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956 Worldwide

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Everything posted by 956 Worldwide

  1. The problem we are facing is that basically everyone thinks they and no one else should get to edit the social contract line by line. But really all you’re doing is using a lighter.
  2. This should be required reading every time some company is about to roll out a new customer portal.
  3. When I think about the storied Mets franchise, I’m confident that in no way will paying Juan Soto over 2/3 of a billion dollars blow up in their faces in the most hilarious and destructive way possible.
  4. It is amazing that half the internet was speculating that this guy was John Wick but in fact he was tweeting about banning flashlights and conveyor belt sushi.
  5. A red beard is a powerful thing. When I first moved to Pak I was clean-shaven and after a couple months I decided to grow my beard out. It came in with a lot more red than I expected and there was an immediate change in respect and attitude, especially from the Pashtuns.
  6. I’ve always wanted to produce a “manifesto.” Somehow I get stuck on “screed” or if I’m really in the zone “jeremiad.”
  7. Not so much that they let them get a start, as much as ISIS had a useful role to play once they were not an existential threat to Assad. And contrary to their press image, ISIS leaders are fanatics but not berserkers— they were capable of cutting temporary strategic deals. - ISIS was extremely useful as a tool to attack and undermine U.S. forces and U.S. allies in Iraq and later U.S.- aligned groups in Syria. For Russia, undermining the west is always the first strategic imperative. - ISIS was a useful rhetorical tool for many years; Russia got a lot of mileage and influence by claiming that they were all that stood between the “U.S. created” ISIS savages and a regional caliphate; in fact they simply effectively kept the stove at a simmer but never a boil. - ISIS and other jihadi groups are a useful pressure valve to get rid of extremist Muslims inside the Russian federation and make them someone else’s problem, and there is less blowback to killing them abroad than at home. - Russia and Assad could let them slip off the leash a bit and cause an uptick in migrant flows to Europe which has always been something Russia cannily exploits (Turkey is not innocent here either). - At one time Russia liked to hold them in reserve as a bargaining chip to get the West to the table. “Let’s go after ISIS together, and put aside all these quarrels over (Russia’s) Near Abroad.” It’s well documented that Russia and Assad allowed them to operate against common enemies from within the “regime controlled” zone. It’s kind of cliche, but the U.S. vs. Russian view of jihadis sort of reflects the inheritance of Western vs. Eastern Rome (Byzantium). The one likes to bring overwhelming force, wipe them out, completely destroy them, see if you can replace them with something more amenable. The second never wants to fully defeat an enemy because they can always be useful so long as they aren’t an existential threat.
  8. I will again say that I am far from “optimistic” but following these scenes from the prison….Assad was sarin gassing people and had a giant hydraulic press he used to squish people and would dissolve their remains in acid. All the takes about how bad it might get next should go on pause for a bit.
  9. Given that his name is Luigi and not Waluigi we should default to assuming he’s on the right side of things.
  10. How do you fuck up a McDonald’s transaction so badly that you get asked for an ID?
  11. In what I know will shock everyone, we bombed ISIS positions in what was until very recently a Russian/Assad controlled area of the country. Almost like they’d been allowing ISIS to hang out there.
  12. Tbh, it’s going to be really hard to be worse than what left. Syria was a charnel house. I’m not saying I’m optimistic, just that it’s hard to get lower, Assad sarin gassed people and ran the country like the USSR during the Great Terror.
  13. The Russians will likely negotiate an exit, there is nothing left to defend and the rebel groups can only lose by not letting them go.
  14. That monkey’s paw really curled when they asked for tyrannical and bloody oppressors of Arabs and Muslims to fall on October 7.
  15. Israel is mopping up the regime’s chemical weapons stockpiles.
  16. Assad is almost certainly in Russia. The Russian MFA announced definitively that he has left the country.
  17. Likely landed at the military airport near Palmyra, where there are still either ordinary or PMC Russians.
  18. Europe needs to prep for a migrant wave like in 2014-15. The populist anger from that one is still resonating across the continent. Erdogan is likely about to get paid.
  19. One of the effective tactics: 1. Opaque Russia-connected entity approaches popular TokTokers and contracts for a neutral “get out the vote message”— but specifies the use of a few precise hashtags in their content. 2. As the algorithm detects these hashtags are popular with the desired target audience, the unknown candidate dumps his own messaging, often unlabeled as political ads and without any actual political content, into TikTok which gets fed to the people who engaged with the get-out-the-vote content. 3. The network of inauthentic accounts, up to 25,000, jumps on using the same pre-cooked hashtag and injects their support for this prior unknown candidate and/or negative messaging against mainstream, pro-West candidates. I will admit to being uneasy with tossing out an election over this stuff but if the intel is correct and a hostile intelligence service used money and deception to make their guy go viral— I don’t know what the appropriate response is if it isn’t disrupted and revealed in real time. Shake your finger and say you’ll stop them next time (unless their proxy doesn’t let you now that he’s in charge)? X is also really vulnerable to this tactic, FWIW.
  20. The allegation is that there were coordinated inauthentic accounts, payment to influencers, election propaganda unlabeled as such, accounts spoofing Romanian government institutions, and concealed paid promos. https://www.rferl.org/amp/romania-russia-election-interference-tiktok/33227010.html
  21. No one stupid enough to agree to a “set yourself up to take the fall for my fake murder” scheme would be smart enough to get away for even this long. I doubt they’d be capable of buying a Greyhound ticket.
  22. Romania’s Constitutional Court has thrown out the results of the first round of the presidential election, won by a virtual unknown hard nationalist, pro-Kremlin candidate. A declassified file presented to the court showed that Georgescu received extensive boosting on TikTok from sources tied to Russia. EU authorities have directed TikTok to retain all its data from that period in Romania. The electoral process resets and candidates all must register again. https://www.politico.eu/article/romania-court-cancels-presidential-election-runoff-tiktok-russian-influence-calin-georgescu/
  23. So I’m staying up to speed, every discreet claim that we’ve looked at from this guy has been bullshit or dubious. Yet we’re still meant to consider his overarching thesis?
  24. I smiled at “buttheads” but then things got really sad. It’s a good letter but the salutation really was a head fake, “buttheads” might fit some sort of fixable billing shenanigans but denying pediatric chemo patients anti-nausea meds earns at the very least “dickheads.”
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