In a normal military this would be a pretty big deal, but Russia has long used the strategy of “keep throwing bodies at them until you win”. That’s also likely the reason their navy and air force are a joke as that strategy doesn’t work so well when you have a finite number of craft to send those bodies on. There’s a reason that Ukraine’s tiny well trained military has been able to use guerrilla tactics to wipe the floor with Russia’s military.

So unfortunately this is likely to make little if any difference, Putin will just find a new piece of meat to stuff into that uniform and then kick him towards the front line. What does make a huge difference though is every time they manage to destroy a piece of Russian hardware (be that a boat, plane, tank, or artillery) as Russia has a very hard time replacing those unlike their practically unlimited supply of cannon fodder.

TACO.

The platform is a tool, and like most tools it can be used for both good and evil. I agree it’s making the problem significantly worse, but hyper focusing on just the platforms while ignoring the people using them doesn’t seem like the right approach either. I don’t know how to preserve the positive aspects of platforms like Facebook, TikTok, and Youtube while also preventing them from being abused to spread hate and lies. I feel like there must be something that can be done to at least improve the situation a little. The various “community notes” features I don’t think were a terrible first step, although they’re also far from a solution. It’s a complicated problem with a lot of potential pitfalls, but one I think is going to be critical to solve and soon because the problem isn’t going away, as long as we have an internet it’s here to stay.

TL;DR: of that whole thing boils down to “the problem is too hard to solve and all the solutions are worse than the problem so don’t even try”. I don’t agree with the premise because if we accept it, then democracy is doomed.

We can not have a functioning society when we can’t even get a majority of the citizens to agree on basic aspects of reality and half the people are convinced the other half are lizard people that are putting mind control drugs in the water supply. A functioning democracy requires an informed and educated populace, and unchecked propaganda, disinformation, and conspiracy theories lead to the opposite of that, particularly when you have a wealthy group that profits from spreading it.

You’re both right which is the real conundrum. It’s becoming increasingly obvious that conspiracy theories and propaganda in our hyperconnected social media fueled internet are incredibly dangerous and rot the foundations of democracy. Democracy can not survive if these kinds of things are left unchecked. By the same token however any mechanism that immediately springs to mind to combat them is ripe for abuse and easily subverted by fascists and totalitarians. I honestly don’t know what the solution is, only that we desperately need one.

Bold of you to assume the MAGATs (including the felon in chief) are smart enough to understand the implied threat/warning.

That does raise an interesting question though. What would happen to those treaties if Canada decided to officially become fully independent of the crown? I don’t think anything is really stopping that from happening other than there not really being a significant upside for Canada.

Also side question, is the king (and I guess the entire royal family) considered a citizen of Canada and all the other countries that apparently never really got their independence from England? That’s got to be incredibly weird for someone marrying into the royal family. “Congratulations you married a royal, here’s your new citizenship to a dozen different countries most of which you’ve probably never set foot in before”.

Well, I suppose that’s kind of like the ultimate veto, “you suck at this so much you’re all fired”. How many times has that actually happened?

As an outsider looking in this seems very weird. I guess the king of England is also technically the king of Canada, but I’m failing to see why that matters even if it’s incredibly strange. I know in England the monarchy is almost entirely symbolic with nearly all the actual governing done by the PM and Parliament. I would assume Canada is the same. Does the monarchy have any actual power in Canada? I believe in England they have a (incredibly rarely used) veto power over parliament but that’s it. Is Canada not the same?

So tipping is complicated in the US. There’s a strong argument to be made that tipping culture in the US has its roots in racism as tips were seen as a way to discriminate against black people in a way that couldn’t be easily proven. The overwhelming majority of wait staff in the US receive non-livable wages with the expectation that the majority of their income will come from tips. As such for many people tips represent a significant percentage of their income. For many tips are not “extra” for doing a great job but instead represent part of their salary that they count on but which can be arbitrarily withheld for any nebulous reason.

This is why not tipping a waiter in the US is not just a statement that they didn’t do a great job, but is an active statement that they did a terrible job. In other countries it’s the equivalent of complaining to a manager about the service, but in the US this can be done in a much more direct far more impactful way without actually having to articulate why you’re upset with the service or even interacting with anyone directly.

To be clear, I am not claiming any of this is good. Tipping culture in the US is terrible and many, perhaps even a majority of Americans would be happy to see it gone, but it’s something of a systemic problem now and doing away with it would require a strong unified approach that in the current political climate seems unlikely.

Sounds like this is less about weakening the US, Trump has that well in hand all by himself, and more about strengthening China and Russia.

They’re being overly sensitive, in most contexts guys is considered a gender neutral term these days. English is just dealing with the slow loss of gender from the language and it’s reached the point where there are so few instances of gendered words left that the ones that are stick out and feel a little awkward. Or like in the case of the parent post where people fixate on the linguistic fossils left in the language and decide to take offense by intentionally interpreting phrases in anachronistic ways rather than modern usage.

It’s the same in the US as well.

The argument they’re also making is that by allowing US citizens in to extract the resources there will be an implicit safety guarantee because then Putin wouldn’t dare attack locations US citizens might be located out of fear of the US actively participating in the war. Whether that claim holds water or not that’s at least the rational they’re pushing.

More like 1930.

Meanwhile over here in the US the clowns we have in the supreme court ruled that anything the president does while in office is de facto not a crime.

You’re right, essentially all so called Christian holidays and traditions are just rebranded older traditions from other religions. People were far more amenable to converting to or at least tolerating Christianity if they could continue their existing holidays and traditions largely unchanged, so Christian churches came up with various explanations for why those holidays were now Christian. It’s why for instance Christmas is in December suspiciously close to the winter solstice despite all evidence pointing to Jesus being born at a different time of the year. Sometimes they don’t even bother with trying to pretend like with Christmas trees and the Easter bunny (also the name Easter).

Possible but it would be an incredibly risky move on Trump’s part as nukes are a very touchy subject and frankly Trump doesn’t have either the brains nor the charisma to pull it off. He’s as likely to make things worse and unite the rest of the world against Russia (including China who won’t want to see nukes deployed in essentially their backyard) as he is to help in a meaningful fashion. Putin knows how limited a tool Trump is and wouldn’t want to risk that. Trump is essentially useless for international purposes and limited to only domestic affairs.

Despite his claims he is not and never has been a negotiator, he only ever “wins” when his opponents are at an overwhelming disadvantage. It’s why he prefers working with companies on the verge of bankruptcy because they’re desperate and easier to push around.

As for deploying nuclear weapons, not only would that unit the entire world against the US, it would ignite the biggest shit storm within the US in its entire history, assuming the military even went along with it in the first place. If anything was going to convince the US military to stage a coup against Trump, giving the order to nuke a recent ally in a war the US is only tangentially connected to would.

Trump doesn’t have enough pull yet to make that happen, and it’s unlikely he will anytime soon. He could manage to get the US to sit out the fight, but actively committing US forces to help Russia isn’t going to happen.

Considering that Putin got his ass absolutely beat by a small country using second hand and surplus military hardware he’d have to be an absolute moron to pick a fight with NATO. Literally the only card he has to play is nukes and that’s kind of an all or nothing sort of move. If nukes are off the table any concerted push by NATO is going to be mopping up in moscow within a few months.

That’s also assuming the US doesn’t get serious about it, but considering Putin’s puppet in the Whitehouse there’s a pretty good chance the US would quit NATO and so wouldn’t factor in. Even without the US though Russia has demonstrated the rest of NATO is far more than sufficient to handle Russia.