(Thread IKs:
fatherboxx)
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alex314 posted:It's not like Russians have monopoly for bad althist-scifi mashups: At least they're fighting the Nazis and not joining them
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Sep 29, 2023 15:25
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OddObserver posted:The issue isn't that there is crappy Russian pulp sci-fi, it's that a huge chunk of Russian sci-fi authors are more than a little fash and even more broadly imperialist than that. It's of course very hard to assess how much cultural footprint that has, and to pull apart causes and effects, etc., but I think it's fair to say it's not a good thing for a county that badly needs to care less for imperialism and more for its citizens. Disposable fiction for chuds exists everywhere and, outside of culturological studies, the ones that are worth taking note of are those financed by the state - usually it means movies, due to finances needed for production, and indeed, Russian cinema is full of resentment complex, just not of "I got turned into mosquito and went back in time to help Stalin conquer the States" variety. Paladinus posted:In any case, I think the reason individual books about gay teenagers sold so well had more to do with that there weren't as many of them available in Russian as the alt-history stuff. I don't think there are any stats, but my guess is cheap pseudo-patriotic alt-history and sci-fi in the past ten years handily outsold most genres that are not 'books for school'. No, it is just that women actually buy books and dictate the market. Every bookstore front shelf is 80% YA fiction, manga and selfhelp books, most chud-oriented books that actually land there are Goblin*-approved and Goblin-authored pop-history nonfiction. *basically Russian turbostalinist lowtax fatherboxx fucked around with this message at 15:38 on Sep 29, 2023 |
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Sep 29, 2023 15:30
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fatherboxx posted:Disposable fiction for chuds exists everywhere and, outside of culturological studies, the ones that are worth taking note of are those financed by the state - usually it means movies, due to finances needed for production, and indeed, Russian cinema is full of resentment complex, just not of "I got turned into mosquito and went back in time to help Stalin conquer the States" variety. yeah this is an important point like there's a lot of Chud Fiction around everywhere and a lot of it can even sell quite well. But selling a million copies is a footnote in a nation of hundreds of millions - is it a window into chud subculture? sure. but generalizing to a whole nation is almost always a mistake. fiction embraced by the state, though, always worth looking at to see what the state thinks is important.
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Sep 29, 2023 15:37
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Nenonen posted:This is very difficult to read. My read of "TDP" is a vehicle? Transportation? Anyway, blue is "can afford food", orange is "can afford clothes" and gray is "can afford {??????}". Also the point of comparison is in the middle of COVID years so not exactly normal. 45% of the responders thought that cost of food was unendurable compared to 29% two years ago. That's drastic, if the poll is representative.
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Sep 29, 2023 19:12
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alex314 posted:It's not like Russians have monopoly for bad althist-scifi mashups: It's Zipang but with a Helicopter instead of a Guided Missile Destroyer.
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Sep 29, 2023 19:19
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Zipang also had a strong undercurrent of "how do we stay true to the pacifism we've been instilled with for our whole careers while also trying to extricate our country from a war it started before it gets its poo poo kicked in when we can't trust its leadership" which I'm guessing a lot of these other stories ... don't.
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Sep 29, 2023 19:31
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Rogue AI Goddess posted:"TDP" means "long-term expenditures" ("товары долговременного пользования"). Durable goods, maybe?
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Sep 29, 2023 20:02
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OddObserver posted:Durable goods, maybe?
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Sep 29, 2023 20:16
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Scratch Monkey posted:It’s pretty interesting and the book covers are bonkers My Russian is trash, so I can't read the first cover, but the second one is "comrade hitler" complete with Sturmgewehr lol Is he leading an attack on the British? Fighting with the British? I can't tell. Bonkers indeed
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Sep 29, 2023 20:28
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There's video of some Russian armored push which gets stopped by a constant stream of drones - like 8-10 drones or so just coming one after the other. The interesting part is the number of drones Ukraine is using and their effectivenes. The attack appears to be stopped entirely by drones without artillery or other support although that may be a misreading. When I learned about the Switchblade 300 I thought that was a war winning piece of kit - like that was the wunderwaffe if ever there was one in 2022. That turned out to be very wrong but the basic concept of a cheap man-portable drone that can blow up an armored vehicle 10 miles away behind a hill is very solid. Ukrainians just needed and made a cheaper and more user friendly version. I'm pretty sure we're witnessing the transition to robot warfare. I suppose they're drones as long as someone is controlling them but the leap from controlled suicide drones to autonomous suicide drones is really not very big.
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Sep 29, 2023 20:31
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Meatball posted:My Russian is trash, so I can't read the first cover, but the second one is "comrade hitler" complete with Sturmgewehr lol The guy explains in his Twitter-novel that there is a whole genre of books in Russia about people who are transported back in time to change history. In the Hitler one the traveler is able to right a great historical wrong by convincing Hitler to respect the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and join with Stalin to destroy their true mutual enemies, the British and Americans. Also a bunch of books about waking up in the body of Tzar Nicholas II and using knowledge of modern weapons to put down the communist revolution, destroy Germany and her allies, allowing Imperial Russia's to take its rightful place as master of Europe. It's like if Harry Turtledove starting downing bottles of vodka and shooting up krokodil right before he wrote.
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Sep 29, 2023 20:38
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Owling Howl posted:There's video of some Russian armored push which gets stopped by a constant stream of drones - like 8-10 drones or so just coming one after the other. The interesting part is the number of drones Ukraine is using and their effectivenes. The attack appears to be stopped entirely by drones without artillery or other support although that may be a misreading. Yeah I also was disappointed by the Switchblade series. The demonstrations were really impressive, but then it turned out that they were basically being built by hand like some sort of craftsman prototype; as a result they cost nearly $100,000 per unit and could only make a couple thousand per year for a conflict that consumes many thousand drones per month. The Ukrainians basically found that they didn't deal with jamming any better than a $700 commercial unit, and the US Army halted their purchases in April 2023.
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Sep 29, 2023 20:44
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Scratch Monkey posted:The guy explains in his Twitter-novel that there is a whole genre of books in Russia about people who are transported back in time to change history. In the Hitler one the traveler is able to right a great historical wrong by convincing Hitler to respect the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and join with Stalin to destroy their true mutual enemies, the British and Americans. Also a bunch of books about waking up in the body of Tzar Nicholas II and using knowledge of modern weapons to put down the communist revolution, destroy Germany and her allies, allowing Imperial Russia's to take its rightful place as master of Europe. It's like if Harry Turtledove starting downing bottles of vodka and shooting up krokodil right before he wrote. It's just Quantum Leap, but for fascists.
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Sep 29, 2023 20:54
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Meatball posted:My Russian is trash, so I can't read the first cover, but the second one is "comrade hitler" complete with Sturmgewehr lol Looks like "Comrade Hitler Part 2: Hang Churchill!" And here's a look into gospodin German Romanov's career. I want to believe that that is a pen name, btw. I know that German is just the Cyrillic version of Hermann, but "Kraut Tsar family" is just too much of a coincidence for the author of Comrade Hitler... https://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/romanov_german I will end Romanov Chat on my part here.
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Sep 29, 2023 20:57
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alex314 posted:It's not like Russians have monopoly for bad althist-scifi mashups: You can’t leave hanging like that- what happens? Do they hot drop on Berlin and kill Robo hitler or Stalin first? I could see an anthology of a company sized unit from every NATO country all dropped on the same day and the various countries trying to work out WTF to do about it. I’m 10 or so years we’ll see Ukraine ones I guess. New Wargame and FPS ones before that.
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Sep 30, 2023 04:57
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CoD can now drop the "We do black ops war crimes" and just roll out Abrams against the evil Russian invaders. Though I think there was already a game about that too
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Sep 30, 2023 09:05
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Dropping a a white male American former-spec ops volunteer into Ukraine is their dream setup for a game really. Lots of ready-made justifications for using a wide variety of weapons and gear while undertaking high-risk missions with set pieces that are recognisable to anyone following the news I suspect they are already doing concept development while counting the days until it is appropriate to portray the conflict in fiction
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Sep 30, 2023 09:30
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I mean, COD4 was already that, fighting one flavor of Russians as an American / Brit alongside another flavor of Russian, it even had a mission in Pripyat. COD won't ever get more nuanced or topical than that, but a new game would let them add new tacticool weapons into the lootboxes. If anybody is salivating, it's the Operation Flashpoint / ARMA devs.
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Sep 30, 2023 09:50
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And Arma 2 (2009) already pretty much did that, in a fictional Chernarus. Then there's Combat Mission Black Sea (2014) which depicts an invasion and US intervention set in 2017.
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Sep 30, 2023 09:57
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Nenonen posted:And Arma 2 (2009) already pretty much did that, in a fictional Chernarus. There was an ambush of a Russian armored column in the exact same place as an ambush in the game.
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Sep 30, 2023 10:42
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WaltherFeng posted:CoD can now drop the "We do black ops war crimes" and just roll out Abrams against the evil Russian invaders. Though I think there was already a game about that too Can I play as a drone operator?
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Sep 30, 2023 11:25
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If I'm not mistaken theres a level in the original MW2 where russians invade America and you defend a burger restaurant with a predator drone.
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Sep 30, 2023 11:39
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steinrokkan posted:I mean, COD4 was already that, fighting one flavor of Russians as an American / Brit alongside another flavor of Russian, it even had a mission in Pripyat. COD won't ever get more nuanced or topical than that, but a new game would let them add new tacticool weapons into the lootboxes.
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Sep 30, 2023 11:39
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WaltherFeng posted:If I'm not mistaken theres a level in the original MW2 where russians invade America and you defend a burger restaurant with a predator drone. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8uHz4_DxZ4Q
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Sep 30, 2023 11:44
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The Arma devs should not be allowed to do any more speculative near-future campaigns. The last one they did was announced in 2019, and when it came out in the beginning of 2020 it turned out it featured a novel pathogen wrecking a poor former colony in the south pacific. They have also already jinxed First Contact.
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Sep 30, 2023 12:06
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OddObserver posted:The issue isn't that there is crappy Russian pulp sci-fi, it's that a huge chunk of
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Sep 30, 2023 12:20
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ought ten posted:Can I play as a drone operator? https://store.steampowered.com/app/2300160/Death_From_Above/
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Sep 30, 2023 13:31
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Scratch Monkey posted:The guy explains in his Twitter-novel that there is a whole genre of books in Russia about people who are transported back in time to change history. In the Hitler one the traveler is able to right a great historical wrong by convincing Hitler to respect the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and join with Stalin to destroy their true mutual enemies, the British and Americans. Also a bunch of books about waking up in the body of Tzar Nicholas II and using knowledge of modern weapons to put down the communist revolution, destroy Germany and her allies, allowing Imperial Russia's to take its rightful place as master of Europe. It's like if Harry Turtledove starting downing bottles of vodka and shooting up krokodil right before he wrote. In the UK we had a popular sitcom/drama where Rodney from only fools and horses finds a portal back to WW2 and uses it to date a barmaid then realises his destiny is to save Clement Atlee from being assassinated by poisoning.
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Sep 30, 2023 14:43
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kemikalkadet posted:In the UK we had a popular sitcom/drama where Rodney from only fools and horses finds a portal back to WW2 and uses it to date a barmaid then realises his destiny is to save Clement Atlee from being assassinated by poisoning. It was mostly "I have all the future knowledge that could change the course of history and have all sorts of major ramifications at this major juncture in modern history. On the flip side, I am also in a unique position where I can cheat on my wife and be SURE she will never meet the other woman!" I'll leave it to you to decide which side the story focused on. Also in a similar vein there is this classic Japanese film.
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Sep 30, 2023 15:06
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kemikalkadet posted:In the UK we had a popular sitcom/drama where Rodney from only fools and horses finds a portal back to WW2 and uses it to date a barmaid then realises his destiny is to save Clement Atlee from being assassinated by poisoning. Never got to see the end of the series but i remember him investing in what would eventually be ITV and the banker shafting him buy picking more "rational" investments which ended up being crap.  Dervla Kerwan was great in it. 
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Sep 30, 2023 15:14
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Owling Howl posted:I'm pretty sure we're witnessing the transition to robot warfare. I suppose they're drones as long as someone is controlling them but the leap from controlled suicide drones to autonomous suicide drones is really not very big. I would suspect it is a very significant leap. Have you seen how lovely autonomous driving is? I very much would think that the reason they're controlled is primarily a: budget and b: quality of control/guarantee of actions. If Russia wasn't good at jamming signals I expect we'd see 10x the drones all being piloted from much further away and more complicated drone coordination.
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Sep 30, 2023 16:28
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Comstar posted:You can’t leave hanging like that- what happens? Do they hot drop on Berlin and kill Robo hitler or Stalin first? I have the very book and a sequel, got it from bargain bin. It's trashy, but well constructed and not outlandish. It starts with a unit testing novel anti-mortar shield before shipping to Afghanistan. Unbeknownst to most of people its actually area time movement, since you can always do quantum leap and not get ambushed. Some sabotage later the small unit of PT-91 tanks, KTO Rosomak APCs, HINDs and various other hardware with best crews and spec ops dudes end up on Sep1 1939 just on the way of one of German thrusts. They pommel poor Germans at night, destroy a bunch of hardware, but one of Stukas damage the time travel hardware. They try to do something, but couple hundred soldiers and some good hardware won't win a war. They juggle possible consequences against history they know, get some contact with military, and do some plans. Book ends (I think) first week of September, with generally equal fight at the border. Next book mentioned that it didn't matter that much, Poland has fallen just a tad later and with some more people GTFO through Hungary and Romania. It's not "armored push toward Reichstag and killing Hitler. But I've read one or two of really trashy ones too. Like "it's August 28, 1939, Polish Ambassador to Germany has visited Hitler in Reichstag driving his fancy car. He left declaration of war taking effect next morning. Noone noticed he left in different car. 3 hours later thermonuclear warhead in the car has went off totally obliterating Berlin and all of 3rd Reich command" There's also this gem: Noteka 2015 posted:In the alternative Poland of 2015, after the media revealed the fact of political corruption of most MPs by the Russian mafia, the President of the Republic of Poland dissolves the Polish Parliament and declares himself the Chief of State. There are mass arrests and deportations of Russian "businessmen". The US President, pursuant to a secret agreement concluded with the Russian mafia, in which the United States, in exchange for protecting post-Soviet nuclear arsenals, agreed to defend its interests, declares war on Poland. The American military operation codenamed "Call of Democracy", the official goal of which is to defend democracy in Poland, is intended to ridicule and humiliate the Polish army, which, combined with economic sanctions and political propaganda, is intended to result in the resignation of the Chief of State and the calling of new elections[8]. If I remember correctly US Army loses in part because some hacker made all PGM recognize birch trees as armored vehicle. It's not a good book.
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Sep 30, 2023 17:54
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alex314 posted:I have the very book and a sequel, got it from bargain bin. It's trashy, but well constructed and not outlandish. So the author just cribbed the Chronosphere from Red Alert?
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Sep 30, 2023 18:07
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Someone should write the opposite, Trotsky escaping his death by time travelling to the future to save Russia from Putin.
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Sep 30, 2023 18:11
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Looks like the US government won't shut down, at the cost of this round of Ukraine aid money, which will be stripped from the Continuing Resolution so it can be approved by both the House and Senate. Don't ask me what this actually means for Ukraine in the short or medium term but I'm guessing not much as more aid will be passed in the future. Although I'm sure we'll get a few doomposts about how it's all over now.
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Sep 30, 2023 19:43
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Moon Slayer posted:Don't ask me what this actually means for Ukraine in the short or medium term but I'm guessing not much as more aid will be passed in the future. OneEightHundred fucked around with this message at 20:13 on Sep 30, 2023 |
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Sep 30, 2023 20:11
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OneEightHundred posted:threatening McCarthy's speaker post if he went to the Dems for votes This is exactly what he did though, and the CR got more dem votes than Republican, lol. He won't be Speaker by this time next month.
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Sep 30, 2023 20:21
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Moon Slayer posted:Looks like the US government won't shut down, at the cost of this round of Ukraine aid money, which will be stripped from the Continuing Resolution so it can be approved by both the House and Senate. Don't ask me what this actually means for Ukraine in the short or medium term but I'm guessing not much as more aid will be passed in the future. The important takeaway here is that we now have clarity that the majority of the GOP caucus in both the Senate and House are against further aid to Ukraine. There have been repeated incorrect assertions in this thread that Ukraine aid is safe because support is bi-partisan and the US military industrial complex reins supreme but it just isn't true. I would go so far as to say the GOP is pro-Putin, as they have literally made Ukraine aid their top issue in this fight, the line in the sand they won't cross. They've given up on other requests for cuts from the original bipartisan deal from several months ago.
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Sep 30, 2023 20:40
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DancingMachine posted:The important takeaway here is that we now have clarity that the majority of the GOP caucus in both the Senate and House are against further aid to Ukraine. There have been repeated incorrect assertions in this thread that Ukraine aid is safe because support is bi-partisan and the US military industrial complex reins supreme but it just isn't true. I would go so far as to say the GOP is pro-Putin, as they have literally made Ukraine aid their top issue in this fight, the line in the sand they won't cross. They've given up on other requests for cuts from the original bipartisan deal from several months ago. Yeah I really never understood the "Ukraine support is bipartisan" in the US Congress idea that so many people say. It might have been more true if this war was happening a decade ago but the MAGA wing of the Republican party is no small part of the party and they are very Pro Putin. Plus if it's something that the Dems support, then they just habitually have to be against it. The Dems could add a resolution that "Puppies are really loving cute" into the spending bill today and chuds would be out stomping puppies to death in droves tomorrow. They really are that lizard brained.
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Sep 30, 2023 20:46
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| # ? Jun 6, 2024 22:52 |
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DancingMachine posted:The important takeaway here is that we now have clarity that the majority of the GOP caucus in both the Senate and House are against further aid to Ukraine. There have been repeated incorrect assertions in this thread that Ukraine aid is safe because support is bi-partisan and the US military industrial complex reins supreme but it just isn't true. I would go so far as to say the GOP is pro-Putin, as they have literally made Ukraine aid their top issue in this fight, the line in the sand they won't cross. They've given up on other requests for cuts from the original bipartisan deal from several months ago. The majority of the GOP caucus is not against further aid to Ukraine. They weren't willing to fight for it in these circumstances, but the majority still support it and will most likely vote in the future for further aid. That being said the majority probably aren't super gung-ho and can easily flip in the future if the republican sentiment continues its current trend, but for now the majority are still on record as supporting continuing assistance to Ukraine.
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Sep 30, 2023 21:01
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