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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 6th, 2023

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  • There’s a great book called The Dictator’s handbook that explains why the Russian oligarchs couldn’t give less of a damn. There’s a YouTube video called Rules for Rulers that does a good recap of it, and the overall political theory behind all of it is Selectorate theory.

    The long and the short is that as long as resources are available to the elite, and as long as they have enough to keep their underlings satisfied, the only time you have real unrest is when the dissatisfication from the bottom outweighs the resource allocation from the top.

    Which they’ve done a good job of preventing by keeping the populous off balance and unable to organize.




  • Ding ding ding.

    It’s one thing to say that this is a federal issue and must be handled by a federal court, but if states can’t decide who is on their ballot in this instance, what authority allows them to do so ever? Different states have different rules with regards to which candidates and how they get on the ballot.

    Federal elections should not be run by States if States are going to be limited seemingly at random on what they can and can’t enforce. What happens if a 20 year old runs for president? Are states allowed to say no to that because it’s in the Constitution, or would Congress need to clarify that as well?



  • The take is actually grounded in history.

    The US has notoriously bad spy craft when it comes to Russia. We spent literal decades believing they were an equal power, spending vast sums on defense to make sure we didn’t fall behind. The government funded all sorts of “studies” but anyone who questioned the narrative got blackballed, and the people who kept getting that work just parroted back what the generals wanted to hear.

    And then the iron curtain fell and the Berlin wall came down, and we saw the state of their military…and it was abysmal.

    We are seeing the same thing with their basic war capabilities right now. Ukraine has been able to hold them off, more or less, for two years using mostly NATO cast off equipment and sunflower seeds.

    There’s a pretty good book that goes over a lot of this by Anne Jacobsen called The Pentagon’s Brain.