The last few weeks have been pretty bad for Ukraine unfortunately They finally seem to run out of steam, both in Kursk and their own territories, Trump seems more and more likely to win the election, and Russia is receiving new munition and troops from other countries while they are still fighting alone and need to deal with lots of restrictions from it's allies. NATO starts to show signs of getting bored with the conflict and America clearly wants to focus more on the Middle East than Russia right now. Even the pro-Ukraine twitter accounts are posting less things, and lots of them are either fluff or complaining about Ukraine's allies. And with Vuhledar's fall Ukraine is slowly losing Donetsk too. Tbf Russia isn't doing well either and it's obvious that the war and the sanctions are biting hard and that they too can't keep this up any longer. The war is coming to an end and Ukraine will lose Donbas and Donetsk but will keep the rest of it's country. A resolution that leaves no one happy - both countries destroyed their economy and decimated their population only for both lose the war. NATO is the only winner in this conflict

Even with being in NATO we still depend a lot on Ukraine for protection against Russia since they are a big country and a really good land shield for keeping Russia at a reasonable distance. So since the first signs of Ukraine (and Kamala) faltering have appeared I took a break from slavshit to deal with the reality. Thanks to Israel for offering a lot of very entertaining distractions while I was busy coping and seething But now I'm done going thorough the stages of grief, and just in time! Redditors and twittards are too starting to realize that Ukraine is losing the war. They haven't accepted it fully yet so there will plenty of salt coming in for months now

Emotions don't matter now when there is drama to mine!

---

Has anyone confirmed North Koreans military are on the ground in the war. Seems like a disinformation campaign so NATO can justify further escaltion.

Everyone is because NATO isn't doing enough and this guy complains about escalation. Redditors weren't happy

1 - How exactly NATO boosting Ukraine?

2 - Ok, lets say NATO somehow boosting Ukraine, where Ukraine going to find new soldiers after 3 years of war and losing many best soldiers?

Western aid not enough to equip 'even 4 out of 14' underarmed brigades needed on the front, Zelensky says

lol "Zelensky says" and maybe read the article again those 14 brigades don't actually exist.

They do exists and they have been trained for counteroffensive in 2023, they just did receive any equipment

Zelensky has been as honest as any head of state enmeshed in an existential war can be expected to be. Your derisive air quotes don't do anything to make you appear to be a knowledgeable or objective onlooker, but I guess you knew that already and just don't care.

Hi Kremlin

Denial is still going strong which means many more drama opportunities in the future

Ukraine has received more than 300 billion dolllars in aid since Russia invaded and almost all of it has been from NATO countries. That's a pretty big boost. If they wanted NATO boots on the ground in the event of an invasion they needed to join NATO instead of choosing to remain neutral.

They did want to join NATO, but you generally can't join NATO with major ongoing territorial disputes

Obviously they wanted to join NATO after they got invaded. That's not how a defensive alliance works though. It's like trying to buy homeowner's insurance after your house already burned down. The whole system would fall apart if no one contributed and everyone just took as much as they need only when they need it.

Bro the world doesn't work like you think it does. I say it without sarcasm or "goal to offend you". The world is divided (zones of influence) and much more dependence.

Reading the history is the key to knowing why everything you can see these times is like that. It's more complicated than it seems to be.

he world works exactly the way we're seeing it work right now.

None of the NATO countries are happy about Russia's invasion of Ukraine. That's why they're sending hundreds of billions of dollars in aid to prop up the Ukrainian war effort and sanctioning Russia to hinder the Russian war effort.

None of the NATO countries are obligated to defend Ukraine though and that's why none of them will take any decisive action that would directly involve them in the war.

Even something like sending ballistic missiles and giving Ukraine the green light to use them to strike military infrastructure inside of Russia hasn't happened, let alone something like putting actual boots on the ground. If Russia had invaded Estonia instead, the US Navy would have sank Russia's Black Sea fleet by now.

I think what he was trying to elude to was that ukraine never decided in a vacuum to not join nato. There have been calls for moving towards nato and the eu since ukraines inception, but russia has been running kgb and shadow warfare on ukraine for decades trying to control them. All this election interference we've been seeing in the west is relatively new by comparison, but russia has been trying to puppeteer ukraine since it's inception, to the point where ukraine has had to have multiple "revolutions" to throw off the shackles their politicians would repeatedly attempt to put on them in driving them towards russia and away from nato and the eu against their will. Yes, ukraine is not in nato, but if russia slaughters it's way through ukraine, multiple more nato member states are now at direct risk and collectively will require much higher defense spending anyway just to fortify a new border with russia where one did not exist previously, let alone the implications on everything else including the black sea, ukraines resources being martialed and exploited solely for a russian war economy, ukraine currently having the strongest army in Europe that's remnants would be turned around to the west after a russian victory. Russia has a fricked perspective, not grounded in reality, to the point where the decision maker(s) really thought the Ukrainians were going to welcome the russian army as liberators. Then there're the implications on allowing russias brutal methods of rewriting ethnic and national identities of the conquered, sporadic use of gas warfare and nuclear blackmail, using food as a weapon for imperial growth, all allowed to succeed. 300b is not a lot if you look at collective defense spending either. If we treat it as such and use it as a reason to stop support, then we either signal that conquest will be ultimately met with eventual boredom and submission, or all that was needed for a quick victory was more intrusive and insidious shadow warfare predating an even larger and more prepared invasion to achieve a quick fate accompli.

So again, yes, ukraine is not a nato member, but they are as close to being one and an eu member as is possible without full acceptance at this point, and the fall out from the end of the war will directly effect nato security one way or another, potentially aiding to kill the eu as well. The money spent on gwot makes our aid to Ukraine look like a half measure only meant to inconvenience a resurgent and growing russian threat.

Lots of cope

NATO considers organizing a summit where they will issue a strongly worded declaration stating that if russia crosses another red line, they will seriously consider considering some more considerations. That'll show'em!

And people joke about Chinese warnings.

Or russian red lines. Yes, sadly. We're no better.

As far as NATO is concerned we are not at war so we don't need to bother too much

What happened to our leaders? They let the bullies get away with things. Maybe social media messed up every one. I can't recall a solid leader right now. The only that comes to mind is Zelensky.

We are not at war but Zelensky is

Ukraine needs to start twisting arms to get aid at this point. Whats being provided isn't enough and its allies hesitate to provide anything more substantial due to imaginary red lines. No one wants the war brought to the Korean peninsula, so I'd start there.

Ukraine bombing Kim would be very entertaining

We joke, but what's the alternative? Go to war with a nuclear super power?

I don't want to fight in that war, do you?

1938 argument.

No, the whole idea is that if we show russia strength now then we will not have to go to (much bigger) fight later. And we are still in a position where we can do that without sacrificing a single soldier, by mostly giving out stockpiles of obsolete weapons, without restrictions.

ATACMS (without stupid limits), Tomahawks, all the F-16s we have (still cheaper than scraping them as part of F-35 replacement programs). Stupid quantities of legacy Patriots for defense. Ukraine will do the job for us and is willing to sacrifice its soldiers.

And you know what? russia won't do shit about it. There will be just more and more "red lines" and desperate pleas for help from "superpowers" like Iran or North Korea, but, as the world realizes we're serious about it, that will eventually run out too.

The only language russia understands is force. Look at Turkey. As much as I despise Erdogan as a piece of shit, he understands this. Remember what they did in 2015. Somehow, this did not result in a nuclear war.

NATO clearly doesn't want a quick and decisive Ukraine victory and prefers to slowly bleed Russia dry. Potentially it would even try to keep the conflict open far longer than either countries can truly fight, locking them together in a spiralling economic collapse. This will keep Russia busy and less likely to chimp out at an important state

"Considers"🤦🏼‍♂️

It's like they're still not reading the room...

Yeah, unless they are going full send I don't want to hear another fricking word from them. Words words words, meanwhile Ukrainians are dying everyday.

Such is the life of a proxy

They don't have to. The grand sum of frick all is clear to see.

The weapons supplied haven't been sufficient. Ukraine is not allowed to attack useful targets.

NATO wants Russia to collapse, not Ukraine to win.

Yes

I think we all know by now that one of the only ways NATO gets involved is if they come under a direct, focused and sustained attack. I forget if this was NATO or France that said they would intervene if they saw Ukraine start to get overrun but I highly doubt that even then they would intervene.

The purpose of NATO is also to respond if member nations are attacked. I wish NATO would do more, sure, but this is still helpful

While it wasn't a direct attack, multiple drones and missiles have landed on the territory of Romania and Poland, both NATO member nations. I don't even think NATO said anything in either of those incidents. The only country with any balls surprisingly, was Belarus because they shot a drone down.

Really says a lot when Belarus is the one taking action when their airspace is violated.

We actually shot one drone down too recently. We generally ignore them and let them pass over but this one was about to crash in a town or something so we smacked it out of the sky

Maybe because other than the drones in Romania which the investigation was inconclusive, the whole Russian missiles are landing in Poland was PROVEN to be Ukrainian air defense missiles landing in Poland.

Do you have a link the supposed proof?

I for one would be curious to know how an air defense missile ends up in Poland.

And as far as the drones go, it was conclusive that they crashed into Romania. There is no doubt about that.And that has happened multiple times, not just once.

Not only has that happened but you have the dozens of times where Russian aircraft have entered the airspace over the Aleutian islands, which last I checked, belong to the US. You have the Russian jets that were messing with the US drone over the Black Sea, in international waters too.

Point is, NATO should be doing more. Instead, they show themselves to be pretty toothless. All bark and no bite whatsoever. There is no point in having NATO if it doesn't do anything when it is necessary.

are still bitching about those drones btw

Considers just means they haven't had the meeting to officially make the decision yet.

How many years is that going to take? Why aren't plans already in place?

No way in heck I'd trust NATO holding up their end of a M.A.D. scenario. Needs replacing ASAP.

Replace NATO with what?

I support the (European) military industrial complex

Ukraine needs all the support they can get, and they deserve getting it

Speaking of, it was funny seeing some american nationalists go "go get your own defence" and as soon as Europeans try to set up their own instead of relying on USA they're like "Why aren't you buying our equipment?"

"go get your own, as long as its from us" 😁

cant please everyone i guess... i consider it vitally important to be able to repair and replace everything we possibly can, and have enough manufacturing capacity in europe to sustain a full blown conflict, long term, if we end up in one

dont get me wrong, i LOVE american hardware, most of it is pretty great... but we just need the capacity

Exactly. The shortage of munitions in Ukraine should tell you everything that you need to know about the importance of European weapons production. The USA does not make enough missiles and ammunition for even a regional war, much less a global one.

I mean, they probably do. Mass manufacturing has historically been one of the US's greatest strengths in wartime.

But they also didn't exactly send everything they had, and there are compatibility issues between US stockpiles and the (former) Soviet equipment used in Ukraine.

That comes back to your point about European manufacturing, tho - Poland and other former Soviet states are likely already stockpiling and equipped to produce compatible munitions, and I think have been supplying them to Ukraine.

So you seriously think the United States should have sent everything they had? LOL

No? Just that what the US sent isn't representative of what the US has.

Europe finally getting off it's butt and investing in it's military is definitely one of the best parts of this conflict

Well Europe could develop its own sophisticated, self-reliant MIC, but then most of those military innovation secrets are going to end up in Russia's and China's possessions anyway, considering how many officials in Europe are so keen to sell out their countries and all the people they represent for money and alliances with dictators.

LOL Europe has had 3 years to develop and expand it defense manufacturing why hasn't it improved significantly?

EU excels at strangling itself with paperwork

And how exactly did China build up its economy..? Something to do with all those American companies like Apple and Tesla outsourcing high tech production to take advantage of cheap Chinese labour...

What does that have to do with Europe being a playground for Russian and Chinese espionage?

Why would they need to come to Europe for espionage, when American billionaires gave them everything to increase their profit margins...?

You must think companies only exist in the us or something.

It's nice to see redditors defend America for once

THEY NEED TROOPS. Weapons mean frick all of they don't enough men to overwhelm Russia and break through the frontlines

Careful, people dont like reading that, theyre gonna call you a warmonger and tell you to go volunteer instead of discussing it :-)

I agree, theyre fighting for us too, and no matter what reaction that evokes in people, its a pretty clearly visible reality at this point.

Putler is escalating, and were sitting on our asses letting him stretch out any imagined boundary and the war as a whole.

>I agree, theyre fighting for us too

Yes, they are NATO's proxy, and the whole point of a proxy is that they get to fight and die while you watch on from a safe distance

Can we stop with the whole day-late dollar-short approach to this war? As soon as the intel on outside soldiers was known, there should have been an announcement that proceeding would result in limitations being removed from Ukraine. And the follow through when Putin inevitably escalates.

It really does seem the west is weak of will. What the frick have we (the US) been spending all this goddarn money on for the past 80 years if not to defend against this kind of shit?

But America doesn't need to defend itself from anything?

Before you rush on even considering making a decision NATO it's probably worth having a few discussions first and then you can think about maybe holding a vote. Make sure any 'group' decision can be overruled by a country with the power to veto though as it won't be fair otherwise.

Oh actually, it's probably better to have an initial meeting in the first instance just to raise the issue so that everyone comes prepared. Ask Janet in the office to check everyone's calendars to find a time which suits everyone, but if there's no date soon don't worry, Ukraine can wait. They've shown they can be patient.

Actually, it might be worth just sending an email first to warn people that Janet will be in touch. Give them a couple of weeks notice though. Stacey can probably send the email, but she's on leave until next week, don't rush her though, let her settle back in as she'll likely have a few jobs to catch up on.

Just bear in mind its the holiday season coming up too... So if the initial meeting to talk about the proposed discussion to potentially consider a possible decision needs to be delayed until the New Year when everyone is back that's understandable.

Ukraine is not NATo. That's it, that's the answer

I hope they do, it's sad that Western countries care way less about Ukraine now, and I wish the media focused more on Ukraine than the Middle East

Why is that? Because the Ukrainians are white and the Palestinians brown?

Because arabs and now persians trying and failing to exterminate israel since 1948 isn't exactly surprising news anymore, maybe. Sudan, ukraine, yemen, and Myanmar are far more relevant to current affairs than hamas still not willing to release the hostages and swear off future attacks on israel as soon as the idf leaves gaza.

Bonus sandshit

Considers and not doing. Boy you are really making it tough for Russia. So tough I don't know why they would continue.....oh right. We are now at the point of sending mean tweets and emails. Please South Korea. Step up further since it seems NATO the mighty NATO is frozen with fear or something.

Cool, potential new proxy

Yip, that's about right. Everyone is considering this and considering that, hence the reason why Russia has taken a fair bit of Ukranian territory this year. Delay, delay, delay, and like every other time you finally get to a decision, it will be about 6 months too late.

This is how it has and is being played by nato meanwhile Ukraine suffers mightily

Should have considered joining NATO sooner

Can we stop considering shit? Start doing shit.

There has been a lot of considering going on last 3 years.

Considers. Brilliant.

Be in no doubt, we are in the midst of a great betrayal. And we'll all be paying for it a decade or two from now.

What betrayal?

Poised? How about already engaged?

Poised? Poised?

Mate they're balls deep.

🤦🏻‍♂️

Look at the bright side, we'll have the opportunity to how the north korean army fights

One minute we are being told NK troops are in ukraine, then one minute we are told they are on the way , then next we are being told loads have been killed in ukraine

Now we are being told they are poised to enter war , sorry if the troops are there, they have already entered the war

We are starting to see a lot of bullshit flying around atm.

Yes, my reaction was 'they already have and we are still "considering" increasing supply to a starved military fighting our primary enemy for us'.

Give them everything they need.

And now they are starting to lose and have outlived their usefulness to NATO, which is why there's very little reaction to North Korea joining Russia. NATO already got everything it wants from this war

Oh NATO, UN, EU, and the US. As an American, I'm very disappointed in us all.

They can always fight alone if they want

Now Ukraine will fight Russia AND NK alone while brave NATO will keep expressing their deep concern about escalation. Or even worse - like what they did when Russian drones fell on Romanian territory. Everyone just pretended it didn't happen.

LOL "alone" a guess almost a half trillion dollars in aid is worthless? And just a quick FYI drones falling out of the sky doesn't trigger an article 5 and the Romanian, U.S., NATO, and EU investigators found ZERO conclusive evidence that those drones were either Russian or Ukrainian.

Article 5 needs to be triggered by the attacked country, NATO can't randomly react. We don't like drones flying over us but don't consider them a mortal danger to the point of dragging the whole NATO into this war

It's almost like many nations want this war to last for decades. I'm sure it has nothing to do with $ and testing weapons.

Nope, nothing at all

are they going to promise more aid and then not deliver it like they did w the patriot batteries?

or give them like 3 more abrams (10% increase) while NK supplies Russia with 2 million 155mm shells and 10,000 troops?

We're not the only country who delayed the patriot system delivery? At least we sent it eventually

Ukraine is gonna lose buttholes do something so that it retains atleast some good portion of its territories

It's not like Russia can afford another three years of this to capture some other part of Ukraine

NATO doesn't have practical ways to reinforce Ukraine. Zelenskyy said that they needed more weapons and ammunition. However, the US's weapon manufacturing speed is nearing the turtles' walk, so Ukraine urged that the Polish government should give the Ukrainian Army made-in-Korean weapons right now. But...the president of Poland rejected it since he said that the Polish Army needed those weapons to protect borders. He announced "Those weapons were purchased by our Polish citizens'precious taxes, so we don't have any reason to try that" Ukraine must make France and Germany donators of weapons. There's no more option right away.

Over half of all tanks donated to Ukraine came from Poland.

is also still being bitched at for not gifting their new weapons to Ukraine

I really don't get why we haven't supported Ukraine into a crushing defeat for Russia two years ago. What's our endgame?

Not have the country with the largest nuclear weapons stockpiles collapsing while at the same time inflicting as much a damage as possible without putting NATO boots on the ground… it's kinda obvious if you have been paying attention for the past 70 years or so.

It's like we learned something from the Cuban Missile Crisis

After a week we will find out if we'll still have Nato

"Considering"? Fricking do it already. Should've happened 2 years ago.

While NATO considers, Russia kills civilians.

Alliance of Kitties and Strongly Worded Letters, no wonder Russia doesn't take NATO seriously, NATO is afraid to show force when its needed, dictatorial Asian country has joined the invasion of democratic European country shouldn't be this tough to respond to, every restriction must be off and must go all-in.

I'm Pro-NATO but this cowardice is embarrassing the "greatest military alliance the world has seen".

And before anyone decide to bring the usual "easy for you to say when you don't get sent to the frontlines", I'm active military in Finland, I'm amongst the first to be sent when the shit hits the fan, and shit will hit the fan sooner than we would like.

Why should the whole Europe go to war because one asian country invaded an european one?

Does anyone know if SK will send troops to Ukraine?

No

A few years ago, I discovered this video from the youtuber Bald and Bankrupt: Inside the Belarus Chernobyl Zone. The combination of unusual destination and the fact that the youtuber was fluent in Russian was enough to pique my interest, and so I followed his content for a few months. At that time, he was pretty much exclusively posting content from Russia and the former Soviet Union.

---

One day, however, I found out something very interesting...turns out Bald and Bankrupt is a bit of a lolcow (no kiwi thread sadly ) There is a whole subreddit,https://old.reddit.com/r/BaldAndBaldrDossier, dedicated to this guy (and apparently some less famous travel vloggers in his orbit) and they have a compilation of links in a pinned post accusing him of being a s*x tourist and a PUA, in a kiwiesque writeup

Is Bald & Bankrupt really a s*x tourist and a prolific pick up artist?

At this point, I was intrigued , the videos I had seen didn't seem to point that way, and I wondered if redditors were just jealous someone else was having s*x I have copied the text here below, but I will sum it up, for your convenience.

That's the question constantly being asked on this subreddit.

The other question is; how are you connecting a quite disturbing individual that was active on multiple pick up artist discussion forums (going by the pseudonyms "Vorkuta" / "The Fantasist" / "The Ligurian" / "PeruLover12") with Ben Rich of Bald & Bankrupt youtube fame? It can't be the guy, surely?.

Well, let's start from the beginning, please keep an open mind and decide for yourself.

Ok, so full disclosure, to date there is nothing beyond ALL doubt that this Vorkuta/Fantasist s*x predator is the very same Ben Rich of youtube fame. Short of an admission that is. However, you'll notice the word "reasonable" is left out from the doubt bit because the chances of Bald & Bankrupt not being this very same Vorkuta/The Fantasist character are, in this writer's humble opinion, in the millions to one..

Here's why:

First of all, let's talk about the background of this "Vorkuta/ The Fantasist" forum user [hereinafter called "Vorkuta"] and the breadcrumbs that led us to discover his real name.

First, Vorkuta described in great detail on one of these forums (Rooshvforum.com) a r*pe charge that he and 2 friends were acquitted of at trial in Winchester, UK. His description of events matches exactly that with the reporting of a r*pe trial in the Southampton Daily Echo local newspaper.. Both the timeline, area, circumstances, age of defendants and even the particulars of the case match that exactly as described by Vorkuta. One of the defendants in the case is reported as being a person called Benjamin Rich-Swift. Vorkuta describes how, at the acquittal, the judge had said that he and the other two defendants had acted "appallingly". A summation Vorkuta disagreed with. As I'm sure he would. The case was thrown out during the trial after the victim had apparently become confused which two of three men had r*ped her. After the trial Vorkuta says he dropped the Father part of his last name (Swift), ran away from a credit card fraud of £30k and simply went by the maiden name of his Mother (Rich). Vorkuta describes living on the Isle of Wight (same location as the alleged r*pe) and on regularly travelling on the IOW ferry where all the defendants in the case lived. It's fairly safe to assume then that the trial Vorkuta describes on the PUA forum (albeit without citing it directly) is the very same as the one reported in the newspaper and that Vorkuta's real name is indeed Benjamin Rich-Swift (Later just "Benjamin Rich").

https://www.dailyecho.co.uk/news/5618610.cleared-men-behaved-appallingly/

The question however still remains, how is this "Vorkuta" Benjamin Rich the same as our Benjamin Rich from Bald & Bankrupt? So far it's purely circumstantial, right?

Ok, so asides from having an identical name, in other posts :

Vorkuta mentions a number of times on the rooshv forum how he moved from the Isle of Wight to Brighton on the South Coast of England. Bald & Bankrupt says his hometown is also Brighton.

Vorkuta describes how he is bald and 6'3 in height. This is identical to the height that B&B mentions in his videos.

Vorkuta describes himself of being from Jewish heritage and in using that to have s*x with Israeli backpackers in India. B&B also describes himself as being Jewish and regularly wears Star of David tshirts..

Vorkuta says his favorite football team is Chelsea, B&B the same.

Vorkuta describes how, on his first visit to India, he fell gravely ill and once he'd fully recovered ended up running a guest house there for 4 years. An identical set of events is described exactly by Bald & Bankrupt in one of his early Youtube videos. The two timelines also match identically.

Vorkuta details his learning of the Russian language, studying and teaching in Russia, a love of all things Soviet and of his many travels around the FSR and outlying countries and in having s*x with as many women as possible there and by any means necessary. B&B speaks Russian and describes a very similar set of events (asides the s*x part of course).

Vorkuta describes having a young Belarusian girlfriend. B&B the same.

Vorkuta explains his "Gaming of women" and tactics in great detail. He explains his most successful technique is to befriend the local men and babushkas and earning their adulation and respect by accidentally showing them fake pictures of himself in affluent settings such as "sat in a fast car in the South of France". Knowing that, in his words

"by the following day they will have told all their friends (and more importantly the young women) of the wealthy foreigner who had just entered their "shithole" of a town"

[with a view that] by the following evening I can drop the Babushkas and fake male friendships and move onto their women.

A tactic Vorkuta calls his "Schindler Technique". In the Bald & Bankrupt videos a common theme is B&B befriending locals and in particular the local babushkas. And somewhat surprisingly describing on camera some of the places he visits as being shitholes. Bald & Bankrupt also has a number of pre-youtube Russian social media accounts in which he claims to be off to Milan and London photographing models and posing in private jets and supercars.

https://archive.fo/orHvC

Perhaps for obvious reasons we also never see B&B recording during the nighttime / otherwise known as Night Game on the PUA websites.

Vorkuta's language as used in the forum is also common to that as spoken by B&B. Vorkuta regularly uses the words like Hotties, Babushkas, Gopniks and Soviet in his forum posts.

Vorkuta describes himself as being an amateur photographer that's fascinated with the former soviet republic. B&B does likewise and was previously an unpaid photographer for the now defunct "Desolation Travel" website where a certain Ben Rich (c/w accompanying photograph of the person we know now as Bald and Bankrupt) can be found. https://desolationtravel.blogspot.com/p/authors.html

Ben R in Vorkuta, Russia

Vorkuta explains his love of old soviet buildings and of going to godforsaken towns in the former soviet republic where not many other westerners have been before. B&B does likewise including to a place called Vorkuta (the City), which is in Eastern Russia.

The countries Vorkuta says are the best to visit for s*x match almost entirely that with the travel pattern and countries visited by B&B in his videos.

Vorkuta explains how he has an ex-wife who's Belorussian and a daughter that's now a teenager. He describes how they now both live in Nice, France, the wife now married to a rich Russian Oligarch who (surprisingly) Vorkuta is friends with. Vorkuta recalls his sexual conquests in the Nice area and of his visits there to see his daughter. B&B describes a similar need and of regular visits to Nice. B&B also writes on his Instagram and Patreon that he is a regular visitor to Nice.

Perhaps most importantly, the posts by Vorkuta on the PUA forums all date from between 2009 and 2015. i.e. some 3 years prior to the B&B videos emerging on the internet. Impossible therefore that someone is emulating his life story or trying to create a hatchet job on B&B by pretending to be him.

Norwegian vlogger Harald Baldr (Realname: Jens Fredrick Aamodt Jørstad) was also a member of the Rooshv forum during the same time as Vorkuta. Similarly he too continually changed his username from, ironically, Harald Baldr then to JamesRodri & then to Felix5000 before deleting all records and posts of his from that site.

Quick aside about Jens Jorstad (Baldr). In addition to the PUA forum posts removed he also deleted his own personal blog and a number of videos that had a far right leaning political perspective, including one where he condemned immigrants that frequented the Paris Metro. A shortened version of the original video (with most of the racist commentary removed) has been mirrored (potentially by Baldr himself) on a Youtube channel https://web.archive.org/web/20180918120200if_/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EuEDuye-JmE&feature=youtu.be . At time of writing some parts of his now deleted blog haraldbaldr.com can still be found on archive.org including a post he wrote titled how to sleep with Thai girls for free.

Vorkuta describes meeting up with Harald Baldr and with other PUAs (including an Irish guy, again with multiple usernames - Partizen aka Irish aka LordTito aka Bartka aka Traktor) in Kiev and they refer to themselves as the "Kiev Revo Crew". A creepy PUA posse that operated in Kiev. A number of these characters also appear in a number of B&B's videos.

NB\ Usernames on web forums can easily be changed. However, when another user then quotes that person's post prior to the username change, the post quoting them does not automatically update to the new username. This is how username breadcrumbs can be linked together. One can only imagine why someone would need to change their username so frequently on an anonymous PUA forum. Or make Youtube videos without revealing their real name. PUA MO 101 perhaps?*

One of the Crew, Irish forum user "Traktor" lives in Belarus, he too is now also attempting to be a vlogger under the username "Irish Partizan", arguably without the user count and charisma of Baldr and Bald. He can be found filming around Kiev and attempting to make friends with random women from that town. Traktor has appeared in a number of B&B videos and vice versa. On the PUA forums however Traktor is not as precious in maintaining his anonymity, or for that matter, those of the others. He mentions the user Vorkuta in the same breath as he does "Mr. Bald", along with Harald Baldr. This from yet another PUA forum called swooptheworld. [RVF in the post refers to the PUA forum Rooshv].

Vorkuta is someone called Mr Bald

Wrapping up, there is much much more to this story, but unfortunately revealing more would involve giving up the names and identities of some innocents, so the above will have to do for now.

Still not convinced?? Well that's ok. B&B has a lot of dedicated fans. Millions in fact. And perhaps you're reading this still of the opinion that travelling the world and sleeping with women is not illegal. And of course, it's not. Under false pretences or through the use of force or threat of being placed in danger if you do not comply with someones demand for s*x though I guess is a moral issue we all have to decide upon for ourselves.

Whatever you believe, the one things for sure is, whoever this Vorkuta / The Fantasist character is in real life (Bald & Bankrupt or otherwise), that person can only be described as one sick puppy. The many seedy stunts and creepy sexual conquests described in great detail for the other PUA members are enough to make the stomachs on even the most liberal amongst us turn. And there are literally hundreds, if not thousands, of posts from this Vorkuta delivered to the other forum members in what they call a "data sheet". This is a summarised report of a recent City visit that includes naked photos of girls asleep taken clearly without their consent, what score they rank that girl out of 10 and additional information such as where and how girls can be found whilst in that City. For obvious reasons these forum posts are now fast being deleted and attempting to be removed both from the internet and from internet history websites such as archive.org as fast as their slippery little fingers can press delete.

Oh, you'd like a taster? Well how about the time when Vorkuta boasts of forcing a young hitchhiker to give him a blowjob in exchange for $6. On the threat that if she did not comply he might leave her in the middle of nowhere as they were travelling alone in a car on some deserted highway somewhere in the FSU. You can only imagine how scared she must have been.

Or another time where he, as a 40yr old man, boasts as he "struggled to enter" an 18yr old virgin he had arranged to meet in London that was, in his words, "going to be in some considerable pain" at the time. But as he describes, he "ploughed on regardless and used lube and viagra". And they say romance is not dead.

And let's not forget, all these morally questionable events and sexual conquests all happened after that very same person had previously been acquitted of r*pe. You'd have to ask yourself what sort of person would walk free from a trial such as that only to then immediately carry on with their unhealthy obsession of pursuing young women for s*x by whatever means necessary?

And on the subject of r*pe, in a (since deleted) video from Bald and Bankrupt from 2018/19 and before the stardom he suggests that [of the many western women each year that "don't deserve to get r*ped"] (that's right, apparently many don't!) "the behavior of some or even most of them meant that they were to blame" and therefore should expect little sympathy as a result. Using the analogy of him being responsible for the theft if his Rolex was stolen as an example of the double standards that exist when women are r*ped and then not held responsible. Man loses rolex to a thief in a market the same apparently as a woman being r*ped. As he says, "Well, what did you expect?"

https://peertube.co.uk/videos/watch/b8edd54c-1be8-44d1-ba0e-a32f510edcc7

Again, perhaps that's another for the moral compass.

His fans would say this video was simply a fair warning to western women traveling to India, a point at worst being badly made? Others might say this was yet more evidence of a serial and dangerous misogynist (with form) traveling the world and hating on women.

Bald & Bankrupt's book was published under the pen name Arthur Chichester. Draft sections posted by Vorkuta in unsanitized format litter the pick up artist forums; including a story of a date he had with two children which makes for some quite disturbing reading. The post almost word for word is the same as a sanitized chapter in his book [warning its not for the faint hearted]

https://old.reddit.com/r/BaldAndBaldrDossier/comments/mibywb/two_versions_of_the_same_story_by_bald_and/

Anyway, why the obsession for finding out all this stuff? Well, that was mainly due to the feeling that I, and one or two others had, on watching his early videos and seeing him zoom the camera in on Women's boobs and talking constantly of hotties, that there was something not quite right with this guy. That and the fact that he was clearly trying to conceal his real name on camera for some reason.

So let me leave you with this. Assuming for one moment Vorkuta is in fact Bald & bankrupt. Purely hypothetical let's say. And we know then that B&B has a teenage daughter who, in a couple of years time, will be of the same age as his current target audience, is it just me that finds that just beyond creepy? Hypocritical beyond belief? You can guarantee he won't want anyone from the PUA forums gaming his daughter in the not too distant future. Perhaps he'd let the little bald Irish guy Traktor have a go? Or maybe Harald Baldr or even that Tall Travels guy with the monotone voice?

Probably not. But it's ok for him to do it if the victims are from a poor country in SE Asia or from the former soviet union, eh?

Further information and links to the articles mentioned above are currently available in the other stickied thread.

TL;DR Bald was a user on the rooshvforums, a PUA forum, which appears to be active to this day under a new URL https://rooshvforum.network/, under the username Vorkuta Here's a link establishing the connection and here's another forum user making the same conclusion:

He apparently used a variety of aliases, including Arthur Chichester (Wikipedia lists it as his publishing pseudonym) and The Ligurian. There are apparent similarities between a book by Chichester and the stories told on the forums by the Ligurian, outlined here Most notably, a story about paying a Belorussian girl for s*x after picking her up for as a hitchhiker! https://archive.fo/huHUZ Hopefully it was just coomer fantasy

A woman in her twenties sat at a cracked concrete bus stop that had services to God knows where. She was wearing shorts and a t shirt which exposed tanned shoulders and legs. I stopped the car and wound down the window.
"Where you going?" I asked. She said a name, I nodded pretending to know it motioned for her to get in, she climbed in the back door. We set off further along the road through the forest past blue fenced graveyards and grey concrete memorials. "So what do you do" I asked after a few minutes of silence, genuinely interested as to how a young woman could survive in this bleakness. She was working for the local government farm in some capacity I didn't understand. Could have been the manager or an udder puller. She smelt of damp grass. It wasn't unpleasant. She was friendly and interested in my journey. I felt the first stirring, I wanted to stick my peepee in her mouth. "How much do you make a month?" I enquired. The reply was pitiful, about what we spend on a decent night out. There was no point number closing or inviting this chick for a coffee, I would never see her ever again. I suppressed what I wanted to say. We drove on chatting about life but with the sun beginning to set and a young tanned woman in my car my latent exploitative nature surfaced, "Would you like to earn some money?" I asked making eye contact with her in my rear view mirror, the question asked before it had been fully rationalised. There was no reply. "We could find a quiet place and rest together for an hour" I continued. Silence. I drove on over the cracked road, the radio the only sound between us, myself feeling a mixture of disgust at my own seediness and excitement for asking and what possibilities hung in the air. We drove past a long lake surrounded by tall green grass with more radiation signs. I imagined fricking her in it. "How much" she asked eventually with a steady voice. I offered her what local currency I had in my wallet, a 100,000 Rouble note ( $6 ). Silence. I drove on avoiding potholes and eye contact. Eventually she spoke, "turn down here". And so I headed down a sandy track past the radiation warning signs towards the lake, and after a short time emptied a fortnight of frustration into her mouth and onto the irradiated ground.

However, that's just ONE time he's been accused of being a sexual predator! Ever wonder why he's "bankrupt" in the first place? He was accused of r*pe on the Isle of Wight (Benjamin Swift-Rich or Benjamin Rich is his real name btw, also on Wikipedia). I should note, however, that he was cleared of criminal wrongdoing here.

After this event, he went abroad to start being a professional sexpat

There are an absolute shitton of links in that post and in the linked posts on that post that have even more accusations, but those two are the big ones. I also remember posts of him talking about how slavic women are his personal fetish and that basically he learned Russian to frick them. However, I'm unable to find the links to those posts Honestly, I do have to respect learning another language just to frick, it's really going above and beyond.

Instead, Here's an archived post where he does an analysis on where to coom in Russia based on poverty level and demographics, where he does mention places with a lot of slavs as being more desirable.

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Now, what happens when a man like that is BANNED from his dream country?

That's right our man Bald was actually banned from Russia, during a West-to-East tour for his channel no less! He was arrested breaking into a spaceport Article

Later, he was banned from the country. Bald says it was for supporting Ukraine in the recently escalated war, but maybe the arrest also had something to do with it

Video discussing the ban:

Since that video, he's been forced to diversify his channel, going to south america, other Eastern Euro countries, Africa and the most horrible country of all: the UK He also recently went back to India, where some of his earliest videos were posted from. (He made a troll video once talking about things he hated about India )

The more recent video, I Visited India So You Don't Have To, caused a shitstorm of blowback against him by Indians. Indeed, if you check the https://old.reddit.com/r/BaldAndBaldrDossier/ front page, the recent posts are full of Indians seething at him

The funny thing is, all this controversy doesn't seem to have affected him at all, he still gets millions of views on his videos and seems to have plenty of fans so he still has lots of money to frick third worlders with!

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TL;DR

-Bald Bankrupt has a history of being a sexpat and has some, uh, controversial s*x stories in his closet

-He was banned from his prime hunting grounds for slavic beauties either for breaking and entering or saying Slava Ukraini

-Even after all of this, the haters can't stop him from sexpatting around the world and making tons of cash

@BWC discuss foreigners coming into Russia to frick their women

@ACK-A discuss a fellow coomer being unjustly hated on by redditors

Darklands Series

1 - Darklands LP Part I

2 - Darklands LP Part II: Charles Bronson Edition

3 - Darklands LP III: Nuns and Coins

4 - Darklands LP Ep IV: Introduction to Equipment & Combat

5 - Darklands LP Part V: We finally briefly go out into the dark lands

6 - Darklands LP VI: We actually start a quest!

7 - Darklands LP VII: We reach our destination

8 - Darklands LP VIII: Raubritter confrontation & learning how combat works

9 - Darklands LP IX: I'm not giving you my goddarn alchemical materials

Miners working in the Erzgebirge. I forgot to include this in the last episode am using this as a segue from the last episode.

Hunt for Formulas

A few of the more important cities have universities, the same ones that had one in real life. There's one in Leipzig but we're heading to Bohemia anyway so let's go to Prague. Charles University was established in 1348 by the Holy Roman Emperor Charles IV as the first university in Central Europe. There was like, I dunno, 8 universities in Europe at this point and most were in Italy, so this was a really big deal. About 80% of the students were foreign as it was the only university in the eastern half of Europe. The Hussite revolution of 1415 that wracked the whole Empire began here. It's one of the oldest universities still operating today.

To save time, we'll take a boat up the Elbe. One criticism I hear of the game is that the cities are all interchangable. Obviously that's a really tarded observation because the city couldn't be nearly this complex if you made them unique. And there are some subtle differences that you'll pick up on if you know your history. Like notice here that the castle is the Hradcany.

Academia is full of uncooperative peepeeheads just like in our time. It'll be tough to find someone who can navigate their bullshit. One person in the party is the "leader". This is the person who will take on any solo task that doesn't depend on the whole party. For almost the entire game up to this point I've left Sasha as the leader because almost all of those tasks involved talking to people and she's the charismatic one. But these university students are a bunch of spergs so we have to deal with them on their own level. Yuna is perceptive and has 29 in Speak Latin, but Redactor has the same skill and slightly more when we add up the other two attributes.

I'll get Thunderbolt. It's explosives. (I'll describe these in detail below.)

After that it was night time so we had to leave. Let's try this again tomorrow. Wow! Redactor pulled it off again. What to get now? Noxious Aroma and Eyeburn are fairly useful in combat. (These are the two potions that evil alchemist used against our guys in the last fight.) Unfortunately the formulas they're selling are for the best versions of it, so they're probably way too hard to make until Redactor gets extremely good at alchemy. So we'll get Black Cloud. This isn't used in combat, but in a lot of dangerous situations it lets you create a smokescreen. Now that Redactor has 5 formulas it's more likely that other alchemists will trade formulas with him.

Having gone through all that ordeal of finding a university and convincing them to sell me a formula, I remember that actually the regular local alchemist will also sell them in any relatively big city. Well at least you guys got to hear the university music. Let's take a look at our formulas. (No I will not call them "formulae".) "Mystical number" is the difficulty. 112 is fairly easy. There's only three ingredients which means it's very likely I'll find both of them soon. (BTW: "Pitchblende" is a uranium ore. Marie Curie first discovered uranium in pitchblende from the Erzgebirge.) Looking at my other formulas I see that actually I've collected all the ingredients needed to make Quickmove, so I could have demonstrated alchemy to you guys a whole episode ago. Oh well. I'll do it now.

Alchemy

We could just stay at the inn and do our alchemy here, but some of these potions will blow up in your face if you make a mistake. If that happens I don't want it to happen in the middle of Prague. So we go camp just outside the city. Quickmove temporarily increases agility, which doesn't help much in combat but is very important in a lot of other situations, like any time you need to climb. Let's look at that equation:

• +100 - Bonus for making just one

• +18ps - The quality of my philosopher's stone. This is something you keep permanently that helps you do alchemy. I picked up a cheap one at some point. Getting a really high level one is expensive and a pain in the butt since you have to deal with the university.

• +42int - I hope this is obvious.

• +44alch - My alchemy skill

• -101mn - The mystical number of the formula.

We got enough ingredients to make more than one, so let's do that. Generally you mix up potions in big batches. It gets increasingly difficult after the third one though. If we try to make 4, that +100 bonus turns into +50 and our chance of success drops to 53%. At a batch of 6 it's a +33 bonus, and so on. So obviously we'll make 3. Nice. That's what I like to see. I'll actually stay here and make a few more batches. You can sell the potions for a profit. Late in the game you can make obscene amounts of money this way, but late in the game you've already got all the money you'll ever need.

More Wandering

At this point I think we're pretty well ready to get into mid-game content with one exception. We really need Redactor to make some potions for us because we're going to run into trouble that you don't want to face with just steel. Also the game will tell us when we're ready. So I'm going to do more wandering, focusing on learning new formulas and stockpiling alchemical components.

We run across a rural monastery. Let's go in. They usually have a lot to offer.

Well these guys seem like peepees. Monasteries run the spectrum from honest to wicked. (Reading the game's data files, there was going to be crypto-Satanic monasteries where if you spend the night they send a Satanic nun or monk to try to seduce one of your party. If they fail a Virtue check they... do things that you're not supposed to outside of marriage. I'm pretty sure that's one of the things that got cut just because they were so far behind schedule.)

This is not my kind of monastacism!

I can't complain about their library though. Books can't be corrupted. We pick up St. Hubert. He was a bishop in the Ardennes in the 600s-700s who is famous for spending a lot of time hunting and just hanging out in the forest with the animals and converting the people around Liege. In the game, he'll help us out a lot. If we run into an encounter in the wilderness that we want to run away from (this will happen) our Woodwise and Stealth skills will be tested. Even Nathan only has 24 in each.

I wandered over to St. Joachimsthal and it definitely wasn't just an excuse to give you a history lesson. It only has a couple thousand inhabitants now, but it was a boom town after the discovery of silver in 1512. Coins were minted called Joachimstaler. This was soon abbreviated as thaler and evolved into the word "dollar". Agricola, who revolutionized metallurgy and geology and pushed alchemy toward being science instead of bullshit did much of his studies here.

Wolves! With our equipment we should be pretty well immune to their attacks, but they're always a little scary. In Darklands if you lose a battle most opponents will take all your money and equipment but leave you alive. Wolves are one of the exceptions. If you lose they'll eat one of your people. I'm glad our New World wolves are nicer. Wolves attacking humans is pretty much unheard of in North America.

Notice how they've landed a 1 point and a 2 point hit on us. That indicates they're not penetrating our armor.

They're not a big threat during the day though. One of the great things in this game that they really follow through on is the day/night cycle. Before electricity a lot of your life was dictated by where the sun was. The Darklands are much more dangerous when it's literally dark.

Kutna Hora, the other important center of silver mining in Bohemia. It played an important role in the Hussite Wars in the early 1400s. Actually I'm pissed because it's depicted in the game as being a small town when in real life it was a major city in this era. If Arnold Hendrick were still around I'd give him an earful.

I guess I'll have to pay. It would be a pretty major sin to get in a physical fight with a bishop even if he is in the wrong.

We go east and spend some time in Moravia. We can get good bows there. Thrown weapons are just not going to be viable going forward because they only have 2-3 penetration. I get Sasha and Yuna longbows. These have 6 penetration, which cuts through any armor an ordinary human wears.

Well we can't let this happen. This aggression cannot go unchecked. It's time to draw a line in the sand.

A surprisingly easy fight. Sasha got beat up pretty bad because she's not strong enough to wear the same level of armor as everyone else. I'm gonna have to figure out what to do about that. I might have to actually do some math and see how much weight we can cut by losing the longbow and maybe even giving her a lighter weapon. I don't need her out there slaughtering the enemy, the rest of my party can do that, but I do need her to stay in the fight. If she gets knocked out there's just 3 of us and we'll get swamped by whatever enemy we're facing.

Castle

Eventually my wandering takes me to the castle of Zossen in Brandenburg.

Sasha tries to figure out if the local lord is a good guy by talking to people but can't figure out anything definitive.

Yuna prays to St. Dorothea of Montau, a native to these parts who lived a pretty hard life. She reveals to her what this guy's true nature is. Woodchippers haven't been invented yet, but we all know what needs to happen to male feminists.

How are we going to get in? We could try to bribe someone but they might just con us. Nathan is very agile (and we could give him one of those Quickmove potions we made to increase his agility even more) but there's always risk there. Yuna could implore St. Reinold, the patron of stonemasons to help.

I'm gonna pick the last one just because even after all these years I've never done this yet. Nice. Now we're going to get into an extended combat, like the raubritter castles but bigger.

Oh wait, actually we won't. We happened to climb into the room where the castle lord is so this will be a quick fight to the death.

Whoa... -17... I think that's the single worst hit we've ever taken so far.

It gets pretty chaotic. Yuna is knocked out but the lord is taken down at about the same time. These guys were wearing brigandine armor, level 4, same as chainmail, so it wasn't easy, but we prevailed.

Zossen turns from a castle into an ordinary village. Let's stop in and see if we can heal our wounds here. Hey wait, wtf, they're Satanic??? Maybe they did need some brutality to keep them in line. We'll mend our wounds and then come back and massacre them.

More Wandering

Eventually we come back to Magdeburg. Everyone loves us in Saxony so it's good to be back home. It's a good place to sell off some of our loot, taking advantage of the bonus from our local reputation.

I bounce around the region for a while doing various boring things. We had about 50 florins worth of dead people's armor to sell off and we invest most of that into alchemical components for Redactor. We concentrate on stuff we need for the formulas we already know, but get a little of everything in case we learn something new. We can afford to now. Also we do some more training.

We've now collected the ingredients for every formula Redactor knows. I was a bit surprised by this. We must have gotten lucky with what happened to be available in the towns we visited. Let's go camp out in the woods and start cooking up some potions.

Alchemy - Mass Production

Of the 6 formulas that Redactor knows, we've made a lot of Black Cloud and Quickmove. We'll only need to use these on rare occasions and we already have more than enough. As for the other 4, all of these are very useful in combat. I'll make at least a few of each. One thing to watch out for is that some of them use the components. So for example I don't want to use up all my orpiment making Fleadust and not have any left to make Thunderbolt. For each formula I'll explain what it does in game and what the ingredients are, because even I don't know what the heck half of these are. After all, this is edutainment. (It's been decades since I took chemistry so tell me if I write something stupid. And some of this I'm just copying from the manual.) Note that for each kind of potion there are 3 different formulas that can make it. They make increasingly high quality versions of the potion but also are more difficult.

First, let me explain the bases. Alchemy ties into the other sciences of the time, so of course the four elements play an important role. The bases are just common mundane stuff that is associated with an element. This stuff is cheap and very common. All the formulas at least one. I'll just copy the descriptions straight out of the manual.

MELANCHOLIC BASE: A variety of plants considered useful in alchemy, such as bell mushrooms, belladonna, camphor, hemlock, seed of sea holly, nightshade, thorn apple, henbane, turpentine, etc.

SANGUINE BASE: A variety of animal materials, such as eye of newt, toad tongues, bat claws, powdered unicorn horn, etc.

CHOLERIC BASE: A variety of acids and other liquids considered useful, including aqua fortis, vitriol and Roman vitriol, alcohol, distilled water, etc.

PHLEGMATIC BASE: A variety of common minerals, such as kupfer (copper), lead, lime (calcium oxide), quicksilver, and kohle (coal).

Fleadust

This reduces the skills of anyone caught in the cloud, affecting them more the heavier their armor is. This ranges from 10% if they're just wearing leather up to 50% if they're wearing plate. We have the highest level formula for Fleadust so the effects will last for 60 seconds.

This is a really useful one. Weapon skill makes a huge difference not just in hitting the enemy but also in defending yourself. The 60 second duration is enough time for me to send someone out to kill the guy before he recovers. It's less effective against poorly armored enemies, but I wouldn't be wasting potions on them anyway.

Orpiment is an arsenic sulfide mineral. It was used as a pigment for its striking yellow color. Some alchemists figured if it was yellow it must be somehow related to gold so they studied it a lot. Be careful with it though, it's extremely toxic.

Cinnabar is a mercury sulfide crystal that looks kind of like quartz. It comes in all kinds of colors. The red kind was used as a pigment. More importantly for us alchemists, pure mercury could be distilled from it. Why ours has to be white, I dunno.

Nickel was named by the miners of the Erzgebirge after a mischevious supernatural being that lives underground. (I wonder if we'll ever run into one?) They were pissed off because they would dig up what they thought was copper ore but it turned out to actually be nickel ore and they had to blame someone for it. In the 1400s it was a curiosity but there wasn't any use for it yet.

Breath of Death

Poison gas. We have the lowest level formula for this so our potions will do 5-12 damage to anyone caught in the cloud. Victims with higher endurance will take less damage.

That may not sound like a lot of damage but the cloud is pretty big so you can easily catch several enemies with it. Note that even though Redactor has the easiest formula, it's still pretty darn hard to make. We've only got a 31% chance each time we try.

Marsh Vapor A natural gas, whose medieval admixture produced a sharp smell. Acquiring and containing this vapor was extremely difficult because it is virtually colorless. It is also known as methane.

Aqua Regia A mix of nitric and hydrochloric acid. This is dangerous stuff as it can dissolve lots of things, including people. Alchemists were fascinated by it because it could dissolve gold.

Thunderbolt

A bomb. Anyone nearby is hit by a fragment. These are treated just any other missile. Damage and penetration depend on how close the victim is to the explosion, dropping off rapidly with range. In my experience, if you throw this into a crowd the guy who is actually hit will take significant damage but for the rest it will be less than 5.

Redactor only knows the lowest level formula, so it won't be terribly useful in combat. It may be better to just use an ordinary missile weapon instead. A longbow or crossbow might do a little less damage in total but it will all be concentrated on one target. However, there are a lot of non-combat situations where we might need to blow something up or just create a distraction.

Manganes You probably had a chemistry teacher light this on fire to show you how incredibly bright it is when it burns. Alchemists found that just as cool as you do.

Arabian Fire

Greek fire or napalm. It does about the same damage to the target as Thunderbolt and a few points to those nearby. It slightly reduces the quality of the target's armor.

I don't see this as terribly useful, especially the low level formula we have. In order to noticeably degrade the target's armor you'd have to hit them 5-10 times. I imagine it will have some noncombat uses so it'll be good to keep a few on hand.

Naphtha The lighter part of petroleum. This stuff catches fire very easily.

Conclusion

We spend a couple weeks camping out while Redactor churns out potions. I made 10 Fleadust as I expect this is actually the most useful in combat and several of the others. We've defeated two evil alchemists and looted their potions so now I think we've got the alchemical support we need to get into mid-game content. I've been dragging my heels a bit as there's a special event that plays when the game explicitly tells you that you're ready. I thought it would have triggered by now. Maybe next time we'll move along to a new stage in the plot.

AYAAN HIRSI ALI

Hello, dear reader. I hope you've had a wonderful Spooktober and that everything is going well at work and with your family. It's important to keep a good work-life balance and to maintain the relationships in your life that make you happy. Don't let your boss take your golden years from you - live in the moment.

Today, I'd like to discuss an author who has garnered quite a bit of criticism for her views and opinions. However, she has great character and she has not backed down from her positions. The person I'm talking about is Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Some of you might know her already, as she made a name for herself among atheists during the 2010s, but in modern times she has been written off as a discriminating right winger. Is she a bigot? By the end of this post, you'll be able to draw your own conclusions.

The post will take the following structure:

1. The Early Life of Ayaan Hirsi Ali

2. Ayaan Hirsi Ali Becomes an Apostate

3. Prey

4. Conclusion

Neighbour, you better be ready, as this is going to be a particularly long piece, but I trust you're used to lengthy effortposts. I'd also like some feedback regarding the quality of the post. Let's begin!

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1. The Early Life of Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Ayaan Hirsi Ali! Oh, how I love that name! Say it aloud; it's quite fun. Ayaan Hirsi Ali! The lady's life began in Mogadishu, Somalia in 1969, the same year as the famed moon landing. For those unaware, Mogadishu is the capital city of Somalia and it has served as a vital trading port in the Indian Ocean for millennia. The city has a rich history and it is also very Islamicized, though this shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone familiar with Somalia's demographics. According to research, over 99% of the country identifies as Sunni Muslims.

Not unexpectedly, Ayaan Hirsi Ali's family is devoutly Islamic as well. Her father, Hirsi Ali Magan, was a prominent figure in the Somali Rebellion Movement, and he is a co-founder of the Somali Salvation Democratic Front. Magan was a very opinionated man, and he was even imprisoned for his political dissidence. Perhaps this is where Ayaan Hirsi Ali gets her bravery and outspokenness from. Do you believe the tendency to be politically active is an inheritable trait?

Now, before we continue, we must discuss a very important topic - circumcision. Female circumcision, also known as Female Genital Mutilation (FGM), is very common in Somalia. I will not be using this term because I believe that all forms of circumcision constitute mutilation. CIRCUMCISION BAD! The country has one of the highest rates of circumcision in the world, and the UN has these harrowing statistics to share:

99 per cent of women aged 15 to 49 in Somalia, have been subjected to FGM, the majority between ages five and nine.

Why is female circumcision so common in Somalia? There are many answers to this complicated question. It is a cultural phenomenon passed down from generation to generation. The practice is associated with purity and honour, and it is considered a rite of passage for girls.

Scholars have pointed to the lack of strong legal consequences for the practice as one of the reasons it has endured. They have also looked at patriarchy as a possible reason why female circumcision is widespread. However, it is worth noting that the practice is often perpetuated by older women. This does not disqualify patriarchy as a motivation for the practice, though it does suggest that there is more at play than the mere desire to control women's sexuality.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali was circumcised at age five. This happened despite her father's wishes, as he was opposed to the practice. She has the following to say about this part of her history:

I remember the celebrations. I remember the goodies and the gifts. And I remember being caught by these two women - one of them my grandmother. But they couldn't find a woman to do it. They found a man, and fortunately for those girls circumcised by men, it's much milder. So I wasn't circumcised in the way that I should have been.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali has spoken out against female circumcision. However, she doesn't stop there. She is also careful to highlight that male circumcision is bad! She has the following to say on the topic:

Though her father was progressive in many ways, he still clung to some customs of Islam and his culture. This meant that he married Ayaan Hirsi Ali off to her cousin when she was in her early 20s. Already, Ayaan Hirsi Ali had developed a forceful personality and she wasn't going to be easily told what to do. She has said the following on the topic:

But because I also love and admire my father, I spoke to the man he wanted me to marry, and I asked him what kind of life we were going to have together. And he said, 'Well, you're going to have six sons for me.' And I told my father I didn't want this, and he said he couldn't go back on his word." When Hirsi Ali refused to attend, they carried out the ceremony without her. "Clan members came together, papers were signed, and I was married."

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2005/may/17/religion.immigration

Ayaan Hirsi Ali wasn't happy with the marriage, and she soon made plans to flee from Somalia. She made it to the Netherlands, where she would change her life and the trajectory of Europe.

---

2. Ayaan Hirsi Ali Becomes an Apostate

Now, growing up, Ayaan Hirsi Ali was a devout Muslim, and she believed wholly in the Quran. As you might have already guessed, things took a turn when Ayaan Hirsi Ali found herself in Europe. After fleeing from her arranged marriage, she sought asylum in the Netherlands. She received a residence permit, and she began her life anew.

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Quick notes from Holly!

The Netherlands. Holland. Dutch. Which one is it? The terms Netherlands and Holland are often used interchangeably, but they actually refer to different things. The Netherlands is the correct and official name of the entire country. It includes 12 provinces, each with its own distinct culture and identity. Holland, on the other hand, refers only to two provinces: North Holland (Noord-Holland) and South Holland (Zuid-Holland). These provinces include major cities like Amsterdam, Rotterdam, and The Hague. Historically, Holland was the most economically powerful region in the Netherlands, and because of its influence in trade and commerce, the name became associated with the whole country.

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At first, she took odd jobs to keep herself alive. However, her intellectual prowess would reveal itself, making it clear that she was destined for more than being a cleaner. In the Netherlands, she exposed herself to a wealth of literature, and this gradually began to expand her worldview and stretch her imagination. She attended Leiden University, where she obtained a Master's degree in political science. Her love of politics only grew, and after graduating, she became a Fellow at the Wiardi Beckman Stichting (WBS), a think tank of the center-left Labour Party (PvdA).

It's at this point of the story that we skip to a historic day - September 11, 2001. The USA was the intended target, but the whole world felt the blow. On this day, Osama Bin Laden, leader of Al Qaeda, orchestrated four aeroplane attacks on various key USA infrastructures. Most notably, the Twin Towers went tumbling down. What motivated the terroristic attacks? As you're intelligent enough to guess, it was a number of factors, including opposition to the USA's military presence in the Middle East and a desire to draw the USA into a prolonged war. There were also religious motivations, and Bin Laden considered the West an enemy of Islam. Al Qaeda's ideology is rooted in Salafi-jihadism, a radical interpretation of Islam that advocates for violent jihad (struggle) against perceived enemies of Islam. The 9/11 attacks were meant to provoke a global confrontation between the West and Muslims, hoping to mobilise Muslims around the world to join the cause. The attackers were promised martyrdom and heavenly rewards, further motivating their participation.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali was taken aback by the attack, and it caused her to question Islam and its tenets. She listened to Bin Laden's tapes and discovered him citing the Quran to motivate the attack. Ayaan's crisis of faith continued when she was introduced to the Atheist Manifesto by the Dutch philosopher Herman Philipse. She found she could not associate herself with Islam any longer and slowly but surely, she gave up her religion. Do you think she made the right choice?

Ayaan Hirsi Ali began writing against Islam and, in particular, its treatment of women. Her writing garnered a lot of attention, good and bad, and it made her a prominent figure in the Netherlands as her political career flourished. To promote her anti-Islam message, Ayaan Hirsi Ali teamed up with filmmaker Theo van Gogh to create a documentary detailing the treatment of women in Islamic society. The documentary, titled Submission, caused much of a stir for its content, especially among Dutch Muslims. A fatwa was called upon Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Theo van Gogh, but those are harmless, right? Wrong! Theo van Gogh was assassinated on 2 November 2004 by Mohammed Bouyeri, a Dutch-Moroccan Muslim. Bouyeri shot Theo van Gogh with a handgun eight times before pulling out a knife and attempting to decapitate the filmmaker. When that failed, he used a knife to pin a letter to Theo van Gogh's dead body. The letter mainly contains death threats aimed at Ayaan Hirsi Ali.

Soon after the attack, Ayaan Hirsi Ali went into hiding, but that didn't last forever, and she eventually resumed her regular political life. After a while, she relocated to the USA where she gained citizenship in 2013. Here, she's lived with her spouse Niall Ferguson and her son whom she had when she was 41! There are so many questions I have regarding her s*x life and her circumcision, but they would be inappropriate to pose to her.

To sum up this section, it is worth noting that Ayaan Hirsi Ali does not believe that Islam is a religion of peace. In her own words:

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3. Prey

The Crux of Ayaan Hirsi Ali's Argument

So what the frick is her problem? She details most of it in Prey, a non-fiction novel released in 2021. It outlines how Europe has changed since the mass immigration of asylum-seekers from Islamic countries, as well as the effect mass immigration has had on the lives of women in Europe. Let's take a deep dive into the text. Hope you're ready!

Ayaan Hirsi Ali begins her critique by pointing out that women are seen less in public:

"Walking in certain neighborhoods in Brussels, London, Paris, or Stockholm, you suddenly notice that only men are visible. The shop assistants, waiters, and patrons in cafés are all men."

According to Ayaan Hirsi Ali, this is because women have chosen to remove themselves due to the behaviour of men. It isn't native men that are the problem - no, the problem lies with Muslim immigrants who haven't assimilated into liberal Western society.

"It is no secret—though it is considered impolite or politically incorrect to point it out—that the perpetrators are disproportionately young immigrant men from the Middle East, South Asia, and various parts of Africa."

Why do the immigrants behave this way? Well, they are coming from societies that do not value women and that oppress women. The immigrants are bringing these values with them instead of adopting Western values. Of course, Ayaan Hirsi Ali points the finger at Islam for birthing many of these patriarchal norms. The other problem? The West is not taking the problem of mass immigration seriously enough. When crimes are reported, they are swept under the rug and authority figures pretend the problem doesn't exist.

"Authorities understate the incidence of assaults and harassment of women. In the interest of political expediency, politicians play down the threat and encourage the police to do the same. Excuses are made for criminal behaviour. Judges hand out light sentences to perpetrators. "

What is important to highlight is that Ayaan Hirsi Ali isn't opposed to legal immigration. She believes that people have the right to seek better lives for themselves. It would be hard for her to hold any other position, as she is an asylum seeker herself. However, her main concerns lie with the beliefs and behaviours that migrants bring with them, especially Muslim migrants. To her, Islam is incompatible with Western values and the religion needs drastic reform before it can be accepted in Europe.

The Rise of Sexual Assault in Europe

Ayaan Hirsi Ali is a noooooticer, and she has noticed a rise in r*pe cases just as the number of Muslims immigrants has risen in Europe. She provides the following stats:

"In Denmark, sexual offences remained stable or slightly decreased from 2010 to 2014, then steadily rose. Danish law expanded the definition of r*pe in 2013, it is true, but between 2014 and 2017, the number of r*pes (based on the new definition) more than doubled"

"England and Wales saw a 15 per cent increase in r*pes in the year to March 2017 and an 8 per cent increase in sexual assaults from the year before"

"France's national statistics also point to an increase in sexual violence. Between 2017 and 2018, the French Interior Ministry reported a 17 per cent increase in r*pes and a 20 per cent increase in other forms of sexual violence, including harassment"

"In Germany, there was a striking increase in r*pe cases after 2015. The number of victims of r*pe and sexual coercion (Vergewaltigung und sexueller Nötigung) had ranged between 7,000 and 9,000 a year between 2000 and 2015, with no discernible trend. In 2016, it was 8,102, but in 2017, it was 11,444—a 41 per cent increase."

"Sweden's crime statistics show that s*x offences against women were at relatively stable levels between 2005 and 2011 but trended upward after that and doubled between 2014 and 2016"

Ayaan Hirsi Ali is adamant that we are not dealing with a case of correlation - the causal relationship between immigration from Muslim countries and the increase of r*pe in Europe are directly connected. In a radical moment of noooticing, she states the following when discussing the refugee r*pe crisis in France:

"Though they account for only 7 percent of the population, they are suspects in 14 percent of s*x crimes."

The R*pe Game

Perhaps the most interesting part of the text comes when Ayaan Hirsi Ali dives into the cases of r*pe that erupted in Europe during the 2010s. It is here that we learn that Muslim immigrants are coomers of the highest order, and they'll stop at nothing for a crumb of kitty. They have no regard for the law or for the sexual autonomy of women, at least according to Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Do you agree? It doesn't matter what you think actually, don't bother commenting with your response. Now stop interrupting me. Anyway, here are some of the cases Ayaan Hirsi Ali brings up:

"In 2016, a 45-year-old woman jogging in a Munich park was attacked from behind. Her assailant strangled her so tightly with her headband that he lacerated her neck and she collapsed unconscious. He r*ped her, then left her in a bush."

"Four Eritrean asylum seekers r*ped a 56-year-old woman in Dessau that same year. She was collecting recyclable bottles behind a school near where the men were drinking. They lured her with the promise of giving her their bottles to recycle, but instead they smashed one of the bottles, cut her face with it, and gang-r*ped her. "

"In August 2018, a 19-year-old Somali broke into a retirement home in Halle, Central Germany. He sexually assaulted one of the residents, a 74-year-old woman, simply "because he wanted s*x."

Coomer!

"Eighteen-year-old Franziska W. left a Freiburg nightclub in October 2018 with a Syrian asylum seeker she had met inside. What she did not know was that her new acquaintance was wanted by police for drug offenses and as a suspect in a gang r*pe. Majid H. was 21 at the time. It appears that he drugged the girl, dragged her behind a row of hedges, and r*ped her. He then phoned his friends, inviting them to join him. According to the court prosecutor, Majid told them there was a woman outside "who can be fricked." Over several hours, eleven men—eight Syrians, one Iraqi, one Algerian, and one German—between 19 and 29 years of age either r*ped or provided cover for the male feminists"

Pathetic.

"In March 2017, a 27-year-old Nigerian living in an asylum reception center in Bagnoli near Naples sexually assaulted a 41-year-old woman. In 2018, a 20-year-old Somali, who had just received a subsidiary protection permit from the Italian authorities, sexually assaulted a 68-year-old woman sunbathing at a beach"

What Ayaan Hirsi Ali is concerned about is that authority figures are not taking action. The migrants committing these crimes are often granted light sentences that do not reflect the severity of the crime. Furthermore, governments aren't acknowledging that s*x crimes by migrants have reached intolerably problematic levels. Some of these attacks are the consequence of taharrush gamea or the "r*pe game". Ayaan Hirsi Ali points to Islam as the basis for the game, and she has the following to educate us on:

"Accounts of taharrush gamea have been recorded in Algeria and Tunisia since the 1960s. "In 2006, Egyptian bloggers witnessed hundreds of men thronging the streets to celebrate the end of Ramadan, harassing women with or without hijabs, ripping off their clothes, encircling them, and trying to assault them. Girls ran for cover in nearby restaurants, taxis, and cinemas. As protests continued in Tahrir Square in 2012, mob attacks against women became more organized. Men formed concentric rings around individual women, stripping and raping them."

Ayaan Hirsi Ali highlights that the game has taken root in the West:

"The r*pe game crossed the Mediterranean in December 2015. During New Year's Eve celebrations in Cologne, as we have seen, more than a thousand young men formed rings around individual women, sexually assaulting them. When the victims identified the perpetrators as looking "foreign," "North African," and "Arab," they were pilloried as racists on social media"

Ayaan does not merely point out the problem. She also attempts to determine it's cause. One of the issues she highlights is that in the global South, women are taught not to draw attention to themselves. This is not the case in the West where women are not afraid to flaunt their bodies and sexuality. Ayaan believes Muslim migrant men who move to the West do want to assimilate, but they encounter a culture clash upon arriving in places like Europe where they are suddenly faced with emancipated women and don't know how to react or deal with their sexual desires.

She also considers the fact that Muslim migrants are resentful of the West. They arrive in Europe seeking success and stability, but very few find it. Instead, most are relegated to the lower class where they find themselves with reduced status, lower than women even! Hence, the misbehaviour may be a form of lashing out at society.

Failure to Assimilate

One of the issues brought up is that Muslim migrants are failing to integrate into Western society and adopt secularist liberal worldviews. Instead, researchers are finding that migrants are clinging hard to their religion and culture, even as they run away from the countries where they are most prevalent. Ayaan Hirsi Ali divides Muslim migrants into four categories

1. Adaptors

These are Muslims who come to the West and adopt liberal values. Such people usually immerse themselves in Western literature and education, and they take advantage of all the opportunities the West has to offer.

2. Menaces

These are mostly young men who are antisocial. They don't have much of a moral framework - they just want s*x and drugs. They are unemployable, land up in trouble with the law, and they take advantage of the welfare system.

3. Coasters

Coasters arrive in the West and follow the rules, but they don't exhibit ambition. Instead, they leech off the welfare system, invite other family members over into the West, and never take up employment that would not pay them much more than what they get in benefits.

4. Fanatics

The last group is comprised of devout Muslims who have no desire to abandon their faith. They are traditionalists and they would like to destroy the liberal West and replace it with Sharia.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali argues that while the dream is to have all Muslim migrants be adaptors, the truth is that they are the minority. When immigrants don't assimilate, they form parallel societies that exist within the host country but feature the culture of the global South. Such communities are problematic. They make Muslim migrants unemployable, as many young men do not want to work in places that serve alcohol, men and women mingle, and they will certainly not work for a female boss.

Solutions

One of the last topics Ayaan Hirsi Ali discusses in her explosive book is whether there are solutions to the r*pefugee crisis. One of the hinderances to finding a solution is that Europe is engaged in victim blaming. Instead of admonishing men who r*pe, they instead turn to women and blame them for egging on the attack. Police and headmasters will ask women to dress more modestly, lest they set off Syrian refugees, and bad behaviour from migrants will be excused with weak explanations appealing to the fact that many are traumatised after travelling from warn-torn regions. Ayaan Hirsi Ali applies her brains to the problem and comes up with the following solutions:

1. Repeal the existing asylum framework

2. Address the factors that lead to mass immigration

3. Address the factors that lure migrants to Europe in particular (e.g. welfare)

4. Reinstate the rule of law

5. Listen to successful immigrants

6. Provide s*x education to all children

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4. Conclusion

Ayaan Hirsi Ali has come a long way from her humble beginnings. Despite being circumcised, she has started a family and became a prominent figure in the West. She is brave and she has not given up her viewpoints even when her life is threatened. We should all strive to be more like Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Unfortunately, not everyone appreciates her genius and in recent years she has been labelled an Islamophobe and a bigoted member of the alt-right. This is interesting, as she began as a figure the atheist left championed. This goes to show how much the Overton window has shifted and how the left has went from staunchly opposing Islam to considering it bigotry to criticise it. It's brutal.

So what do you think of Ayaan Hirsi Ali? Do you think she makes valid critiques of the migrant crisis? Or is she unfairly biased against Islam? Do you believe her rhetoric helps women, or is it inviting more discrimination toward Muslim women in the West? I'd love to hear your thoughts on this fascinating woman.

Totsiens!

Part 9 of our epic voyage through the classic 1992 RPG Darklands.

Darklands Series

1 - Darklands LP Part I

2 - Darklands LP Part II: Charles Bronson Edition

3 - Darklands LP III: Nuns and Coins

4 - Darklands LP Ep IV: Introduction to Equipment & Combat

5 - Darklands LP Part V: We finally briefly go out into the dark lands

6 - Darklands LP VI: We actually start a quest!

7 - Darklands LP VII: We reach our destination

8 - Darklands LP VIII: Raubritter confrontation & learning how combat works

Thanks for making this @Losercel.

We ended last episode in Paderborn, having just been rewarded for slaying a raubritter and now we've got 16 florins to spend. We had some concerns about our weapons not penetrating armor well enough during that battle, so that's our first priority. Let's see what they have for sale here.

Equipment

OMG look at this. See where it says 38q next to the name of each item for sale? That means it's 38 quality. Weapons, armor, shields, alchemical potions, and various things like lockpicks have a quality rating which has a subtle impact on how well they work. For every 10 points of quality your weapon is better than their armor you get one extra point of damage. That may not sound like much but you get that bonus point even if you failed to penetrate their armor. That may not sound like much, but with a fast high quality weapon it can really add up.

Average items have a quality of 25. There is a shop in the marketplace that always sells 25q items wherever you go. But each city can have a swordmith, armorer, bowyer, and tinkerer (these sell certain specialized weapons) each with its own level of quality. So if you happen to be in a town with really good swordsmiths like we are now, you want to jump on that opportunity. You never know when you'll find that opportunity again.

One rule that I only just learned now after all these years while going through the hint book is that all the equipment you loot off of dead bodies drops in quality by 10. That explains a lot, because that crap is hardly ever worth using by the time you get your hands on it.

• Sasha - I'd like to get her a better quality longsword but they don't have any in stock.

• Redactor & Yuna - I'm going to replace their maces with military hammers. It does one point less damage than the mace but it has 5 penetration so it even matches plate. The main job of our impact weapons people is to penetrate heavily armored enemies, so that's my highest priority here.

• Nathan - There's not much selection of polearms here. I get him a pike, which at least has pen 4, but it's very slow. I'll keep that around just for heavily armored enemies.

The armorer here is only 23q so I'm ignoring that. Same with the bowyer. Paderborn isn't that big of a city so they must specialize in weapons.

As long as I'm here, I pick up some camomile for Redactor's alchemical experiments. One of my formulas uses it, and I have no idea when I'll find a store stocking it again, so I better get it while I can. Alchemey can be very expensive because you've got to hoard ingredients like this until you've collected every one you need for a formula.

At this point I'm just going to play for a while because we need more money before I can show you some mid-game content. Higher tier quests are quite a bit more difficult than anything we've done yet, so we're going to need good armor for the whole party. Also we won't get far without alchemy. I go on a couple more raubritter quests. If you want to maximize your earnings on these, go around to nearby cities and ask everyone for a job. A lot of them will want you to kill the same guy and there's no reason why you can't accept all of their offers.

Education

I end up in Leipzig. I managed to get a meeting with the mayor and he offered me a raubritter quest. This is a big win for us as the mayor pays out more than the merchants (20 florins I think?) and you get a huge boost to local reputation if you complete a quest for him. An especially big win since Leipzig is such an important city in this era, the most important marketplace in eastern Germany. As you can see, it's at the junction of roads leading in all directions. It even has a university.

Speaking of education, we've got 55 florins so we can afford to study for a while. We'll have to find teachers willing to take us in as students. Let's start with the monastery. They can teach us Read/Write, Speak Latin, and Religion. Usually these guys are pretty cooperative. They'll only refuse if you have little Virtue or local reputation.

Redactor has 40 in Alchemy, which is quite respectable, but you can never have too much skill. The higher it is, the higher the chance that you'll succeed in making potions. Let's see if we can get the alchemist to teach him. Nice. The alchemists are what we would today call "on the spectrum" so they often refuse. (Notice how the text here hints at which skills, attributes, etc. were being checked. You'll see this often all over the game.)

As long as we're here, I'll try trading formulas with him. See, this is what I mean.

I go to the tinkers and ask them for a teacher as well. They teach Artifice.

Let's go to the inn and start studying. Sasha is going to work on her Artifice. This skill represents your technical abilities. It's used in lockpicking and many other situations. We'll have Yuna study Religion as that's her specialty. As for Nathan, none of these skills would really do him much good. When these skills are checked it's almost always against your best party member and we've already got people better than him. So we'll have him work. He earns 9 pfennings per day as a blacksmith. The occupation you work at depends on your abilities. In his case it's probably his strength that got him the job.

We study for a week and each of us picks up 2-3 points in our skill. That may not seem like much, but most non-combat skills are extremely difficult to increase through normal gameplay.

Random Encounters

I'm going to just play the game for a while now. I won't write everything I'm doing as it's is going to be pretty boring if you're not the playing. I want to show you guys how alchemy works, so I'm going to roam around to various cities buying new formulas and the ingredients we need for them. I'll just write about the random encounters I run into. There are many of these and they make up a big part of the game.

I'm going to try to sneak away. It's probably just some bandits that we could take care of easily but you never know. Besides, this is a rare chance to practice our Woodwise skill.

These guys have no idea who they're dealing with. I wipe them out without breaking a sweat.

Pagans. I hate these guys. Let's vandalize their stupid altar.

Uh oh. These are schrats, basically German bigfoot. It must have been their altar. Some schrats are good Christians, but just like humans many of them worship Satan. I may be in over my head.

Oh boy. That's a lot of them. They're so close, our missile weapons won't be much help. There's not much to do but just fight it out.

It's a very close fight, with both Redactor and Yuna getting knocked out. A prayer to St. Clare healed Sasha and kept her in the fight. Without that we would have lost.

Yuna gains some Virtue. Which makes sense since we all got beaten up really bad for doing that. We'll camp here and rest for a little while and then head over to Magdeburg to stay at the inn to get fully healed.

Frick this guy. I'll just pay him to avoid any trouble. I don't want the Dominicans on my butt.

Where should I wander around? It's nice to have a certain region that's your home base where you've got good local reputation. You can return there every once in a while to take advantage of the better prices and do your studying there. But you've also got to do a lot of wandering to find quests, alchemy ingredients, and new saints. Let's go into Bohemia.

I head down to Dresden, kill another raubritter, and achieve "local hero" reputation.

Notice that near Freiberg there's two mines. The Erzgebirge ("Ore Mountains") between Germany and Bohemia were extremely important at this time. Tin had been mined there since prehistoric times, but in 1168 silver was discovered near Freiberg and settlers flooded in. More discoveries were made in the late 1400s. During this period the mines of the Erzgebirge were on the cutting edge of technology, driving progress toward the Industrial Revolution.

The important thing for us is that we can buy alchemical components there. But first let's learn some more formulas so that I know what to buy. I keep striking out when I try to trade formulas with other alchemists, but we're rich enough now to just buy some.

Bad Alchemist

I'm not giving you my goddarn alchemical materials. This guy may be a tough opponent but I think we can take him if we really have to.

His guards are poorly equipped. Like many of the thugs we've run into they're using falchions (basically machetes) which ordinarily would bounce right off our armor. But notice the plus there. That means they've been enhanced through alchemy. Depending on which potion was used, that could mean they can slice right through our armor. The alchemist himself would be easy to kill if we could get to him, but his guards will block us. They're even blocking us from using missile weapons against him. But he can toss potions over their heads at us. My first priority is going to be dispersing my guys because he's no doubt got some area effect attacks and I don't want us bunched up.

This is probably Noxious Aroma. It decreases all skills for several seconds before it wears off. He hits Redactor with the same thing and Sasha with tear gas which temporarily incapacitates her. When these get clear of the bridge I'm going to have Nathan try to get around them and go after the alchemist.

Sasha got tear gassed again. He tossed Stonetar at Yuna, which greatly slows down anyone walking through it, so she won't be able to get into the fight soon. Redactor is holding off two enemies while Nathan slips past them. I bet Nathan Chen could be a really good running back IRL.

He tries to slow down Nathan with stonetar but it's too late. He's run out of potions. Nathan kills him instantly with one swing of his halberd and the guards are easily mopped up.

This is some nice loot. He ran out of combat potions but he has a lot that can temporarily enhance our characters or their equipment. We'll save these to use in an emergency.

Notice how this combat was way more complex than just killing street thugs. Combat in Darklands is never going to be as intricate as Troubleshooter but once you get into the mid-game it's not just mindlessly slashing at each other.

Maybe in the next episode we'll finally do some alchemy. (Spoiler: we do!)

In the first part:

https://rdrama.net/h/erstory/post/310720/the-mitfords-bonglands-most-dramapilled-family

We learned about Tom the Jap-bashing bussy-blaster, Diana the super-smart-and-witty-but-repeatedly-cucked fascist and Decca the communist proto-redditor. Let's continue our look at the dramafull Mitford family...

Deborah

'Debo' was the baby of the family and the longest-lived. She only died in 2014. She lived long enough to hear Chocolate Rain by Tay Zonday- imagine that.

_{I'm only putting this here because it'll totally frick with people who just scroll through this post to see the images}

Debo married into serious money and position and became the Dutchess of Cavendish. She and her husband were Nazi sympathisers, but much more circumspect and low-key about it than Tom, Diana or Unity. Nevertheless, Decca still felt the need to rat them. These facts never really came to light until the couple decided, after decades of keeping their heads down, to suddenly enter politics and campaign for the newly-formed Social Democratic Party* in the 1980s. The official reports on them and their family, including salacious details provided by Decca, were circulated in the press. When the SDP merged with the Liberal Party, the Libs kicked the Cavendishes to the curb. The Liberals have a habit of attracting embarrassing supporters...

_{*Minor note on the SDP: this party was formed by five prominent members of the Labor Party who quit after the party took a hard-left turn in the late 70s. They merged with the Liberals and disappeared. This is ironic because, under Tony Blair, the Labor Party effectively became the SDP. Their leader, David Owen, flapped around helplessly as a European envoy to Bosnia during their horrible war, eventually getting recalled after a vote of no-confidence by the Euro Parliament. He got a peerage and became 'Lord Owen' for doing what everyone does in the politics of Europe- frick all.}

There's not much else to say about Debo except that her very recent death might explain why nobody's ever tried to make a TV show about the Mitfords.

Pamela

Pamela lived in the country and briefly married the physicist Derek Jackson. Jackson married 5 other women and blasted many a bussy although he went to Rugby school and served in the RAF so Tom was not one of them. Jackson was famed for his work in atomic spectroscopy (how atoms absorb and emit radiation- useful for a whole bunch of things in medicine and science), his riding career- including riding a horse in the Grand National and the enviable amount of fricking he got done. His biographer Simon Courtauld describes him as a "rampant bisexual". He shacked up at one point with two half-sisters and was banging both at the same time.

Behold the King:

After her break-up in 1951 Pamela lived with Italian horse-rider Giuditta Tommasi. The nature of their relationship was never disclosed but Decca described her, somewhat chuddily, as a 'You-Know-What-Bian'. Diana's letters reveal she thought their relationship was platonic but was not bothered one way or another. Make of that what you will.

Nancy

Nancy was the nearest thing to the normal one, which is darning considering this is a longpost about a Dramapilled family. She was also, apparently, a decent writer. Like many of her sisters, she had a nickname... 'Woman'. Yes, her sisters called her 'Woman'. Not 'The Woman' just 'Woman'. This was because she was the eldest and the most sensible. Nancy managed to stay on good terms with her whole family- despite a brief falling out with Diana during WW2. She was smart, sensible, good at what she did and got along well with others. What a crushing bore- let's move on to the most dramapilled of them all...

Unity

As a child, Unity Valkyrie Freeman-Mitford was the Jan Brady of the Mitfords. Her sisters were smarter than her, better looking than her and more socially adept than her.

In the words of Diana's biographer Jan Dalley:

"Unity found life in her big family very difficult because she came after these cleverer, prettier, more accomplished sisters."

While another biographer, David Pryce-Jones, added:

"If you come from a ruck of children in a large family, you've got to do something to assert your individuality, and I think through the experience of trying to force her way forward among the sisters and in the family, she decided that she was going to form a personality against everything."

So, in short, she became a Dramatard.

What could she do to stand out?

How could she make herself special?

Who could help to really make everyone notice poor little Unity?

Hitler was to Unity what stickyposts were to Masterlawlz.

"I think the desire to shock was very important, it was the way that she made herself special. When she discovered Nazism and discovered that it was a fantastic opportunity to shock everybody in England she'd discovered the best tease of all."

-Jan Dalley (Diana's Biographer)

Her younger sister, Decca, with whom she shared a bedroom, was (as we saw in the previous episode) a dedicated communist. The two drew a chalk line down the middle to divide the room. Decca's side was decorated with hammer and sickles and pictures of Vladimir Lenin, while Unity's was decorated with swastikas and pictures of Adolf Hitler.

Unfortunately neither had the common sense to realise this was childish larping. Decca had a long life to do so... Unity did not.

In 1934, Unity had enrolled in a German language school close to the Nazi headquarters in Munich. She was determined to stalk Hitler and, as it happened, this was pretty easy to do.

One of the great lies that always gets told is that we, the good guys, are virtuous simple folk while our enemies are decadent and addicted to opulence. Hence Hitler is always presented in stately rooms with high-ceiling, wearing shining jackboots and a crisp uniform while sitting upon cushioned luxury chairs. Some of the Nazis definitely were like that but in the early 30s, when not attending official functions, Hitler generally wore an old tweed jacket with a crumpled fishing hat stuck on his head. He often drank coffee and ate strudel at the same restaurant he had visited years ago before the Great War. He walked around Munich without guards and would speak to any passerby who spoke to him, even if they were critical of him and his party.

Unity was literally able to just sit in the same place Hitler took his breakfast. She didn't approach him, however: like Landlord Messiah hanging around a slutty-and-used-up-but-strangely-likeable pornstar, she just sat there and stared. Eventually- after months of this shit- Hitler asked her over. They spoke for over 30 minutes- Hitler paid her bill.

She wrote to her father; "It was the most wonderful and beautiful [day] of my life. I am so happy that I wouldn't mind a bit, dying. I'd suppose I am the luckiest girl in the world. For me he is the greatest man of all time"

Hitler was taken by this strange Bong girl too and fascinated by her middle name- Valkyrie. Turned out that Unity's grandmother had been a friend of Richard Wagner who was, of course, Hitler's fav. He was very superstitious- a trait later used to justify fantastic theories of how he intended to dispell Christianity and reintroduce worship of the Germanic gods- or worshipping the Warlords of Atlantis... or the Ark of the Convenant but less Jewish. Or maybe some other shit, IDK. Aliens probably. Anyway, he thought Unity was destined to be in his life.

The big question is whether she got a taste of the old meat-and-one-veg.

Well, there was one person who definitely saw it as a possibility...

Eva Braun was intensely jealous of the attention her boyfriend was suddenly paying to this Bong strumpet. She wrote to a friend;

"She is known as the Valkyrie and looks the part, including her legs. I the mistress of the greatest man in Germany and the whole world, I sit here waiting while the sun mocks me through the window panes."[

Hitler would spend days away, apparently with Unity. He often did not come home at night and would claim he had business at the office doing Nazi stuff when Eva would demand to know where he had been.

Eventually Eva did what most foids would do in this situation and tried the old attempted suicide trick. This got Hitler to cut back on his time spent with the Bong. As Wikipedia puts it, Unity "learned from this that desperate measures were often needed to capture the Führer's attention."

Unity knew there was one thing Adolf loved more than blondes and that was ragging on Da Joos. She attended the Hitler Youth festival in Hesselberg with Hitler's friend Julius Streicher, where she gave the kind of speech about God's Chosen People that would get standing ovations in many American universities today. She subsequently repeated these sentiments in an open letter to Streicher's paper, 'Der Stürmer', which read:

"The English have no notion of the Jewish danger. Our worst Jews work only behind the scenes. We think with joy of the day when we will be able to say England for the English! Out with the Jews! Heil Hitler!

P.S. please publish my name in full, I want everyone to know I am a Jew hater."

This caused an outrage in some parts of the Bong media, but Hitler rewarded her with an engraved golden swastika badge, a private box at the 1936 Berlin Olympics, and a ride in a party Mercedes to the Bayreuth Festival. So the first part of "Operation: Sit on the 'Dolf Peepee" had been accomplished.

She was inducted into the inner circle of the Nazi Party, appearing on the balcony with Hitler when he declared the Anschlauss and she was sent on a mission to meet with pro-Nazis in Prague where she was arrested.

A 1936 MI5 report called her "more Nazi than the Nazis."

In 1938, Hitler gave her a choice of four apartments in Munich. Unity visited one apartment to discuss her decoration and design plans while the soon-to-be-dispossessed residents, a Jewish couple, sat in the kitchen crying. She was given special treatment even Hitler's closest confidants did not have. Albert Speer wrote that nobody was allowed to talk about politics to the Furher except Unity.

Although Hitler told Unity many times that an alliance with Bongland was unlikely, she kept pressing for it and even drew up plans with lists of potential allies. Some of the names that were mentioned were Lord Halifax (Churchill's Tory rival to lead the coalition government) and eccentric Scottish soceror and self described "sensual adventurer" Aleister Crowley. Both men expressed horror when they were told of Unity's beliefs that they might be pro-Nazi. Crowley, who the Daily Mail called "the wickedest man in the world" seems very unlikely to have supported Hitler.

In 1939 Unity and Diana were in Germany when Hitler told them both that they should leave as soon as possible because he believed war with Bongland would follow within weeks. Diana left, Unity didn't.

Diana said later: "She told me that if there was a war, which of course we all terribly hoped there might not be, that she would kill herself because she couldn't bear to live and see these two countries tearing each other to pieces, both of which she loved."

After war was declared, the fate of Unity was initially unclear. She had visited the office of the Bavarian governor to ask if she would be detained as a enemy alien. He told her she would not be but was concerned enough about her mrntal state to mention her visit to Hitler who, apparently, did not look up from his papers when Unity was mentioned. There are some stories that Unity tried to see Hitler and even resorted to calling Eva Braun to try and get Adolf's atrention.

Rumors started trickling through to Bongland that Unity had been arrested and shot by the Nazis. This was only half true- she had shot herself.

Fricking ineptly, as it happens. She used a pearl-handled pistol given to her before her mission to Prague by Hitler himself. He visited her several times in hospital despite the huge amount of work he had organising a fricking world war. She remained unaware throughout that he was beside her.

Despite the war, the Germans and British cooperated to have her repatriated. She was initially sent to Bern in Switzerland where her mother and Debo went to collect her. Debo said in an interview many years later:

"We were not prepared for what we found – the person lying in bed was desperately ill. She had lost 2 stone [almost 29lbs], was all huge eyes and matted hair, untouched since the bullet went through her skull. The bullet was still in her head, inoperable the doctor said. She could not walk, talked with difficulty and was a changed personality, like one who had had a stroke. Not only was her appearance shocking, she was a stranger, someone we did not know. We brought her back to England in an ambulance coach attached to a train. Every jolt was agony to her."

She arrived in Bongland in January 1940:

Showing she still had a bit of the old dramatard in her she declared she "was glad to be back in England even though I'm not on your side."

Her mental age was likened to that of a 10-year-old, or a "sophisticated child" as James Lees-Milne (cousin of Winnie the Pooh creator and a bussy-buddy of Unity's brother Tom) called her. She had a tendency to talk incessantly, had trouble concentrating her mind, and showed an unusually large appetite with sloppy table manners. Lees-Milne observed her to be "rather plain and fat, and says she weighs 13+1⁄2 stone [189lbs- fricking Bongs and their weird weights]". She did however, retain at least some of her devotion to the Nazi party; her family friend Billa Harrod recalled Unity stating that she wished to have children and name the eldest Adolf.

In 1941 she was caught banging an RAF pilot and MI5 reported that she had been seen trying to solicit other airmen around an RAF base. The men said she would ask them "intelligent questions" about their planes and missions. The pilot she was banging was reassigned to the supersonic propellor tests in the north of Scotland (fly your Spitfire up really high and dive towards the ground- see if you can break the sound barrier). He died, believe it or not.

Unity Valkyrie Mitford died of meningitis after the area around the bullet in her head began to swell. It was impossible at that time to remove the bullet.

She, was buried at Saint Mary's Church in Swinbrook Oxfordshire. Her sisters Nancy and Diana would join her later.

I hope you enjoyed this overview of the Mitfords:

Tom, Diana, Decca, Debo, Pamela, Nancy and Unity.

And let's not forget the amazing suppporting cast which included Oswald Mosely, King Edward and Queen Wallis, numerous bussy-blasting pals of Tom, Derek 'Action' Jackson, Tay Zonday, The British SDP/Liberal Alliance Party and, of course, Adolf Hitler himself.

Goodbile.

Follow up to this.

My main takeaway from this, a hypothesis that I've been developing since the first time I voted and was appalled about how our side managed to lose, is that the people running the Democratic Party don't want to win.

Look at how the Democratic Party works in South Korea. The they're hounding the current president's wife because:

Would be such a MILF but...

• She's a weirdo.

• She's into geomancy.

• She believes that she's clairvoyant.

• She accepts very small bribes.

• She's childless. She doesn't hear the pitter patter of childrens' feet in her house, just the paws of cats. (Yes a female DP member actually this.)

The last president before that:

• She might have been fricked by a cult leader in the 1970s. (Heard this one direct from a Korean ajumma.)

• She's the lesbian lover of that guy's daughter (I've actually never heard any Korean say this but it's so fricking obvious I'm gonna say it now.)

• She's always been controlled by the cult.

• She sank a ship carrying 1000 kids as part of a human sacrifice to that cult.

• She's childless.

It's not important how many of these things are true (it's a lot ). There's one pattern here to me that's really obvious: None of these things are ideological. They're things that would offend rightoids as much or more. That's what you do when you're trying to win. You try to appeal to the middle to join you and the other side to be so disgusted they stay home.

In America the Democratic Party would rather lose than do anything obvious like:

• Call Trump an r-slur.

• Call out Trump directly for adultery. (It's everyone's right these days.)

• Call out Ivanka for being a literal whore. (Some GenX dem got really offended at me when I even said this on a message board.)

• Cut ties with the Teachers' Union and appeal to parents. (You ever wonder why you're losing support among blacks?)

• Drop the whole gun control issue. You lost on this long ago. Every time you bring it up you're (no pun intended) shooting yourself in the foot.

• Say that you're against illegal immigration without using a bunch of euphemisms that us regular people don't understand because we didn't just graduate from Oberlin with a gender studies degree.

• Block blatantly illegal mergers that directly effect consumers, like the one where all grocery stores in the western US are merging.

• Do a publicity stunt on Columbus Day where you say something like "I won't apologize for America."

• Insinuate that Lindsay Graham is homosexual.

• Say that abortion is really bad but it shouldn't be illegal. (Remember when Clinton did this and won?)

• Say that you're not "woke" and denounce "anti-racism". (Virtually everyone in America agrees with this.)

• Acknowledge that blacks have been losing their jobs to illegal immigrants for a long time.

• Reform the tax code so that ordinary people don't need to have so much stress about it. Blame the other side for stopping you.

• Reform corrupt county sheriffs and judges so that you can't get held up by highwaymen in uniforms and given a ticket while traveling through hick towns. (The President can't actually deliver on this, but promise it anyway.)

• Stop treating Cesar Chavez as the token LatinX you'll appeal to all Latinx through, because you're lazy and want a Martin Luther King of every minority and they're all the same.

• Stop saying LatinX.

• Call out Republicans for blocking every attempt to stop illegal immigration for generations.

• Propose actually doing e-Verify.

• Explain to r-slurs that building a wall was always a scam because most of the illegal immigrants come right through the gates and just overstay their visa.

• Emphatically support nuclear power to combat climate change.

That's just off the top of my head. I've got better ones I can't remember right now, issues that neither party will address but are really important to the American people.

I've heard that the Democratic Convention in 1980 was already like this. By now it's terminal. The Democrats these days are a bunch of special interest groups tied together by intersectionality, which just means nobody can do anything because someone might be offended. It's an organization where most of the people don't give a shit if their party wins or loses because they'll keep their "activist" job either way. For the rest of us who are actually voting, that's not good enough.

"Diana the Fascist, Jessica the Communist, Unity the Hitler-lover; Nancy the Novelist; Deborah the Duchess and Pamela the unobtrusive poultry connoisseur"

-The Times

History

The Mitfords were an aristocratic family from Northumberland in the far north of In-Gurr-Land, right on the border with Haggis-stan. Their ancestors had been 'border reivers' which is a fancy way to say cattle rustlers who were occasionaly paid money to fight in the wars between the two nations- they were the kind of soldiers you paid when you wanted whole farms and whole farmer's families to conveniently disappear. Other prominent reiver families were the Armstrongs, the Nixons, the Bells and the Elliots. An alarming number of Burgers with those surnames are descended from the reivers as many of them were forced to flee Bongland when Scotland and England merged and they suddenly found themselves criminals on both sides of the border.

The Mitfords had managed to get themselves a peerage tho- the Barony of Redesdale- so they were legit and no-one could touch them. Here is their family crest...

Those are supposed to be moles. I thought they were duck-billed platypuses but moles are still a bit weird.

Many members of the family served as something called 'High Sherrif of Northumberland' but, far away from Sherwood Forest, their exploits against Ye Merrie Men of Yore are not recorded.

Daddy Mitford and his Daughters

Skip forward several centuries to the early 20th Century

David Freeman-Mitford, Baron of Resedale and the Lady Sydney...

...have one son, Tom, and six daughters who were- oldest first- Nancy, Pamela, Diana, Unity, Jessica and Deborah. They were, in the jargon of the time, 'debs' of some note at their coming of age- that is debutants. Debutants were young girls 'coming out' into society- needless to say, coming out meant something very different back then. This was often accompanied by a big party where young eligible men of the right breeding were invited to gawk at them. If this sounds like a meat market you would be right, but the Mitford girls were very sought-after marriage-material. They were rich, from a storied came-over-with-the conqueror Anglo-Norman heritage, and some of them (Diana particularly) were considered good-looking. In roaring 20s London they were the talk of the town and that was before they even did any of the fricked-up things they would later do. Many of them had strident views on politics and, going into the thirties, some of them would go on to create international scandals which would echo down the ages. We will start with poor old Tom who had to cope with a young life of everyone he knew wanting to frick his sisters- this might explain how he turned out.

Tom

Tom had his bussy blasted at Eton, like many Bongs of his class. His famous butt-buddies included his sister Nancy's future fiancée and the cousin of Winnie the Pooh creator A. A. Milne.

He once pretended to be an artist called Bruno Hat and took part in an art hoax which will seem very familiar as variations of it keep getting repeated to this day.

He later straightened out somewhat and banged some foids. One of whom wrote about him in a book (as we will see, foids producing mediocre literature is not a new thing) where she described him as "the handsomest man she'd ever met" and, less flatteringly, a "minature version of his father".

When war broke out in 1939 he joined up and was eventually sent to North Africa. There was some concern about sending him, you see, because of his professed Nazi sympathies- and the actions of some of his sisters, but we'll get to that.

When the war with Japan began in 1942 he was happy to be reassigned to Burma to have a crack at The Nip. He died about four months before the WHOLLY JUSTIFIED ATOMIC STRIKES ON HIROSHIMA AND NAGASAKI, when a bunch of half-starved Japanese soldiers decided to commit suicide-by-Bong and charged his position.

Over 50 Sunrise-Islanders were killed and Tom was the only Bong casualty. He was found beneath the body of a Jap soldier he had apparently killed before succumbing himself to a bullet wound in his neck.

Diana

We'll tackle Diana next because her story intertwines with many of her sisters. When they were young, her younger sister Jessica was her best friend and the two were inseparable. This will become very ironic later.

Remember what I said about 'coming out'? Well Diana made a mini-scandal by engaging and eloping with a son of the Guiness beer family when she was 17.

This is the couple in Sicily. Daddy was not pleased that his daughter had had her guts pushed in by an Irishman but, as Diana was now spoiled goods, he had no choice but to agree to the wedding. Especially when he found out how much money this beer-peddling Irishman had.

They had two sons but the marriage was headed for the rocks. Little known to the boozy Potato-neighbor, his wife was being watched by eyes other than his... cold, blue eyes which watched and waited and drew their plans against him...

Nah, actually Oswald Mosely didn't have to plan against Guiness because he had been banging his wife pretty much throughout their marriage. Mosely was pretty set-up on Diana but he was married to the great-granddaughter of Lord Curzon, the first Viceroy of India, and it would be awkward for him to divorce as his in-laws had got him his peerage. His wife was also the one who got him started in politics and had previously served with him as a Labour Party MP.

In case you've never seen Peaky Blinders, Oswald Mosely was the leader of the British Union of Fascists which was founded out of the ruins of his previous organisation The New Party which was built out of the ruins of the organisation he had stolen from Rotha Lintorn-Orman, a female WW1 ambulance driver who had repeatedly ran out into No Man's Land, to rescue wounded Bongs. Before you say, 'ah, relying on the Krauts not shooting a foid right?' this is what she looked like in 1916:

She actually deserves her own effortpost because she was pretty remarkable. Died aged 40 of booze, s*x (with both men and women) and drugs (opium being a favorite). Chaddette Chuddette manifest.

Anyway, in 1933 Lady Mosely died suddenly of peritonitis. Before you jump to any conclusions, Oswald was heartbroken and even Diana could not console him. Fortunately, his wife's younger sister could, and Ossie fricked the pain away with a younger, tighter version of his dead wife.

Then he married Diana straight after she finally divorced that dreadful Irishman.

_{Diana did not look happy with the outfit her husband asked her to wear that day}

Diana's marriage to Mosely strained her relationship with most of her family. Her parents considered the two to be 'living in sin'. Jessica couldn't get over Mosely's politics and learned to hate her sister for them too. Nancy despised Mosely too but learned to get along with him for the sake of her relationship with Diana- Nancy would never make a good Redditor. She did eventually ruin things by writing about Mosely in her book Wigs on the Green and she and Diana stopped speaking until after the war. The rest of the family got along very well with Ossie- history does not record if Tom tried to get his bussy blasted the fascist leader.

In 1934 Diana's sister Unity took her to Nazi Germany. After they attended a rally- just for funsies, you know- Unity asked Diana if she'd like to meet 'her new friend Adolf'. Diana would return with her husband the following year. Unbeknown to them, they were being watched by other eyes... cold, blue eyes which watched and waited and drew their plans against them...

Well, not Winston Churchill actually- Churchill had behaved far too Chuddy during the Great Depression- wanting to turn the army loose on protesting miners, that kind of thing- so Stanley Baldwin kicked him out the government. But MI5 and MI6 both had their eyes on the Moselys.

Diana and Oswald were married in 1936 at the home of Josef Goebbels. Diana had never expressed any antisemitic sentiment and the BUF had largely avoided ragging on the hebes until after their visits to Nazi Germany. Clearly Hitler must've had an impression on them because they came back determined to act like an American college student in 2024. The resulting carnage when BUF blackshirts attacked a Jewish part of London was known as "The Battle of Cable Street" and was a massive PR disaster for all things Chud in Bongland. Rising fear of Hitler and the danger of him igniting a new war meant that the Moselys' trips to the Third Reich looked increasingly bad. Mosely tried to rebrand his party as the 'British Union', dropping the F-word, but when war finally broke out, Churchill's new coalition government decided that Ossie and Diana should probably spend the war under lock and key. An MI5 document from the time described Diana:

"Diana Mosley, wife of Sir Oswald Mosley, is reported on the 'best authority', that of her family and intimate circle, to be a public danger at the present time. Is said to be far cleverer and more dangerous than her husband and will stick at nothing to achieve her ambitions. She is wildly ambitious."

When the filth came to arrest her she stuffed a signed photo of Hitler under her newborn son Max's cot. Max, btw, would become the chief executive of Formula 1 motor racing in later life and successfully sued the News of the World for this headline:

Not because it wasn't true he was into bondage and hookers but because it "wasn't in the public interest" to know he was into bondage and hookers.

Anyway... initially the Moselys were held separately but Churchill would personally allow them to stay together after 1941 in Holloway prison. They were moved to house arrest in 1943 and released in 1945 although they were denied passports until 1949. Mosely was not stripped of his knighthood.

Evelyn Waugh, a friend of Tom (buttsecks not confirmed but heavily implied), said Diana wore a diamond swastika upon her release from prison.

Post war Ossie tried to revive the Union but failed. The couple moved to France for a while where they were neighbors of the Duke and Dutchess of Windsor...

Yeah, them. Here's charming old Uncle Edward & Auntie Wallis with their neices Elizabeth and Margaret...

Oswald continued to frick around throughout his marriage to Diana. She said of this; "I think if you're going to mind infidelity, you better call it a day as far as marriage goes. Because who has ever remained faithful?"

He died in 1980. She died in 2002. Of Hitler and the holocaust here are some of her remarks:

"I didn't love Hitler any more than I did Winston [Churchill]. I can't regret it, it was so interesting."

"Well, of course, horror. Utter horror. Exactly the same probably as your reactions." However, when asked about having revulsion against Hitler for this, she said that "I had a complete revulsion against the people who did it but I could never efface from my memory the man I had actually experienced before the war. A very complicated feeling. I can't really relate those two things to each other. I know I'm not supposed to say that but I just have to."

And a couple of stories about her and God's Chosen People:

The journ*list Paul Callan remembered mentioning that he was Jewish while interviewing her husband in Diana's presence. According to Callan, "I mentioned, just in the course of conversation, that I was Jewish—at which Lady Mosley went ashen, snapped a crimson nail and left the room ... No explanation was given but she would later write to a friend: 'A nice, polite reporter came to interview Tom [as Mosley was known] but he turned out to be Jewish and was sitting there at our table. They are a very clever race and come in all shapes and sizes.'"Diana offered to entertain her teenage half-Jewish nephew, Benjamin Treuhaft, on a trip to France. The offer was refused by Benjamin's mother, Jessica, who remained estranged from Diana over the latter's political past.

"Maybe instead they [European Jews] could have gone somewhere like Uganda: very empty and a lovely climate"

Jessica

Everyone called Jessica 'Decca' and I'm doing the same cos it's easier to type. The way some people around here act, you'd think people like Decca were invented by social media but that's not true. Long before reddit, twitter and all these other 'spaces', Decca hated her parents (because they were fascists), hated her country (because it was fascist), hated the media (because it was fascist) but didn't hate her sister Diana until she married an actual fascist. Some would say that points to Diana being far more influenced by her husband and her pal Adolf than any ideas in her own horsey-nosed blonde head but that doesn't really scan with her later life.

Wikipedia insists that Decca rejected her father's wealth and status but, of course, that was only true after she copied her sister and ran off with a wallet... I meant man- her cousin actually. They ran off to join the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War. George Orwell's wife apparently hated Decca after the latter enthusiastically supported the Red Terror, where the Soviet-aligned Brigades purged the Marxist-Anarchist Brigades to which the Orwells were members. I recommend Orwell's book Homage to Catalonia if you want the full story on that shit-show.

So, a privileged foid with daddy-issues and very left-wing politics who turns authoritarian at the drop of a hat...

Burgerland was the obvious destination for such a lady.

Her Cousin-Husband dead in the war (officially MIA but I think we can now- in 2024- confidently say he died), she would marry Jewish American civil rights lawyer Robert Treuhaft with whom she joined the Communist Party of America. She had literally been in the country for less than six months. Incredible people complain about modern immigrants. In their defence, they both left the party in 1958 after the Soviet invasion of Hungary.

Along with her husband, and a bunch of other leftie celebrities, she campaigned against the r*pe conviction of Willie MacGee

_{wearing t-shirts over your suit was the 40s equivalent of taking the knee}

In the 50s, Decca and her husband refused to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee and she wrote a book pooping on her new homeland:

And a book pooping on her family:

She wrote other things and her letters are published. It's all exactly what you'd expect. Wikipedia insists they're 'classics'. Remember that MI5 document talking about 'best authorities' on Diana's character? Yeah, that was almost certainly Decca. Her last meeting with Diana was around the deathbed of their sister Nancy. Of Decca, Diana said this:

"I quite honestly don't mind what Decca says or thinks. She means absolutely nothing to me at all. Not because she's a Communist but simply because she's a rather boring person, really."

She was also a shitty mother surprise, surprise.

Decca died in California, like all good communists.

This has turned into a bigger thing than I thought. If enough people show an interest, I will write up on the final four Mitford girls- Debo the Dutchess, Pamela the (alleged) lesbian chicken farmer, Nancy the 'Woman' and Unity...

Yeah, Unity is really something else.

We just got paid those 4 florins so I go out to spend it. I pick up some slightly better leg armor for Redactor and throwing weapons for Redactor and Yuna. One reason why I want most of the party using throwing weapons right now is that later on we'll be using alchemy, tossing potions in combat. I think (I'm not 100% sure on this) that Thrown Weapon is checked to see how fast and accurately you can do that.

Now I want to find somebody who will give us a raubritter quest, the best quest in any RPG ever. So we'll ask the usual suspects: The Fuggers, the Medicis, and the Hanseatic League.

This guy wants us to go to another city and break in and steal something. I don't do these because they're really dangerous, don't pay well, and they're not really something Christian heroes do.

This guy wants us to go on another fetch quest. It's to Magdeburg. That's way out in the east of the country. Way too far to be worth the effort. (I recently was listening to a podcast where they were interviewing a Cold War fighter pilot. His job if the balloon went up was to nuke the airbase at Magdeburg. It was assumed he would have nowhere to go back to after that because his own base would have gotten got. Some parts of history aren't romantic.)

This guy doesn't even offer us a job. Trying to get a quest depends on a lot of factors including fame, local reputation, and the speaking skills of your leader. And often they just don't have a job for you.

Let's try the mayor. It's risky trying to ask him for a job because he might just laugh at you and call you names and damage your reputation, but I'll risk it for you guys. Wow. We actually got in, but he offered us another fetch quest that would take us into East Germany.

I have a specific quest I want to go on for this episode for dramatic purposes so I'm gonna just play the game for a while until I run into it.

This is what I was looking for. A challenge to fight a raubritter. Germany was fragmented into so many little territories at this time that you could have one butthole who owns a castle and is the dictator of his little territory, robbing and raping with impunity. Actually it's not that different today. Look at Ferguson, Missouri where the cops were just randomly pulling over black guys and giving them tickets and threatening to frame them for a crime if they didn't pay it. This guy has a castle east of Paderborn.

Okay there's his castle. There's many ways to approach this. First let's trying just asking to come inside and ask to spend the night. What a nice guy.

We've gotten into the castle, which gives us the opportunity to try to burn it down. If we're very lucky then it's game over for him. We'll still have to fight him as he and his troops run to escape the castle, but they won't fight nearly as well.

Well so much for that. Obviously we can't ask him to let us in again. We could try to scale the walls and sneak in and try setting a fire again, but I don't like our odds. If our guys fall then they'll get hurt. Instead I think we'll go for a long campaign of attrition. I'll start out by ambushing his squads of troops roaming around the forest shaking people down.

They saw us first so we don't get the element of surprise. Oh well. We can take these guys I'm sure.

We're outnumbered 5-4 but all of these guys are the same level of trash as those street thugs we fought in the beginning. Their leader has roughly the same kind of equipment as us but it's of lower quality and I'm sure he's weaker and less skilled than our guys. I start out by having everyone use their missile weapons against one of the trash enemies. Hopefully we can cut him down and take away their numerical advantage before they even reach us.

It works. After that it's just a free-for-all. I maneuver my guys around a little to try to double team one enemy at a time, but it's not a tough fight. Take a look at the bar on the left side of the screen. The blue, green, and yellow columns show how much endurance, strength, and divine favor you have. The thin little column next to it is the same thing but for your current target. You can see here that Sasha and Yuna have taken minimal damage.

At this point I'm going to grind for a little bit, ambushing one or two more patrols. Every time we wipe one out, we reduce the raubritter's army a little bit. If my guys get hurt, I'll camp out and heal. You can't just camp forever, but I don't expect to get hurt very much.

All right, enough playing around. It's time to lay siege to his castle. Again, every time I beat one of these resupply parties it weakens his army. That means fewer enemies with less equipment.

Whoa! This is it. This is gonna be a tough fight as the raubritter is equipped with plate and chainmail armor, much better than ours. He's carrying a two-handed sword that will chop through us like butter. And we can expect him to be much more skilled than his minions. Fortunately since we've killed so many of his men already he only has three to accompany him. They are pretty well equipped though, comparable to us. This is going to be far tougher than any fight we've been in yet. I don't know if we can pull it off. My strategy will be to kill off his thugs as fast as possible so we can all gang up on the raubritter. Even with plate armor we should be able to take him down then.

I got one just with missiles. Good start.

I got two! That's Nathan with the bow who landed the 13-point hit.

I think we're alone now, there doesn't seem to be anyone around.

Now it's time to finally explain how combat works. It's complex but it's also pretty intuitive so you don't have to worry too much about the math if you don't want to. The most important mechanic is armor penetration. Armor comes in 5 levels of thickness. Each weapon has a rating for how good it as at penetrating armor. If the weapon's penetration rating is the same as the armor's thickness, damage is cut to 1/3. If it's lower it's cut to 1/8, which often means no damage at all. So as you can it's extremely difficult to take down a well-armored opponent.

The raubritter is wearing plate (5) and chainmail (4) on his limbs. (You hit the limbs 50% of the time.) Unfortunately I didn't remember to reequip Nathan with a better weapon and his long spear only has a penetration of 2. Sasha's longsword has 3. Yuna and I have maces with 4. (One of the reasons why we want a mix of weapons in the party is some of can specialize in penetrating thick armor while others specialize in dealing out maximum damage to less armored opponents.) At least our people will get a few bonus damage points for being very strong, but clearly we'll need to use some new tactics to beat him even 4 on 1.

First though, Yuna has taken a heck of a beating so let me see if I've got any saints who can heal her. St. Anthony hears Redactor's plea and actually heals her quite a bit. Now it's time to gang up on him.

Throughout the game up until now we've just been using the standard attack mode. But to take down the raubritter we're going to have to switch modes.

• Standard - The most appropriate in most situations, but not this one.

• Vulnerable - Try to hit the enemy in a vulnerable spot. This adds 1-4 penetration when you hit, but you also attack much more slowly. We put Sasha and Nathan in this because otherwise they'll never penetrate and only do a couple points of damage if they're lucky.

• Berserk - Just go all out on the attack like you're on PCP. We put Redactor in this mode. You're much easier to hit, but since we're just hitting him from behind that doesn't matter. Each attack is slightly less likely to hit but you attack much faster. Hopefully with that rain of blows we'll frequently hit his limb armor and do moderate damage.

• Parry - Concentrate on defending yourself. You're much less likely to be hit, especially if you have high weapon skill, but your attacks are slower. We put Yuna in this mode as she's holding off the raubritter while the rest of us attack him from behind.

It actually goes much easier than I expected and we take him down quickly. I think what was happening was that with all four of us on him at once, we were hitting on every attack. Sasha and Nathan couldn't make a lot of attacks as they were in vulnerable mode, but if every one hits that's good enough.

Now off to collect our reward. The 8 florins are nice. With that I can afford to buy at least one of my people a high-end weapon. Next time we run into a heavily armored opponent I want at least one guy to be able to penetrate easily. Pretty soon I might even be able to afford to dabble in alchemy. We get less tangible rewards as well: 40 reputation in Paderborn and +20 fame. (I think we got +3 for that satanic village.) Local reputation helps in a number of ways: better prices, better chances of being offered a quest, and people are just more likely to cooperate with you.

But maybe the biggest reward is the haul of loot we got from all those thugs we butchered. Look at all this stuff Sasha is carrying. Since they like us here in Paderborn it's a good place to sell it all. That brings in another 8 florins. The raubritter had below-average plate and chainmail. Nathan might be just barely strong enough to fight effectively in this, depending on what weapon we get him. There's also a two-handed sword. This has 4 penetration, so I'll keep it for Sasha to use against heavily armored opponents. The longsword is probably better for everyday use as it's much faster and lets us use a shield in the other hand.

Next episode: Let's spend some of this money!

On his blog's open thread, one of the poor confused SFBA Rationalist Cultists contemplates voting for Trump, and Scott Alexander has this to say.

I agree it's unlikely (not impossible!) that Trump does something worse than January 6, but I kind of depart from consequentialism here; it seems like this sort of thing ought to be punished regardless; the next person who considers something similar ought to know it will make them a pariah. If we can't manage pariah, it should at least lose them a few percentage points of the vote.

So Scott Alexander seems aware of the facts of the Jack Smith briefing on the subject, but there is an extremely obvious opening for Scott Alexander to punish Trump for defecting from democracy, and that is of course using the word 'fascism' to describe the movement of Trumpism.

But that would require Scott Alexander to call wolf, and Scott Alexander is never wrong. He couldn't possibly have been wrong when he wrote "You Are Still Calling Wolf," because he is definitely rational, his cult doctrine says so, and he follows it scrupulously.

---

Here's what we have:

A country has fundamentalist, evangelical religious people who have blind faith in their creed. They believe whatever their leaders tell them.

Fundamentalist: especially prone to doctrine-based 'fundamental' arguments or reasoning.

Evangelical: especially prone to evangelizing their religion.

The SFBA Rationalist Cult has elements of fundamentalist, evangelical religion. They have a bishop in the form of Scott Alexander who tells them what to think, or at least, everyone sure does seem to believe the same things Scott believes about whether or not there is a wolf in our politics!

This is why it matters that Scott got it wrong.

---

So these cultists basically have this doctrine called "The Sequences" which are overtly spiritual in nature, they inscribe a definition of virtue in those who read it. The trenchant criticism of their doctrine is 'what is novel is not good and what is good is not novel.' It's a re-implementation of Christian ethos with a secular mindset, but these people believe they discovered everything for the first time and are the originators of a new philosophy. Because of this they have a horrid myopia of thought, an incapacity to relate to normal people and normal politics.

And Scott Alexander evangelizes his "Effective Altruist" philanthropy wing of the cult. They used to be more evangelical, it used to be common for you to encounter some myopic person who on stumbling in conversation would say "Have you read the sequences? If you read the sequences you'd understand." They got this bullied out of them a bit over time.

But the most horrifying part of the story is that these are people who by and large participated in the New Atheism movement, a sort of online revival for the disaffected religious of the United States.

People who saw up close the authoritarian nature of blind religion.

And these are the people who when fascism came to the United States were unable to perceive it as fascism. There were times you could get Scott to admit that Trump, that Trumpism, was dangerous, though it was never clear on exactly what Scott thought that danger was, only that he had been bullied by wiser people in his circle into saying "Trump bad" grudgingly in vague terms.

The problem is that Scott Alexander, when he looked at leftists freaking out about the fascism, loaded all of his denialism about the wolf on one single point: racism. "It's not quite as overtly racist as Hitler, therefore it's not fascism!" said Scott proudly; "Well reasoned!" cried back his cultists.

Fundamentalist, evangelical Christians gather around a strongman type in 2016. Our politics gets more violent because violence begets violence and Trump glorifies violence. The media is discredited as an institution in away that evokes linear comparisons; "Lügenpresse" and "fake news."

The ugly truth is that Scott Alexander's skepticism of woke ideology obscured, for Scott, the wolf. After all, proclaimed Scott, isn't the media lying about IQ and race? "Well reasoned!" cried back his cultists.

The distinction between avoiding uncomfortable or irrelevant topics and accusing the media of fabricating lies when they report the actual truth of Trump's actions was lost on the SFBA Rationalist Cult.

So a 'policy of cruelty' was enacted in internment camps and 1000 children are still not reunited with their parents. This doesn't count as fascism for Scott Alexander. (Obama's child separation policy was restricted to incidents of suspected human trafficking.)

And now we're at:

• Trump wants to mobilize the military to deport illegal immigrants

• Trump wants to mobilize the military to deport legal immigrants, the Haitians here legally

• Trump wants to mobilize the military against public dissent

And on January 6th Trump launched an insurrection in denial of the election he lost. Is that not fascist enough for you, Scott? Why not? Because he didn't talk enough about race in his speech that day?

I suspect there's a few things going on with these remaining denialists:

• These people all think about what they would do if they were to launch a dictatorial takeover of the government, and the one thing they would not do is say so many things with fascist vibes. "Since Trump is emitting fascist vibes, we can safely conclude he is engaging in 'kayfabe' to trick Democrats into overreacting, and will not be fascist!" they proclaimed. "Well reasoned!" replied the cultists.

• Total woke derangement capture: fear of a communist purge keeps them more afraid of Democrats than of Republicans. This is another inability to perceive a real difference. There's a moderate center and an extremist fringe in much of politics, and the scary thing happens when the extremist fringe gains the center. This is what Trump represents, the extremist fringe in the center. Neither Biden nor Harris is communist and the woke moral panic has to come to a stop. ("You Are Still Calling Wolf About Communists")

---

The consequences of Scott Alexander's writing is essentially that everything his cult touches is tainted. When one part of the country is either deceived by the lies of a fascist or endorses those lies as authoritarians do, another part of the country which reads books can recognize the wolfish characteristics, and you are unable to recognize the wolf, you have a credibility problem.

Why should anyone take you seriously on your list of existential threats to the human race if you can't even notice the threat to the human race that has demonstrably occurred before?

Like it's pretty simple: the howling murder monkeys swarm and kill a bunch of people under a strong murder monkey. It's not more complicated than that until you give the murder monkeys a military industrial complex. Genocide is in our blood this way, and when the howling murder monkeys swarm (do you agree that they are swarming? What was January 6th if not a murder monkey swarm?) it is irresponsible to believe they would not conduct a genocide.

What would be hundreds or thousands of enemies of the new regime being put to death by the howling murder monkeys (King Herod comes to mind) becomes millions. It's not complicated. It's just not.

So the people who were freaking out in your clinics, Scott, might have gotten some details wrong, but they were "directionally correct" and now the SFBA Rationalist Cult has a credibility problem because you faceplanted hard when it came to politics. "Rationalists should win, why don't they?" Because of congenital failures in their doctrine: they believe they received a revelation, they're constantly receiving revelations, but only in a secular way, you see, because they're not religious, because religious people are irrational, and rationally a rationalist must believe they are rational: they followed the spiritual practice, they receive the spiritual result.

If you make the motions of evangelizing for your cult, you are evangelizing for your cult.

---

@Impassionata3 wrote about "microfascisms" or "millifascisms" in the context of the Pledge of Allegiance

The pledge of allegiance is the activation, as in oral practice, of the national mythos cult ideology. I loosely consider it harmless. is it fascist? because all national myth is supportive of a jingoistic narrative, it's a little fascist; you can measure it in microfascisms but you will still have to measure it thus. In school you have the option not to say it. This is an introduction to the notion of freedom of speech and questionable allegiances; for this I think it good education. But there's no denying that because it is 17.76 microfascisms, it marks the danger.

Democrats who try and put an end to this have a certain right to their opinion. There's nothing wrong about the motivation to reduce the microfascism exposure, even if I personally don't think eliminating that source of microfascism emissions would have prevented the current fascism.

Let me see if I can just dash this out:

• Trump is called fascist by a bunch of people. Bush did not vote for him.

• The child separation policy, a deliberate policy of cruelty, is implemented. Over 1000 kids are still separated from their parents.

• Trump summons his militia through Steve Bannon (January 6 documents out of Chutkan case show) and many people have gone to jail already for his attempted coup.

• Bush called January 6th an insurrection.

• Trump indicates he will mobilize the military to round up undesirable people.

If you placed your bet on "Trump is not a fascist" in 2016 and have not figured out that you lost, too bad!, you lost, it was fascism. It was at least 1000 millifascisms and it didn't come from the pledge of allegiance.

So my question for Scott Alexander becomes something roughly like:

How many millifascisms have to accumulate before you have a full fascism?

or

If the right word to use to describe the threat of Trumpism isn't fascism, why not? What word would you use instead?

@Impassionata3 again has a scoop here with POST-POST-POSTMODERN QUASI-MARXIST NEO-FASCISM

Though I think I prefer:

Postmodern Proto-Marxist Neo-Fascism

Postmodern

Broadly speaking there is modern thought which reaches its terminus around the horrors of World War I, and there is the alienating nihilism with regard to national narrative necessary in the post-WWII political landscape. Jacques Ellul wrote about "The Victory of Hitler": even if Hitler was defeated, the military industrial complex and its attendant mass murder machine lay waiting for the next genocidal dictator to emerge. It can happen here. Scott, pull the darn fire alarm.

Arguably @Impassionata3 is correct to use post-post-postmodern, because there are some convolutions. The first convolution occurs in the 60s with the hippies and the establishment of boomer ideology, in which revolutionary/progressive tendencies are absorbed by the machine but mostly people get jobs and have children. The second convolution occurs with the death of punk, you could add a third in the resurgence of grunge, but the 90s "Era of Good Feelings" came to an end with the third convolution in the War in Iraq. Baudrillard is notable here.

Proto-Marxist

Rush Limbaugh, as a warrior of the Cold War, studied his enemy and read Marx. Then he took a Marxist approach and injected class resentment into rightwing politics. Then Fox News took this propaganda technique and it became the defining perspective for the 2000s. This populist movement is Marxist, this is resentment of elites, these people are revolutionaries without a realistic goal besides violence against the system.

But Fox News can't call it Marxism or use the word 'class' because under boomer ideology, those are no-no words.

Neo-Fascism

Why "Neo"? Because it is a 'new' fascism in that it is aware of the reputation problems that fascism, being in my view a general ideology of power through any means possible which glorifies violence and tends towards white supremacy, and is therefore somewhat better at hiding its tracks. In this 'neo' lies a lot of reflection on the strategies it takes to advance the fascist agenda.

When I came to Scott Alexander's culture war threads in 2016, I saw that the fascists were there. This was strange, they don't normally gather. Of course it was later that good journ*lists made sure the public knew what Scott Alexander had done: he invited neoreactionaries, some of whom were overtly fascist, into his political spaces, and they festered there, giving Scott Alexander a deserved reputation for at best being an easily used dupe and at worst a sympathetic pseudofascist. To this day it is strange to me that the people in Scott Alexander's spaces don't know how unusual it is that they are so populated with white supremacists.

See the way it worked was: every Scott Alexander community, the subreddit, the groomercord, had fascists cruising 'mask on' and a sidecar community where they would go 'mask off.' But you didn't even need the sidecar community to see what they were, because in order to spread their message, the mask has to slip. I grew a lot less afraid of fascists because I could see that they were bound by the requirement to eventually spread the noxious element of their message and get unmasked. But I grew a lot more concerned with the idiot moderates like Scott Alexander whose blind obeisance to a logical interpretation of 'free speech' forbade calling fascists 'fascist' and racists 'racist' because these were no-no words in Scott Alexander's spaces, sensitive men who were afraid of wokes becomes woke derangement syndrome this way.

In other words, Scott Alexander's commitment to free speech was tepid and weak, confining discourse to moderate tones which are easily faked by fascists, driving out the people who can perceive the wolf. The resulting evaporative cooling effect leaves Scott being hit with cries of "Well reasoned!" for everything he says.

---

Bundle up the 'dissident right' and what do you have? "Two movies on one screen" is a postmodern construct. A bunch of people predisposed to denialism about the fascism both overtly and covertly, intentionally and unintentionally furthering the murder monkey hate spiral.

The consequences of Scott Alexander's political writing is indeed this failure in online politics to recognize the threat that Trump and Trumpism face (because, and this is important, the movement is as much in the people around the figure at the center of it.)

And you end up with Elon Musk retweeting someone claiming that during the Harris-Trump debate, Harris "lied" about Charlottesville and a bloodbath sentence.

But the full statement Harris made included:

• the Stand Back and Stand By comment Trump made, connecting him with the white supremacist militia

• January 6th itself: an armed mob with white supremacist militia attendees disrupts the peaceful transition of power and comes close to killing elected politicians

Since then, Jack Smith's briefing has provided this missing piece, that Trump called Steve Bannon who posted a call to arms ("all heck will break loose on January 6th")

So it's an insurrection, a call to civil war, an attempt to overturn a valid election.

That should be 1000 millifascisms. A full fascism. Add the child separation policy, add the threats to round up undesirables, and you should update your assumptions ("priors" implies a rigor that you do not have you frickhead cultists) to be that Trump and the people around him would absolutely turn the ovens on.

---

The best way you can punish Trump for defecting is to sound the alarm, Scott. You failed to do it before because you got distracted by a photo op with a taco.

The SFBA Rationalist Cult was especially good at rationalizing why they were so rational, and not so good at admitting their mistakes. I don't expect this to go anywhere but I have to try.

""Oh don't worry these people always out themselves" - Mario1599" -Dramamine

Full comments. Some sweatys can't behave, so of course the thread is locked. The top comments are funny though

Finally some foreshadowing of /u/LiamJazeefa:

Prologue

**One humble redditor suggests an offsite where evil reddit admins can't get the wholesome pedorinos. Another tells them to get on their uwu Groomercord. This is all it takes for (unarchived) TRANSPHOBIA to rear its head** https://archive.is/g0kxb

Part 1

**As predicted, we get an entire backstory about how Lilam is actually the real victim in all this. Some relevant points made** https://archive.is/vBAGT

1. No stalker child, keeping tabs on male feminists and child predators is a bad thing because it only makes them want to r*pe more(?)

2. When Chris Chan got stressed, he did his neurodivergent stress sigh. When this person get's stressed, they just need a little CP, as a treat

3. Age bracket is 3+, but don't worry, Xe sometimes has to settle for 18+

4. Not aware of recidivism stats, even though this contradicts the previous message (my 1)

5. Unironically does the "aktually it's ephebophilia" when they're x-age or older" Relevance is unclear when they're still saying they're attracted to literal toddlers too.

6. Despite not knowing any criminology stats (see 4) they just know in their heart of hearts that most MAPs are non-offending because ???

Just for the record they're admitting to acquiring and jerking it to CP

7. Want a source? Um sweaty, you're talking to an intellectual. Be prepared to get peer reviewed articles and 90 minute lectures from The Science™. It might be too much for your feeble mind.

8. Lists some of the dangeous apps pedos might be using to target children. Groomercord mysteriously not present

Part 2

**Now to the horrible stuff. TW: People are explaining why someone might not be sympathetic to someone who self-describes as a person who enjoys jerking off to children being r*ped.** https://archive.is/NBNtW#selection-1643.0-1650.0

Vivid_Wrongdoer_1662 (more like Bigot_Queerkiller_1488 am I right) makes this horrible point, but our intellectual has a strong rebuff to this nonsense.

• I don't have a time machine, BIPOC.

For some reason "I can't unfap to the r*pe of those kids" doesn't soften this heart of stone. Here comes the truth nuke. Total CP enjoyer absolution. Get ready to feel like a fricking fool all you woodchipper posters

• I'm absolved of my sins because

  THE STATUTE OF LIMITATIONS HAS EXPIRED

• something something therapy (that fixes everything according to reddit)

• People are being mean to me, did you ever think about that?

Yes, I wasn't punished, and I continue to be an unrepentant menace to children who is still attracted to them, but at least I'm not rude. Also you can't get me nah nah nah

Part 3

**Of course it wouldn't be reddit if we didn't try to use nu-terminology to try to de-stigmatize horrible behaviors act scientific and emotionally detached from our own horrible actions try to silence opposition by being a faux authority talk about this in a civil manner** https://archive.is/hPdkX

• all my critiques are ^^^ It's extreme copium and deflection

• I also like the random redditor trying to redefine porn on the fly because child porn was giving it a bad name or something: "You should use the better term, child sexual abuse material. Porn is consensual."

• Here's a few more redditors accidently telling on themselves.

-- They're just using harsh terminology to checks notes make child r*pe and CP sound bad:

-- P-do activists are so brave for sticking up for the stigmatized paraphilia community:

Certified yikes sweaty moments

Part 4

**One last over the top cope for the road- you're literally sending death squads after me.** https://archive.is/IiXqC

• The true victims in all of this are those that see mean words on their screen. Do you have any idea what it's like to be told to keep yourself safe by a stranger over the Internet (the answer is yes, it happens all the time, grow the frick up). This is what avoiding signs of victimization is, btw- minimize all your horrific crimes against children and then cry about mean words from pseudo-anon accounts you'll never interact with again.

-- "Go sit in a corner for three hours and imagine people saying these things to you every single day for 10 years."

counterpoint: Xe doesn't even need to do this, just stop telling people how much you enjoyed child porn. Stop telling people you find toddlers attractive.

• Fear of Doxing. I will once again remind you that NOBODY ASKED and you just volunteered about your attraction to 3+ year olds. If you did this on an account that can be connected to your real name, you should also be in jail for being fricking r-slurred.

• The famous Internet death squads are coming for the wholesome pedos (God I wish that were true )

Epilogue

. There is a twitter account with this same username- https://x.com/lilamjazeefa. The most recent tweets are from 2016 directly \@GovGaryJohnson and \@GovBillWeld... the Libertarian candidates for the 2016 election... Some jokes just write themselves.

If there is one thing I despise, it would be "low-effort" trolling. I see it all over this site. Today I am going to start enforcing consequences.

https://rdrama.net/post/308178/you-are-all-useless/7166452#context

Now it all starts when the user, @BooMetropolis enters my thread. He does nothing but spam emojis. A technique that was funny back during my amateur days of trolling, but one that I grew out of before I even left middle school. I tried to reason with him for a few comments to give him a chance to be more creative. He did not listen and continued to spam. When faced with a spammer there are multiple ways to counter them. I prefer finding a lower effort way to spam. Once I googled his name and discovered that he proudly displays his name and face for all to see. This only serves to make my job easier.

I instantly begin counter spamming. While he has to manually search for an emoji, I simply press ctrl-v and respond with his own face.

As I work from home and treat trolling as one of my passions it will be easy to counter spam him with his own face. But I will not stop there. Normally I would, but this guy considers himself a skilled troll. And yet he resorts to amateurish tactics? Disgusting. He needs to learn.

Before I explain what I did next, there is something one should know about me. I do not get off to porn, and I only release myself once per week in order to peak my testosterone. Moon's most major mistake was messing with me on a release day when my test is peaking. I also only ever get off to my imagination, and my own erotic novels that I have written and self-published. The next thing one should know is that I have mastered multiple forms of meditation, primarily focus meditation. One of the ways I have trained this is by releasing in the same exact spot on the wall for nearly a decade. I always place a target to prevent stains, and I can hit it from over 3 feet away now without even looking.

Why is this relevant? Because I released all over MoonMetropolis's face.

Your first response is probably going to be "Isn't that gay?!?" A response that is easily countered. Because you see, I was not thinking about Moon at all, my thoughts were focused entirely on his mother and my original story that I wrote about her. I simply stuck his face to the spot on the wall where I normally aim for and by controlling my thoughts I came all over him in the most heterosexual fashion. Below is the story I wrote and used as my inspiration. I wrote this in about 45 minutes, and was still on the clock when I wrote it meaning I made more today writing that story about riding Moon's mom than he made at all today. This is something called "effortless mastery". Years of work trolling the ff14 ERP community put on full display for all to see.

Sognara stared at the screen, his fingers hovering above the keyboard as "Moon" spammed emojis. It was a typical online spat, but for Sognara, this wasn't just about winning a digital war of words. He was disgusted by the low effort that his fellow "troll" was putting out. He decided it was time for a requiem. He googled Moon's name and instantly found his name and face. "Some people put no effort into their cybersecurity..." Sognara said smugly to himself as he stood up from the desk.

For you see, Sognara was not an ordinary troll. He had mystical powers that gave him the upper hand in more than just trolling. His eyes narrowed as an idea began to form in his mind. After a few keystrokes, Sognara's screen flickered, tapping into something beyond cyberspace. Through the glow of his monitor, he could see the dimly lit room where Joshua sat typing furiously. But his gaze shifted, zeroing in on the woman moving through the house in the background—Joshua's mother. A grin crept onto Sognara's face. She would be the key to his next move.

With a few whispered words, his power surged through the connection. In Joshua's home, a strange aura enveloped his mother. She paused in the kitchen, her hands trembling as she gripped the counter. Her body began to change—stretching, expanding, until she towered over the room, her head brushing the ceiling. She gasped in shock, trying to steady herself as she realized what had happened.

Joshua, oblivious, continued typing at his computer, wasting his entire life away, spamming emojis because there wasn't a single creative thought flowing through his thick skull.

Sognara wasted no time. With a surge of energy, he projected himself into Joshua's home. His form materialized near his mother, and without a second thought, he leaped onto her back, gripping a lock of her now massive hair like reins.

"Let's give your son a little wake-up call," Sognara chuckled, pulling on her hair as if steering her like a mount.

His mother tried to resist, but Sognara's will was too strong, her eyes wide with confusion and panic, moved forward, her huge feet thudding against the floor with each step. Sognara dug his heels into her sides, urging her toward Joshua's room.

As they approached, the walls of the hallway trembled. The floor groaned beneath her weight, and without hesitation, Sognara guided her to kick through the door. The force sent wood splintering into the room, causing Joshua to spin around, his face contorting in disbelief as he saw his now enormous mother standing in the doorway, Sognara perched smugly on her back.

"What the—?!" Joshua stammered, standing up from his desk, his hands shaking.

"Hey, Joshua," Sognara called, his grin widening. "Still think you're the best troll around?"

Joshua's mother, in her dazed state, stumbled forward, her massive hands flailing as Sognara guided her into the room. Her foot came crashing down on Joshua's desk, shattering it into pieces. His computer went flying across the room, sparks flying as it hit the wall.

"Mom?!" Joshua screamed, running toward her, but Sognara yanked on her hair, steering her out of the room. The giantess clumsily moved through the house, knocking over furniture and smashing through walls as Sognara spurred her on like a wild horse.

The house began to crumble under her weight, each movement sending tremors through the foundation. Sognara cackled heartily as they smashed through the kitchen, the giantess' hand accidentally sweeping dishes and appliances off the counters as she tried to regain her balance.

Joshua ran after them, helpless as the destruction unfolded before him. "Stop! What are you doing?!"

Sognara turned to face him, smirking. "You thought you could out-troll me? This is what happens when you mess with the master."

With one final command, Sognara guided the giantess toward the front of the house. Her foot slammed into the wall, creating a gaping hole as the structure gave way. The roof began to collapse, dust and debris filling the air.

As they stepped into the yard, Sognara gave one last laugh before jumping off her back, landing nimbly on the ground. The giantess shrank back to her normal size, collapsing into the grass, dazed and exhausted.

Sognara gave Joshua a mocking salute before he snapped his fingers, vanishing back into the digital void, leaving Joshua standing in the wreckage of his home, stunned and speechless.

With this blow dealt, I will now easily when the battle of wills and beat him at his own game. He will eventually realize that he can't out spam me when it takes me less effort to simply paste his face. If this continues to the point where I get bored of this I will hire an Indian to join the site and I will pay him 20 dollars per month to reply to any comments directed at me with his face until he gives up. That is called the power of having a job.

For the rest of you who lack creativity or who put no effort into your work I want you to consider this a warning. That is all for today.

Background:

Ariana Grande is a 31-year-old racially-fluid pop star who got her start on Broadway (13) and Nickelodeon (Victorious). She was probably sexually abused by someone important and as a result of that became extraordinarily popular as a singer who mixes pop, retro-pop and R&B elements in her songs. Her style can best be described as giving precocious coquette pickmeisha vibes.

Examples of hit bops by her include

Honestly her whole discography is great. Most of the time she pisses redditor race realists off because she unabashedly changes what race or other social construct she presents as.

Also she spit on a donut one time:

And she had to pay 1.25 million in alimony when she divorced her husband last year:

https://apnews.com/article/ariana-grande-dalton-gomez-divorce-f4393ab6b6c203f11d3fa4534978d6a8

Cynthia Onyedinmanasu Chinasaokwu Erivo is a 37-year-old African-English Broadway star who broke out in a revival of The Color Purple for which she won a Tony and a Grammy. Additionally she played Harriet Tubman in a movie about Harriet Tubman.

Needless to say, she's no Ari, but she's a decent enough singer and has been riding the DEI train fairly successfully.

Wicked (2003) was a musical based off a book based off a movie based off a musical based off of a popular's children's book published in 1900 called The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, which was written to surreptitiously indoctrinate children into buying Silver and believe in fairy tales. It was basically the Harry Potter of those aughts.

In the early these aughts, Broadway was having a very difficult time. It had become somewhat of a joke to have come from or to go to Broadway. Stephen Schwartz (famous for writing the music for Disney's Pocohantas and Dreamwork's The Prince of Egypt) decided to change all that by relentlessly targeting white women as a demographic. He used a combination of good music, easy moral lessons and nostalgia bait (for college, for Americana and for a popular children's story) in order to make Wicked. It was an extraordinary success and was basically the MCU of musicals. For years afterwards musicals were a thing again.

Originally, the wicked witch in the musical was played by Idina Menzel, a Jewish-American Broadway star with phenomenal vocals known for playing Maureen in the musical Rent, known for her jaw-dropping performance in Wicked and much later known for the hit Disney single "Let it Go"

Sometime around when people were starting to pretend Hamilton was good and JK Rowling was still getting shit for Goblins being antisemitic caricatures (back before Hamas made antisemitism cool again) Idina Menzel was replaced by some DEI hire and a story that was originally a thinly-veiled allegory for Jewish Americans feeling out of place in WASP society and then being pogromed for being Nietzchean supermen was replaced with the same empowered Black vs oppressor White story we've seen a hundred times now.

Anyways, they made a movie out of it and true to the moment they picked a not well-known black star whose vocals are only going to be up for the task of the musical's most important song if the audio is remixed by ChatGPT. I'm still going to watch it (and so should you!)

---

There are two main types of anti-Ari Wicked posts:

1. I can't believe Ari is outshining Cynthia 😡

2. I can't believe Ari is skinnier than me 🤬

---

Here we have a gay man complaining about how Cynthia is being overshadowed by Ari:

https://old.reddit.com/r/ArianaGrandeSnark/comments/1g1wdj8/glad_more_people_are_noticing/

Comments include:

It's the marketing for the movie too. Plenty of trailers begin and end with Ariana's voice over, feature clips and substantial soundbites from Popular, show multiple costumes and moments from AG…. And have scarcely any meaningful Elphie moments. Even the snatches of her they show in the clips are like Yeoh and Bailey saying something to her, it's not even her speaking. I swear there's way more Glinda / pink merch happening, and her merch is more designed.

and

i knew this would happen when ariana was cast

and

It's not the Ariana Grande show, though Ariana and everyone around her are trying to make it that way. Cynthia is the MAIN CHARACTER. PERIOD. Why isn't she the one that's heavily involved? They're banking on Ariana's name to sell tickets and get people into seats. Meanwhile Cynthia is forced to stay on the sidelines. It was an odd move to have Ariana on SNL again and not Cynthia or maybe BOTH of them together. Anyway, I hope they learn from this disaster and keep Ariana on the sidelines and give Cynthia the spotlight during the sequel. Though I doubt they'll sell as many tickets for that than this first movie.

If I see this movie, it'll be to see Cynthia's acting and for the music. I'm still debating because I don't want Ariana's bad acting (the Cat Valentine acting aka the only acting she knows since her Nickelodeon days) to ruin the movie for me.

Here's a post where people look at someone with a normal bf% and think she's dying of cancer:

https://old.reddit.com/r/ArianaGrandeSnark/comments/1g1siyh/trigger_warning_respectfully_eff_fans_who_say_she/

I said I was genuinely concerned in the ariheads sub and quickly realized it wasn't even worth it. Someone replied "who needs haters when you have concerned fans" I didn't even respond. I was like alright, you delusional fricks. Stay enabling. We're not stupid.

and

Her physical health is going downhill :/

Anyways there tons of these things. Have a look yourself

https://old.reddit.com/r/ArianaGrandeSnark/comments/1eqj580/not_another_trailer_wait_is_that_ethan_and_ariana/

https://old.reddit.com/r/ArianaGrandeSnark/comments/1et15pp/people_are_waking_up/

https://old.reddit.com/r/ArianaGrandeSnark/comments/1fs1zyp/ha/

https://old.reddit.com/r/ArianaGrandeSnark/comments/1cmd7xk/gagged_her_a_bit/

https://old.reddit.com/r/ArianaGrandeSnark/comments/1c16urb/_/

BONUS: Here's the youtube version of a tiktok that goes into detail about something:

CONTEXT:

https://www.eurog*mer.net/dragon-age-the-veilguard-wont-have-an-arachnophobia-mode-because-it-doesnt-have-a-single-spider

Apparently the uber soys working on DA4 deliberately avoided the use of spiders as enemies, in order to avoid offending the sensibilities of those with arachnophobia.

The news of this going along the grapevine is just many tiny titbits of news, making even the most braindead slopconsuming DA fans hesitant about being excited regarding the upcoming Dragon Age 4 in less than a month - especially since 3 months ago, Bioware had released a trailer which garnered a large amount of dislikes from people for a myriad of reasons.

The reason for the backlash or dislike or lack of positive feedback are many, including the great fracturing of the fanbase - but most of it was also to due with the context within which the DA4 trailer was released. For the past 2 years gaming has seen spectacular mega-blockbuster game failures from AAA developers and publishers, stuff like Redfall and GOllum, Forspoken and Suicide Squad and Skull and Bones, Saits Row 2022 reboot and so on.

ALL of these uber AAA games had immediate uncertainty and pushback upon their trailers, Saints Row 2022 reboot's trailers back in 2020 & 2021, had immediate backlash from the core Saints Row fanbase, whom had gotten used to the dark humor and morally abhorrent but likeable protagonists of the series.

The student soyboys protagonists of the reboot, left many with uncertainty as to the quality of the rest of the game, if the developers could seemingly miss the previous tone of the series so badly to SUCH an extent. Even Saints Row 4, the batshit insane matrix alien invasion parody title, held the dark humor and moral abhorrence of the protagonists to old standard, even if Saints Row 2 fans hated the zany story.

Instead it gave the fanbase a fear that the developers of the Saints Row 2022 Reboot legitimately hadn't actually played the games, or legitimately didn't comprehend them and their themes.

In the ensuing months past its release in 2022, the /r/saintsrow sub was a perpetual battleground, where shitlibs wokes and soys tried to gaslamp everyone into believing the game was good or even of acceptable quality - yet this time, the spectacular critical and financial failure vindicated the detractors of the Reboot, in that their fears all the way back in 2020 were well founded - in that if the developers could not even hold the same writing tone of the previous titles, whether through incompetence or agenda pushing, then there was very little chance that the other aspects of the game would be up to par.

A similar phenomenon had occurred in the trailers, and pre-release period of many uber high profile failures. Forspoken to Gollum, to Redfall. And although a bad trailer is never a guarantee of a predictor of the quality of a game, these specific high profile failures, each so close to each other, each vindicating detractors from teh moment the trailers dropped, demonstrated that much could be inferred by veteran gaymers or even normies ESPECIALLY negatively if the writing tone of specific series was different, if woke girlboss or woke seeming modern contemporary politics were present within the trailer, like a canary in the coalmine,

or just corpospeak and obvious trendchasing. The now infamous Concord failure was another such prediction by detractors as much as 2 years ago, since many Hero Shooter genre corposhit trendchaser soulless games have already lost millions for their demented out-of-touch CEOs. In fact Concord WILDLY exceeded even the worst predictions of failure as we now in the present know with hindsight.

I had an exchange with @Losercel 3 months back (can't remember the comments) where he exclaimed it was foolish for dramatards and other detractors to already be so negative with regards to a game still 4 months away, and I espoused that in isolation this might be true, but within the context of so many high profile failures, the negativity was warrented.

---

ON SPECIFICALLY THE PUSHBACK ON THE DA4 BIOWARE TRAILER:

Again many reasons for the negativity, but basically 3 months ago, the pushback could be boiled down to 2 main factors.

Many peeps immediately despised the artstyle of the trailer, declaring it too be "too cartoony", and appearing to be targeting the zoomer or Fortnite or Hero Shooter fandom.

With an additional 15 years worth of build up disdain for Marvelesque dialogue and writing

Additionally peeps decried the tone for being waaaaaay offbeat, too similar to Disney/Marvel or too light hearted, in comparison to the previous entries of the series having been relatively grimdark in tone type Dark Fantasy, with certain portions of of ALL 3 games having had sections which were borderline horror in tone and theme. (The Broodmother quests in Origins, the female Frankenstein quests in DA2, and the MINDRAPE quest or Fade in Inquisition) Even inquisition could have many dark moments despite its more colourful palette compared to its progenitors

"This is what Tevinter Magisters saw in Golden City."

Anyways it's just a whole comment section meming and lamenting the fear that the feel of the game was too different from its predecessors.

---

Additionally since 2019-2024, another phenomena had occurred, a relative mainstreamification of chudtubers and anti-woke media critics on Youtube, for example the most infamous currently being guys like the Critical Drinker.

Born from many chuds, to eventually even normies having had no outlet to voice their discontent of modern Hollyweird woke slop from both Disney and Hollywood greater, in which race-bending of white european characters from traditional medieval periods, to disliked girlboss chars, to the perception that modern contemporary politics had found its way into escapism fiction.

These anti-woke critics/youtubers still wouldn't sway any liberally minded peeps, and their reach was still only a fraction of normies, but even IRL in my real world experiences, around the office water cooler, or worksites or between trusted friends or family, I have noticed explicit anti-woke sentiment or talking points espoused by peeps i would consider super normie and apolitical, with regards to modern Hollywood media

https://variety.com/2024/tv/news/star-wars-lord-of-the-rings-bridgerton-toxic-fans-hollywood-response-1236166736/

Even Hollywood writers have actively written that detractor fandoms have started to have an actual word-of-mouth effects upon their bottom lines! With many blame being laid upon the feet of the myriad of anti-woke or chudtubers which had sprung up.

This exchange between @SpookNarca and @eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee best sums it up.

https://rdrama.net/h/vidya/post/307335/sweet-baby-inc-purged-its-client/7151111#context

https://rdrama.net/h/vidya/post/307335/sweet-baby-inc-purged-its-client/7151188#context

---

NO SPIDERS!

Back to the no Arachnophobia thing

Basically in the past 3 days Biowarefans have been slapping about how this is totally a non issue maaaaaaaaaaan, to this is another straw on the camel's back in terms of redflags

"On it's own, the lack of spiders is not an issue. The problem is quickly becoming all these small things that wouldn't really be an issue "on their own", they add up. No more spiders, only 3 choices (this is an issue on its own), only 2 companions, can't control your companions etc etc etc... DAV is quickly becoming unrecognizable."

"It's a sign that this game is going to have no teeth to it; it's going to be modern Marvel levels of Slop"

"Exactly, people like this would piss and shit themselves if Sten was a companion, or other character like Javik or Regill"

"I'm scared of spiders like most people but this is weird. This reminds me of a mod that replaced spiders with mabari. But they still spawned in by coming down from a web which is way FRICKING scarier than a spider doing that lmao"

<insert eyerolls="" here=""> </insert>

"I'm afraid of water. REMOVE THE OCEANS!!"

"To me this sort of thing raises concerns. These sort of changes feel more like "what we can do to appease the audience" whereas I don't think anyone who is creating a very good story would be worried about that because they know the game/story itself is enough that people will be a part of it and enjoy it regardless. Or it's just one less piece of art they have to design which would be in line with the Keep changes and scaling back scope."

This is especially noticable as ingame characters have joked at the amount of ingame spider enemies killed!

"Trump isn't a fascist. He's just an old man inflicting his narcissistic delusional consensus reality on the entire nation, backed by white supremacist militias which he has already used to attempt to overturn an election."

distinctions WithouT differences

@Impassionata asked me to handle @carpathianflorist 's cowardly request to define "tds," and while at first I was annoyed that Impassionata punted to me, the task has been growing in my mind.

There is this problem with predictive models: if you modeled Trump as an authoritarian dictator type from day one, you were carrying certain preconceptions which may or may not predict Trump's behavior on any given day. It became fashionable, in this postmodern way, to talk about "two movies on one screen." It became fashionable to view Trumpian 'fascist vibes' as an affectation and not an indication. After all, Trump didn't actually attempt to lock Hillary Clinton up.

This notion of 'kayfabe' made politics virtual in a way that would have stunned Baudrillard. Trump, it could be said, was only LARPing fascism, but (so went the theory of the people who denied the validity of the fascist indicators) this was only an elaborate ruse by which to draw leftists into overreacting to the fascist vibes and further discrediting them and empowering Trump.

The net effect was the term "Trump Derangement Syndrome," borrowing from "Bush Derangement Syndrome" which was a traumatic response to the machinery of war being leveraged in post-9/11 America. A large number of people described Bush as a fascist, and this was simply not true.

But it is true that the latent fascism of the United States accelerated under Bush. It is true that surveillance became normalized and the police state became deeply established.

I think much harm has been done by a misreading of Umberto Eco's ur-fascism. Seeking a simplistic definition of fascism and seeking to understand leftists in their own words, would-be commentariat, the chatterati, descended on Eco's article and misunderstood it.

It's also worth noting Jacques Ellul's assertion of "The Victory of Hitler," that regardless of the demise of Nazi Germany, there was no undoing the power of the military-industrial complex, that it could be tethered to a racist political movement at any point. This is the 'ur-fascism' lurking in the background of politics since 1945.

So there's a difference between the latent tendencies towards fascism, the introduction of the "pledge of allegiance" to classrooms, and the development of an actual racist violent movement.

It's more or less indisputable that Eco's ur-fascism exists in American politics. The question is whether or not a movement is active in its pursuit of power, a racist movement, a violent movement, a movement around a strongman.

Which is all to say that there is precedent for "Trump Derangement Syndrome" to describe an overreaction, a label for leftists who are 'taking the bait.'

---

But this is about communication of the danger. There were many, many points before Hitler's complete control of the police state. The historian says: this movement, Trumpism, bears many of the markers (but not all) of other movements with authoritarian demagogues. It's reasonable to expect that this is a danger to the continued stability of the United States, a danger to democracy, a risk of a purge of undesirables.

Indeed, the actual fact of the matter is that the child separation occurring in immigration processing centers was a deliberate cruelty (and that any separations which occurred under Obama were not inflicted as a regular punishment but out of concern for child trafficking; a distinction with a difference.) This cruelty of Stephen Miller was one of a large number of events which occurred which could not reasonably be said to be 'kayfabe.'

So there is all of this smoke, and there are all of these people who habitually engaged in denialism about that smoke. "That's not smoke, it's just kayfabe." "That's not smoke, it's just a LARP."

And prior to January 6th, perhaps there was limited evidence that Trump would actually engage dictator mode. But this refusal to accept the results of an election is the act of a tyrant. It's the act of a tyrant who is attached to a white supremacist movement which glorifies violence.

It's a fire.

So I ask you the question: who has been deranged by Trump? The people who reacted reasonably to the presence of a fire and called it a fire, even though the denialists called them deranged in their urgent reaction to the presence of a real threat?

Or the people who engaged in denialism about the fact of that fire?

Again, this is simply a matter of fact: Trump is a tyrant, a dictator, an authoritarian leader who does not care about the truth, who resorts to violence, who makes up lies about immigrants to demonize them and justify their mistreatment.

Anyone who can't accept that these people, if given power again, might very well commit genocide, has Trump Derangement Syndrome: Trump distorts their ability to see reality plainly. Trump becomes a figure who they have habitually defended and this deforms their understanding of the reality of these social forms.

---

Trump is a national disaster.

If you are late to this understanding, and can only now admit to the fact of the fire that the left has been warning about for the better part of a decade, pull the fire alarm. The best time to pull the fire alarm is as soon as you see the smoke. The second best time is now.

< me on day 3 of 8 hours of fricking BOULDERING with a 45 lb pack a day to get this stupid flag on the summit

Some info: yes Mt. Marcy is a real mountain lol. when I've told some of you about it you've gone "wtf is that real" but it's actually the highest point in the Adirondacks/NY in general https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Marcy

I made the flag emblem with my cricut and I used my serger to size down a cheap truth and reconciliation flag to fit on a stick . If I had my druthers it would be ironed but it seemed like a lot of work at the summit of a mountain

Since this is /h/outdoor and I did genuinely the most arduous horrible journey of my life I am going to hope I can do enough under expands to get effortpost status bc wow I was unprepared and I need to be compensated in some way for this terrible decision I made entirely of my own volition

Day 0.5

Started off the journey canoeing out to a campsite at Saranac Lake so we'd be able to get out to get to Marcy quick the next morning calm waters, nice warm day, perfect for a short hour long paddle

got a pretty nice island campsite, came with a big rock to put your stuff on canoe camping is great because you can just load things up heavy af and not have to worry about carrying any of it was a cozy start to the trip surely it can only get nicer from here!

Day 1

Woke up bright and early to start the day! But what's this... the fog has rolled in and the horizon has disappeared. That's okay just retrace our steps it will be easy and we'll be back to the truck quick

moments like these really make you understand why neighbors thought they could just tip over the edge of the earth

It took about 2 hours with 0 visibility navigating around islands that would only appear when we got really close to them, but we managed to get to land, loaded up the truck, consolidated the packs to bring JUST what we needed to get through the next few days of backpacking. It's just hiking+camping, so we felt pretty confident that our 45 lb packs would be fine. People who need expensive ultralight gear, lmfao, kitties, imagine spending thousands to have a light pack when you could just GIT GUD and be strong !fitness knows where this is going. Now that we were set up with the essentials we got on our way ....

...to spend $75 on parking alone they also made us get a bear barrel because bear hangs are illegal there it's the northeast, if a bear comes for your peanut butter just tell him polar bears go way harder than him and he doesn't deserve any lil treats and he'll run away crying. We purchased our barrel that totally fit all of our food and set off!

The first day we did this portion of the trip in red The first hour or so took us 2.5 miles to Marcy Brook. Nice dirt path, mostly flat, just a tiny bit uphill, boy this trip is going to be great! this is Marcy Dam so beautiful to see the mountains in the distance, the trees changing

Hm, there's campsites here, but if we go another half a mile, it'll be more secluded, and we'll be even closer to where we gotta go! What's another half a mile when we're already making such great time?

I can't begin to explain to you how fricking bad of a decision this route was. It immediately switches from flat, dirt paths to climbing over gigantic rocks. this is about the nicest that the path got, which as anyone who backpacks knows, this still sucks butt when you have a big pack and 4 days to go where you can't risk twisting an ankle. It got much worse than that but I had to lock in and didn't take pics unfortunately. Hiking when your knee is coming up to your chin to clamber over rocks is already tiring, but do this with a 45 lb pack as a 120 lb girl and it becomes a nightmare very quickly. I kept getting stuck in positions where I'd have to get on my hand and knees and pull myself up over rocks that were nearly as tall as me, and half the time my hiking companion would have to lift the pack as I stood because I couldn't stand up under the weight of it after 8 hours of pushing myself til my heartrate was hitting 180 GET A SECOND JOB IDC JUST BUY THE ULTRALIGHT SHIT IF UR A LITTLE GIRL TRYING TO DO THIS

Occasionally, there would be short breaks with very beautiful views that my camera cannot adequately portray the feeling of being very small in these giant gorges is incredible

After literally 8 hours straight of hauling myself up rocks, sliding off rocks taller than me where I was dropping down feet after that, getting stuck in between (I was seeing even shorter azn women come back the direction toward me with their dogs, b-word how the heck did you do that these rocks are 6 feet tall, there was 0 way I could've gone back through this path), doing the thing where you climb up cliff faces with your back wedged against them and shimmy up with your legs (chimneying?) we were no closer to finding a camp site. Morale was at an all time low. We were passing people, doing the wealthy mayo sport acknowledgements "hows it going" "you too" where you don't even really hear each other, you're just saying stuff to let each other know you're normal. Finally one asked "hows it going" and in my moment of personal 9/11 I was like "really bad actually we've been going nonstop all day I'm exhausted but there's 0 campsites and infinite giant boulders" and they indicated there were secret ones back a ways since the maps you buy at the lodge don't have campsites just lean-tos and they were all taken god bless those people

It was pitch dark by the time we found a spot to set up for the night even though we started at 6 AM. We brought a pot to put on the jetboil to fry up some spam for our dinners but it wasn't compatible so we just put wet soft spam in with knorr pasta packets and boiled em with the little jet boil thing made for boiling water , and that doesn't sound especially good but after that day this was literally ambrosia. After wondering for the past 4 hours if we were going to find a spot at all, my mind was too wired to fall asleep. Thank god for benadryl

Day 2

It could only get easier from there. Not even a moment, it really only could. It wasn't easy but anything compared to that first day was nice

We did this part in yellow ending up at the Feldspar campsite by mid day.

The day started off with a pretty light hike it wasn't so much a ton of climbing as much as just trying to keep your feet as dry as possible when you have to ford these large river sections

It was my first time crossing a rope bridge! it was pretty neat, but my pack got readjusted so it was even heavier that day, and I had to climb a big rock to get up to it and embarrassingly got stuck in front of a bunch of gay dudes lmao I had to take the pack off to stand up . I can squat 200 but turns out starting flat on ur belly after you've been gassed for hours is a whole other game

There was still a lot of climbing over large rocks, but they were only like waist high instead of chin high. there were a couple "what the frick" moments too though. I think this image actually represents the whole trip very well

We got into camp relatively early that day since there was still light out and it was nice for a couple hours til some randos came and set their tent up literally 5 feet away lmao wtf is with people the northeast has so many people that you climb boulders nonstop for 2 days and you still gotta listen to people talk about what growing up in a jewish home was like well into the night on a good day, in solitude, it's impossible to not make racist jokes in the tent, so I have to imagine we were probably pretty bad that night black bears are not worth being afraid of so we brought some trail mix in to snack on so before you set ur tent up right next to someone else consider: if u are afraid of bears, they may not be, and they're probably snackin in there

When the "would you choose the bear" thing was going around this is why it was stupid af btw, I could hulk probably a crowd of 10,000 Jewish women, I am not afraid of them nor even moids, but if I had to choose between a bear or Abby Shapiro and her giant milkers in the woods I would pick the bear. He's supposed to be there! I went to the woods to get away from you people

Day 3

To the summit! we did the green part of the map up to the summit and then back to the campgrounds. We left our shit set up and just took light packs. And what a good decision that was It was very very steep the first half. I've never been more happy to have sewed a full linen outfit for this trip than at this part - highly recommend investing in some linen if you're doing sweaty shit.

we kept coming across little flat areas where I'd try to prevent myself from looking up at the peak and at how far away it was. But the views were pretty lovely and because at least if it was arduous, it was arduous somewhere pretty

We stopped for lunch on this big flat rock just before you have to lock in to get to the summit, looking at the peak once again had me but sitting on this big rock and eating pepperoni and cheese wrapped in a tortilla hit in ways you couldn't even imagine

It started getting less "climb up rocks and boulders" and more "try to find a tree to grab while you walk up steep rock faces" until we finally reached the point when you can SEE the summit, and jfc

J

FC

I was expecting something of a trail. Maybe with a rope! You could hold it so you could pull yourself up kinda, and stabilize yourself!

NOPE

It's just some spray painted marks to tell you vaguely, the fewest humans have slipped and rolled off if they went this way. the perspective on this picture is kinda fun, almost looks like it could be me taking a photo below me of a flat area. No. It's straight fricking up. AND YOU JUST HAVE TO WALK UP IT

and you know what happens after you walk up it, right?

YOU HAVE TO FRICKING WALK DOWN IT TOO

WITH YOUR FEET

I need you to understand that the angle here is such that it kind of hurts your ankles to be walking up it. You need good grip shoes here. Or you just die lmao. There's a doxxing photo of me where some rocks slipped under me and I shut down and just curled into a ball for a few minutes until I started going up on my hands and knees while yuppies with their lil sticks were walking up, not a care in the world

But the peak! Again, photography fails me here, there's no way to capture what it's like looking DOWN on dozens of gigantic mountains, looking at places you've climbed for days to get to previously and seeing them so far below you. A couple screenshots from the panorama I took you could spend all day looking through the binocs up here

I spoke to the DNR worker at the peak and she confirmed they will be changing this to Marsey now that I've claimed it for us.

Climbing down the mountain sucked butt because I was scared of tumbling off, and we ran out of water and were thirsting over random mud puddles on the way 👀, but getting back to the tent at the end of the night and knowing that it was all downhill from here was so nice

Day 4: The Final Day

Just kidding lmfao, the final day started off with a bunch more frickin uphill. we did the final blue part all the way back to the parking lot on this day. We packed everything up and lamented having to carry our giant packs around again but at least we knew at the end of the day we'd be able to buy a bunch of goyslop and go hang out in an airbnb with a hot tub.

In the northeast, when a beaver sets up a dam, they just... divert the whole route for everyone and you have to traverse through the mud. They should learn about tannerite! Beavers may have built America but there's no reason you can't just step on their dams if they wanna be peepeeheads and set up on the route, at the very least I've seen dudes portage heavy butt plastic canoes over beaver dams while wearing CROCS, you're telling me these ppl expect you to be able to do the rest of this horrific trail but not walk on some beaver houses??

During the portions it wasn't muddy, it was lovely , during the portions it was muddy, it was funny to pass the yuppies with their lil sticks and white northface meanwhile I'm covered up to my waist in mud and almost lost my boot to the bogs

Eventually, we got back to Marsey Dam. And what a beauty it was. Past that, all flat land... that original 2.5 miles that made us think it'd be an easy trip. Seeing the truck again I've never felt more relieved. We were grunting out "truck!!! truck!!!!!" covered in mud, stinking to high heaven, my white shirt was permanently dyed brown from tripping almost getting lost in the bog like Artax, one side of my butt burning in ways never before felt because I was leading the climb up the giant boulders with my right leg. We went to a grocery store and bought a cart full of goyslop for a 'oops we were in the woods for it' bday and gorged ourselves !goyslopenjoyers know what it's like after camping

Total distance for the trip was only 18 miles, elevation was 2466 ft from bottom to top. If you did it without packs or ultralight ones the rock climbing would likely be just moderately challenging instead of

Overall this was definitely "type 2 fun" where it's not fun at all while you're doing it but in hindsight it was neat and I'm glad I did it. I'm also glad I had no idea it was going to be this butt because I would not have done it if I knew it was going to have 2 hours of hiking and then the rest would be rock climbing lmao. I would never do this again. If I had to, I'd do one of the day long routes where you don't camp and just bring a camelbak. No one seemed to want to kill themselves when they were doing the day hike so I assume it's not that bad, and the guide book says it's a fairly easy route.

I did see some really nice guys from NC with awesome accents struggling hard AF to get through one of the routes on our way out, I really hope they had a good trip and when they got back home it wasn't fricked I can't imagine anything worse than going through avalanche pass and then getting home and ur house floated away

idk what the word limit to getting something marked as effortpost is but i'm going to hit it

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Let's drop into this little village along the way. Who knows what we might find there?

I have a chat with the village chief.

Ye shall be as the gods, knowing good from evil.

Where have I heard that before? I know it's in Genesis, but who said it?

Let's head over to the church as long as we're here. Redactor's Divine Favor is depleted, but through some intensive prayer he can regain it.

Umm... wtf is going on here?

St. Simon Magus and St. Elymas. Have you figured it out yet?

There were a lot of them but they were poor unskilled villagers and they attacked us piecemeal so we made short work of them. The village chief had some armor slightly better than ours so I'll equip one of our people with it. (It's a good thing nobody complains about wearing the armor of a guy we just killed.) Now let's see what we can do about their demonic shrine.

Nice one Yuna. This is why we put so many points into her Religion skill. It really comes in handy sometimes. Sasha picks up a small increase to Virtue.

Now our cross country navigation is going to get complicated here because we're supposed to go "North of Bremen" but North of Bremen is the North Sea. So presumably we're looking for a place close by.

Oh frick. We're not just gonna die, we're gonna be dragged down into heck. Dying isn't such a big deal since ordinarily we'd just go to heaven and I'd have to create a new replacement character, but these bastards will steal our souls. There's no way we can beat them at this point. This is an utterly hopeless situation. Fortunately Redactor knows St. Anthony, the patron of hopeless causes.

Thanks for the intervention, bro!

We find Bremen. It's actually a little bit inland up the river. That explains a lot. We'll pop in for a bit to learn a new saint, maybe grab some bratwurst. The four choices we have are St. Francis and three extremely obscure ones. I remember that Francis is very generous in listening to you even if you aren't terribly virtuous, so he's a good one to pick for the early game.

Oh sweet. He's totally overpowed. He can increase our Virtue, which will let us supplicate some of those more difficult saints.

They make decent bows here so I pick one up for Nathan. It won't make a huge difference in most battles, but sometimes you can shoot down an enemy right at the start of the battle. Since fighting an enemy two vs. one gives you a huge advantage, anything you can do to reduce their numbers early on helps greatly.

I go quite a ways to the North past flooded marshes and finally find what I believe our destination is.

We haven't gotten around to buying a rope yet, but our people are only using light armor and weapons so fortunately with a little luck we're all able to climb up. Now we run into this darn dwarf. They're not necessarily bad people but they can be infuriating to deal with.

Here I'm confused because we've obviously run into a bug. Redactor has a mace. Sasha has the sword sword. Either way, it's a good trade. We only have pretty cheap basic weapons right now. When we finish this quest, we'll get paid more than enough to replace them. (Later in the game we would have to guess this a lot of thought if he was asking for something like a high-quality brass handgun.) Now let's just hope we can get back to Bremen without a fight and buy a replacement weapon quick.

We have to run away from some giant spiders but other than that have no trouble. At Bremen we buy Sasha a long sword. It's not quite as good at penetrating armor as her short sword was but does considerably more damage. That should be better because we're avoiding heavily armored enemies so far.

Now we need to get back to Wesel (I think it was?) and deliver the history scroll to complete our quest and get paid. I've been writing this for a long time and I still gotta upload the screenshots, so I'm gonna dash through this without recording every random encounter along the way.

It's November now and the snow has begun to fall.

We run into the infuriating problem that I can't remember who hired me for this quest and it doesn't show you in game. Fortunately some kind soul made an external program to read your saved game file and tell you all the quests you have going on. It's the Fugger in Wesel.

A mere 4 florins isn't that much, but it's a good start for us. Next time we can buy some more equipment and maybe even some skill training. Our people's combat skills are good enough now that with a little bit better armor I think we can try taking on a tougher quest next time: A robber knight!

We picked up 10 Fame points! This is basically your score in the game. It's how much recognition you get from people across the Empire, not just in one town. People take you way more seriously and it's an end unto itself.

When I look at the illuminated manuscript I want to see me staring right back at me.

I'll give you a quick front-matter tl:dr, I'm rigging a bet by responding to this, and work pays me to browse rDrama.

That's right, I'm being paid to write hot takes no one should read!

Long post ahead, ye be warned.

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So @Impassionata typically writes schizo posts with political themes, and doesn't really seem to get concepts critical to understanding the modern political world. Things like nuance, multifaceted issues with multiple root causes, fellow traveler-like paradigms for political movements, etc typically escape the grasp of most liberal/socialists/partisans. There's more than one reason to vote for or against someone, especially in a flawed democratic republic like the USA. (I wouldn't be shocked if Impassionata was a euro-cel.)

Politics isn't about having a home. Politics is about making decisions about how our government operates, and Trump is inimical to the continued further operation of our government because he's old. He is old. And he has to leave the race.

So already we're out of the gate with a cool assertion that old people shouldn't hold political office. This is a really good indicator that the OP is either too young to vote, or missed the last election and wants to blame someone for bad outcomes that happen in political environments. Far be it from voters to choose who their candidate should be, like with a primary. That's too complicated for voters says @Impassionata old people should just be banned from office except when they're running on my ticket. Pelosi, Bernie and Biden? They aight, but opposition candidate old man, who won the primary with millions of votes? Shouldn't be on the ballot.

This is the theme of @Impassionata's screed that for whatever reason old people suck. I personally like old people, I think old people are healthy for democracy because they have assets, consider their families, and typically don't rank abortion as their number one issue unless they're divorced and in their mid sixties white women. (IE: Evil) So out of the gate, we have an issue with old people in democratic politics, but really no follow through as to why. Let's take a closer look.

It doesn't matter how reasonable you think your reasons are if they result in an incoherent conclusion. Support for Trump is incoherent. Your reasons are therefore invalid no matter how reasonable they seem to you. Let's examine them.

So again, leftist tendency to eat the horse before you take your cart to market. Sad! If everyone knew the outcome of each and every decision they would make, there would be no need to make irrational decisions, everyone would be a rational actor and philosophers could all kills themselves. Unfortunately, far from leading to philosopher genocide, we have a still living @Impassionata ranting about people making bad choices. Student loans for art degrees are a bad choice, but somehow I think personal responsibility will be dodged for @Impassionata here.

People in a free society are you know, free, to make whatever choices they want within certain guidelines. But for whatever reason, voting for a New York real estate billionaire is against what is permissible because he advocates for 90's era Democrat policies, which I'm told are racist, xenophobic and chuddy for current year + 8.

Then we get some weighty analysis from @Impassionata here:

Whether or not you like the government having power, the government has power, and it's time for you to man up and accept it and stop whining about it. Our government has power. It has power which extends through its foreign connections, including to Israel and Ukraine.

No one denied that the government has power, I said I didn't like the current government (Biden Admin/Harris Admin) in power. I acknowledge that the government will use violence against me if I don't pay taxes to give to Israel and Ukraine. I freely acknowledge that although the government, in various administrations have shown a total lack of interest in doing things like disaster preparation, sealing the border from migrant caravans, ensuring the drug crisis is addressed, trying to limits money in politics, limiting the racialization of institutions or enforcing SCOTUS orders on said issues. This is to name a few hot button issues, enjoined with a flailing economy and general lack of trust in our political leadership. But confusing Israel's power to tax American workers, or Ukraine's power to drain our coffers is stupid, because none of these things materially help Americans of any variety except rich people who buy bonds for deficit spending at higher yields, or you know, people who own weapons companies. @Impassionata frames this as a moral failure on my part, where since I'm not happy to get out my checkbook and launch us into a nuclear confrontation with a foreign power a globe away, that's indicative of serious moral decay. You know, especially after progressives were against the War in Iraq and Afghanistan, I expected them to be peaceniks, but now nuclear weapons are good, and so are shredding men, women and children of both Ukraine and Russia.

No one really likes to think about the implosion of Russia from a consequentialist viewpoint. So let's just remind everyone, Russia 100+ million people, and Syria which was 22+ million people. So if we're just glossing over this, if Russia collapse tomorrow, we could reasonable expect a Syria-like influx of refugees from the deterioration of Russia's state cohesiveness to the tune of 5x the size of Syria. That would be bad. But no one in the State department cares, because you'll just be branded a traitor, suspicious or sympathetic to Putin instead of being considered on the merit of this risk.

Moving on.

Trump is too old to be involved in international politics. But: Trump is Neville Chamberlain here. Appeasement is stupid. You can't appease authoritarian dictators. Russia is our geopolitical adversary. Trump's behavior towards Putin was always incoherent. You favor a less interventionist foreign policy. You should not believe that Trump will be interventionist. The US does not want war, the US does not want to be involved in wars. We have obligations to our allies which we can and should keep because THEY ARE OUR ALLIES??? THEY ARE WHAT IS KEEPING THE WHOLE PAX AMERICAN TOGETHER??? It's like you don't even understand the plan here. The plan for our foreign policy is HAVE ALL THE ALLIES. To have them, you have to help them.

Like all things, there's a time and place for it. For example, ignoring the nuance of the Euromaidan movement's overthrowing the government and just saying that Ukraine freed themselves from Russia's puppeteering, you really have to examine what our links were to Ukraine. I'll rip-off Wikipedia right here:

The Budapest Memorandum was negotiated at political level, but it is not entirely clear whether the instrument is devoid entirely of legal provisions. It refers to assurances, but unlike guarantees, it does not impose a legal obligation of military assistance on its parties.[2][53] According to Stephen MacFarlane, a professor of international relations, "It gives signatories justification if they take action, but it does not force anyone to act in Ukraine."[52] In the US, neither the George H. W. Bush administration nor the Clinton administration was prepared to give a military commitment to Ukraine, and they did not believe the US Senate would ratify an international treaty and so the memorandum was adopted in more limited terms.[53] The memorandum has a requirement of consultation among the parties "in the event a situation arises that raises a question concerning the ... commitments" set out in the memorandum.[54] Whether or not the memorandum sets out legal obligations, the difficulties that Ukraine has encountered since early 2014 may cast doubt on the credibility of future security assurances that are offered in exchange for nonproliferation commitments.[55] Regardless, the United States publicly maintains that "the Memorandum is not legally binding", calling it a "political commitment"

So just to summarize, treaties need to be ratified by the Senate, otherwise they're not legal, or binding. Clinton and Bush specifically didn't think this would pass the Senate, hence Memorandum instead of treaty obligation. In a normal country with checks and balances, this would of course be widely known, accepted and practices. But we don't live in a country that respects norms, democratic or international. We live in America in it's most corrupt iteration. There's no reason to be in Ukraine other than to threaten Russia. You can be for or against that, but pretending that Ukraine was some long-time ally is histrionic. Ukraine is a corrupt shithole with unironically unelected head of state. Putin has won more lections than Zelensky, and probably just as many fair ones. Moving on.

There is absolutely no reason to deploy the military to enforce border security. The legislation around the border which was cancelled by Trump (which Republicans are now blaming him for) would have been the best responsiveness to the border crisis. Trump did a really terrible thing in causing that legislation to fail in order to run on the border.

Trump torpedoed an amnesty bill played off as border security, that was poison pilled. I'm glad he did. Somehow Kamala got ahold of that crisis without those laws, or maybe not? No one knows what's true anymore unless you live on the border or are a victim of a crime committed by a marauding migrant. Moving on.

The Republicans attempted to use criminal procedure against the Bidens.

@Impassionata doesn't know that an investigation by the House is not criminal procedure. It's ok to investigate people who take bribes. That behavior should be normalized. If it were, Biden, most politicians would be in jail. Something I very much support given our level of corruption.

Because Progress Marches On. "Trump is a felon!" people will scream, Trump is a felon, stop whining about it.

I like this glib response, because it's pretty crass. Rather that addressing prosecutorial malfeasance, generally the fraudulent prosecution of Trump that various other DA's backed away from, it's just a wholesale dismissal that Trump could be innocent of what(?) he's being accused of. I'm not even sure what the crime is, I have two degrees in political science, I regularly interpret law, I actually don't understand how he's being convicted other than for political purposes. But maybe a certain grocery clerk can enlighten me.

You don't have a brother.

Things take a turn for the worse when @Impassionata starts saying I don't have a brother. Not sure what this is about. The rest of the post is generally nonsense, has no redeeming value. Apparently I'm some kind of nazi for voting for Trump, who in my opinion is pretty milquetoast on a variety of issues but has the occasional follow through, versus Kamala, who has never won a presidential primary but failed upward thanks to Biden dying on stage three months ago. Thanks Obama.

Anyhow, it's been fun, time for lunch! May be a part two somewhere in me, only if I get a raise though.

@Impassionata if there's anything else you want me to address, let me know.

!russians !chuds !nooticers !sophistry !metashit

/r/McDonaldsEmployees is a subreddit for McDonald's employees to talk about their shared trials and tribulations and commiserate.

One user, "euphoriaxlove720", posts a thread titled "(USA) I almost died in the freezer.":

https://old.reddit.com/r/McDonaldsEmployees/comments/1fo70r4/usa_i_almost_died_in_the_freezer/

I was on fryer and we had ran out of mc-crispies, and I went to the back to grab more and two freezers in, I got trapped. I was in there for about 20 minutes and I was crying and having a panic attack because I couldn't get out. I was gone until people noticed I wasn't back at the fryer and I tried banging on the door but there was no panic or emergency button. If it wasn't for one of my coworkers I would've died in the freezer. Everyone please be careful when going into the freezers and always have a device with you. I'm 17 and neurodivergent and I was all alone just waiting for someone to either find me, or waiting for death. The freezer there was a death trap and the only exit required a key which I didn't have. On average 60 people a year die from walk in freezer incidents. This needs more awareness. Because it's the most terrifying thing I've ever went through.

Many users are supportive of the OP at first, attributing this chilling experience to a poor design. However, in typical Reddit fashion, the thread soon turns into a neckbeard McSlapfight over US building codes.

Desperate-Face-6954 asks:

There's no bell? In Australia walk in fridges and freezers have a bell on the outside of the door that works from the inside. The occupational health and safety inspectors would make a huge deal out of a bell not working, they save lives.

FrostyCartographer13 responds:

In the US, all walk-in coolers or freezers are required to be openable from the inside, even while locked.

OP is either making up the story or didn't realize you can open the door with a slight push.

BellOfTaco3285:

Just because they are required too doesn't mean they are, or the latch on the inside is broke. There are THOUSANDS of places in the US aren't up to code, you're insane to think that EVERY SINGLE walk in freezer is up to code, that's simply not the case. I've worked at multiple places with a walk in cooler, two of them didn't open from the inside. One didn't have a latch on the inside at all, the mechanism was broken off and they never bothered fixing it, so if you didn't prop it open then you'd get locked inside, there was even a sign on the front saying "If this door is open CHECK BEFORE CLOSING, IT COULD SAVE YOUR CO-WORKERS LIFE". the other had the latch to open it from the inside, but it was broken, it would work half the time, the other half you'd be stuck unless you propped the door. The one without a latch ended up getting fined and closed down when the code enforcement officer found out, but it goes to show that there are plenty of places that don't have their required stuff up to code.

ChronicallyCurious8:

Ever hear OSHA? The fire department, the health department. You mean to tell me with all these departments that are running in and out of all these restaurants that they would let something like this go ? If this were true, this would be a huge violation and a huge fine.

By the way, why didn't the 17-year-old report this? I bet they didn't because it didn't happen.

Sorry, I've been called ignorant on here, but you people are the ones that are ignorant, not me

The OP replies:

I'm not making it up. There was a white plastic gear looking thing that said "you're not locked in" but I couldn't get it to open. This was so traumatizing for me and my coworker saved my life. I have no reason to make this up. I have autism and I struggle with instructions and I couldn't open the door I tried so hard and I eventually gave up…

The argument then shifts into one about whether the OP could sue for emotional distress and PTSD.

DatRussianHobo:

I'm pretty sure OP has a law suit that's easily winnable.

CringeLord5:

What are the damages? """Emotional distress""" while real probably won't win a case

anipie05:

Almost dying, no way to get out, faulty freezer door, emotional destress, etc. Several occupational health and safety violations as well

FuzzyChickenButt:

Almost """"dying""""" after less than 10 minutes being in there? How fricking dramatic

anipie05:

Could have been a bigger problem if the co worker wasn't there to let them out. Why are you in defense of big corporations? Either way it was an occupational safety hazard. Laws were broken.

FuzzyChickenButt:

I'm not defending corporations, brains. One look at their profile & you can see they have issues

In a separate shitshow, the OP is accused of basing his entire personality on the fact that he's neurodivergent.

Final-Garden asks:

What was the point of mentioning you're neurodivergent

FNC-Jman:

A lot of people for whatever reason like to make their illness/disability their whole personality. I can speak from experience because I've seen it firsthand.

psychedelic666:

It can lead to increased anxiety in situations like that, it's not a personality it's a medical condition

Tension increases as the OP faces more and more accusations of making his story up.

ChronicallyCurious8:

This is a made up story. There are laws in place for preventing someone from being " trapped " in a walk in cooler FFS.. Over the years I've worked in several different McDonald's units in the state I live in. Not once have I ever seen a walk in cooler that you can't get out of immediately.. My family also owned private restaurants where the walk-in cooler has a push button mechanism on the door inside the Walk-in cooler.

Sorry OP, but you need to really up your game about your stories .

This couldn't have possibly happened in the US .

This would be a.SERIOUS violation of huge proportions if it were true.

Maybe a 17 year year old you don't realize that these restaurants are inspected EVERY 6-12 months by the health department, ( among other types of inspections county & state wide ) and a violation like you're reporting just never happened.

Edited

thisisntmynametoday:

Monthly health inspections? Where do you live? Not every municipality or county is diligent at inspections.

In Massachusetts we are lucky to get two inspections a year.

And I worked a place that the inside release for the walk in broke one day.

ChronicallyCurious8:

It's edited. Ppl do make mistakes. Yes even when they proofread.

If truth be known you're more upset because OP mentioned autism. Sorry but if autism affects OP that bad maybe Mickey D's isn't for them.

I'm sure the manager knew OP how much is it most likely due to the fact that OP made sure everyone knew that in the comments here.

thisisntmynametoday:

I said nothing about autism?

I called BS on your assertion that every walk in freezer in the US is up to code. I've worked at a place that wasn't, and I got caught in the walk in when the latching mechanism broke.

It didn't have a panic button, or a release button.

Thankfully my boss and I were cleaning out the freezer together and he heard me throwing my shoulder into the door.

Stop telling people their experiences aren't real, random internet commenter.

ChronicallyCurious8:

I didn't say you did.

Do you know an opinion page is? Apparently not.. We all have opinions if you don't like mine, I'm sorry .

Have the day you deserve

Elsewhere, Redditors debate whether one can call 911 without a signal or inside a walk-in freezer.

imnotgunertellyou:

I'm surprised you didn't have your phone on you to call for help. Glad to hear you're ok!

FakeMikeMorgan:

Depending on how the walk In is designed, a cell phone may not get a signal from inside.

apaw1129:

You can always reach 911, even without signal or service.

ExqueeriencedLesbian:

not true at all, you definitely need signal

apaw1129:

False. You can dial 911 even without signal or an active service. Research it.

Aurora-314:

Definitely not possible, you literally can't make calls without a signal. That's why satellite phones/ devices are needed for emergencies if travelling in remote areas with no signal.

apaw1129:

Google

Aurora-314:

It says it can use other providers if your provider doesn't have a signal. Or if the network is busy it will drop other calls to let yours through. And if the signal is too weak for a call a text might get though.

But that doesn't mean you can call when there is literally no signal. Where do you think the radio waves from your phone can go when you are in the middle of the desert and there are no cell towers nearby? Or if there is a thick metal freezer wall literally blocking them?

Internationalthief:

They must think cell phones transmit power of friendship waves.

FrostyCartographer13 creates more McBeef when he responds to the OP's "I'm not making it up" comment and suggests that, ackchyually, it was just a prank, bro:

I don't care if you got autism and the reason why I want to assume you are making it up a story i give the details on how the door works.

The doors are larger than the doorway itself. They actually set in a resses in the freezer entrance so the gaskets can make a seal. There are no latches that hold the door closed. The only mechanisms for the door closing are the spring hinges and the door assist.

The door assist helps hold the door in the closed position and helps when opening the door.

If the events did happen to you, I will provide you with a possible alternative as to why.

You were the victim of a prank.

Someone (probably the person who let you out) followed you when you went to get the product.

They held the door closed so you couldn't get it open right away and waited for you to start to panic.

After they get their laugh at making you panic, they let you out.

You were most likely in there a total of 5 minutes, not 20. While under duress, such as panicking, a person's sense of time becomes dilated.

You were probably freaking freaking the frick out since you thought you were trapped. Those minutes probably felt like forever.

BellOfTaco3258:

I'm so glad you think you have the ability, knowledge, or right to say what their experience was, were you there? No? Cool, your opinion is invalid.

FrostyCartographer13:

What is the more likely of the scenarios?

Out of the dozens of times, the door is opened each day, that it would not open once, then return to operating as normal without a discernable cause?

Or

That OP is the victim of the shitty "trapped in the freezer" prank that has existed since before I ever worked and didn't realize it?

BellOfTaco3258:

OPs story is more likely. You want to create a narrative with zero evidence of actual being there.

FrostyCartographer13:

And OP is making an assertion with no evidence.

Thus, I am allowed to dismiss and offer a more plausible explanation without the need for evidence.

BellOfTaco3258

The evidence is their experience… keep thinking you know everything! Glad you know all of the facts of the incident and were there to see exactly what happened…. oh wait.

"I don't believe OPs story so I can say what I want without evidence of what actually happened, nor was I there to see the actual event, but I don't need to! I'm always right". I'd hate to be around you in person.

Their bickering continues further, of course:

There is, it goes without saying, loads more slapfighting in this thread, which, as of this post, has no less than 963 comments. The entire thread is a massive dumpster fire. Here are just a few more highlights:

TehFlogger, responding to Desperate-Face-6954:

It's not their fault. Darwinism just didn't take their parents out first. It'll solve itself.

boymeatcafe, responding to Us_Strike:

unrelated but is your pfp willy wonka from tom and jerry: willy wonka and the chocolate factory

This_is_Me888:

Annnnd that's why I had to pull forward and wait for my food.

Kris_toast:

Just put my fries in the bag bro

damiandarko2:

what does being 17 and neurodivergent have to do with this 😂

FurbyCultist93:

This happened to an Arby's employee fairly recently. They didn't make it.

Captndabberz:

Doesn't relate to the post but looking at your account OP I think you need a lot of help, I hope you the best and am glad you are ok tho

somecow:

ALL freezers can be opened from the inside. Some sort of latch, knob, button, etc.

Do yourself a favor and stay out of there if you can't figure it out.

stubrador:

I believe this to be largely embellished

Teamorange0:

Lol to this entire post. I've worked in food service for 30 yrs and unless there's some sort of catastrophic damage to the door, there's no problem. Let alone the ability to bust your way out of needed.

scottishguyhere:

Someone would have found you all mc crispy and cold

Retro-Lit-Coach:

I have a feeling either A) You just didn't push hard enough on the door or B) This is a fabricated story because it's literally illegal for them to have a door like that

Ninja2ZERO:

This person has a weird profile.

Signal-Note-8280:

You weren't trapped.....you were Mctrapped

ImportancePrudent136:

bruh. womp womp.

MustHav3BeenTheWind:

I swear tho, them freezers are cold asf

PrestigiousLife8831:

Sounds like you were 20 minutes short of a major pay day

Defiant_Good9427:

LOL gtfoh this is satire right ?

OleDirtyChineseJoint:

20 minutes and you thought you were dying? Good grief. Kids these days. We used to take a bong in there and hide

National-Entrance-94:

Why are people saying OP is lying? There are actual cases like this where people did stay trapped in freezers & died?!

jorand19 gets a response from the OP regarding autism:

So does Otherwise_Rip_7337 when he accuses the OP's story of being false, starting an extended argument with the OP that you can see for yourself if you feel so inclined.

In conclusion, the ultimate lesson here is this: regardless of what your post is, someone will always find some way to tell you that you're wrong. Especially on Le Rebbit.

!neurodivergents !effortposters

Hey you, the person reading this, you can ping engineers or ifls on this thread (if you feel like it)

Previous thread:

https://rdrama.net/h/nerdshit/post/301878/inquiry-into-the-titan-disaster-reveals

Scott Manley video:

Documents:

https://www.news.uscg.mil/News-by-Region/Headquarters/Titan-Submersible/

CliffsNotes:

• Oceangate experimented with a full-carbon hull for their submersible, but the hemisphere endcaps would cave in on the models hence the switch to titanium for the final design

• The carbon fiber was selected as a cost-cutting material in an effort to make the submersible as light as possible. That in turn was done to save cost on the support ship required to deploy the submersible, as this was intended to become a commercial operation at some point, with submersible expeditions being sold as tours for the general public

• Carbon fiber is not on the list of approved materials for the fabrication of human-rated pressure hulls. This is not due to any of its intrinsic properties, but rather due to lack of testing of such vessels.

• It is a well known fact that carbon fiber is capable of supporting tensile stress but does not manage compressive stress as well, hence its unsuitability as a material for submersibles. This fact was parroted here a lot by resident subject matter experts . However, the testifying engineer believes this to not be an issue as the same was said about acrylic plastics, which were initially met with strong skepticism but are now one of the officially approved materials for construction of human-rated pressure vessels. He believes that none of the carbon fiber's downsides are complete deal-breakers and a solution could have been developed that would allow for its eventual implementation. He backs his point by presenting various different composite submersibles, including the chinese Petrel-X that is rated for 10000m depth. He believes that composite materials provide several advantages over traditional ones (like corrosion resistance) and that with enough development and testing carbon fiber could be deployed as a material for pressure vessels, with the issue being that Oceangate did not invest nearly enough in research of this material to justify using it.

• Speaking of acrylic, the acrylic window used on the Oceangate vessel was rated only up to a 1000m dive depth, as compared to the nearly 4000m at which Titanic sits. It is a miracle that it hadn't failed, which we know it likely didn't due to analysis of wreckage (see last post)

• The reason the window wasn't rated to the correct depth is due to the fact that instead of going for a concave inner surface, like the industry standard, Oceangate instead opted for a filled hemisphere-like shape, with a flat inner surface, with the reasoning being that a concave window would cause lensing and make close-up objects appear further away, which they wanted to avoid for the sake of satisfying the potential customers.

• Some information regarding the manufacture process was revealed:

• Oceangate had previously constructed 2 prototype vessels, both of which failed, by layering the carbon-fiber sheets only radially. The final design included perpendicular carbon-fiber sheets, which were aligned both radially and longitudinally. It is also revealed that their consultant, Boeing (lmao ) suggested a carbon-fiber sheet to be layered at 45 degrees to radial, but this wasn't done in the final vessel likely due to the difficulty of manufacturing it.

• It is also noted that during the construction of the hull, they would notice occasional wrinkling of the carbon fiber in certain spots, which would only accumulate with each subsequent passing and result in a non-smooth cylindrical shape by the end. To combat this, they decided to split the entire 5-inch thick hull into 5 1-inch thick concentric cylinders, each of which would be ground and smoothed at the end to remove said wrinkles and provide a smooth surface for the next layer. The layers would be then held together by some sort of surface-roughener and industrial adhesive. One might imagine that grinding at carbon fiber would compromise its strength, and it is interesting that after taking cross-sections of the 5 different layers and counting the amount of wrinkling sites, they didn't observe any reduction of them and in fact each consecutive layer had more wrinkles than the last, the only difference being that they were invisible from the outside now.

• Analysis of the wreckage shows that the hull did fail along the inter-layer seems, though not all layers disjoined in this way, which could either be random chance or an indication that some of the layers were glued together better than others. Similarly there are no signs of carbon-fiber films themselves tearing within each individual layer, which demonstrates that the resin cure which was used between the carbon-fiber sheets held way better than the adhesive which they used to join the bigger layers together

• Similarly by analyzing the recovered hull fragments the researchers noted that the imperfect cylindrical shape of the carbon-fiber layers translated into uneven coatings of interlayer adhesive, where some regions would have a lot of adhesive and others would have practically none. In addition to that they also noticed microscopic longitudinal rub marks in between layers and deposits of crushed, powdered glue that would accumulate in some of the voids between the layers. This indicates motion between the different layers which is very very bad as you want the vessel to act as a single solid structure in order to withstand the outside pressure, instead of having these individual sliding layers.

• Cross-section analysis of the individual layers also revealed small voids and cavities between the carbon-fiber sheets. Whether this is in any way significant to structural integrity of the bulk material is unknown either to me or the video author.

• The frontal metal end-ring which connected the titanium hemisphere to the carbon-fiber hull and was suspected to be the source of initial failure was recovered and analyzed. The suspicions were largely confirmed as inspection of the gluing site which held the ring to the carbon-fiber showed that the glue was peeled right off the metal ring and mostly remained on the carbon-fiber part. (gluing the parts is apparently a industry-standard practice, for more info see last thread). This indicates that the glue-metal interface was likely the source of initial failure. Moreover the video author proposes to narrow it down to the bottom section of the glue-metal interface on the metal end-ring, as that is the segment where the carbon fiber hull was absolutely shredded and no larger pieces remain, as opposed to the upper side where large pieces had stratified into the individual layers discussed above. In his opinion it is the shear motion of the layers around that point which could have destabilized the hull and caused it to be shredded.

The Real-Time Alert System Truth Nuke:

The alert system on the vessel consisted of acoustic sensors mounted around the hull, which would listen for the sounds of shit breaking and record the data for later analysis, and tension sensors, also mounted around the hull, which would measure the tension or compression that the hull underwent and similarly record the data for later. It also seems that not all of the sonic sensors were functioning, but somehow this isn't even the crazy part.

Now, on dive 80, at around 15:30 (shown on graph), during resurfacing the sensors recorder a loud-butt crash. It was so loud that the passengers heard it, it was so loud that potentially the surface crew might have heard it. It was dismissed by Stockton as the carbon hull setting into the metal ring, something unrelated to the structural integrity. But looking at the tension sensor readings at the same time shows a big jump, indicating that the hull had been rapidly deformed.

Looking at the tension sensor readings for subsequent dive 81 (red) and comparing it to previous dive 80 (blue) shows that the vessel behaves differently at the beginning of the dive, indicating that after this bang the hull now has a different deformation mode. And this mode of deformation is localized to the forward-bottom-left area of the carbon fiber, that sits right against the metal end-ring discussed earlier. This behaviour persisted for the following dives as well.

So basically the warning system worked as intended, giving them all the information needed to see that something is going wrong with the vessel, but Stockton chose to ignore it.

The dive 80 happened back in 2022, and since then the submarine was transported, left outside in the weather, fallen off the tow-boat, and dove several more times, all likely worsening its condition, and one engineer even expressed concerns with the matter in which it was lifted by crane, arguing that it wasn't designed for the kind of tension it experiences when being hooked from above and left to dangle.

The TL;DR is that it was literally all willful negligence and they could've stopped and re-evaluated this thing at literally any point right up to the day it sank, but chose not to. What a horrid way to go

Greetings dramatards I wanna post a parallel example about ragebait, to show how utterly stupid and malinfromed foreigners are about safrica

[1st]

@haggis posted earlier about a 70 year old Boomer boer having gone haywire and shot a black kid over stealing a single fruit (he waz probably a repeat thief and the boer lost his mind), which put the usual rage into the shitlibs, micks, liberals, westoids, redditors, leftists and irish who comment the usual hatred towards SA whites, and that we should all deserve to be culled like the Haiti uprising and our land disowned and the usual tired trite about 1Dimensional evil opressors

---

[2]

Well on the complete opposite end of the spectrum, we have the uber chuds of 9strag, filled with ultra-nationalists racial supremacists (each for their own race lol) , and all equally misinformed.

https://9gag.com/gag/aLnjyNW#comment

basically this post, and reposted copycats of it, have been making the rounds over 9gag today, as repost bots plagiarized each other, to farm ragebait upmarseys. I tried to find the other copycats - they usually had title like "Look how Safrica fairs 30 years after the hwhite rule ended!" or something like "Looks like africans can only tear down what the Huwhite man build!" and so on.

And just like the fricking rage post from @haggis, all nuance and complexity of any situation is thrown down the drain into oblivion as emotion shrouds all cognition

Now often in South Africa, a lot of self destructive riots have taken place, similar to the yank Floyd riots which escalated from peaceful protests to outright mob riot induced pillaging of every nearby store. Moronic self destructive riots are common in SA, to the point where we even have a saying here in afrikaans, in that the agtergeblewenis is someone so incapable of thinking of consequences that they are the type of peeps who'll wait in line at the bus stop in the morning, waiting for the same busses he had burned down Yesterday

Often south african protestors had even burned down schools in their rage, or like the Zuma Riots 3 years ago in Eastern Safrica, where an entire province was set aflame by rioters.

BUT

This specific example is different

or reference, https://www.thesouthafrican.com/news/protests-r33-road-kzn-service-delivery/

In all the otehr 9starg posts the racists won out, but only in this one was, the matter further clarified:

"This is an image from Kwa Zulu Natal, South Africa. 4 years ago... This was a protest because of the lack of water and electricity. But they built a fancy new road to get to 4 houses up the hill"

https://www.thesouthafrican.com/news/protests-r33-road-kzn-service-delivery/

I can't find the other copycat 9gag posts which heaved with racism and all the chuds downvoting the explanation behind this action, so you guys will just have to take my word for it, but basically compared to the post I linked in which the most reasonable comments won ,out it was all a shitshow, which is probalby why they were deleted - even the usually lax 9strag moderators probably woke up.

But to further continue, so many many Safrican local municipalities are brokenshit corrupt, to the point where people literally don't have clean drinking water (if they even have functioning non-leaking pipes) or electricity. People often strike and protest to their local municipalities and beg them for their services, but are often ignored because the local politicians have no fear of being ousted or convicted of criminality

The specific road was literally leading to the wealthiest district of that local town, and their destroying the road was the equivalent of dumping trash in front of the frontyard of the mayor of a town refusing to fix your problem, by inconveniencing or actively hurting the politicians refusing to fricking do their jobs.

https://www.timeslive.co.za/news/south-africa/2020-09-22-protesters-dig-up-tarred-kzn-road-as-service-delivery-frustrations-spill-over/

====

The resident, who was part of the protest which saw the road being dug up, justified the action.

"We have been promised [services] for years. New villages have been provided with water and electricity, but not us. Today the police came and shot at us. If it means we have to be shot to get basic services, so be it," the resident explained.

====

---

I myself and the firm i work for had to suffer the past year against Free State province municipalities choking the life out of small towns through Regulatory Capture, because the subhuman fricks there ,refuse to approve Rezonings, subdivisions or consolidations of properties and a whole slew of Town planning shit, which basically prohibits new businesses from forming, and they fricking cant buy or open new commercial locations! all because the stupid small minded fricks want bribes, as the economy dies around them

Then these slime drive around in black-tinted BMWs obviously not bought from their meagre bureaucrat salary, and peeps can see where they live in the nicest parts of town - which is what led to the peeps chopping up that part of the road leading to the upper class homes in which the municipal high staff worked - thus forcing the frickers to listen the community

in this instance i even had compassion towards these rioters. if @sneedman was up there with a pickaxe, I'd be joining him in my fricking frustration from this choking corruption.

---

so all these 9strag straggots who dont know shit and usually post about comparing civilizations don't know shit about SA. and just continue empire-of-dust posting which i believe is an entirely different matter and this just placated the bias of chuds

just poltardia posting blablabla - it's actually miraculous that other safricans had jumped before me to demonstrate the actual happenings and clarify the complexity of the situation, and was topvoted in the comment section about this chud morons

---

Anyways !nonchuds to the same degree as these chuds are fools, so too to the same degree are shitlibs and libtards and leftoids and Micks misinformed and beyond capacity to understand safrica

In this history themed /h/marsey post, we'll take a tour through Egyptian history with the help of some relevant Capys. Cos Aevann's from Egypt geddit?

You gotta be an Egypt person to know Egypt. You can't just dabble in it. Most of my knowledge comes from this:

-- @Redactor0

This is very true lol so this post won't be anything more than a brief overview. The main point is that I thought it'd be fun to make some history themed Capys and use them to -ify Egyptian history. Hopefully someone gets a kick out of this.

---

People have lived within the boundaries of modern Egypt for at least a million years, with the earliest known cowtools dating back over 400,000 years and the earliest habitation sites around 100,000 years. Egypt served as something of a bridge for people crossing from Africa into Asia and vice versa, and many otherwise unrelated cultures would call part of it home throughout the long prehistoric period

Regarding the early history of Egypt, if not that of all mankind, it's important to note that the Sahara was not always a hot desert as it is now. The region is believed to go through wet and dry periods over time and was at least once an extension of central Africa's grasslands and savannas. Nomadic peoples of the Late Paleolithic and Mesolithic could easily spread across Egypt without the difficulty of desert nomadism and the lands supported many lifestyles. Some cultures lived as hunter-gatherers while others herded grazing animals. Many passed in and out of Egypt without settling

Several of Egypt's early agricultural cultures appeared along the Nile river and developed simple farming there. They lived on wild grains and endeavored to care for them, but did not necessarily plant the seeds in organized rows. The Qadan culture lived along the Nile for as long as 4,000 years and were notable for independently inventing sickles and grinding stones However, these cowtools disappear after the culture fell and the people were replaced by hunters and fishers. Something to glean from this ancient history is that in Egypt and perhaps other places, humanity did not necessarily progress linearly from hunter-gathering to agricultural city building. Different lifestyles "took turns" before the Agricultural Revolution truly set in.

(This was supposed to be something like "capymegalith" but grew to become sidebar worthy lol)

Other early cultures actually lived in what is now the desert, surviving off oases and river channels that no longer exist. One noteworthy site, Nabta Playa, was built around what was once a drainage basin as far back as 7500 BC. The area was inhabited into the 4th Millennium BC and gave rise to several stone structures, including what may have been one of the oldest archeoastronomical formations in the world as pictured above. Countless other megalithic structures to be found in the sand seas of the modern Sahara suggest how widespread fertile land in the region used to be.

Another relevant culture, the Harifian, are believed by some academics to have migrated out of Egypt and into the Levant where they merged with the Pre-Pottery Neolithic B culture. Some further believe they may have represented the original people to spread the Proto-Semitic language to the Middle East. Like the Indo-European languages, the Semitic family spread across a vast area and included East African and Canaanite languages alongside Egypt's modern tongue Arabic. Ancient Egyptian itself though is not Semitic in origin, a fact that further alludes to the variety of independent cultures that lived in the area.

The civilization we all know as ancient Egypt arguably owes its existence to the nature of the Sahara. As the desert grew and the surrounding lands became inhospitable, the peoples of Egypt were forced to either leave or retreat to the Nile and live as sedentary farmers. They built cities along the river valley, delta, and remaining oases and learned to use the river's seasonal flooding to water their crops. Sometimes referred to as the Proto-Dynastic or Dynasty Zero, this late Neolithic era birthed the modern Egyptian populace and identity. The people here spoke Egyptian, wrote in early hieroglyphics, worshipped the beginnings of Egypt's recognizable pantheon, and may have even practiced marsey veneration This is also the latest period where the Egyptians developed their beer making -- a five thousand year old beer brewery was discovered in 2021, and the scale of the operation suggests regular beer brewing was well established by then.

According to mythology, the lands of Egypt were divided between the Upper and Lower Nile before being unified by the mythical King Menes, now believed by some historians to have been the same person as Upper Egyptian King Narmer. The pictured dual crown of Upper and Lower Egypt would become a symbol of the Pharaohs from then on.

Egypt's unity lead to the Dynastic Period, a gulf of time stretching thirty-three Pharaonic dynasties from Egypt's Old Kingdom to the end of the Greek Ptolemaic.

Egypt's Old Kingdom is more or less what people often picture when they think of ancient Egypt This era saw the construction of many of Egypt's famous monuments including the pyramids of Giza and the Sphinx The tourism it spawned helps to keep the economy going even thousands of years later.

The Old Kingdom gradually declined into anarchy and decentralization, the First Intermediate Period. Unity was restored by the Middle Kingdom, lasting from c. 2050 BC to c. 1650 BC. Middle Kingdom Pharaohs built their pyramids out of mud bricks instead of masonry with casings of limestone, so few of these pyramids have survived into the present. Statues became more and more common in this time, with the block statue design remaining popular well into Greek times.

As the Middle Kingdom declined into the Second Intermediate Period, classical Egyptian records claim the land was conquered by the Hyksos, the word itself coming from the Egyptian term for outsiders. A Semetic speaking people from the Levant, they are traditionally credited with introducing the chariot to the Egyptian people.

Egypt's New Kingdom began under the Eighteenth Dynasty when the Hyksos were driven entirely from the land, lasting from c. 1550 BC to c. 1069 BC. This dynasty included several notable Pharaohs. Akhenaten was infamous for trying to do away with Egypt's pantheon and force the worship of a sun god Aten Some historians even credit him with establishing the oldest known monotheistic religion. His (probable) son Tutankhamun only lived to twenty years of age, but would retroactively become perhaps the most famous Pharaoh of all when his tomb was discovered in 1922. "King Tut's" tomb was unusually well preserved because the entrance had been buried and flooded over, whereas other Pharaonic tombs were robbed of their burial offerings long ago. On that note, New Kingdom Pharaohs didn't use pyramids as cemeteries and hid their tombs in sites like the Valley of Kings

Ramses II, also known as Ramses the Great and Ozymandias, conquered much of the Levant, fathered between 80-100 children, and lived to be over 90 He is famous for fighting the Anatolia based Hittite Empire at the Battle of Kadesh, the first recorded battle where extensive details of tactics and formations are known and also the largest chariot battle with thousands of the things deployed at once. Its aftermath also led to the first known peace treaty between nations, and a copy of it hangs today on the wall of the United Nations headquarters.

The Egyptian New Kingdom was subjected to the 12th century BC Bronze Age Collapse, an event caused completely and entirely by the Sea Peoples no really just ask Redactor As opposed to the Hittites or Mycenaeans, Egyptian civilization survived the period but came under the influence of foreign powers once more -- the Third Intermediate Period. Libyan rulers controlled much of the country through the Twenty-Third dynasty, and the Twenty-Fifth dynasty was ruled by Nubians

Nubia was a civilization in modern Sudan that was tied to Egypt's early history and influenced by Egyptian culture. From 754 to 656 BC the Nubian Kingdom of Kush ruled over Egypt as the "Black Pharaohs". They represent the kernel of truth at the center of Hotep ideology

The Kushites were driven out by the Neo-Assyrian Empire's conquest, and Assyria ruled Egypt until its own collapse. The Egyptians had about a hundred years of independence as a break before Persian conquest in 525 BC. Egypt rebelled against Persia in 404 BC but was finally subjugated in 343 BC. Nectanebo II has the distinction of being the very last native Pharaoh of Egypt, as his defeat led to a second period of Persian rule.

Achaemenid Persia controlled Egypt until it was seized by Alexander the Great in 332 BC Upon his death the short lived Macedonian Empire was split between his generals, and Ptolemy established a kingdom that would stand until the days of Augustus Caesar.

Ptolemaic Egypt, the "thirty-third" Dynasty, would also be the last. The Ptolemaic rulers respected the culture and religion of the Egyptians and had themselves seen as Pharaohs. Much art of them was produced in the Egyptian style.

But it's important to note they were Greeks ruling over a conquered people and kept all the important postings in Hellenic hands. The Ptolemaic monarchy produced Cleopatra VII (the famous one) and though there is much pop-history discussion about her racial heritage she was fundamentally Greek. In fact Cleopatra was the only Ptolemaic Pharaoh that ever bothered to even learn the Egyptian language.

In 205 BC, the Egyptian priest Horwennefer led a rebellion against the Ptolemies that wasn't defeated until 185 BC. The remains of a stele made to commemorate the Greek victory would eventually become the Rosetta Stone (But more on that later )

The last Pharaoh and another of the most famous, Cleopatra is most known for her involvement in Roman whatnot and her alliance with Mark Antony led to the conquest of Egypt in 30 BC by the army of his rival Octavian. Though not the first foreigners to rule Egypt, the Romans did not continue the ancient Pharaonic tradition and simply made Egypt into a province of their new empire.

All in all, Egypt's dynastic period is considered to have lasted from c. 3100 BC almost to the first millennium AD. The divisions of dynasties (originally thirty) come from the Aegyptaiaca, a history of Egypt written by the Ptolemaic era priest Manetho, and are still used by Egyptologists today. The last three dynasties were coined later in reference to the second Persian Satrapy, Alexander himself, and the Ptolemaic Greeks.

Egypt remained under Roman rule until the 7th century. It was a major breadbasket province for the empire and among the wealthiest and most populous. It also became one of Rome's first imperial provinces, those controlled by governors appointed by the Emperor rather than the Senate, and was notable for being ruled by an Equestrian governor. The Equestrians were the second of Rome's property based classes (the plebeians and patricians being hereditary classes) and ranked below the Senatorial. To prevent any influential Romans from using Egypt as a power base like Antony, Augustus Caesar allowed only Equestrians to hold the position because they were considered the "lowliest" of Rome's aristocracy. This made Praefectus Aegypti the highest rank an Equestrian could achieve in the early empire.

Christianity eventually spread to Egypt and took hold there until Islamic rule. Alexandria would become a Pentarchy city and also saw the Arian controversy, the first great schism within the Church that produced the breakaway sect of Arianism The tradition of Christian hermits and monasteries actually began in Egypt and spread to Europe from there. The Coptic language also developed during this period and would remain Egypt's common language until at least the 10th century AD. It produced the still extent Coptic Orthodox Church, based on the Coptic Rite rather than a Latin one.

From 618-628 AD Egypt was briefly ruled by Sasanian Persia before Eastern Roman control was reestablished. The near constant warfare at the time between Byzantium and Persia weakened both empires and enabled the very rapid conquests of the Arabian Rashidun Caliphate, the first ever of the great Muslim powers and the empire that ushered Egypt into the contemporary Islamic period. The conquest of Egypt from the Romans was complete by 642 and the lands of the Nile would remain under Arabian Caliphate rule as the centuries went by and as power transferred to the Umayyads, then the Abbasids. Muslim rule had the obvious effect of converting Egypt to Islam, though it was not until about the 9th century that it became more common than Coptic Christianity amongst the common populace.

Also by the 9th century, the power of the Abbasids had declined enough to allow further flung regions of the newly Islamic world to assert regional independence. Originally a Turk brought into Abbasid service as a Mamluk, Ahmad ibn Tulun was sent to Egypt as resident governor in 868 but quickly took advantage of the climate to assert independence and cease payment of tribute. The "Tulunid Emirate" represented the first period of Egyptian independence since the days of Cleopatra and would help to establish the idea of Egyptian nationalism in the face of a previously imperial Muslim world. It came to an end with the Abbasid reconquest in 905, but the Caliphate's direct power was still weak and Egypt was somewhat autonomous under their tributary Ikhshidid dynasty of Mamluk governors.

The next power to rule Egypt was the Fatimid Caliphate, an Isma'ili Shia polity that originally emerged from Tunisia. The Fatimids conquered Egypt in 969 and gradually made it their center of power. They were the ones to establish the modern city of Cairo, proudly setting it up as a proper capital complete with palaces for the Caliph and the official state mosque. One notable Fatimid Caliph was Abu Ali al-Mansur, famous for establishing centers of learning and concluding peace with the Byzantines, but infamous for destroying the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem and helping to provoke the Crusades

Fatimid power was weakened by conflict with the Seljuk Turks and then the "Franks" (Crusaders) who would capture virtually all of Fatimid territory in the Levant. Crusader leaders like Baldwin of Jerusalem and Amalric of Jerusalem would invade Egypt proper from time to time, damaging the coast and threatening the river delta.

One prominent Muslim commander of the post Second Crusade, Saladin, rose to be the vizier of the Caliphate and used his power to abolish the Fatimids outright in 1171. He took the title of Sultan in 1174 as the founder of the new Ayyubid Dynasty.

Though not born in Egypt and remembered as a leader for the Arab world in general, Saladin is another figure that has retroactively become a symbol of Egyptian nationalism. He was the first to be called Sultan of Egypt and is at least perceived as being a more "Egyptian" leader than the previous Fatimids. Egyptians (Sunnis) also note that he returned the land to Sunni Islam and did away with Fatimid Shia influence.

If nothing else, Saladin made the Egyptian eagle as originally depicted in Pharaonic era symbolism into his personal emblem. The Eagle of Saladin would in turn inspire Egypt's modern coat of arms.

A longstanding tradition of Muslim powers was the usage of slave soldiers called Mamluks. Originally captives from the Turkic peoples of Central Asia, later recruited from a variety of foreign cultures, Mamluks were converted to Islam if not already and made to fight in the armies of the Abbasid Caliphate. The practice continued and evolved over the centuries, with many Mamluks becoming commanders and governors for their masters and establishing hereditary lineages of their own.

Many other post-Caliphate states continued the practice into the early modern period, the Turks themselves making use of Mamluks after converting to Islam and establishing their own states in the Middle East. The Ottomans continued the tradition through the well known Janissary corps, referenced by this very site no less.

The Mamluks of Egypt evolved into something of a knightly caste, and in the wake of the Seventh Crusade they overthrew the Ayyubids entirely and established the "Mamluk Sultanate". The Mamluks defended Egypt and reclaimed territory in the Levant from the Mongols, at one point representing the only major Islamic power in the Middle East to not fall under Mongol domination Alas the Mamluk form of government was somewhat unstable and their intial Bahri Dynasty would go through 25 Sultans in less than 150 years, with the subsequent Burji Dynasty turbulent as well. The Mamluks also had the unfortunate distinction of seeing Egypt through the Black Death. The plague may have killed as much as 40% of Egypt's population and became a recurring problem for the cities of the Nile over a 150 year period.

As Mamluk power declined, Egypt was conquered by the Ottoman Empire in 1517 and became the Eyalet of Egypt. Al-Mutawakkil III, last of the ceremonial Abbasid Caliphs (used to legitimize the rule of later Muslim rulers) was taken from Egypt to Turkey and anointed the Ottomans as the "Fourth Caliphate" from then on.

The conquest of the Mamluk Sultanate opened the way for further expansion in Africa and gave the Turks control of the holy cities of Mecca and Medina. Egypt itself became a breadbasket province once more and produced a disproportionate amount of the empire's food. It also served as Turkey's hub for the transportation of Yemeni coffee and goods from trade routes to India.

Egypt's fortunes waxed and waned with the rise of fall of Turkish power. By the late 18th century the European empires had become stronger in comparison, and Britain was well underway in establishing interests in the area and the lucrative trade route to India.

While still an officer for the French Republic, Napoleon led an invasion of Egypt in 1798 and defeated the initial Ottoman force sent to stop him. Britain took the opportunity to intervene and stranded the French army after sinking their fleet. Napoleon abandoned the troops in 1802 and the French surrended.

The French actually had the romantic study of Egyptian history as a secondary objective of theirs and Napoleon himself established the Institut d'Égypte in Cairo. On July 15th, 1799, French soldiers discovered the famous Rosetta Stone while working on the defenses of Fort Julien to the northwest of Rashid (Rosetta) The stone was handed over to the British after the surrender and was sent to the British museum in London. Its discovery led to the field of Egyptology as it is today.

The significance of the Rosetta Stone is that it contains the same message written in three scripts, Egyptian in Hieroglyphics, Egyptian in Demotic, and Ancient Greek. Because Greek was known, the stone allowed scholars to finally figure out how to decipher Hieroglyphics, which is why the earliest Egyptian records can be understood. Otherwise ancient Egypt would be as mysterious as the Indus Valley Civilization, a comparable early civilization whose script remains untranslatable.

Napoleon's invasion permanently destabilized Ottoman power and left a vacuum that would be filled by an Albanian regiment commander Muhammad Ali. Originally part of the force sent to fight the French, Muhammad Ali of Egypt became the dominant figure in Egypt and was recognized as viceroy to the Sultan in 1805. He conquered much of Sudan of his own accord and campaigned for Turkey in Arabia and Greece, but in 1831 he abandoned all pretenses of subservience and went to war with the Sultan. His armies defeated the Ottomans in the Levant and southern Anatolia and threatened Constantinople itself. In line with their post-Napoleonic belief in the "balance of power", European nations were alarmed at the potential collapse of the empire and intervened diplomatically. Muhammad Ali ultimately agreed to peace in exchange for autonomous hereditary rule over Egypt, and his descendants became the royal family that would be recognized until 1952.

And yes, that means modern Egypt's arguable founding father was Albanian

It was also in this period that Egypt began growing its famed cotton as a cash crop industry. The Suez Canal, financed by the French Compagnie de Suez and originally opened under their control, was completed in 1869.

As the 19th century continued, Egypt fell into debt towards Europe it couldn't repay. A European commission led by Britain and France took control of the treasury of Egypt and forgave the debt in return for taking national control of the canal and establishing a permanent military presence. Increased hostility with the locals and Egypt's independent army led to a joint Anglo-French invasion in 1882. From then on Egypt became a de facto British protectorate, such that they ruled over the Suez and began building the Cape to Cairo Railway.

Though until 1914 it was technically still an Ottoman province.

When the First World War broke out in '14, the British made their control of Egypt official by establishing the Sultanate of Egypt, a puppet government without any remaining pretenses of Ottoman influence. Turkey's entry into the conflict as a Central Power led to the Sinai and Palestine Campaigns in early 1915. Ottoman forces opened the theatre with an ambitious raid on the Suez itself, but British forces had broken this offensive by 1916 and soon advanced into Palestine. This long campaign would eventually take the Allies as far north as Aleppo before the unconditional Turkish surrender

Though the Egyptian Sultanate itself was officially neutral throughout the war, tens of thousands of locals were made to serve within the Egyptian Labour Corps and Egyptian Camel Transport Corps

Egyptian resentment to British interference had only grown stronger after the hardships of the war, leading to the nationalist revolution of 1919. The riots and mass demonstrations finally led to Britain's official declaration of independence for Egypt in 1922, the new government taking form as the Kingdom of Egypt. However, Britain held on to many rights including security of communications, defense of Egypt, control of Egyptian foreign policy as well as full control of Sudan and the Suez. The world still considered Egypt an extension of Britain going into the Second World War

Following Italy's entry into the conflict in 1940, an Italian invasion of Egypt was beaten back by the British Western Desert Force in Operation Compass, an extended raid successful enough to send Italian troops scrambling back into Libya. The arrival of German reinforcements and reorganization of Axis forces under the Afrika Korps allowed a renewed offensive into Egypt that would be countered by the first and second Battles of El Alamein -- battles that would go down among the great Allied victories of 1942 alongside Stalingrad and Midway. British forces then pushed on while American forces landed in Morocco, leading to the final defeat of all Axis forces in Africa in May of 1943 During the war Egypt remained officially neutral but provided significant material support to the British. Egyptian troops also defended themselves from occasional Axis attacks and would suffer over a thousand killed and wounded.

Meanwhile, Egypt's yearnings for true independence continued to grow. The Anglo-Egyptian treaty of 1936 promised an end to British military presence beyond the Suez except in cases of foreign invasion of Egypt. With that invasion having happened and ended, Egyptians in the post-war period became more fervent than ever in demanding British withdrawal. In '42 there had also been the infamous Abdeen Palace Incident in which British troops surrounded Egyptian King Farouk in his home and forced him to accept a Wafd controlled government -- the Wafd being a political party and the British believing such a government would be more cooperative for the war effort. Lest he end up overthrown by the British as had happened to Iraq and Iran in the same period, King Farouk capitulated. This incident was seen by the Egyptian people as a national embarrassment and stirred them against the monarchy and existing political parties

In '48 the Egyptian army attacked Israel alongside other Arab powers and were repulsed everywhere beyond the Gaza Strip though an officer named Gamal Abdel Nasser made a name for himself by holding out until the armistice. The stresses of this war inflamed the situation at home as disgruntled army officers began to collaborate against the Kingdom.

In 1951 Egypt withdrew from the '36 treaty and began a Suez incident by cutting off water to the British base and refusing to allow any Egyptian workers to travel there. Egyptian police were seen aiding guerillas and a police station was leveled by British attack. In '52 King Farouk was overthrown and forced to abdicate the throne by the Free Officers Movement, a conspiracy against the Kingdom led by Mohamed Naguib and Nasser. Becoming Egypt's second president in '54 after Naguib, Nasser pressured the British more heavily than before and in '56 he kicked off the Suez Crisis by nationalizing the Canal. Egypt was invaded by the militaries of Britain, France, and Israel but ultimately ended the crisis in control of the canal, still administered today by the Suez Canal Authority established under Nasser. For all these reasons 1952 is considered as the year Egypt gained its true independence, and Nasser is seen as another founding father for the country. (At least that was the impression I got from a boomer cab driver in NYC )

Nasser was seen as a hero to the Arab world after standing against western powers, and in 1958 he attempted to put Pan-Arab nationalism into practice by forming the United Arab Republic with Syria. The government lasted only until '61, but Egypt continued to officially refer to itself as the UAR until becoming the modern Arab Republic of Egypt in '71. Another highlight of Nasser's administration was the Six Day War, a third (but not the last) conflict with Israel

Nasser reigned until his death in 1970 and was succeeded as Egyptian President by Anwar Sadat. This marks the beginning of contemporary Egypt, which in this context is defined by boring modern politics I don't feel like talking about

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And that's all for now Hopefully someone somewhere learned a thing or two, or maybe a dramatard will angrily correct something I got wrong. Either works for me

I might do more emote driven history tours if anyone's interested. Brazil might be next cos capybaras are from Brazil geddit? Would this be interesting? Should there be more emotes and less words? Lemme know