Yeah of course industries will collapse. 100 car factories will close, 5 superyacht factories will open, tying up the same amount of productivity. Owned by the same guy.

There will be tons of spacecraft launchpads, private jet hangars, etc.

And wars of course.

The rich will keep trading with each other. Look at housing for an example.

The rich. Companies will stop targeting products to wider and wider swathes of people, just like nobody caters to the homeless now.

Trump got shot at a rally, very minor injuries, would be assassin dead

All the other crazyness does not make this normal.

Isn’t the whole genocide and people’s reactions to it political?

As long as Twitter does business in the EU, it has to follow the law.

Not yet. But Trump might make it one. That’s my point, electing someone that makes the US more equitable is unrealistic, but electing someone who will make it a dictatorship is not unrealistic.

DSA enforcement is spicy, since the EU can create its own team to fight disinfo on Twitter, and charge it to Musk, in addition to the massive fine.

Care to argue the point?

Yeah I never know with this guy if his stupidity or his criminality won any particular day.

There was no buffer zone. Poland, Slovakia, the Baltics were under Russian military occupation for most of the last century.

Russian soldiers were on the NATO border even back then. Soviet troops suppressed multiple revolutions aimed at creating an actual buffer zone, in 1956, in 1968 and so on. The bullet holes are still there. Some who fought are still alive.

When the Wall fell, all these “buffer zone” countries wanted to join NATO because they knew the Russians will come back.

Ukraine was indeed a buffer zone. Ukraine wanted to be one. Everyone signed that in Budapest. And yet when Ukraine wanted to do something and go its own way separate from Russia, but not into NATO either, Russia invaded in 2014.

Russia broke that buffer zone. And sincerely, Eastern Europe has agency and can decide who its allies are. Russia has always been an enemy, and if you look at Finland, even dealing with the devil itself had better outcomes than giving an inch to Russia.

Other billionaires making money might have started to be afraid to do so.

The point is noone cares why the dems went towards the corporate right. Noone cares if Bernie got kneecapped or had no chance to begin with.

We can argue back and forth as long as we go crazy whether a more progressive administration would have been realistic.

The cold hard truth is a US dictatorship now is. It’s not edgy, it’s sad is what it is. Hillary got us Trump, and Biden will get us Trump.

Again, look at it from Eastern Europe. What’s the good choice?

Being independent is a choice as well, and most tried that. They mostly got invaded by both sides, either being raped and pillaged in tandem or one after the other.

What’s the good choice Poland or the Baltics should take?

No, the story ends with King Donald Trump.

How does this relate to Afghanistan wanting to have NATO neighbours or not? The original debate was whether Russia was justified to be hostile to neighbours joining NATO, and you brought up Afghanistan as an example.

Yet the Afghanistan neighbours involved in the NATO invasion were not NATO members, they were in fact NATO-hostile. So the lessons seems less “don’t have NATO neighbours” but “ally with your trustworthy neighbours that won’t sell you out”.

And all that said, NATO and the US in the Middle East and Asia is not the same as NATO in Eastern Europe. I agree that the US should fuck off all the way back to where they came from, but Russia is more of a clear and present danger than the US is. At least here. There are no good guys, only the bad one near you with a rifle and the one far away with a loan.

Linkerbaan, put yourself into the shoes of any Eastern European country in 1930, and decide who to ally with. I bet however you answer that question, there will be a nice example why it was a dogshit choice. It is not that much different now, except the collective West seems less bad than the Third Reich was.

Death Road to Canada

Benefit of the doubt here, weren’t the casinos some criminal conspiracy to dodge taxes or sg?

The US Afganistan invasion was supplied through Pakistan, and to a lesser extent, the old Russian lines that Russia used in its own invasion. Georgia was also an intermediary to a lesser degree.

None of these are NATO members.