Stargate SG-1, full of blatant military propaganda (I know it’s not so bad, but), was filmed there.

If the US is going back on the deal, then Canada should too. Make it legal to jailbreak all US tech.

That should be considered with plans for further escalation varying from nothing to an embargo.

Though arguably piracy and jailbreaking are not so bad for said domination. Microsoft practically encouraged piracy in ex-USSR at some point. Piracy solves the availability problem, supports market share, leads to short-term loss in sales but long-term growth.

But that’s Microsoft, while US government in general seems to think DMCA is for them what the Sound was for the Danish crown in middle ages.

While this is true, people travel to Dubai and to Thailand and to Egypt (maybe not much recently) and, well, to Turkey.

Accountability and checks and balances in countries listed are such that the former two are technically absolute monarchies, so in that regard worse in skeleton than England after Magna Carta.

So Eastern Europe is not in the list? Just askin

It’s not a clownshow of course, things usually make sense when costing this much money, and of course they don’t stop making sense when costing billions.

Making sense is not the same as helping goodwilling humanity.

Maybe they just forgot

Turkye is moving against Russia though. They overthrew Assad, a close ally of Russia.

All while Russia made no move to help him, other than, of course, accepting him in Moscow.

And they have sold drones to Ukraine,

Selling weapons is profitable.

and trapped the Russian Black sea fleet.

That’s their obligation by Bosphorus straits’ treaties.

A collapse of Russian power in the Caucus leaves them as top dog in the area.

What collapse?

If you mean Azeri aggression against Artsakh and subsequent ethnic cleansing, and occupation of sovereign territories of Armenia, by that - then it’s no surprise your other conclusions are such.

There wasn’t any collapse, Russia exchanged Armenia for Azerbaijan as their ally, or so they think. They are leaving both countries, while hoping, apparently, for Aliyev to be their friend, because he’s a MGIMO graduate and lectured there, a member of that kind of ex-Soviet elite that considers itself aristocracy by now.

They have a lot to gain from a Russian loss in Ukraine.

They are the main proxy for the Russian economy to avoid sanctions. They have a lot more to gain from the war going on.

But in any case - there is, of course, a component of conflict between Russia and Turkey, of the “who’ll be on top” kind.

Also Turkish and Israeli money. These are well interconnected with Russian money, but I think that triad and Russia specifically should be treated as different things.

Maybe it has, I don’t know, but actual ties, money and technologies and cooperation, seem to go on.

Also “in Europe” has very dubious politicians, like UvdL, as well. I don’t think Trump can be worse than that bitch. As a person, of course, as a politician he has more power.

Our alliances with the free west are dead.

That’s a bit exaggerated.

Alliances with Middle-Eastern monarchies, Israel and such - are apparently becoming even stronger.

Alliances with European countries and the Commonwealth - yes, but doesn’t seem enough of a breakup to deprive both sides of the common R&D and weapons trade and logistics system.

North Korea is its own thing, Stalinism is not good, but it’s not an aggressive nation even against South Korea. It’s just their elite’s way of survival to threaten everyone around and to make themselves necessary to their neighbors, which are China, Russia and, well, South Korea.

Iran is strained the opposition it has in its conflicts, so it tries to deal with Russia and India and everyone, China included.

Russia is a gang of thieves scaled to a nation with nuclear weapons. Such an elite can’t stand a democratic nation with similar official language and half the population talking Russian, with decent level of life, nearby. They’d lose peace, so they chose war. And frankly I think that this was predicted by those supporting Ukraine. The idea was that Russia will kill itself against Ukraine, or take the L not accepting the price needed, and it turned out that Russia’s elite will rather pay that price.

So, I didn’t mention China itself. China is the nation everyone listed, including US, is heavily reliant upon economically. And war in Ukraine made Russia even more reliant on China, and destabilization in the Middle-East made Iran even more reliant on China, basically bad things make everyone even more reliant on China.

And China is an adversary. So what Trump&Vance&co are doing is to accept all kinds of scum into their allies’ ranks, except China. Allowing that scum to do as it pleases.

So - it’s “not allowing the better to be the enemy of the good” and at the same time cozying up to all kinds of gangsters, double win.

I wish your next election is an election.

He doesn’t have to be Russian stooge to be evil, and to behave like one too

Democracy is just one word and a set of ideas connected to it.

Other than democracy there are meekness, dignity, wisdom and rationality, by the way, none of these contradicts any other, and a few even more important - faith and bravery and choice.

So, I see nothing wrong with democracy dying in any kind of public setting when the 7 things I’ve listed stop being even tolerated.

Says Kyivpost.

Lines on the map seem to very slowly move in Russia’s favor and Russia’s “leadership” doesn’t care about human cost as long as it allows further operation of their state.

It’s their job to study strengths and weaknesses, so the quote is kinda stupid. Whether they are aware of anything can be said only retrospectively.

I just don’t see where Russia is losing, I live in Russia and every year since 2022 people (sometimes not the dumbest kind, but with age comes naivete, and everyone is naive outside of their immediate profession) around me would say how Russian economy and\or defenses are going to crumble soon because of this war.

And before that since 2020 how they are going to crumble because of inability to adapt.

And before that because of sanctions, yes, what was called sanctions then was seriously talked about.

And before that because stealing elections is unpopular and generally immoral.

And before that because Putin will certainly lose an election, right?

It just doesn’t work like that.

In Russia there’s an expression “глубинный народ” (something like “depths’ people” or “deep people”, hard to translate), meaning some consistent deep popular feeling about something, it’s usually ascribed barbaric feelings, like only caring how the rest of the world fears your nukes or hating everyone intelligent.

But it’s also sometimes ascribed wisdom. For example, about prophets predicting the death of Russia’s regime all by itself one day. Some of those prophets being children of the previous generation of that regime, supposedly separated from the current generation, but after becoming irrelevant coming back to their herd, like Sobchak.

Things are achieved when people work to achieve them, and with the amount of work they take, not the honest amount, not the amount those people can possibly do. Life is not honest.

Russia is not losing this war. It might reformat it into some kind of frozen conflict.

In principle it always was closer to Russia than the rest of “western” nations.

It is a right wing fascist dictatorship.

Descended from a communist bureaucratic corporation (USSR was technically that). This for me is the scariest argument against corporations as a form of organization - they breed inside themselves the kind of parasites that can’t survive in smaller hosts.

Also I have doubts against mixing right-wing and fascist, in some sense fascism for the right-left category is what null is for boolean types. There are right ideologies, there are left ideologies, fascism is about lack of any consistency in ideology.

The last thing we need right now is a Pope that openly and aggressively supports far right governments in his speech.

I’d weigh this variant you fear same or less as a Pope who is saying all kinds of things for sufficient sums of money from all kinds of governments, maybe not limited to governments.

Which would be similar to Francis, but Francis is dangerous in being subtle.

That’s a fallacy, or a strawman, or a scarecrow, I can’t decide which of these.

He’s already as bad as

a nazi apologist Pope

, just in small ways.

Saying that he’s good because he’s not doing the Musk salute is similar to saying Putin is not a belligerent fascist dictator because he has elections and doesn’t have fascist ideology.

They (Vatican) literally have a representative at dealing with oriental Catholic churches, that’d be Chaldean, Armenian Catholic etc churches. That representative is in practice as good as another ambassador to Azerbaijan. My paternal ancestors belonged to Armenian Catholic church, and as you understand something of historical value on that might be in Vatican or institutions\museums\whatever under its control.

European universities started as church institutions doing 3 things - theology, philosophy and medicine. So no, he shouldn’t.

and falsely claimed he is “despised” by Ukrainians

Doesn’t really seem false by now. Zaluzhny was more popular and seemed to have some plan. Zelensky used the fact that said plan seemed a compromise worse than Ukraine can get at the time, to press Zaluzhny out. Ukraine really has spent some time postponing elections.

Also let’s remember that under Poroshenko Ukraine was having steady military preparation and buildup, Zelensky didn’t add much and Zelensky’s approach to conflict, if anyone remembers, was almost pro-Russian (as in “we just have to stop shooting and talk”, and yes, it doesn’t seem there was a better plan). Also for two weeks or more before the invasion it was in all the news that US and other governments think Russia is going to invade Ukraine.

Ukraine could have, you know, mobilized, taken this seriously.

I’m of an opinion that Zelensky initially was a Russian trojan horse for Ukraine, similarly to Pashinyan for Armenia. Except Pashinyan did his job well and Armenia is on its knees, while Zelensky kinda failed to do that because of existence of well-prepared (at that point in time) military and western support.

This may seem satanic, but since Russia is grinding to shit its own troops in Ukraine, suggesting that a government or a faction interested in their country becoming again a Russian puppet is grinding its troops intentionally too - doesn’t seem so stupid, I’ll explain why - the military is basically where most of patriotic and volunteer work went in Ukraine since 2014. It’s in some sense an institution such a government would try to damage as badly as possible.

Also notice how rumors about corruption in Ukraine’s military (not taking about the rest of the government, that part is not interesting, it’s an ex-Soviet state) have been building up slowly in correlation with that military becoming less professional and weary, because of slowly losing competent people as direct casualties, by disability or even burnout.

OK, that’s my impression.

Immigrants from Eastern Europe tend to have such alignments. Ukrainians even more than Russians.