Haunted Life

Love that we have a DoD that doesn’t believe in tradeoffs

>"Why does [rule] exist? Its pointless and only stops cool stuff!"

>leadership stops enforcing rule

>cool stuff happens for a while

>someone makes minor mistake at the wrong time

>100 civilians killed

>"How did we let this happen?"

You think you like cool shit until people die.

From ancient to abstract, this one sure got around.

United Front: Breasts Without the Airbrush

The shocking thing about Laura Dodsworth’s pictures of 100 women’s breasts isn’t the flesh on show, or the many shapes and sizes, but the realisation that images of unairbrushed, non-uniform breasts seem to be so rare. “We see images of breasts everywhere,” says the 41-year-old photographer, “but they’re unreal. They create an unflattering comparison but also an unobtainable ideal. I wanted to rehumanise women through honest photography.”

This has been a common method for a long time in some states

Well as much as I'm not American and have only experienced MAGA from the outside, I feel completely qualified to give my very expert, scholarly hot take.

Maybe it really just amounts to some confusing combination of Trump's own positive attitudes toward authoritarianism (since MAGA is at its core a personality cult) and a healthy dose of strong general anti-establishment sentiment easily sliding over into just "anti-American" ("democtatic elites") sentiments, maybe with some disguised isolationism somewhere too (if America shouldn't intervene in Ukraine, they are to some degree kind of required to argue that America shouldn't police with Russia, or anyone else for that matter, in the broader sense)

But if I had to give some single reason that honestly probably covers most of it, it's just money. What are "liberal values" in the face of investment opportunities, etc, business is good, something. (Qatar really is insanely obscenely rich. It's like the Norway of the MENA)

Of course you also really can't discount just how susceptible a group with intense mistrust in the MSM is to "alternative narratives", a.k.a. Russian and Chinese propaganda campaigns

Nations have always tried to influence each other’s population. A classic example would be Radio Free Europe, which broadcast American perspectives on the news to Warsaw Pact countries. But the advent of the Internet has transformed the flow of propaganda. Everyone can access information from anywhere. So any sufficiently organized group—this category is NOT limited to nation-states, btw—can spread their message if they understand how to manipulate internet audiences. This is memetic warfare. Successfully targeting a powerful nation’s population, as is the case here, means that the attacker can influence the culture of that nation, and by extension, the path that nation takes in the future. Soft power, when effectively used, is terrifying.