Sorry- I didn’t know that part off the top of my head But since you asked, Russia’s presence in Hawaii was sort of like its presence in Alaska and California: early 1800s outposts established by agents acting on behalf of the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian-American_Company, which the Russian Crown had granted a monopoly on operations in North America and the Pacific but was unable to back or support such claims.

You mean something like a third Reich?

Well, yeah. In very real ways WWII was about upending the post-WW1 order (which was punitive of Germany generally). It’s really interesting to understand how crazy the flows of money were, and how badly the US in particular bungled its role as the issuer of the world’s de facto reserve currency at the time- in the aftermath of WWI, Germany and its allies were made to pay reparations, France occupied the industrial territory on their border, and any money France or Belgium or Holland received in reparations promptly went to American banks, to repay war bonds borrowed to finance the fighting (which had, in turn, been spent in American factories on war materiel, weapons, munitions, etc).

https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/12/the-real-story-of-how-america-became-an-economic-superpower/384034/ (sorry this is paywalled now, it was a really good read when it was available so I’ll summarize briefly)

By the end of the first world war, all of the belligerent nations’ economies were in tatters, their leadership were forced to inflate their currencies to make payments- but the US declined to inflate its own currency to make it workable for them- and when the US didn’t think about its new role in maintaining a viable world order, it put everyone that owed it anything in the position of paying their debts not in their own inflated currencies, but in US dollars. This essentially collapsed the German economy and its currency, and it was just unnecessary.

I wonder why we can’t just decode the term ‘settler’ for what it is:

“terrorist”, but with state aegis and pliant media cooking up anodyne narrative cover

All of these locations (Alaska, California, Hawaii, much of eastern Europe) are ones that Russia has at one point in its imperial or soviet history had either outposts or territorial claim to. Of course, much of Eastern Europe was as recently as the 1980s under the Kremlin’s direct control, either as puppet states or as territory Russia or the USSR directly claimed. Finland and Poland in particular have both been completely invaded by Russian forces multiple times, but at the moment they are built up defensively in ways that Russia quite honestly has zero chances of winning against.

Alaska was territory that imperial Russia claimed before any European country did. It was sold to the US during the Crimean war (1853) because Russia needed the money and in all likelihood it was going to lose it to Britain. Russia established early trading outposts in Alaska and California but sold or abandoned them after wiping out the fur animals they’d come to harvest and trade.

This talk for the benefit of Russian audiences is about reminding Russians of former imperial or soviet glory, but the problem with that historically is that it wasn’t actually glorious.

The current propaganda push to get Russians thinking they really have a shot at rolling back the map changes since Imperial times is just an effort to sustain Russia’s modern project: dismantling the post-WWII order in which the West (the US, in particular, but NATO and much of the UN) upholds alliances that Putin sees as against Russia’s interests.

I’m pretty sure California could defeat Russia

California has more blue-water navy in San Diego than Russia has in the world. It also has more air force stationed there than Russia has.

(granted, these are US forces, not California forces, but there is no real-world scenario right now in which California would face invasion without the full military support of United States and NATO)

Where is Russia 2 miles from Alaska?

The international border goes between the islands of little and big Diomede. Both of these islands are remote from land in either direction, and they are situated about midway in the narrowest part of the Bering Strait.

Since you asked where, here it is on a map

Yep, that’s pretty close, but nope, that’s not really tactically meaningful.

“total victory” sure sounds like they’ve given some thought to their objectives and it’s no accident they’re killing lots of civilians

it is literally just Poland between Germany and russia

Poland has one of the most powerful militaries in Europe. If you think Russia’s been struggling in Ukraine, you haven’t seen anything yet. Since Poland joined the EU (and later, NATO) it’s become much more prosperous than it was under Soviet/Russian influence:

It’s been using that prosperity to spend on military. It’s not the pushover from days of yore any more, and it’s in NATO

Oh, no!

Well anyways

He’s mad that there’s a move afoot to sell seized Russian assets and use the proceeds to fund Ukraine’s defense. The signal is: if you buy these things (yachts, real estate, whatever) Russia will see to it as a matter of official policy that you will fall carelessly out of a high window somewhere. The quiet part said out loud, tho, is that Russia now claims that anything it ever held, whether as the USSR or imperial Russia, or the current Russian Federation, is theirs forever no takebacks.

Basically the read on this should be: Russia is having trouble laundering rubles into non-sanctioned currencies (those foreign assets are basically conduits to do that) and is now saying essentially that if they can’t keep our offshore loot they’ll just seize all of Eastern Europe and demand tribute from their vassal territories

…of course, if Russia could actually do any of that it already would have

Rhetoric of this sort just promotes distrust in election systems, which of course prompts demagogues like Trump to promise voters they can fix it if they gain power. The fun thing here is that the right here needs you to believe things that aren’t true in order to justify them doing a coup, the stupid thing is that stupid people take this kind of talk seriously.

But seriously, American voting is relatively secure- it’s just that where lawmakers don’t want voters deciding the ‘wrong’ way they’ve gerrymandered them into districts to prevent them doing it, and they’ve done things to strip voters of their voting rights and to suppress voting and to make it inconvenient or difficult to vote. This has been a bipartisan thing in the past, but today the GOP are the chief offenders.

Also, Putin’s Russia is in the stage of democracy where elections are an exercise in flaunting the death of democracy itself, and nobody should ever take his talk about elections as being in good faith, ever

Freedom always suffers when the people with power dole out privileges and patronage to the ‘right people’ but deny rights and protections to everyone else. Happens every time

Where the first speech absolutists at?

They’re buying social media platforms and censoring speech they don’t like

I seem to recall that when southern states wanted to prosecute Martin Luther King, Jr for “hate speech” on the theory that his calls for equality amounted to anti-white racism, the way SCOTUS dealt with that was by punting on the question of what hate speech is or isn’t.

By taking the ‘hate speech’ stick away from states, the high court effectively ruled that Nazis had the right to rallies under the rubric of free speech. It was this optimistic dithering on the court’s part (surely, the way forward is free speech and everybody will use that in good faith right?) that is part of why the US’s stance on hate speech diverged from that of Europe and the commonwealth

well after all lots of Russian oligarch yachts have already been seized, so… might as well melt them down for slag and heave them at the Russians

B/c if Israel just stops like it’s trendy to demand, then Hamas will regroup and go again

That’s an interesting prediction I’d like to see tested, honestly. What if, (hear me out here) the only thing keeping air in Hamas’s sails is the perceived need to resist the occupation? Hamas isn’t and never has been popular among Palestinians, in much the same way that Likud is really only politically relevant because someone needs to take a firm hand with Hamas.

Also, if Israel doesn’t stop, like it hasn’t for the last 70 years, then Hamas will regroup and go again, right?

Honestly this has all the same energy of the ‘defund the police/thin blue line’ rhetoric we’ve seen sail through our political spaces; if you listen to the law-and-order narrative the logic is that force must be escalated until those thugs learn their lesson, while that seems to drive up protest movements and that in turn gets the thin-blue-line crowd frothing for cops to use real bullets instead of rubber bullets and tear gas.

There was peace between Jews and Palestinians before the state of Israel began its occupation and settlements. The beef here isn’t religious or cultural, the issue is the occupation and the dispossession of Palestinians of their family homes. One thing Israel could try (that it hasn’t) is not doing that

good bot 😊

I’ve been watching the media and our politicians both-sides the issue in ways that seem contrived to ensure that the occupation and genocide will continue without interference by anyone in a position to do anything about it, especially my own elected representatives and officials.

Reading South Africa’s Application instituting proceedings in the World Court document myself reminded me how thirsty I’ve been to hear from anyone serious about the matter. It’s very human-readable, cogent even- well worth the read.

Corollary data for cyclist fatalities shows a similar increase over the same timeframe https://bikeleague.org/new-fatality-data-for-2021-shows-increase-in-bicyclist-deaths/

Of the 1,230 bicyclist deaths in 2021, 853 died in motor-vehicle crashes and 377 in other incidents, according to National Center for Health Statistics mortality data. https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/home-and-community/safety-topics/bicycle-deaths

While it’s nice to hear that Biden is ‘under pressure’ about this, I wish it took something less than obvious genocide and a near-global consensus that these are crimes against humanity for any sort of media to register it.

I honestly don’t understand why Biden is so hawkish on this; it’s not like giving Israel carte blanche will get him support from Republicans, and doing it really does appear to divide the left enough to hurt him politically.