I’ve had the thought that if I were to design a psyop campaign, a pretty solid option for dominating the discussion would be to come out swinging and accuse everyone else of being an agent. That way, people have to either constantly defend against accusations, or they conclude, rightly, the accusations are baseless and decide to disregard the very idea that there is a psyop going on.

*Benjamin Butler

Ah, right, I got my acronyms confused.

The problem is you’re not saying the magic words. Actually parsing an argument is out of fashion, so you gotta sprinkle your posts with stuff like “free Taiwan” or “fuck Putin” or whatever, so the LLM they paste your posts into to summarise them can understand them.

VS? Wasn’t x86-64 originally an ARM creation?

Yes, fragility is disgracefvll veakness. To defeat the enemy ze men mvst be strong, zey mvst be heroes, zey must have vill to seize vhat zey vant. It vill to pover zat vill tvrn little boys into strong men. Zis is antifascism.

No, there is no thought process, it’s all just words.

Sure, but that’s usually done through a UPS cabinet, not on an individual device level.

Appliances that don’t depower when unplugged sound like an incredibly bad idea.

Does it? If you’re defending, it’s presumably from an attack, which you are thereby opposing.

I mean, imagine if Russia and the US announce tomorrow that they formed a military alliance - it’s just defensive, don’t worry about it. Also, UKIP, AFD, and FN won, and the UK, Germany, and France are joining, too. No, the rest of NATO can’t join, but it’s just defensive, don’t worry about it. Also, Taiwan can’t join, but China might. Don’t worry about it.

I get that exclusion doesn’t necessarily have to mean hostility, but I don’t think it’s a stretch to see a power block forming that deliberately excludes you and be concerned. Now, I could think of a few ways of dealing with that concern that don’t involve, yknow, going to war, but I’m not the guy running things.

?

Hey, look everyone, they’re doing the thing in the article!

Ah, but that would mean Turkey wouldn’t be blocking the flow of migrants anymore, and we can’t have that now, can we?

“My daughter has been just itching to meet you!”

Honestly, there’s a solid argument that one of the reasons for post-soviet states being what they are today is that the dissolution of the USSR wasn’t followed by a Marshall Plan of some kind. OTOH, it’s questionable if it was even feasible to pull one off considering the size of the USSR.

IIRC the long tables started during COVID.

Well, yes, NATO was built to oppose Russia, that’s why they refused Russia membership, and why Russia considers NATO inherently a threat. And why “Russia joins NATO” is a non-starter, Pution or no Putin.

Russia has tried joining NATO before, NATO wasn’t really interested. It’s one of the main reasons Russia is convinced NATO is inherently hostile to Russia.

I mean, yes, but I fail to see how that’s relevant.