Ah yes, it’s…

checks notes

the US fault that Russia invaded Ukraine. Right, makes perfect sense, carry on.

The only involvement the US or even most of the NATO countries have had in this complete shitshow has been to sell obsolete military hardware to Ukraine at a steep discount. It was probably cheaper to ship the stuff in bulk to Ukraine than it would cost to properly decommission it so might even have saved some money doing that.

Russia desperately wants to make this a fight with NATO or even better the US so they look like less of a laughing stock for losing this badly.

They tried making subscription turn signals but nobody bought them. /s

I seem to recall a big kerfuffle around a decade and a half back about Russia not actually knowing what became of a whole bunch of nuclear weapons in the aftermath of the USSR collapsing. There were also rumors of Soviet nukes being sold off to various unsavory groups. It really wouldn’t surprise me to find out there was some truth to that.

I have also heard that ICBMs and the like require regular expensive and specialized maintenance in order to remain functional. Knowing what we now know about Russia what do you figure the odds are that some general or other decided those maintenance funds would be better used to line their pockets since the odds of actually using those nukes were so low?

China would just wait until it’s over and then pick through the remains of Russia. Probably try to claim a big chunk of southern Russia using some excuse or another.

They appear to be a propaganda outfit. They’d fit right in with InfoWars.

I’ve learned how powerful the unelected bureaucracy is. You have to win in November … you have to dismantle the leftist state … they are devious, they are ruthless and they are out to get you.

Those are called voters.

Yeah, there was an article a couple days ago that really dug deep on who these guys are and this hoax is something they’ve done a few times now. It’s a shame they destroyed an actual archeological site to steal the mummy they butchered and glued back together to make their “alien”.

This “article” is just more of the same nutjobs repeating the same BS. They already tried to claim they had the body DNA tested but a representative of the lab they said did the work said they did no DNA testing as they were only asked to carbon date the mummy which of course shows legit results because it’s actually cobbled together from a real human mummy.

Ah yes… bots… I’m sure that’s it.

uncertainty over Chinese policies

That’s a feature not a bug. China is vague about their laws because then people self-censor because they don’t know where the line is. It’s a classic trick of authoritarian regimes. Anyone doing business in China should understand you do so only because the CCP has decided to allow it and they can change their mind at any point for any reason. You have no rights there, and if you forget that they will definitely remind you. Or remind whoever they replace you with.

Can we just ban tiblur? I’ve seen a half dozen posts in various subs from there and without fail every last one has been absolute garbage.

Edit: actually I think it technically is banned. Community rules say no posting links to social media and I think tiblur technically counts as social media.

It’s also worth pointing out that this was all taking place at the height of McCarthyism. There’s a lot you could get away with in the US at the time simply by framing it as anti-communist and adding “In God We Trust” to the currency was just one such example. Something else interesting that I ran across while doing some fact checking here was this flier from 1955 that seems scarily similar to current propaganda. Just goes to show I guess that the more things change the more they stay the same.

I wasn’t using perceived there to suggest that the USSR didn’t oppress religion, but rather to point out that it was a reaction to beliefs in America at the time. Whether the reality of USSR was different from that belief wouldn’t have mattered as the decision to emphasize religion in the US was a direct product of the US anti-communism propaganda effort (once again, because I know there’s a significant tankie population on Lemmy, I’m not advocating FOR communism here). It’s sort of like a second order effect. First you have the reality of life in the USSR. Then you have how the US populace perceived that life. Lastly you had the political decisions designed to steer that perception towards their own ends. Encouraging deeper religiousness in the US or even the perception of such was simply seen as a wedge issue that could be used both domestically and abroad to try to steer people towards the US side of the cold war.

What a shitshow. Church shouldn’t mingle in politics.

Yeah, so there was a broad understanding of that principle for a very long time following the complete shit show that state sponsored churches created in Europe, so much so that it was enshrined in actual law in the first amendment to the US constitution. Other countries such as Australia also have similar laws.

Unfortunately, as a reaction to the perceived anti-religion policies of the USSR during the cold war, the US decided to emphasize religion as a staple of life in the US, going so far as to add “In God We Trust” to US currency, something that is arguably a violation of the first amendment and most likely should never have been allowed. Making things worse Republicans realized that they could weaponize ignorant evangelical Christians as part of the southern strategy, and so began to depict themselves as the party of Christianity, once again walking the line of what’s allowed under the first amendment.

Recently evangelicals have managed to convince themselves that first amendment does not in fact prevent religion from getting involved with government, but in fact merely prevents the government from putting any restrictions on religion. They have decided that that means they can simply ignore any laws they disagree with by claiming it violates their religion, while also seeing no conflict with trying to enshrine their religious beliefs as law. Many of them also push a revisionist history that the US was founded as a Christian nation and that therefore Christian beliefs should be the basis of law in the US, some going as far as to suggest the US officially adopting Christianity as a state religion.

The one ray of hope in all this is the waning belief in religion. If religion can be successfully kept out of politics for the next couple decades it’s possible that churches won’t have enough sway to be a useful tool of politicians anymore.

Eh, it’s debatable. He had already shipped Wagner off to Belarus and folded the Wagner troops into the Belarus military, so Wagner was pretty effectively de-fanged at that point. The only thing Putin gained by this was sending a message to anyone else that decided to stand up to him, although if anyone still didn’t understand that Putin tends to assassinate people who displease him they haven’t been paying attention since like 1980 when Putin was still actually KGB. This is very on brand for Putin, although it is a bit novel to apparently go with airplane “crash” rather than his usual standbys of poisoning, “falling” out of windows, or tripping down flights of stairs/elevator shafts and landing on bullets.

On the other hand, it does make Putin look scared and weak that he felt the need to assassinate someone who he had already effectively defeated, without needing to fire a shot at that. I still wonder how he pulled that off. He must have either had some seriously damning dirt on Prigozhin, or else made him one hell of a deal to get him to about face and march right out of Russia. Maybe Putin just straight up threatened to nuke him if he got any closer to Moscow and he decided not to try to call Putin’s bluff.

Bit off topic here, but what’s a hexbear? First time I’ve ever encountered that term.

I’d be more inclined to believe they’re probes from higher dimensional beings than that they’re intelligent life from other stars/planets, but even that I’d give astronomically low odds to. It’s like a 99.999999999% chance it’s some unknown phenomenon or misunderstood sensor reading/glitch, 0.0000000009% chance it’s something from a higher dimension, and 0.0000000001% chance it’s aliens.

The poster of this has exactly one post and one comment. The post is this one which consists entirely of one image showing nothing and a list of unsubstantiated claims that read like a greatest hits list of conspiracy theories. The one comment is to a ex-mormon community saying a list of other ex-mormon communities on lemmy is “very useful”.

Now, I’m not really inclined to defend mormonism, it’s a terrible “religion” with a laundry list of crimes and bad practices associated with its leaders at every level, but unhinged ravings like this with literally no evidence to back them up should probably be removed by a mod.

Clearly because actually explaining it doesn’t generate clicks and controversy

Solving real problems is hard because if it wasn’t they would be solved already, but making up fake problems is really easy.

And monkeys could fly out of my ass. Before we start hand wringing about AI someone would probably need to actually invent one. We’re probably closer to actual room temperature fusion at this point than we are an actual general purpose AI.

Instead of wasting time worrying about a thing that doesn’t even exist and probably won’t in any of our lifetimes, we should probably do something about the things actually killing us like global warming and unchecked corporate greed.

Not sure how you square those numbers with reports like this then: https://www.businessinsider.com/cruise-ship-air-pollution-carnival-cars-europe-study-2023-6

That wasn’t the actual report I was thinking about, but its been a number of years since I saw that original report which looked at pollution of shipping vessels vs. pollution of US automobiles and found that an overwhelming majority of the pollution came from the ships.

The good news such as it is is that as pointed out in that article regulations have improved in 2020 and it’s already showing reductions in ship pollution.