The Europeans don’t want peace there. They sponsor the conflict behind the scenes, because it gives them cheap access to the diamond mines in the area.

According to reports, the first thing M23 did was to take over the mining towns and forced people to get to mining.

Perhaps the US government has also realized that continuing to waste substantial national funds on these outdated and ineffective institutions is neither meaningful nor in the best interest of the country. In fact, the continued existence of these institutions only brings more chaos and creates more trouble for the world.

I don’t think they’ve realized this at all. Trump people like Rubio, Musk and Vance have already stated that USAID and all its programs were wasteful but they intend to remake them to be cost-effective. They’ve also stated that they are keeping hundreds of programs active for now.

I think the prime motivator behind this was that all these regime change organizations were seen as being staffed with anti-Trump people, or people loyal to Trump’s political enemies, or even people who actively promoted Russiagate. This is nothing more than a restructuring, and a continuation of the same agenda and strategies, just at less cost, more loyalty to Trump, and modernized. Musk’s involvement (and other tech billionaires) indicates we’ll be seeing these tools make a return, under different names, in social media. Probably infused with AI-generated content, and more privatized.

If we consider the moves to ban TikTok, villify Red Book, etc, this might have even been a pre-Trump plan that Trump is simply executing in his own way and serving his own (or his peoples’) personal agenda. The idea being to take over the “alternative media” space and eliminate potential opposition to the echochamber being constructed.

He and his buddies also seem to have raped the fitness trainer, and then forced him to admit it on video.

What’s a BC?

Oh for sure. No question there. I don’t see it having this kind of outcome either. I do believe there’s a possibility that the Trump administration thought of it this way however.

By their own citizens who they convinced Russia thirsts for their blood and homes.

If I was Putin, I wouldn’t agree to such a ceasefire. Denazification is a must at this point, along with all the other demands. If the nazis are left running whatever is left from Ukraine, in 10-20 years, this whole thing will be repeated again. We’ve seen how Syria turned out.

There’s this theory circulating that the whole thing was a trap for Ukraine and Europeans to say they agree to a ceasefire, and that they await Putin’s response. And if Putin responds “sure, and here’s my conditions” (which he did), and US says “sure, let’s talk about doing that”, then the Ukrainians and Europeans can’t back out without being seen as the unreasonable ones.

It is. Taller = More for many people. When we are children, we actually think tall and thin = more than short and wide. We lack the logical skill to figure out that 2 glasses of such shapes hold equal volumes of water.

Even though this skill develops later in life, many people are still subconsciously wired to think tall = more. Therefore tall = better.

There’s other things at play here, like stacking more cans per shelf, which makes it look like it’s squeezing the competition => better.

Greek civil war 1945-1949: 150 000 dead communists in battles, executions and pogroms. Followed by 30 more years of repression, including the use of brutal concentration camps, whose sole purpose was to either kill you or break you.. All under the supervision of the CIA.

Can’t wait for the “no iphone AI in communism” memes 30 years from now.

More of an observation that most successful revolutions or protests so far in history, where we have data for, had at least this many people.

When I learned of this, it was used to make a point that 1% of a country is actually quite a lot of people when they get together.

There’s an anecdotal statistic going around historian circles, that if a revolution gets 1% of the country’s population to participate in some capacity, then it succeeds.

Abattoir is just the french word for slaughterhouse, and it means the exact same thing. But point taken.

The article says there’s a narrow corridor which is about 0.5-1 km wide. This means the Ukrainians are in operational encirclement.

Russians usually leave a small corridor open like this, because they’ve observed that Ukrainian high command dislikes retreating and insists on sending reinforcements and supplies, as they order units to hold to the last man. At the same time, they try to sneak out heavy equipment and elite units. Both resupplies and shuffling of troops/equipment along this narrow path are usually easy targets for UAVs, missiles and air strikes. That’s when they inflict the highest losses. This also softens the units caught in the pocket and makes capturing them easier and less dangerous.

So, I found some articles she wrote. The brainworms are strong in this one.

Lamenting that her anti-communist ultra-conservative parents are Trump supporters. Surprised that Gusanos also support Trump. Bonus points for discovering she dislikes “consumerism” and her Soviet friends suffered during the collapse of the USSR.

Pointless cooing for Zelensky. Basically an excuse to brag about playing in a movie

I imagine her book for Zelensky reads sort of like this

What makes you feel sad?

WTF?

It also angers me at the end where the owner feigns ignorance, when clearly this culture permeated the whole abattoir. This wasn’t one or two workers being sadistic. At that scale, it was everybody.

Part of the problem is that the DRC has been unstable for decades (thanks to colonialism), and the area there is huge, hilly/mountainous (especially near the border with Rwanda) and heavily forested, making it really difficult to actually control it against an enemy force. Add to that the many other rebel groups DRC has to contend with, and the distances to cover in order to redeploy troops, they’ll be lucky to get back what they lost.

Kivu (the disputed province) is known to be really mineral-rich with gemstones and rare earth minerals, so I can guess that the driver behind the conflict is, yet again, Europeans and Americans trying to secure cheap resources.

I’m sure this is a very simplistic take, but from what I’ve read this is an ongoing struggle between the Tutsi and the Hutu peoples. Colonial powers used the Tutsi to suppress the larger Hutu population. This created societal divisions and hatred that still exists to this day and manifests in different violent incidents in many countries in the area.

Rwanda wants to take over the Congolese region that borders it, using this wider racial conflict as an excuse. There’s been (mostly guerilla) battles taking place in that area for close to 3 decades now. Recently, some Congolese villages and towns were handed over to Rwandan forces by elements of the Congolese army, though the Congolese say this “hand-over” was staged after Rwandan-backed rebels actually took over these towns, and now the Congolese army is fighting to to take those back.

I don’t know enough to judge what exactly is true and isn’t true. It seems that the UN chronically considers Rwanda to be the aggressor in this conflict.