How many people pay for porn though?

The outliers, the people making sure your local furry artist can afford a wacom tablet, they’re not gonna drop that money on any old ramshod image thrown together out of statically likely pixels. Who’s gonna pay for all the server time needed to generate the lowest quality of the lowest common denominator smut?

Really makes you wonder what would have happened if Revelation was just never accepted as cannon

I thought the penalty was a fine?

Britain is Rome, the US is Constantinople.

Funny, considering the US has far more in common with the British Empire than it does with the Roman one.

Highly financialised naval power, with land holdings around the whole globe (the sun never sets on US military bases), mostly coasting on the momentum it had coming out of the previous century and flailing wildly in a way that only accelerates the inevitable decline into irrelevancy.

that was the act of overthrowing the actions of his father, not some long term dynastical plan.

Yes, that’s how dynasties work. Inheriting political power produces stupid results.

Also worth noting that we backed Saddam Hussein through the Iran-Iraq war. You can’t pick out this or that middle eastern conflict the US has been a part of and declare it “the good one”. We’ve been meddling for more than half a century. It’s silly to act though each individual event just happens, as if shorn free from the consequences of the prior one.

I’d more argue Star Trek is a procedural cop show in space, but yeah pretty much. The last really good science fiction movie I saw was probably Arrival, and that was ten years ago.

You’d be surprised. I gave up on the second episode of Picard and thought the first season of DISC was alright right up until they went to the mirror universe. Decided it wasn’t for me.

But my dad watched every single episode of everything that Paramount has put out. He hates them, but he watched 'em. Talks about them the same way he talks about ENT or the JJ Abrams movies.

The US was the world’s policeman

You know when people said that, it was derisive right? The US wasn’t elected to the role by some body at the UN. Americans decided themeselves it was their role, as history’s great exception, to decide matters across the globe.

Also, hilarious to say the Gulf War was the good and just war and the Iraq war was a big fuck up, considering they were both the product of the same political dynasty. As if one did not inextricably lead to the other.

fallacy fallacy

ITS NOT WHATABOUTISM TO TALK ABOUT THE MILITARY ACTIONS OF BOTH SIDES OF A WAR; SHUT THE FUCK UP THIS ISNT FORMALIZED DEBATE; AND EVEN IF IT WERE, YOU ARENT USING THE LOGICAL FALLACIES CORRECTLY ANYWAY

Getting the needed US aircraft carriers into place before telling Iranians to revolt

Didn’t they bring two additional aircraft carriers into the region like a month before the “preemptive” strike that kicked this off? Also heard rumblings that the US has been moving quite a lot of aircraft into the region since like December

the world’s most lossy store of compressed fiction reproduces sci-fi tropes

make sure to clutch your pearls and act like the machine god is coming

The US did just lift trade sanctions on Iranian and Russian oil

https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/us-treasury-chief-defends-russian-232400558.html

Discovery’s last season took place in a dilapidated, far-future federation that forgot how to build Genesis Devices.

I saw the first episode of it, was reminded that better episodes exist in TNG, and watched that instead.

Yes? I’m arguing that the United States set a precedent for what wealthy, nuclear-armed states can get away with. We started using the “right of self-defense” as pretext to invade other countries. I don’t see the contradiction you seem to see?

I’m not making the points you seem to think I’m making. Don’t know what to say, honestly.

Also, here’s the text of Article 51:

Chapter VII — Action with respect to Threats to the Peace, Breaches of the Peace, and Acts of Aggression

Article 51

“Nothing in the present Charter shall impair the inherent right of individual or collective self-defence if an armed attack occurs against a Member of the United Nations, until the Security Council has taken measures necessary to maintain international peace and security. Measures taken by Members in the exercise of this right of self-defence shall be immediately reported to the Security Council and shall not in any way affect the authority and responsibility of the Security Council under the present Charter to take at any time such action as it deems necessary in order to maintain or restore international peace and security.”

literally right after that:

You’re the one saying “puppeteer”. Why frame it as either 0% agency or 100%? Clearly there are degrees here. Ukraine is its own actor and the US and it allies are more interested in using their leverage to push against Russia rather than for Ukraine. They can both be true.

Again, look at Afghanistan in the eighties. It too was its own polity. At the same time, US support and arms clearly had a substantial role in how events transpired, with consequences felt far more heavily by the civilians it was supposedly in aid of.

you really like cherry picking, don’t you?

Of course citing article 51 is an un-serious legal justification for invading Ukraine. Just as it was when cited for the invasions of Vietnam and Iraq.

Ukraine isn’t a puppet, they aren’t being forced. That’s your framing of what you claim is my position, not what I’ve ever said. They’re doing the rational thing, given the circumstances. But the US is not supporting them out of some principled stance against invading sovereign countries. Multiple people across both the Biden and Trump governments have said, our goal in the region is to exhaust Russian military capacity.

Buddy, the invasion of Ukraine is a bad thing, but I can also recognize that my country literally set the legal precedent Putin cited to the UN when he started it.