this is like when france says they still have influence in africa, and then point to the former british colony of nigeria as evidence

npr has fallen

putin is the only candidate willing to court the anti-putin demographic like this

Follow this business logic to its ultimate conclusion and everything becomes an MLM.

and thats how you create real value

https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/08/15/botched-cia-communications-system-helped-blow-cover-chinese-agents-intelligence/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uh_q02eefFM

@[email protected] I don’t have better sources on the repercussions of the aldritch ames incident on me, but while the youtube video talks about the CIA comms failure it does touch on the aldritch ames indicent at the start.

It’s obvious they don’t trust any of the Chinese Americans

That’s why they can’t spy on China anymore.

The golden rule of espionage is that your enemy is gonna spy on you as well. So it’s incumbent on you to go on the offensive and spy even harder.

The kind of person who can spy on China or, say, the Soviet Union speaks the local language, and has economic and political ties with local assets. Both the spy and the assets are gonna play a double game if for no other reason than the fact that they can make more money that way.

The US played that game well all throught the Cold War. And it chose to lose the capability to do so after the Aldritch Ames Incident. The americans have gone on the defensive, and are more focused on ensuring the enemy can’t spy on them at all. As a result the espionage officers can’t be perfect for the job - hiring a well connected person is too much of a risk - and the espionage assets aren’t hired in the first place. What CIA agents the US had abroad were legacy agents from a more daring time. And all those guys were purged when the Iranians found a security breach in the american intelligence networks, got the informants’ names and sent the list to Russia and China.

i post

so the original balloon meme wasn’t humiliating enough, they are doing it once again

Ukraine’s victory is merely overwhelming, rather than extraordinary

wait, australia also has ‘lord mayors’?

how did that happen

Not just the housing problem, social mobility as well.

By ‘defending it’ abroad, of course. Don’t know about Australia, but I always hear about US army recruitment favoring impoverished households and school districts.

How are peasants supposed to compete with aristocrats?

Become a mercenary and knighted somehow.

yes but have you considered that if you don’t vote for biden trump might do the exact same things? checkmate tankies

when did brazil take a bite out of west africa

nothing irrational about this happiness

that’s a healthy way to distrust the US and chinese governments i guess

don’t tell them this but they could have looked for sparse vegetation and dug in the sand nearby and waited for water to trickle in but the bullshit they pulled off was very cool

Of course you’re talking about harm. We all are. It’s even in the OP: ‘vegetarians won’t eat things that caused harm to produce’. Well, that’s a generalizing statement. Do the vegetarians in question eat eggs? Quite a few do, and that’s factory farming. Do they consume animal products that purport to be from ‘free range’ farms, that in itself is a cope to be quite honest. Are they vegetarians for religious reasons? Then there’s a lot of variety there. And then there’s the world of crafts, as every single inch of a cow is used in industries other than the food industry. The idea of abstaining from animal products is always tied, somehow, to harm reduction. Even in a spiritual sense.

The parallel to IP breaches is, frankly, not very convincing at all. Not eating an egg because it comes from a tortured chicken has very little to do with wether downloading a movie hurts the studio’s bottomline. The consensus is that piracy is a service issue because IP monopolies are not breached by literal theft. Not every pirated download is a prospective client. Many plain don’t have the money to pay the tithe. Many others plainly just pirate to test and then buy it anyways. Others still will download cracked games because of the damaging software that comes with the paid versions.

Regardless, as I said, even if you estabilish a parallel between abstaining from animal products to boycotting entertainment then that parallel only strengthes the retort. Just as a vegan abstains from anything related to factory farming, a person might refuse to studios who take a deleterious ideological stance with their money. Ultimately, the only thing that binds these two worlds together is the idea of ‘voting with their wallet’, which actually strengthens the vegan position. This I say as someone who actually does eat meat.

Vegans avoid animal products because modern factory farming is the torment nexus given form. If organized religion wasn’t bunk, pastors across the US would call the food industry satanic.

Meanwhile, people do in fact boycott products from other industries which they perceive to be engaged in harmful and anti-human activities. If a studio executive donated money to transphobic causes, I’d pirate whatever they put out that interest me.

There’s no contradiction whatsoever. Both cases are about industry and the harms thereof.