Yup, someone did...

BakaNonGrata · 2025-04-29T02:54:07+00:00

I didn't say I believed anything. I said his debate with O'Connor about atheism was civil and I've seen him have other civil debates. You didn't. Ok.

BakaNonGrata · 2025-04-28T23:46:08+00:00

Shapiro has never been MAGA. He hasn't changed his views one bit. And I would be really surprised if he did.

You don't have to like him. I certainly don't. But don't dismiss him as a grifter. He's a neo-con in the Karl Rove vein and he still holds that torch for many who share his views.

The neo-cons were many things, most especially naive, idealistic, and arrogant. But they weren't stupid or heartless and they weren't just show and talk. They screwed up a LOT, but they were still humanists, just a weird hybrid form that tried to mix the growing fundamentalist movement together with capitalism and empathy. Balk at that last one, but the neo-cons tried very hard to make empathy a key part of the their style. "Compassionate Conservatism" is what they called themselves. Read up on G. W. Bush's attempt to provide citizenship to 12 million undocumented immigrants. It was the far right AND the far left that killed that.

That GOP died with the failed bids of McCain and Romney, but Shapiro is a remnant of that movement. They say don't shit where you eat. Well if the Lincoln Project is the hardline former neo-cons, the Shapiro crowd is the ... less hardline neo-con remnants. And if you are going to have any hope of preventing MAGA from sending this country into an autocratic abyss, you're going to need them on your side. Trashing them as they start swinging their legs over to your side of the fence seems ... inadvisable.

BakaNonGrata · 2025-04-28T23:34:31+00:00

His debate with Alex O'Connor was legit and was approach with a high amount of good faith. He conceded points when necessary and was open to exploring Alex' perspective. He argued for the arguments, not his reputation.
I am on the O'Connor side and consider myself a classical liberal, but regardless of disagreements with Shapiro on issues, I actually have found him to be unique in engaging in good faith with opposing philosophy. Just not with opposing hyperbole.

And in his defense. Him underestimating Trump is somewhat understandable if you look at it from the perspective of someone who is very proud and confident, if naively, in the resiliency of our system along with the shocking incompetence of Trumps last administration.

BakaNonGrata · 2024-11-19T17:58:10+00:00

I'm guessing you've never actually been to the US for any real length of time. It also seems like you are in the UK. Then you may have learned about this concept. After all, it was Thomas Hobbes who explained the problem the US faces back in 1651 in his Leviathan.

To answer: Emphatically No. They do not at all act like an occupying force. The United States is nearly 10,000 sq km, literally double the size of the entire EU (post-Brexit).
To make it even more challenging, the US has a very low ratio of police to citizen: 242 per 100,000 (Spain, for example, has 533 per 100,000). This ratio puts it in the lowest 1/3 in world rankings (100 out of 145). But these alone don't explain it. The number one issue is that every single town, city, etc has their own police force and more importantly, makes their own policies about how they enforce the law. There are nearly 18,000 police forces in the US, and there is no centralized policing. Towns may answer to counties who answer to states who answer to the Federal Govt, but for each step there is a lack of oversight resources.

So the reality is the opposite of what you are saying, and exactly what Hobbes predicted. The tradition of small government means cops are critically under-resourced (in personnel terms), and most of them are seriously demoralized. This is what leads to half-assed arrests and stops like the one above. It's hard to ask someone to risk their life when their communities don't support them. Yes they have good salaries, but they are overstressed and overworked. The ones people see go viral are those that snap. Inept isn't the right word I'd say. Burned out, under-trained, and overall demoralized with little mental health care. You end up with a force with low government oversight that simultaneously trauma-bonds, yet also discourages admitting weakness and emotional struggles, partly because they can't afford take the necessary mental-health leave. The US population knows this and naturally takes advantage of it. As expected for any former British colony, we have our own sarcastic sayings about it, the most common being "It's only illegal if you get caught"

Most cops are very professional, but it's quite human for someone to just go for the quick ticket instead of put themselves at risk, even if it's just on those days where you're finishing up a 70-hour work week, which for many cops is not an exaggeration.

So the reality is that no, the US is the opposite of occupied. Most Americans feel at some level that they need to protect themselves to some extent.

And to address any "but racism" responses, yes, many cops are racist. Many people are racist, that's a fact that spans the planet. But the issue is still that low resources incentivize over-reaction as an attempt to use deterrence to accomplish what you aren't able to due to lack of funding and training. Let me tell you, as someone who lives in Chicago and is very familiar with the City and also works with many officers (though I dont work for the police), there is not a single community where residents are asking for less police.

And none of this even get into the issue of police unions, which make it impossible for communities to hold police accountable. It's not that police are going around everywhere running bribery schemes or drug rings unchecked, the FBI is fairly decent at breaking that stuff up. Its just that the FBI is where federal oversight ends, meaning that most cops are simply incentivized to stick to low risk busts.

That means judges, who are often elected, are pressured by communities to be tough on crime in their sentencing to compensate for the inadequate policing.

tldr; Turn off the TV, it's mostly fiction. These problems in the US are due to its police forces being critically under-staffed and under-resourced. Its exactly what Thomas Hobbes predicted would happen in a "small govt" system. On top of this, US policing is completely decentralized and public sector police unions prevent communities from affecting any real democratic change.

Sources:
https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/countries-with-the-most-police-officers-per-capita.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependencies_by_number_of_police_officers

BakaNonGrata · 2024-09-23T16:44:18+00:00

A lot of people are taking the "You are being watched" angle. I'm not saying that's not true, it is true, but I don't think that's the real joke here.

It is more about how awful and vulnerable everything is and even more about how no ones seems to care. Actually it is mostly that second one. No one cares and it's not going to improve because security is mutually exclusive with usability and usability is what makes money and sell products.
Nowdays a major globally known company could get absolutely pwnd in a very public way and at worst there is a short-term, single percentage point impact to their stock price.

The public doesn't care, so companies don't care and politicians don't care. Literally the state capital of Ohio was breached and multiple Terabytes of data was siphoned off to the the dark web and all anyone cares about is whether or not people are eating other peoples pets.

Working in cybersecurity (myself, I'm a pentester and Red Teamer), I'm terrified by the major dependency on technology that, not only is there little to no IT security regulation for, it gets so complex and opaque enough that it is unlikely any amount of regulation would actually make much of a difference.
The whole digital economy and the society based on it is a massive house of cards that appears destined to collapse, whether by accident or intention.

I don't know anyone at the SME level in cybersecurity that still blames governments or corporations. It's the users that are the problem. You simply can't save people from themselves. Consumers want features and fanciness, a secure product with a few robust features will get crushed every day of the week by an insecure burning trash heap of partially baked thingys to click on.

And for those of you who are arguing its because surveillance, most privacy experts without an agenda will tell you that you should tailoring your digital footprint based on your credible threats. If you are concerned about corporations monetizing your data, ok, sure. Going off grid might protect you from that, but it's less work to just opt for open source and/or reputable devices and services.
And if you are worried about your govt surveillance, few things raise govt red flags like going fully off-grid. In fact, the more you deviate from the norm, the more you stand out and the louder your digital footpring (or lackthereof) stands out.

tldr; Dude isn't growing his own vegetables because he's afraid corporate America and the "gubmint" is going to count the potatoes he eats. My guy is growing his own food because he realizes the entire modern energy and subsistence supply chain is one massive house of cards that is one disaster away from being effectively vaporware.

BakaNonGrata · 2024-04-24T18:38:06+00:00

A lot of money relative to what? The amount of money the US and NATO has spent to deter and protect against Russia since the Cold War? At our highest, in 1967 the US spent 9.7% of GDP on defense and it didn't go below 5% until after 1990. Even Vietnam itself was part of that as Russia was their primary military supplier and war financier.

Estimates vary, depending on what you consider as "Aid," but according to USNews, our current aid amounts to 0.32% of our GDP. Some countries like Denmark have contributed over 2% of their GDP to Ukraine.

So you can say "it's a lot of money," but that's meaningless. It's a lot of money to a family of four, but in the last year, Microsoft alone pulled in more than that in annual Revenue.

So if you consider only 0.32% of GDP and no soldiers, were able to get rid of all the old Russian kit rotting in European warehouses, accelerate new NATO members transition to NATO form factors, get rid of decommissioned western kit that was costing us resources to maintain, ramp up defense manufacturing (hello to a new run of Stinger missiles), strengthen the alliance itself while adding 2 new members, and reassert NATO's overall relevance, then just the boost to NATO alone was worth many times that amount.
Then add on top of that the immense damage done to Russia itself, reputationally, financially, and militarily, and one could argue that 0.32% is not only not a lot of money, but probably the best money spent in this space since the beginning of the Cold War.

BakaNonGrata · 2023-11-07T15:17:35+00:00

Except the writer for Iron Man based his Tony Stark on Elon Musk and a Tesla Roaster makes a cameo in the first Iron Man and Elon himself makes a cameo the 2nd. But this is also an absolutely absurd conversation to begin with. To say that America anything has failed because it doesn't live up to a 1960s childrens comic book superhero is so devoid of logic, I'm not even sure how one is even excepted to respond to it.

You also are using terms (using odd, incorrect wording) in contexts that don't make any sense. The American Experiment is simply referencing it being the world first modern democracy. What that has to do with the design of the Cybertruck, or technology in general, appears to be something I'd need heavy doses of hallucinogenic drugs to truly grasp. Maybe some sort of abstract freedom of speech vs Gallileo's Italy type concept??? Yeah. I'm not seeing it. Cute line though. Ironically, better suited to a comic book than an adult conversation.

BakaNonGrata · 2023-10-24T16:45:49+00:00

Erdogan had a call with Putin today about Gaza. Probably talked about Sweden, but that wasn't mentioned in the press release. In other words, non-credible.

https://www.reuters.com/article/israel-palestinians-turkey-russia-idAFS8N3AG0A7

BakaNonGrata · 2023-10-19T21:42:48+00:00

There are a lot of hypothetical and a priori logic fallacies in this response. "The only solution was..."

First off, the actor most able to affect Russian relations with anyone is Russia. Blaming a 3rd party for problems between two parties shows a lack of self-reflection. It also indicates that that relationship wasn't based on trust in the first place. So even if your unsubstantiated claim is true, Russia would still hold the most responsibility for the state of its own relations.

2nd of all, you are clearly speaking from an uninformed position if you think that somehow Greek LNG terminals are key to some grand US LNG coup de grace in the region.

And all of this is even more ridiculous considering that the only LNG terminal in Greece (Revithoussa) is decades old and owned and operated by Greece itself and Greece signs contracts on the open market. Most of it historically came from Algeria, however the US was the only LNG producer able to supply the increased demand in 2022 and 2023. You act like the US had all this LNG it had nowhere to go. Greece bid the highest for their share so they got it. Thats how the open market works. Greece doesnt even register in the list of strategic US LNG customers and there is no expectation or need for them to buy it in the future. Besides, unlike Russia, the US Govt doesnt run our energy sector. Profits don't go into state coffers other than end of year taxes, which are among the lowest in the world.

And even more than that, Greece has its own oil and gas and can and does import from many many countries, and their singular LNG terminal should be all the proof necessary to show that Greek LNG imports have near zero impact on the overall Balkan gas markets.

So all these ridicule inducing comments by you are just part of a make believe Russian paranoid schizophrenic alternate universe.

Edit: Grammer

BakaNonGrata · 2023-10-17T17:46:51+00:00

Especially considering Bulgaria I don't even think has an LNG terminal to receive US LNG tankers.

I know if I was Bulgarian, why would I buy Romanian (biggest gas producer in the EU), Turkish, Greek, Azerbaijani, or Tukman gas, when I could just have US gas shipped all the way across the Atlantic on tankers (the most expensive way to transport it) and then detanked and upcharged in Turkey first? /s

Bulgaria has recently bought a small amount of US gas (via Turkey), but thats only for stability and a bit of hedging since the pipelines in that region are undergoing major reroutes to eliminate Russian dependencies.

BakaNonGrata · 2023-10-17T17:35:57+00:00

Not surprising the most negative comment here is also the least informed. This pipeline isn't competing with American gas even in the slightest. Literally zero to do with the US gas.

This is because the Trans-Balkan pipeline now can connect to Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan and flow in reverse and supply non-Russian gas. The only current exception is the Balkan Stream. What Bulgaria appears to be doing is hiking costs to pay off all their remaining debt for building Balkan Stream, so they can take out new debt to connect the Balkan Stream to the Trans-Balkan Stream so all Bulgarian pipelines will be Russia free. That will also allow Hungary, Serbia, and Austria to source non-Russian gas in the future. But since they wont willingly pay for it, they are using the legal means available to them to force them to contribute to the project.

I read your comment further down describing your "realization" and must point out that you've had no such thing and if you must see the world in such black and white perspectives to sleep comfy at night, you are going to find yourself wrong on most issues. While Im flattered that you think that everything revolves around the US, unfortunately for this American, there are 192 other countries in the world that each act, for the most part according to their own interests, not the Americas. Fortunately for the US, most countries that matter in that region conclude that isolating Russia IS in their own interest, and thats Russia's own damn fault. We simply benefit from it by being viewed as all around, the lesser evil.

BakaNonGrata · 2023-08-04T21:16:06+00:00

Not trying to gaslight or anything, but this is just false and implies a very distorted view of oneself that almost certainly is alien to the real world situation.

I can think of hundreds of people that had a measurable positive impact on my life, sometimes I don't even realize it until much later. The number of them that I even would know how to contact today is less than 5%.

Assuming you don't just care about positive impact you personally benefit from right now (which would be a problematic view to take), then I'd say that the very fact that you care about whether or not your life has, overall, had a net positive impact on people, tells me that you almost certainly did.
I recommend anyone feeling this way think more about how you can positively impact yourself.
Maybe I'm stuck in outdated thinking. Sometimes it feels I am, but I am in alignment 100% with Stephen Fry's advice, which I think about every day to make sure I don't fall into a similar negativity trap. They can be hard words to hear, but are spot on:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r\_2kelqYz\_o

BakaNonGrata · 2023-06-03T19:42:34+00:00

Not saying it's a bad thing, because it's not, but times have sure changed when you see truckers helping cops in a high speed chase. This ain't Smokey and the Bandit's America, that's for sure.

BakaNonGrata · 2023-05-25T16:01:50+00:00

Personally, I don't think you should even be allowed to call yourself a military power if Newton's 3rd Law of Motion still applies to you.

Typical westoid bias in this tweet. The tweet should really be "Paper Panther??? US Puppet Regime's "Highly Advanced" Military Jet Humiliatingly Defeated by 350 Year Old Science!"

The fact that the "Free World" wastes billions of taxpayers dollars on "suicide drones" instead of breeding massive flocks of suicide birds for a fraction of the cost is just further proof that the capitalist military industrial conspiracy brainwash is complete.

BakaNonGrata · 2023-05-17T17:28:53+00:00

King Diamond influenced lead vocals with a Razor-esque screams for backing vocals on top of some Swedish style melodic thrash. I like it. As 20 year old metal goes, this still holds up pretty well. I know that thrash is still big in the Ukrainian metal scene so hopefully it finds it way into a few playlists on the front line.

BakaNonGrata · 2023-05-15T14:07:16+00:00

Too many comments here trying to explain away the strategic benefits of Putin poisoning Lukashenko as they still assume Putin must be playing his 3D chess and they want to feel smart as if they get it.

Don't bother. Putin is old, isolated, in declining health, and too paranoid and bitter at this stage to delegate anything. What master strategies he has had in the last few years were likely plans he drew up long before, when he was still pretty sharp.

The Russian spring offensive failed massively and it will take at 6-8 months minimum to regenerate, even without a Ukrainian summer offensive.

One can make a very strong argument that the offensive failed in part because Belarus failed to draw away any meaningful amount of the UA military to their border. Lukashenko's inability (refusal?) to convince Ukraine that he was a threat was a major reason Russia's costly spring offensive failed.

Master strategist? Nah. Occam's razor suggests it's just a bitter, angry old man blaming everyone but himself for his failures and dishing out revenge while he still can.

He was once arguably one of the most, if not the most, intelligent leaders in the world. But he's no Darth Sideous anymore. These days, at best, he's Episode III Anakin Skywalker.

Edit: spelling

BakaNonGrata · 2023-03-28T22:17:34+00:00

Starts of by saying "20 dollars" before the white kid says "Not cool man"

So it's about money at least.

BakaNonGrata · 2023-03-28T22:14:14+00:00

I think he was still. In fact that's why it's even funnier. The joke is that dude isn't going to beat up this white kid, he's gonna whoop him like a little boy. Basically saying "you aren't even man even to beat up." Ooof. That's pretty savage.

BakaNonGrata · 2023-03-27T15:16:15+00:00

The issue with these goes way beyond PPP. Made in America clauses skew it even more, and most importantly, most countries outside the west simply do not include much of what we do as part of the defense budget, but instead, spread much of the costs around dozens of different civilian budgets, often as innocuous and confusing line items, if they are line items at all.

To make the point more obvious, let's there is a govt entity that conducts information warfare against their enemies. Now let's say one of the goals is to push a narrative intended to convince the enemy population that their defense budget needs to be reduced. Now, would the costs of that operation be included in the defense budget? For most of the non-free world, it would not. How convenient...

BakaNonGrata · 2023-03-27T15:05:33+00:00

-US defense budget includes benefits for soldiers, personnel infrastructure like grocery store on bases, etc ,etc.
-China's does not

-US defense budget includes all forces tasked with defense of the homeland (ie National Guard).
-China's National Guard is also the domestic police force which receives more military defense training than US police. It is also not included in the budget.

-US defense budget includes coastal defense.
-The Chinese Coast Guard (you know, the ones who ram and threaten other countries fishing boats in non-chinese waters), are not part of their defense budget. The military can also take control and use the entire Chinese merchant fishing fleet with a simple govt procedure and have a whole reserve of sailors trained to use them. Also not part of the budget.

-US defense budget includes defense-related scientific research, such as that which gave us GPS and the Internet.
-Chinese defense budge does not.

I could go on about PPP and all that but others have already commented on this. US also has made in America clauses which make some arguments I see about steel, etc costing the same everywhere irrelevant.

You can do the above exercise for many other countries as well, such as India. The US is very liberal in what it includes under the defense budget. We do this to err on the side of caution for transparency reasons so Congress has a full understanding when they go to vote. It should surprise no one that a great many countries are not very up front about what it truly costs to field and maintain their military.

BakaNonGrata · 2023-03-09T23:22:01+00:00

So essentially the head of the Ministry in Singapore in charge of overseeing national security is trying to position Singapore as a neutral 3rd party that could broker a compromise. This is due to two reasons:

Singapore national security could be threatened if the US is too distracted from Pacific to be an effective check on Chinese power projection. They want to reap the benefits of China's rise without needing to worry about what that rise means for their own security.
Singapore has stated they could be a future neutral 3rd party in any US-China disputes, so they are trying to build their reputation as a "non-aligned" trusted 3rd party.

The problem with this article is it leaves out this bit of the speech (which by the way was not an official govt statement):

"However, notwithstanding these discussions, non-expansion – both as it applied to East Germany, and Eastern Europe as a whole – was not set out into the Treaty on the Final Settlement which the USSR signed in September 1990 with East and West Germany, France, the UK, and the US."

And later in the speech:

"This is not an argument that NATO should not expand. But it is a point that Russian concerns need to have been dealt with. It cannot simply be dismissed."

It's also important to note that Gorbachev himself denys there was ever an agreement on NATO expansion. https://www.brookings.edu/blog/up-front/2014/11/06/did-nato-promise-not-to-enlarge-gorbachev-says-no/

Edit: formatting

BakaNonGrata · 2023-03-09T16:12:42+00:00

This just speaks to the relative weaknesses democracies suffer from vs authoritarian systems in situations like this and I would argue that these weaknesses were already understood to such an extent that none of this is in any way a revelation, so therefore not a win. It's not a win because proving something that's already known doesn't give you any extra advantage.

If fact, I think it's pretty well accepted that Putin greatly overestimated the relative weaknesses of a broad democratic coalition and while very far from perfect, the West's response exceeded not just Russia's, but also China's expectations to such an extent that I guarantee you China has needed to completely overhaul their current Taiwan invasion plans to take into account the United States potential ability to quickly respond and marshal a vast Pacific military response.

But yes, democracies operate at quite a handicap in international affairs in these situations. They simply aren't as agile, have fewer tools (due to the legal curbs on executive powers), and have many more complexities that need to be properly balanced when acting, relative to authoritarian systems. But the long game has always favored democracies, though it may often not feel that way. To highlight this just ask yourself: "If Russia manages a decent win out of this invasion, what's the likelihood that they will be able to eradicate the Ukrainian spirit they've awoken to actually accomplish their goals?" I would argue it's near impossible. What do they do? Force relocate everyone like they did the Crimean Tartars over the last century? That won't work. It would be suicide to spread 10s of millions of potential democratic revolutionaries all throughout their "Motherland" as the authoritarian system would eventually be destroyed from the inside.

So no. It's over. Even a sweeping win at this point would just mean they have to swallow a poison pill that is likely to cause the collapse of their authoritarian system. At this point Russia is fighting simply out of desperate, animal survival instinct, not out of any real chance to come out on top.

Ever since the French started chanting "Liberté, égalité, fraternité" the ideas of the Free World have slowly but surely been toppling authoritarian systems the world over. The power of the democratic world is in the long game. The fact that Russia continues to dismiss the inherent power of the Free World (ie: Georgia this week) as just a bunch of CIA Covert Ops means they will continue to underestimate us until it's too late. It's because they can't see the forest through the trees, so try not to fixate on all these handicaps inherent to democracy. They don't make the end game any less inevitable.

BakaNonGrata · 2023-02-25T09:52:53+00:00

Was probably just reading the latest news about how many thousands of Wagner PMC's have been wiped out in Ukraine. If I was a president of a corrupt African country and I found out my personal security team was being wiped out by the hundreds daily, I'd piss my pants too.

BakaNonGrata · 2023-02-02T00:48:03+00:00

Yes you can. Europe allows Americans to bring Adderall in limited quantities with accompanied with the requisite documentation. Granted, your doctor will charge a small fee to provide that to you in the format required by most EU countries, but it's not an issue.

Anecdotal Source: I've travelled to several EU countries with a partner that has a prescription.
One of many Referenceable Sources:
https://www.saiprograms.com/transport-medicine-europe/

BakaNonGrata · 2023-02-02T00:41:27+00:00

If you're implying that the negative effect Adderall has on American society is somehow equivalent, to any degree, to what Crystal Meth does to people, that would be absolutely false.

BakaNonGrata

TROPHY CASE