DdCno1

Not just the withdrawal, but also the assassination of a Revolutionary Guards general, which Iran themselves said was why they staged October 7 as an act of revenge.

I’m curious if he was okay before.

I’ve seen people carelessly throw away their garbage right next to garbage bins, because they couldn’t be bothered to get a little closer or aim.

The bear has more determination, because it has an incentive to get to the tasty, high calorie food that doesn’t require the energy expenditure of chasing it down and tearing it apart. Throwing away garbage into a designated container on the other hand is a chore that some people believe they can skip, because they are the sole protagonists in their own stupid little world.

I’m probably missing a joke here, but irrecoverably as in they most likely needed another computer to fix it: In this case, create a new startup floppy disk - there was no hard drive, after all.

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Bit late, but my unintentional solution to this was playing Guitar Hero and, before I had a computer capable of running it and a plastic guitar, the open source clone Frets on Fire. I noticed a massive improvement in dexterity after a few months and it is permanent.

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It has everything to do with what is currently happening, because Hamas’ strategy hasn’t changed since.

A superpower that doesn’t project force around the globe isn’t a superpower. Love it or hate it, but America is the sole remaining superpower and as such, it can’t afford to stay out of affairs, including in the Middle East - and when it’s forces are attacked, it has no other option but to strike back. That’s the bare minimum. The moment it retreats out of world affairs, power vacuums emerge and the world becomes a much less stable place.

Can we not post and upvote literal Chinese state media?

It’s brilliant insights like these that I come to this community for.

Reason #49583 for any Russian with a degree to get out of the country.

I feel second-hand embarrassment for journalists, analysts and politicians who, for many years, portrayed Putin as this shrewd master strategist - whereas in reality, he’s merely another brutish, mediocre autocrat, repeating all of the same obvious mistakes similar rulers have made for millennia.

Nothing Israel has done justifies October 7.

Here’s an in-depth academic analysis of this:

https://stratcomcoe.org/publications/hybrid-threats-hamas-use-of-human-shields-in-gaza/87

Not that you care, given the ridiculous lie you just spread.

China’s economic growth

How much of this is growth comes from construction? How can we know we can trust the numbers out of China?

Fine construction? Based on what? Have you actually seen these ghost cities? There is nothing fine about them.

I don’t think you quite understand that in this case, it’s millions upon millions of working and middle class people who put most of their life’s savings into this.

Sure, but China suffers from enormous environmental cost as well (cement is ridiculously terrible for the environment; now think about what drives most of their paper growth), under an inherently unstable hybrid between market capitalism and state economy, coupled with what can only be described as a demographic WMD, an erratic leadership that, through purges after purges after purges, is busy erasing even the pretense that it’s operating under technocratic principles - and on top of that, you get these heave-handed attempts at information control. The latter in particular has never ever worked at making people forget that the economy is on a downwards trajectory with absolutely no sign of even slowing down, let alone a solution that doesn’t involve launching a major war in Asia in the hopes that rallying around the flag will somehow prevent the whole house of cards the CCP has been busy building over the last couple of decades from crashing down.

Xi inherited many of the issues China is suffering from, but he also inherited a nation that was slowly opening itself and reversed that course almost from day one. Instead of realizing the untapped potential the emerging Chinese civil society had, he only saw it as a threat and clamped down on it through positively Maoist measures. He has also done everything in his power to make the economic situation worse, all in the name of securing his rule and that of his party (in that order). Xi’s answer to economic woes and the demographic decline is mass slavery, which I feel the world will finally stop accepting the moment China oversteps its bounds towards the outside. A war against Taiwan would do it, but I feel like even a major escalation in their (at this point) ten dash line imperialism, perhaps against Japan, could be enough to trigger substantial backlash.

How doubleplusungood.