I feel like weight class doesn’t do it. Women have higher body fat %. Is a welterweight woman athletically equivalent to a welterweight man? I don’t think so.

Some real relatable high school insecurity right there. I definitely had a few months as “funny tshirt guy” and a few months as “no logo dark color shirt guy.”

I’m not following how it’s any problem for China to just be on Russias side? They get cheap resources while focusing the West away from Taiwan and showing the West the impossibility of trying to win a proxy war against a world power. Seems like they get everything they want. So they lose out on some trade with a smaller GDP than Ethiopia, whatever.

Or it’s a coincidence. N=2

This is their official policy. And if Taiwan wanted to unify, I don’t think any force COULD stop the reunion. He’s not talking about whether or not an invasion would work.

Blocking condemnation doesn’t cause guilt for the initial act. You can agree or disagree with that activity separate from anything else we are discussing.

A US company selling F35s doesn’t make them responsible for everything that F35 ever does. There were no American decision makers saying to bomb the Iranian embassy. There was a US decision maker when the US (prior administration) killed Qasem Soleimani, blame them for that. You have to see the clear daylight between killing someone with a gun and selling someone a rifle they later use for murder.

Promising to protect Israel is a tactic to prevent retaliation, obviously. If you asked the Vatican I’d bet they are against Iran retaliating. It doesn’t retroactively cause blame for Israel’s actions to shift to everyone who doesn’t want Iran to retaliate.

That’s a pretty huge detour to take to decide that Iran attacking Israel for an action Israel took is Joe Biden’s fault. Things are allowed to happen in the world without them being the fault of the US.

Makes sense. ISIS, who claimed responsibility for the attack, famously hates when Russia blocks a truce in Gaza.

Yeah it’s sort of like accusing a presidential campaign of being “all about gaining political power”. Of course that’s the goal. That’s not the metric by which you should judge its actions.

I could have told you that too but you HAD to ask Viktor Orban…

I honestly don’t understand the math of not releasing movies and un-releasing games. People say tax purposes but I’d think streaming is essentially pure profit, hard to imagine not being able to make 20% of your money back or whatever credit you get for taxes.

Even so, we had Russian forces gathering on the border with Ukraine as Zelensky himself said the US was being paranoid for saying they were going to invade. Some level of movement may be seen but dismissed as posturing. China regularly masses ships in the South China Sea and does war exercises.

And, they have years to plan. If they open a new air base close to Taiwan next year and fill it with planes and parts, they don’t have to move them into place 5 years later when they actually use them against Taiwan.

Again, I don’t know anything. But months of warning seems like a lot.

I’m no Chinese war strategist but that’s a full-war problem, presumably they have a plan for that and I don’t see any reason why it would need to be a plan that takes months of visible effort to prep for.

Hitler

It’s sort of a famous issue in Russian geopolitics, Moscow is on the North European Plain which leaves it vulnerable to attack. Back to the Russian Empire they were trying to expand to get buffer space. The USSR expanded to the Carpathian mountains which really narrows down the border that has to be defended but, ya know, the USSR included a bunch of sovereign countries that don’t want to be Russia.

D-Day was a surprise largest sea based invasion force in all of human history.

They don’t have to be in league. Russia wants lebensraum because their borders are not geopolitically secure, and they were all part of the USSR. China wants Taiwan because they’re historically the same country. North Korea is in tension with South Korea because they’re historically the same country. Iran isn’t directly expansionist they just want nukes for power projection.

They are similar ambitions, that doesn’t mean they would happen on the same time scale they are all discrete circumstances.

Why would this be the case? They can prepare in secret.

Depends on how reliant they are on Taiwanese chips.