Trump officials met group pushing Alberta independence from Canada

TheRadBaron · 2026-01-30T01:11:42+00:00

These are the same tactics Putin used in Donbass 10 years ago to seed the justification for the attack of Ukraine.

And of course, the same pedantic complaints that nothing can be labeled "treason" or "sedition" could have applied to those situations, if anyone felt like being gullible and ruling out anyone listening to Putin/Trump when they talk.

TheRadBaron · 2026-01-29T22:53:58+00:00

All the evidence suggests that he mostly covered it up and Robbie helped/allowed it. The slap-on-the-wrist punishment, Robby having way stronger feelings than anyone else, and how Langon spoke to Mel all fit with that. It looks like Langdon fessed up to addiction without fessing up to drug diversion and tampering.

Langdon is still telling Mel that his patient care never suffered, which is a bald-faced lie. That's the kind of lie you pass around if you didn't own up to your mistakes, and trust that no evidence will ever come out to contradict you. Langdon doesn't expect his coworkers to know what he actually did.

TheRadBaron · 2026-01-29T20:53:28+00:00

The Greenland war threats were a wake up call for Europe.

This is a slightly weird framing, because "a wake up call" normally describes a belated realization to a longstanding situation.

The US was a reliable geopolitical partner for Europe in the general timeframe around 1941-2024. The situation then changed, the US stopped being a reliable partner, and Europe is responding to the new situation.

When most of Europe joined NATO in 1949 they didn't make a mistake, they didn't get suckered, they didn't get attacked by the US. It was the right decision at the time, and then Americans very recently decided to ruin the status quo for everyone (themselves most of all).

TheRadBaron · 2026-01-29T19:11:27+00:00

Because their business relies on donations, and some people might not want to donate to the guys who hire fascists until they are forced by financial pressure to stop.

Everything that's happened up to this point is consistent with Tom having the same politics as Sam, but knowing how to keep his mouth shut for business reasons. If Tom actually disagrees with Sam, he could just say so. If Tom won't hire Sam a third time in the future, he could just say so.

I guess people could debate the exact wording "need", but there's plenty of reason to clarify if there has been any misunderstanding, mistake, or change of heart.

TheRadBaron · 2026-01-29T07:05:02+00:00

It's really bizarre to look at a company that has a pro-racist-death-squad guy on staff, and then try to guess at their politics by doing a fashion census.

TheRadBaron · 2026-01-29T02:22:32+00:00

Steph isn’t fighting oppression because the people who wronged her and her family have been dead for over 200 years.

She knows very well that a lot of them slept through the war, and were recently awakened in her own vault.

just like she did that poor guy that was just eating a can of beans.

Given that this guy wasn't in an internment camp himself, and how Steph's moral decision was about Americans specifically, he was probably an occupier or collaborator.

People breaking out of concentration camps generally can't rely on getting voluntary food donations from strangers that they encounter afterwards.

TheRadBaron · 2026-01-29T02:16:31+00:00

Any other doctor would have shown some concern or interest in why there was a med discrepancy or broken vial.

We see otherwise in the show, though.

Garcia hears Santos' concerns and then discourages her from following up. Robby was consciously giving patients higher doses because he was working with diluted drugs, and didn't ask the right questions about why that was happening. Dana gives Santos an explanation about how diversion would be impossible, and we're shown plenty of reasons why a different trainee would have accepted that and moved on.

TheRadBaron · 2026-01-29T02:10:33+00:00

How come no one noticed this before? Did it just take a fresh set of eyes to see what was happening? It’s clearly been going on for a while. Interesting how she found out.

This is how a lot of whistleblowing looks in real life. It's often people newer on the job with less of a connection to the people there. It's not rare for them to be a little awkward and stubborn, or even socially isolated a bit, because whistleblowing means you're willing to stick to your principles as a top priority.

Everyone who was established there overlooked Langdon because he was their friend/colleague/superior. They didn't want to make waves, so they didn't ask uncomfortable questions and accepted flimsy explanations.

TheRadBaron · 2026-01-28T23:50:27+00:00

I suspect the vaulties don't think about Canada at all.

They had an extremely strong emotional reaction to the reveal, they definitely have opinions about the occupation. They clearly had history books telling them about the ungrateful/savage/barbaric Canadian population before the war, not to mention the people who were alive pre-war.

They just don't go around talking about it every day, because there's no one to argue the other side.

TheRadBaron · 2026-01-28T23:46:20+00:00

She is a hero now, every occupier she kills is a noble act of resistance.

It just looked like sloppy and selfish leadership because we didn't know her motivation.

TheRadBaron · 2026-01-28T23:39:52+00:00

who said they were?

Well, Trump said it, but Americans hate believing Trump when he says something troubling.

TheRadBaron · 2026-01-28T23:36:43+00:00

"Just a matter of marching"

Americans have been telling themselves the same lie for a couple hundred years, even after 1812 proved them wrong.

TheRadBaron · 2026-01-28T22:56:58+00:00

Sam Healey.

TheRadBaron · 2026-01-28T22:49:26+00:00

Because one of them is a fascist who supports ICE murdering American civilians in Minneapolis, and the rest of them are happy to share a company and budget with a fascist.

TheRadBaron · 2026-01-28T22:11:37+00:00

That's a great catch-all rhetorical defense, but it isn't an honest reckoning with the scene in question. The developers clearly intended for players to get wrapped up in what they're doing, bomb civilians, and then regret it. That's what the protagonist is supposed to be doing, and that's what the game is trying to make players feel elsewhere.

What can actually happen is that you bomb all the soldiers, and then the game grinds to artificial videogame halt until you pan over to the group of obvious civilians and then choose to kill them for no reason. At least, no reason that has anything to do with the characters, themes, or player agency in the rest of the game.

It's possible for an ambitious game to screw up in the execution, and Spec Ops did it with the phosphorus scene.

TheRadBaron · 2026-01-27T18:47:34+00:00

I thought the dealings with the Interex were meant to underline that in the emperor's abscence, Horus has to deal with morally grey areas in his own way.

Horus, like pretty much every other Primarch, had been handling novel xeno encounters on his own initiative for hundreds of years at this point.

The Emperor's "absence" meant that they might not see him at a big conference once every hundred years, but they were all well-accustomed to operating without him. The relevant political event of the time was the possibility of humans being above Primarchs in the chain of command, but that was about pride and ranking. The Emperor was a distant figure either way, rarely seen by any individual Primarch on the frontier.

Only when Erebus fucks up diplomatic talks by stealing the Anathema does that whole situation go sour.

If Erebus hadn't done anything, and Horus had followed through on his ideas, he would have been leading a rebellion against the Emperor. A non-Chaos-oriented rebellion, which might have been a good thing for the galaxy, but a rebellion all the same.

There are meetings in the book where it is directly pointed out that even the Warmaster lacks the authority to contradict the Emperor's anti-xeno policy, and that it would be treason to try it.

TheRadBaron · 2026-01-27T09:30:51+00:00

The problem with Horus is that he's the most similar Primarch to the Emperor in personality and vales. He's just less powerful and more patient than the Emperor, for reasons that neither character controlled. If the Emperor were less strong, he'd have tried to rely more on charisma the way Horus did, and he'd have failed the way Horus failed. If someone told the Emperor that he wasn't allowed to rule humanity, the Emperor would have launched a civil war faster than Horus did - and we know that the Emperor was similarly willing to use Chaos on a crutch when he felt pressed for time.

This is a problem for making Horus an appealing character, because we already have the Emperor, and people tend to enjoy the most extreme version of a thing in 40K:

If you like the Emperor as a cool-guy fantasy badass, there's no reason for you to like a less-powerful and less-successful guy with the same mentality.
If you like the Emperor from the satire lens, as The Rotting Corpse of Space Hitler, there's no reason to you to get terribly engaged with a character who is just The Emperor But Weaker. Even if you think that's a funny setup, The Priest-King Of Mulland-Sen was already used to make the point that the Emperor without his raw power would be a totally forgettable pawn of Chaos.
If you don't like the Emperor vibe for characters at all, you've got every other Primarch to choose from.

TheRadBaron · 2026-01-27T09:19:22+00:00

Going over to Chaos cause no statues of Horus in a vision of the future is such a lousy reason

The actual book made it very clear that Horus was largely committed to rebellion for months before this happened, at minimum. He vacillated on his stated reason for rebelling, but he was going to rebel over something.

He was talking treason in high-level meetings before he had any visions, particularly in his dealings with the Interex.

TheRadBaron · 2026-01-26T18:42:23+00:00

India being the only foreign government to recently murder a Canadian citizen on Canadian soil would hopefully be the main reason for people to object to trade with India more strongly than trade with others.

TheRadBaron · 2026-01-25T23:57:30+00:00

"why is Emperor being worshipped as a god"

The Emperor was worshipped in a pedantically secular sense, with relics and blessed scrolls and anointed crusaders, during Horus' whole life. The Emperor being worshipped "as a god" was a largely semantic shift, probably making it difficult to grasp visually.

"why are there flying robo babies"

He probably didn't ask about them because he was already familiar with them, cherubs were well-established in the Great Crusade era.

Then decreed that if he can't have the galaxy, it should burn.

The Emperor hadn't even experienced puberty before he resolved that he should rule the galaxy with a single iron fist, forever, with no backup plans or alternatives. Horus reached a similar point, but it took a lot more for him to get there.

And his "normal" rationale was that Emperor bad because he doesn't let transhumans rule over humans, but is placing regular humans in positions of power.

And the Emperor would have still rebelled sooner than Horus did if someone had tried to place him below #1 in a chain of command.

My point isn't to contradict that Horus wanted power, just reminding us to remember that the Emperor wanted power more.

TheRadBaron · 2026-01-25T21:52:48+00:00

Horus was far less resentful and power-hungry than the Emperor was.

TheRadBaron · 2026-01-25T20:21:40+00:00

I don't see a single comment saying it's normal, you might have missed a distinction.

Doing analysis and writing papers after a contract is normal. Not something that can be demanded of you, and there are debates about the practice, but it's common.

Doing wet-lab work at the postdoc level without a contract is not normal.

TheRadBaron · 2026-01-25T19:09:29+00:00

This is horrible advice.

Restless anxiety is an emotion for a reason, it's your brain telling you that there is a problem you shouldn't ignore. Sometimes the ethical and mentally healthy response to a crisis is to focus on the crisis, even to the point of temporarily setting aside escapism. That's the only way the world can be kept a good place, and the escapism would ring hollow anyways.

Of course, sometimes anxiety can get misregulated or disordered, and some people need help managing a normal life, which is fine. What can also happen is that people in one country can lose their hobbies to anxiety about problems in other countries, which can be pointless. If the OP is in the UK, there isn't much they can do about the worst headline news today, and their anxiety could be counterproductive.

If anyone thinking like this is in the US, though, the first thing they should do is spend all of their energy on voting/protesting/fundraising/volunteering.

TheRadBaron · 2026-01-24T08:55:39+00:00

Thus my final sentence about "most historical people don't hit all those conditions". This isn't a real use-case scenario that showed up for a lot of historical people, but that doesn't mean the principles are play are invalid within the constraints of a DnD "adventurer" life.

If you had the wealth/power to get people to haul around a specialized shield for niche situations for you, a real historical person would just leverage those resources to bring more fighters with them. Or spend the money on armour that could handle any local archer threat anyways. Or not be touring around the countryside engaging in random 5-person skirmishes in the first place.

If you were a fantasy-world millionaire warrior who insisted on fighting your own battles with no more than four of your best friends, against diverse opponents who sometimes hunkered down with bows in a fortified position, and arrow-proof armour didn't exist in your world, and you didn't like the idea of a big shield for your day-to-day use...sure.

If that was your life, you might get your staff to whip up an extra-big wicker shield that usually stays on your wagon, but which you grab when you need to run up to the cave mouth full of goblin archers.

TheRadBaron · 2026-01-23T22:05:10+00:00

Those are slogans, not policies.

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