Protectionism only really makes sense if you’re a country without native industrial capacities and trying to industrialise. Even that is debatable.

Russia used to be a major world power with highly developed heavy industry and okay-ish light industry. A lot of that has been poorly maintained since the fall of the USSR but the factories are still there. Protectionism makes little sense here.

Ireland too :(

Article says the rebels going in are Islamists. Sadly, I don’t think life will get much better in Syria and will definitely worsen in Kurdistan.

They’re calling Musk a tourist

Damn, TIL. Thank you.

And for the first time in my life, thank you Erdogan.

NATO has not changed its position, that’s the thing.

https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/news_218165.htm

https://www.politico.eu/article/nato-backs-israel-and-warns-iran-to-stay-away-gaza-hamas-netanyah/

There is a very good reason the Irish care about Neutrality. The Montrealites are not so different.

Edit: Thank you Chairman Meow for telling me about this: https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/turkey-blocks-nato-israel-cooperation-over-gaza-war-sources-say-2024-08-01/

A compound in Texas run by an ultraconservative who loves guns is an American tradition

And yet they cannot survive a snail

Windoze must die! Long live DOS!

~ War cry of the ancient geek

The expedition was not real. I was alluding to Lovecraft without naming him.

There were some geologists (field work by my reckoning) from Massachusetts who went mad after an expedition to the Antarctic. The survivors came back mumbling something about a horrible thing from beyond the mountains.

Counterpoint: the replication crisis

In a vacuum, appealing to authority is fallacious. An idea must stand up on its own merits.

IRL, things get fuzzy. No one has the expertise and time to derive everything from first principles and redo every experiment ever performed. Thus we sadly have to have some level of trust in people.

Would this mean that the coming Age of Fire will result in smaller whales as global warming screws with the krill spawn rates?

I interact with enough tankies to tell you in advance.

In the view of tankies, Russia isn’t imperialist due to some weaseling with how they define imperialism in economic terms.

The US, on the other hand, is as imperialist in tankies’ minds as it is in reality.

Thus, to to them, Russia is waging an anti-imperialist war with the long-term goal of establishing a “multi-polar” world.

Thus, the tankie conclusion is that NK is heroically sending in the soldiers to help fight imperialism.

I see no need to try and explain why this is wrong. That’s left as an exercise for the reader.

*cognitohazard unless it is contagious

We do. DB0 and Solarpunk.

An invitation to “Learn Olbanian!” was directed at Madonna in 2006, when in her blog she used an electronic translator to address her Russian fans and called them “Russian ventilators” by mistake [3] (i.e. by confusing “fan (person)” and “fan (machine)”, while the latter is ventilyator in Russian).

Literal IT Crowd episode plot