Why!? Why, Combinator!?

Have you not seen the memes? Or are you saying that the Great Leaf Forward isn’t real, and I spent my life’s savings on pictures of Mao Zedong for nothing?

If the fine people of Minnesota have access to RPGs or high calibre machine guns, it may as well be made of butter

We very badly need air defences. We don’t have so much as a shoulder-launched anti-aircraft missile, let alone anything long-ranged.

After WW2, the various industrialists who financed and supported the Nazi party all got off scot free. I hope that isn’t the case this time around.

We sent a bunch of these to Ukraine. They didn’t perform well - got stuck in the mud easily, the armour wasn’t sufficient for the threats, and the height didn’t help with not getting hit. They’re appropriate for colonial policing operations, which is why they’re perfect for ICE, provided the Minnesotans start shooting back

At least it’s interesting to watch!

I agree, the separatists should go on down to the US

I got rid of it years ago, thankfully, but I’ve heard the talk. As it stands, we wouldn’t make it a week outside of a guerrilla war, and I don’t know if we have a strong enough society or motivated enough populace for guerrilla war. We could make ourselves a hard enough target for them to avoid if we invested heavily in expanding the military, but where are we going to get the weapons? America? They could turn them off remotely I’m sure. China would be a good option, but America might invade us right away once they found out we were doing that. It’s a big problem.

Even if we could get the Europeans to do anything more than write a strongly-worded letter, they don’t have much in the way of military might themselves. Frankly, I don’t trust them to help unless something changes, but the ticket is deterrence. We need to make ourselves a hard enough target that the Americans aren’t willing to try to take a bite, and it’s going to take a combination of alliances (we should ally with Mexico, since America is coming for them too) and armaments.

Regarding shifting social spending to defence, I think it’s a bad idea, at least without other major changes elsewhere. Part of our problem is motivation - we’ve had 40 years of neoliberalism telling us the state owes us nothing besides tax credits and we owe the state nothing besides paying our taxes and obeying the law. We’re already halfway to losing public healthcare, so we won’t even be able to fight for that. We need a fundamental paradigm shift to save this country, and I’m not sure if we have the will or the imagination.

The rest of the “democratic” world supported Israel as they bombed Gaza to rubble, and supported America in basically every murderous invasion and regime change of the last 80 years, right up until America threatened to take Greenland - suddenly it’s different if America comes for someone in the club. All the “democratic west” amounts to is a few rich countries run by rich pedophiles, but God forbid we do business with big bad China, right?

Hell, they already had us, and we just didn’t know it. Every western country was in lockstep with the US, especially in foreign policy. Now the US has decided that soft power is woke, and everyone has to publicly submit to them. This could at least offer us an opportunity to break free, though the odds could be better.

I would take either, but we have neither. Carney is a progressive conservative.

One of the examples is how South Korea suffered tourism losses after stationing American missile defence batteries on their territory. I would agree with China’s decision in that case.

I mean, look on the bright side. At least the unhinged fascists to the south aren’t bombing us right now, unlike Lebanon’s case. It’s not ‘out of the frying pan, into the fire’, it’s ‘out of the frying pan, into a different, less hot frying pan’. Could be worse!

That’s silly, you can’t just decouple from both of the world’s largest economies. The EU deindustrialized itself, and Australia and New Zealand aren’t exactly economic superpowers. Also, Japan is a de-facto one party state with a far-right government.

The smart thing to do is to play the superpowers against each other - distance yourself from the US as much as we can (which we of course can only do to an extent), and normalize relations with China. We would be fools to continue to blindly follow US foreign policy while the US threatens to invade us.

Ah, you’re right. Instead of bringing up the calendar, it brings up _{notifications}, and you have to click a little pop-up button to see the calendar. Thank God I only have to worry about this on my work computer.

Slava

Being able to shoot the invaders is highly conducive to an insurgency. Otherwise, you would have to throw rocks at them, which is suboptimal.

Not on your life, they’ll have AI-powered Google Maps!

I also want it to have a built-in clock and calendar in the taskbar. But Microsoft won’t even let me have that! They got rid of the calendar!