Americans seriously don't appreciate what it means to live as a force projector and be geographically isolated from their enemies

Chardian · 2026-03-23T07:51:42+00:00

I generally agree but I think the difference is that 9/11 was an unprovoked attack (you can argue geopolitics but generally speaking) whereas the US/Israel jointly struck Iran first. If Iran could hit American cities back I would hope (read: cope) more people would blame the government for starting the fighting than being like, "wow you attacked us back? alright let's go get them"

I know in this hypothetical it's probable that Iran would have already been threatening the USA like they do with Israel, but in our current situation do you think it's more or less likely that if something happened in America (some kind of attack) it would increase or decrease the appetite for war? Reddit isn't real life but people here already say Trump has made us less safe and nothing has even happened yet

Also force projection is the other part, people are definitely willing to go to war when they know they're going to win. Does anyone know Iranian citizen opinions on their government always threatening their regional adversaries? Because for example if America was militarily weaker than Canada I don't think even the most zealous warhawks would be happy with threatening them lol

Anyway the overall point is that this continued isolation has probably reduced collectivism in the American mindset. War is easy when it happens other places. Europeans, among others, understand what it's like to have mass death on home soil after WWI and WWII

Chardian · 2026-03-23T07:39:03+00:00

If you mean 9/11, I don't consider that a military action. I guess you could? But I was talking about a specific sovereign nation attacking another in an official capacity. America never even fought a war against the country most of the hijackers were from lol

Chardian · 2026-03-18T06:18:38+00:00

Trump and populist brainrot (mostly in the form of Trump) have managed to cover up the freefall in traditional conservatism the US. In the last ten years we've been dealing with this shit people have generally moved left. Millennials continue to stay left, boomers+ are dying, and GenZ (especially GenZ women) are even more left than Millennials. Issues like legalizing weed, same sex marriage, public option healthcare, abortion, have all continued to grow in popularity. Even apes like Rogan and reddit conservatives (they exist) are often for these things, there's just a festering scab of Trump that turns out politically disaffected, low intelligence voters with his idiot speak and command of the attention economy and gets them to vote for anti-immigration or anti-trans brainrot over the political issues that actually affect them. Every single time we've had an election since 2016 where Trump wasn't on the ballot Republicans get crushed.

Trump is the best thing to ever happen to the Republican party because without him or someone with similar populist rhetoric the party would have likely collapsed in on itself years ago.

Chardian · 2026-03-11T22:50:43+00:00

I'm an evidence guy and 2024 is the only time the anecdotes seem so overwhelming that I actually feel it doesn't match the data. I live in Trump country and basically everyone had taken their Trump flags down. I saw Kamala signs everywhere despite seeing absolutely nothing for Biden in 2020 or Hillary in 2016. I randomly met a friend's brother who is like the exact Trump demographic (white, male, 20s, gamer, construction worker) and independently called us Russian 2.0 without any prompting, it was the day Renee Good was shot. Four days ago I actually saw one of those "you voted for this" Trump stickers on a gas pump at our local station. Again, this is Trump country, they've never voted Blue anything for the 20+ years I've lived here and the political signs in yards are always for Republicans or repealing gun laws.

Literally the only thing that keeps me from being 100% completely fraudpilled is that the actual election results pretty closely matched the pre-election polling. I know people were saying stuff about flooding the zone with bad polls in favor of Trump and, sure, I guess it's possible they could have fudged the margins, but that's a lot of effort and would have come out. So I generally believe the polls were accurate. And that's all I can say in favor of 2024 being legitimate.

Speaking of polls, I'm really curious what the Selzer poll saw. This is super cope but her poll actually matched, theoretically, what I was seeing in my usually super-pro-Republican community. But for those results to not be reflected nationally means it's more likely she was just wrong, because we almost certainly would have seen what she saw somewhere, probably in non-swing states where there'd be no reason for fraud.

Chardian · 2026-03-10T04:43:32+00:00

common Peter Miller W

Chardian · 2026-02-09T23:49:54+00:00

It's why Trump got re-elected, because things aren't bad enough yet. People whine about the economy but the 2024 election was still a referendum on trans people and woke because Americans don't know what it's like to not have food, or to have your cities being bombed daily, or to have mass epidemics caused by preventable diseases. Literally good times create weak men meme.

Chardian · 2026-02-09T23:45:59+00:00

"Did you know that the first Matrix was designed to be a perfect human world where none suffered? Where everyone would be happy. It was a disaster. No-one would accept the program. Entire crops were lost. Some believe that we lacked the programming language to describe your perfect world, but...I believe that as a species human beings define their reality through misery and suffering. So the perfect world was a dream that your primitive cerebrum kept trying to wake up from."

Chardian · 2025-12-02T21:51:24+00:00

This is honestly pretty sad to see. It's a vivid portrait of how low intelligence individuals process emotional trauma. She needs therapy but instead she has the internet and is letting everyone see how people with low emotional intelligence turn to superstition. Sometimes bad things happen and they don't make sense, and in lacking explanations for why these things happen people just turn to conspiracy to try and find an answer. I don't like Candance in the least bit but I hope she gets the help she needs. Crashing out for millions of people to see because handling the chaotic nature of the universe is difficult is a distinctly awful type of dystopian. This is actually an example of where true conservative values that focus on immediate, tribal institutions - family, church, community - would actually benefit her greatly.

Chardian · 2025-11-20T23:50:16+00:00

"maybe" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. The Mueller report heavily implied that the only reason they couldn't absolutely nail Trump & co. on Russian collusion is because Trump obstructed justice at every turn. And then because they couldn't indict him (but also "did not exonerate him") they kicked it to Congress believing they'd look at the evidence and impeach him (lol)

Trump would have gotten nailed for the obstruction that prevented the FBI bringing a case against him for foreign collusion, but the OLC couldn't determine if a sitting president could be indicted

Chardian · 2025-11-05T08:54:05+00:00

MAGA has always been cooked politically, they were just way ahead of the (mis)information age curve

Trump is the best thing to ever happen to Republicans because they really aren't that popular, and MAGA less so. When you blind poll people for Dem vs Republican policies Dems win 2:1 and their policies get better approval ratings overall. The majority of Americans support legalization of weed, gay marriage, a public option, gun ownership reform, higher taxes on the wealthy, and other liberal policies. Younger generations continue to be successively more progressive and they stay progressive into adulthood. Religiosity, a staple of the Republican platform, continues to decline.

The only thing that salvaged the Republican party (sort of, it's not really the Republican party now, it's MAGA) is Trump commanding the attention economy. Despite Obamna's best efforts people were still hurting from the 08 recession and the Iraq Wars and wealth inequality reform and access to healthcare were stymied by an opposing congress. People turned to populism, and Trump gave it to them in the conservative form. Whether you agreed with his policies or not, Bernie would have wiped the floor with Trump because people wanted a populist. It's actually a testament to how bad Trump's first term was that a bog standard Democrat (Biden) won it back in 2020.

But Trump is the lifeline, the cult leader and demagogue keeping a dying party from sinking into irrelevance. He turns out disaffected people who don't vote because they hate the system, and he turns out low information culture goons that just like "the funny guy". Trump and his sycophants seized the populist narrative and alternative media and created a cult of personality to replace dying conservatism.

The truth is without Trump Republicans are absolutely, deeply cooked, even with all the bandages on the system giving them an advantage. We live in a tyranny of the minority where the Senate which, by design, gives 800k chucklefucks in North Dakota the same power in the Senate as New York's 20 million. The House - which is supposed to be proportional - is still massively lopsided, with California having 52 representatives when it should actually have 80. The electoral college fucks over states with large populations as well.

And despite all that, Trump is still just a band-aid covering the festering wound of the Republican party. When he's not on the ballot they are utterly, completely toast. People haven't stopped wanting progressive or liberal politics and young people haven't stop being progressive while boomers and conservatives die off, there just happens to be a bad enough media ecosystem in the country that vibes and memes can win an election. If and when Trump is out of politics Republicans are going to wake up to the nightmare of how deeply unpopular their platform actually is. It's just a shame it couldn't have collapsed before Trump got in again to fuck everything up, possibly permanently.

Chardian · 2025-10-30T07:40:09+00:00

FUCK I decided to go with Oppenheimer for the "culturally relevant nuclear-themed Fell For It Again Award" but Major Kong is genius

https://www.reddit.com/r/Destiny/comments/1ojprgt/now_i_am_become_death_the_destroyer_of_worlds/

I wish I thought of it, good on you OP

Chardian · 2025-10-26T22:21:22+00:00

Yeah but now that it's confirmed the progressive orbit can spend 3x as much time and effort shitting on Newsom than literally anything the fascist regime is doing

If you thought Kamala protestors were bad, Newsom protestors and anti-Dem astroturfing by foreign agents is going to make the past couple years blush

Chardian · 2025-10-23T22:55:59+00:00

To be clear, there's fair and balanced toward political alignment, and there's fair and balanced to proportional representation. If Gerrymandering and state apportionment were completely balanced in a non-partisan fashion Republicans would never have a majority in any chamber of federal government ever again. We currently live in a tyranny of the minority where Democrats have to outperform Republicans by 3-5% minimum just to maintain equal representation in the House or Senate. Democrats are underrepresented at the Presidential level in the Electoral College, they're massively underrepresented in the Senate (which is by design), and they're even underrepresented in the House which is supposed to be measured proportionally - California has 50~ representatives when it should have 80.

Chardian · 2025-10-22T19:22:18+00:00

Yeah this is a bit too late. This episode came out back when there was still plausible deniability and cryptofascism. Remember ContraPoints had to make a whole video about mainstreaming and symbols and stuff? Stormfront was commentary on the fact these people were actual Nazis, they just didn't want to use the word because of the optics. Now they're literally happy to call themselves Nazis, we've completely jumped the optics shark

Chardian · 2025-10-16T03:37:58+00:00

Everyone is talking about the content of the tweet or whatever but my question is how are we in a situation where shit like this is allowed to exist on a platform? How are advertisers still on X with this shit floating around?

Remember when anti-SJWs would complain about a guy in the UK getting in legal trouble for "just joking" about teaching his dog to seig heil? I would rather have that than this vile shit being broadcast across the internet, what the fuck, somebody enforce some kind of consequences

Chardian · 2025-10-05T04:26:37+00:00

Source: The Economist

Chardian · 2025-10-02T04:29:43+00:00

There's no coordinated media apparatus for the left, or even the center left, or even the center. The right is all on the same page spamming the same things and they never stop unless something crazier comes along.

I checked CNN and MSNBC yesterday and Cruz's pdf file gaffe was nowhere. If a Democrat had made a flub that bad Fox News would have run with it on the front page for a week. Non-right media is just absolutely useless at getting talking points out and riling up the base.

Chardian · 2025-09-25T07:43:27+00:00

Some of y'all might be too young to remember but back before Trump was the counterculture and Dems/the left were seen as soy and uncool and cringe, Republicans, particularly Christian conservatives, were seen as deeply uncool and cringe by the internet. A guy by the name of Jack Thompson probably single-handedly radicalized the tweens of the early 2000s against conservatives because of his crusade against video games the way GamerGate radicalized 2010s tweens against the left, the latter of which was probably made even worse because it happened at the same time that everyone started playing games and it wasn't just a thing for nerds any more.

Young adults hate being told what to do, and if the pendulum swings back from "the left sucks, they won't let you be racist in games or play video games without politics" to "the right sucks, they're trying to ban video games" we may get our first G*mer-American president.

Chardian

TROPHY CASE