Random Rant Thread

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And by "Like Reagan" she means suffering from Alzheimer's and relying on his wife's astrologer?

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Anyway, whoever the fuck wrote that Biden speech should be fired. The White House has had to frantically walk back from that stupidity.

It was really Trump-level crap, and Biden is not Trump. He doesn't have the kind of reverse-credibility that Trump has, if that makes sense to you. So it was worse than any of the Trump garbage.

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One thing about this war is that everything on the Russian side has been so chaotic, incoherent, inconsistent, all-over-the-place that it's amazingly easy for them to move the goalposts as often as they want to.

I do concede that some of it is part of the plan - not being very specific or clear - but much of it is undoubtedly not.

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No, realism doesn't assume every player is "rational". It does recognize the role and power of ideology. Otherwise yours truly would viciously attack it.

Those Cold War blowhards keep talking nonsense about realism no matter how many times they have been corrected. It's so annoying, and disingenuous of them.

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TFW you see one of your go-to Covid experts retweet Garry Kasparov's garbage tweet approvingly.

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I know I'm the last person who should say this, particularly in this thread, but stay in your lane, people!

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Mariupol. Sadly we are already familiar with this kind of scenes in other wars.

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Mariupol is not a major Ukrainian city at all, but still its population is (was, at least) almost half a million.

Ukraine is a big country with lots of people, at least by the European standards. Lay people still tend to underestimate that.

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OK, I apologize. I didn't know Biden completely ad-libbed that part. That's totally Trumpy, and seriously what a fucking idiot.

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One thing I absolutely hate about young Western Europeans in general these days is that they use far too many English words in their conversation.

I've heard a German girl say "cringe", in a German conversation. That's garbage, man, unless I'm mistaken and it's actually a legit word.

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South Korean Covid fatalities per capita officially surpassed Japan's, and the gap has been widening every day. Japan has also lost a helluva lot of old people to Omicron, but the fatality rates have been significantly lower than in South Korea. No one knows why. There isn't much difference between the two except that South Korea has a much better testing regime, which is irrelevant here obviously.

Neither countries had done (real) lockdowns, and the social restrictions have been generally comparable. Schools have been mostly open in both countries. The masking rates are higher in Japan, but not significantly so.

Oh, and the booster rates were, and still are MUCH higher in South Korea because once again the Japanese government fucked up on that front too. And Japan is older than South Korea.

Hmmm. So, no one knows why.

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I always mentioned Taiwan and South Korea as model cases, but now it'll have to be Taiwan and... Japan?

I live in the goddamn country and know how sloppy things are around here, so that definitely doesn't feel right, but who else? Singapore? Nah, it's just a city. New Zealand? Nah, too unique. Australia? Pretty close, but their fatality rates also have just surpassed Japan's.

And of course China is China, doing its own lockdown festival.

So... well.

These things can change though.

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You can make fun of the Polish language for its spelling-pronunciation difficulties (for non-Poles anyway) but it's far more consistent as a language than English, which is a complete, utter, total orthographical mess. The existence of such a strange thing as "Spelling Bee" is a testament to how fucked up English is as a language.

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"Don't let Putin get away with it!"

I don't even know what that means. He *can't* get away with it no matter what you or anyone does. He can spin the matryoshka doll however he wants to, and have a "victory" to sell to the domestic audience, but there is also this thing called reality. It famously bites.

I don't think people really understand what kind of an economic hell Russia is headed for. It'll take a decade or more to get the economy back to the 2019 level.

Sanctions are notoriously hard to be lifted. They will continue indefinitely, and all Russians will feel the pain sooner or later.

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And whether he "wins" or "loses" - again, it's so easy for Russia to move the goalposts that these words don't mean much - his country will have to pay for much of the rebuilding of Ukraine one way or another, on top of the cratered economy.

Look at Mariupol. It's a ruin already. If Russia wants the Donbas, they will have to rebuild that area.