Darzin

I think the chance of Trump leaving NATO is overstated he didn't in his first term he may not in his second. Also the Europeans could pretty easily keep Trump in NATO by making some deal. Trump dislikes NATO because he feels like it's the Europeans taking America for a ride. If the EU made a deal to increase defense spending or pay US troop costs in Germany or Estonia Trump wouldn't be inclined to do it. Trump wants a grand bargain where the Europeans "pay there fair share" if they offer him that I think he'd be inclined to accept.

Republicans have an entirely different relationship to Taiwan and China then they do to Ukraine and Russia. You shouldn't use one to measure the other. A lot of Replicans leaned into being China hawks to counter the Russia stuff and even the wingnuts are always going on about "Chicoms".

Yeah I thought it was just my VPN and/or the Chinese firewall. Seems Ran may be trying to sus out any Cylons among us.

Yeah most people get very squishy on this topic and put it in a separate box. That's probably a good thing but I understand unhinged zealots way more than lukewarm believers if this stuff is real it REALLY matters. Despite that it's the LGBT accepting denominations that are hemorrhaging members the most. Most people who leave more conservatives denominations myself included don't then hop over to the Episcopal Church. Liberal Christianity is pretty moribund and I don't see it getting revived.

Because of the stigma a lot of pollsters use none these days as it gets a much higher result. Agnostic is probably the word that best describes me, or pantheist if you really want to get into it, but I usually give the answer Deist when asked by religious people. Because if you say Atheist or Agnostic they go into long philosophic arguments about a Platonic first mover God when what they mean is God says "you can't eat pork" or God says "the Gays can't marry" the question of, which God? is much more interesting to me then is there a God so I try to steer the conversation there. I have had the police in rural China refuse to believe I wasn't religious because I was white. Every few months they'd stop by and tell me not to spread missionary materials or preach "my" region to my students. I'd tell them it wasn't my religion they'd say ok and be back with the same reminders after three months.

I haven't watched the English version not sure if I'm going to, but I enjoyed the Chinese one a lot though it did have some pacing issues, actually the poor pacing at parts really felt like an anime, which often have those same issues. But the whole of season one of the Chinese version is avaialbe on youtube, if anyone is interested in watching it.

Yeah Westerners especially Western liberals have a hard time imagining that "the people" may not want a happy tolerant liberal democracy and may have other goals, or may just view their government as legitimate. We don't have much of a hard time understanding the Assyrians may have viewed their government as legitimate but have a hard time in the modern context. There was reddit post talking about Balon Greyjoy and his goals which despite asoiaf I think illustrates these type of goal divergence;

I think a lot of Western analysis is too focused on the paper rather than the actual materials that paper can be used for. During the initial stage of the ware a lot Western analysis was too optimistic about the chances of Russian failure focusing on the low GDP rather than Russia's production abilities and stores. Money is nice but in the end it's the material reality of machines and people making stuff that affects the war. Now this is the opposite. This GDP growth is not healthy economic growth.

Patriarch Kyril is pretty inline with most Christian leaders present and historical in supporting his country while at war. And his other practices share more with the common understanding of Christianity, on a historical, traditional and scriptural basis.

That sounds pretty accurate to me. The Russian government has spent a ton of effort to keep the war from affecting Moscow too much, and the goods affected by the sanctions are mostly international luxuries or high tech components neither of which have filtered down that much though the latter is starting to show an effect with things like airplanes. The rest is just standard talking points that pretty much everyone in favor of Putin believes. Also lol that the Russian secret police arrest Russians who post on message boards outside of Russia.

I mean if we are citing Republicans we could draw all sorts of conclusions, but it should be obvious that parental leave from a private company, with private shareholders, operating in a capitalist system, isn't any kind of socialism.

This is the point I was making the article suggested a few missiles aimed at Berlin and Paris would make the democracies fold rather than enrage them and embolden them to action. I think that the lesson of those wars is that democracies are willing to fight conventional wars with clear goals and they will tire of guerilla quagmires, though both Vietnam and Afghanistan had 20 years of western involvement before that happened.

I don't think that attack scenario is very likely. Russia is much much weaker then NATO and the war is only making them weaker. Russia zerg rushing the EU is an entirely different beast then them invading Ukraine and it just doesn't seem like they'd get very far. And the idea a Russian strike on critical infrastructure would "weaken Western resolve" is the kind of mistake dictators always make about the West. Japan thought the same thing with their strike on Pearl Harbor and we see how that worked out for them.

I survived but not doing that again the hangover was like getting hit by a truck. My girlfriend's dad apparently loves this stuff so I'm giving him the rest of the bottle.

The brandy I bought today was 33 yuan which is a worryingly low price in China but I didn't feel like going all the way up to the supermarket and the Baiju while reliable is still Baiju。So convivence story "brandy" it is. Fuck it it's exam season.