As a bonus, we also have the US government (and I’m sure other countries too) making secret, “unofficial requests” to private corporations such as Twitter and Facebook to extralegally censor speech, as FOIA requests eventually revealed.
See, this is an interesting question. Are they?
They certainly succeed in giving off that vibe. They seemingly have seen a lot of economic growth while Russia stagnated. I would probably guess that they are, indeed, more competent.
But, they’re an even bigger unknown than Russia. They’re notoriously opaque and at least sometimes cook the books when showing the outside world their economy growth, or stuff like their rate of fatalities during COVID.
They seem to have a much bigger GDP and a much more loyal citizenship than Russia. We think their technology is better than Russia’s, but not as good as ours.
But, we won’t really know if they are a paper tiger until we see them in a real conflict. They could, with the advantage of proximity, be unassailable by the west if they invade Taiwan. Or we might see themselves completely blunder trying to stop a rebellion in a small country. I don’t think anybody guessed Ukraine would hold up like they have, even with western supply lines.
This sounds like subtitles for a DVD commentary track, which were probably supposed to be a separate subtitle track but weren’t for some reason (or your player defaulted to them alphabetically).
Hey! Who are you calling an idiom?
Good to know they uphold this text by not publicly murdering and raping random civilians in their homes and proudly sharing the video.
Imagine comparing the situation in the united States, where women have favorable hiring and scholarship status, to the Taliban state where women are literally property and not allowed to get a job or education under threat of death. Like actual death, not someone online telling you something rude.