personally, talking to anyone about politics here is unnerving. Most people are in this fog where current events are only an ephemeral storyline that they tune into periodically like it’s a TV drama. Never a big deal, never anything that could affect them or those they care for. It’s a position of privilege, frankly. Maybe some of them are just that dumb. I think a lot of people, though, are scared, either of their ignorance or their powerlessness, so they simply avoid being involved or educated out of discomfort. That’s probably the nicest interpretation I have for my countrymen’s behavior.

Otherwise you are spot on. The uniquely tasteless brand of brash American chauvinism that we were globally lampooned for during the Invasion of Iraq has metastasized. We are long overdue for being knocked down a peg. I wish I could say the fallout from this painful reckoning would stay within our borders, but it most likely won’t. We have a very uncertain year ahead of us, let alone the next five years.

There is a sizeable “Lost Cause” myth among racists for both South Africa and Zimbabwe/formerly Rhodesia. In talking about these countries and seemingly caring about them, it makes them seem more worldly and less racist. They’ll often try to deny that these regimes were apartheid at all by pointing out that the military was desegregated, despite that having little to do with how the native Africans were actually treated both under the law and outside of it. Their fascination also crosses over with anti-communist sentiment because many of their adversaries were communist if not directly USSR-backed. And killing communists is BASED.

It’s all “right of play” rhetoric that one quote about arguing with Nazis talks about, it’s either intellectually lazy or intentionally dishonest. When you get down to brass tacks with this Myth, the hypothesis they put forth is “Africa can only ever prosper if Whites are in charge.”