That's not a bad analogy either. There's tons of different layers to the conflict from trade to diplomacy to legitimacy to identity etc.. Not all of it paints Russia in a good light, and like all things IRL there's tons of nuance.
Meanwhile the common understanding is that obviously Putin just woke up one morning and decided to be Hitler for no reason! /s
It's very rational if you understand what exactly is going on, which is an old paradigm dying and new ones coming into conflict.
The old paradigm was US as the sole superpower, with America ruling the seas with it's navy and controlling the land with it's might. If you contest us, you get bombed to shit and we blow up your trade boats so you become a 3rd world shithole. But the America understands that it will not be a physical power for much longer. It kept the world under it's thumb and integrated in it's economic system via military power for 80 years, but it no longer has the interest or ability in trying to contest things physically anymore.
This is a result of western degeneracy in real terms. You mix the people so there is no national unity to support a war, you tar your patriots as traitors so nobody qualified signs up as soldiers, and you promote only the unqualified DEI applicants so you can't coordinate any serious conflict*. That's okay, because real physical reality does not matter. Only words and what you can convince people is true matters. This has been going on internally in all aspects of the US for decades, but now manifests externally in our ability to maintain an empire.
America has adjusted to this. Since it can not/will not employ warfare, it's new paradigm has to be coercing the world with the tools it has developed. It can control economics. It has gotten very good at crafting narratives and manufacturing public opinion. It can shame and remove enemies from the narratives. It can communicate to the enemy population directly. But all of this is relatively nascent; this is the first time ever deploying this kind of "force" on a national level. (It is also still a blunt instrument. It can only activate as a full blast shotgun; that's how you get dumb shit like Russian cats being banned.)
Russia has noticed our moving away from force and realized that if we're not willing to physically stop them, then they can use force. Their new paradigm is to go back to the old ways, where what matters is actually real: having troops and tanks and planes and bombs. By necessity if they win this, then what other nations have to follow this paradigm too because it doesn't matter what you say if you're dead.
This is very interesting, because it'll reveal the course of world politics for 40+ years. If Russia wins, we should see a number of balkanized conflicts around the globe and a return to countries focusing on actual metrics of success. If the west wins, then we'll likely see the globohomo ascendant and truly become a world government kept in line with soft power and propaganda until someone figures out a new paradigm.
But make no mistake that this is war, and the west doesn't care about Russia having nothing to lose because it is going scorched earth on them just like a real war.
* And on the flip side, the new paradigm is an advantage in that you can control it with just a handful of powerful... er... policymakers on your side to dictate what the government and media do. Militaries require lots of troops who are trained to fight and might fight you if you're trying to grind their peoples into the dust.
Ukraine was definitely already using bitcoin. In the capital city of Kiev, you can walk into a crypto store with a pocket full of money and walk out with a wallet on USB containing BTC (or Etherium).
IIRC, this law doesn't even legalize it. It wasn't illegal. This law regulates it for the government to tax and track it, which sounds like the opposite of more freedom for bitcoin.
I work in the industry and have access to a lot of sales data.
I don't know GoG offhand, but basically nobody buys Steam games on Mac or Linux even just looking at games available on those platforms. Mac is better than nothing but still pretty bad, and lower than just it's market share. Linux is basically a rounding error.
Took a lot of digging to find even one of them, and now the main summary is now replaced by an infrographic and the mortality table is vanished.
But if you look through the link below, there were 9 vs 169 cases of covid with 1 to 9 as serious cases. However, there were (in the supplementary appendix) 5570 vs 2638 adverse events with 240 vs 139 severe adverse events.
Adverse events are normal and things like crashing a car get included so that's why you still have 139 in placebo. But nearly 2x as many severe adverse events is what happened here.
Pfizer had two publicly available studies.
One of them had more deaths in the treatment group than the control group. Both of them had ~4x as many people showing severe adverse reactions in the treatment group compared to the number of people with severe Covid in the control groups.
It seems more likely they're predicting upcoming unrest (likely because they've got plans to do some things the population hates), and they don't want people to be able to cover their faces anymore.
They knew masks did nothing in the first place. They pushed them anyways for political reasons. Those political reasons no longer exist so they'll go away slowly.
Another person has it in wiki link form, but the short answer is that when the USSR dissolved the former soviet states still had nukes. The USA said we'd protect them from the kinds of things they'd need nukes against if they give up their nukes.
They give them up. Then they get invaded barely 20 years later and the US lets them get fucked.
What? There's no house arrest for anyone in America. There's full freedom of movement, no curfews, etc.. No vaxx requirements for doing anything I can think of. Haven't had a mask mandate in I don't know how long, and only a handful of people still wear masks in my area. And I'm in a relatively liberal area.
There was some stuff briefly as the covid panic got into full swing last year, but that's been rolled back basically everywhere. From my own traveling to other countries this year, there's far less restrictions in the US than the foreign countries I've visited.
He has a wife, but apparently propositioned Linkin Park's Chester way back when.
“So the first time I met Gene Simmons, I was like ‘Whoa, that’s Gene Simmons. He’s like right here.’ So I went over and introduced myself. He grabs me by the shoulders, and he says, ‘You are a powerful and talented young man.’ He’s staring at me in my eyes and says, ‘If we were in prison, I would make love to you.’ I was like, ‘Oh.’”
The interview iterates that it wasn't a joke, and he seriously is like that. Hollywood straight maybe.
The "Why 3D model something this ugly into your Videogame" award, for the ugliest character in gaming.
Mostly because goddamn Cere from Jedi Fallen Order made me quit my playthrough with those unskippable cutscenes last year, and I don't even know WTF was going on with TLOU2 having a Abby as a protagonist.
Prop 22 is a trojan horse piece of crap. It basically is written as a carve out exemption specifically for a handful of existing companies and everyone else can get fucked.
It adds special criminal penalties to competitors that 'impersonate' rideshares (eg, being a taxi and not removing your sticker before getting fares) and mandates diversity training for any rideshare/driver companies that ever want to compete against them.
Naaaw. This is Jews trying to push down other Jews because they aren't democrats. It was anti-Cuomo protests.
Some protesters chanted, "Jewish lives matter," while others chanted, "Donald Trump."
Just the usual liberal riots fine, conservative protests are VIOLENT.
Horses are a literal ton of muscle and if you hurt one they can come down on you with the wrath of god*.
*Both the horse and the police, because like K-9s they've got legal protections as well as optics in their favor. Hitting a police car with a bat while it slowly pushes through protestors is 'resisting', hitting a horse is animal cruelty.
Statistically gay men are some 10x more likely to be pedophiles. It just takes putting together simple math until you realize the hate facts.
Taking the lowball numbers, for estimates, 7% of girls and 3% of boys are molested as children. ~90% of molestations are done by men. To be as generous as possible to homosexuals, we can say that women just have an average distribution taking 10% off the top. Gay men make up at ~2% of the population.
So 48% of the population (straight men) is molesting 6.3% of the population (girls). On average every straight guy results in .14 molested girls. And 2% of the population is molesting 2.7% of the population (boys). That means on average every gay guy results in 1.35 molested boys.
That's basically 10x worse.
In other reports, I've seen numbers that around 20% of molestation on boys is perpetrated by women.
In that case it drops down to every gay statistically molesting ~1.2 boys in their life. And I'm sure not every homosexual rapes kids, but it's made up for by the ones who rape multiples.
Also note that this lines up very suspiciously with nearly half of all gay/bi men having been molested as children.
It points very heavily at a causal link. Gays molest children, which causes more children to be gay.
Social Credit will only ever be used against you and never for you. If it exists, these people would have piles and piles of it and would never be zeroed out because they are part of the party's apparatus.