Translation: “we’re dangerously low on supplies in a bunch of areas and we need to rush some logistics in without Ukraine blowing them up”

I genuinely do hope Zelenskyy completely ignores this unilaterally-declared truce

I mean it IS retaliation though. It’s retaliation for thinking absurd tariffs are a great idea to apply to one’s allies.

And please do note that some particular countries who were until very recently considered geopolitical adversaries by our government (Russia; Belarus) are NOT targeted by any of the tariffs.

This is what happens when you switch teams, and all of your allies are not a fan of you switching teams, and they don’t want to be tied to your currency standard anymore.

Brb, gonna go gut ourselves strategically real quick

Reposting:

It’s not fucking “strange”.

It’s Canada, Japan, the EU, and our other former allies retaliating against the US trying to use absolutely asinine and ham-fisted tariffs as a cash grab/shakedown by engaging in strategic retaliatory fiscal policy.

This is actual 4D geoeconomic chess. Because if orangeboi doesn’t listen and they keep going, the USD standard goes away.

lol this is nakedly apparent as a shakedown

If it weren’t for the AfD bit, my reaction would honestly be “good”, considering how integrated and integral Germany has become to the EU as a whole. France, Germany, Poland, and Italy could conceivably become the core of a unified EU military - and I think that’s now obviously necessary, since the US is turning into an adversary state.

With AfD being let back in the building… oof. That’s a big fucking wildcard. I hope France can keep RN/FN down, because them gaining power would be it, I think, for EU unity and democracy.

Currently, we’re trying to catch our breaths while stabbing ourselves in the lungs

I bet orangeboi will demand they give back the Vipers and Patriots next, despite the fact that it wasn’t us who gave them most of that stuff

Yeah, and so are all the people who voted for him. And so is the DNC for being so fucking feckless and out of touch that they let things get this bad.

Because ♾️% > 245%

Yes, I know how numbers work, and that they can be sorted.

Why don’t you do a quick dive into Wikipedia and give me a bullet-point summary of what France has done militarily in Iraq since 2009. I should tell you that I know the answer, and I just double checked it for good measure. I’ll wait.

Tbh this is a less bad outcome than I was concerned this was going to have (after letting him in to the prison: “Uh oh, looks like your president thinks you’re a gang member. You can just chill here forever.”)

…what? They pointedly refused to participate in 2003…?

Ooooh wait - I think I remember: they were originally part of the Gawker conglomerate (with the us-focused politico.com, jezebel, jalopnik, and some others), and Peter Thiel snarfed them up / did a hatched job on their staff, right?

Fucking Thiel, holy christ. He’s really gunning for Murdoch’s spot on the “shittiest humans alive” list, isn’t he?

I do hope Macron channels de Gaulle (1966) at the meeting, and in any policy he enacts and pushes the EU to adopt as a result. To those unfamiliar: France pulled out of the NATO command structure from 1966 to 2009 because they didn’t trust the US to simply use it as an extension of the US military. And I do mean “they should kick us out”, not that they should leave themselves at this point.

Read up on the Holodomor, and more broadly, the Tsarist- and Soviet-era tactics that have been used by Russia throughout their history to fragment, undermine, and winnow away at non-Russian ethnic groups that they’ve subsumed in their expansionist conquests.

Fucking embarrassing. And dangerous as all fuck.

Are you guys, like, not seeing what’s going on over on our side of the pond? Are you feeling nostalgic for some overenthusiastic hiking through foreign countries? Are you feeling the need for scapegoating and protectionism? Holy fucking christ.

Look at how we are fucking up, and then don’t do that. Please. For the love of god.

The Republican regime.

It’s a regime. It’s adopting a behavior and format that we’ve seen before in other places. One of those places was Germany during the 1930s and 40s, and the regime started with “N” and ended with “azi” (or if you want to be more formal about it, ended with “ationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei”).

But there’s also notes of Khmer Rouge on the back of the palate, considered how firmly anti-intellectual our regime is now, and how they’re attacking (figuratively, but I expect literally at some point, after the insurrection act gets invoked against “gang members”, considering orangeboi’s temperment and Gorka’s commentary from a day or two ago).

Coming soon: a screwdriver and a soldering iron

Tbh I’m betting we’re going to intensify coup efforts, in addition to eventually resorting to Putin-esque “little green men” bullshit. And I think the only hope of ultimately stopping that is an internal coup.

So far, anyone with the resources to do anything about this fascist takeover has been entirely to chickenshit to actually fucking address the issue in a forceful and direct manner. For fucks sake, Biden had a carte blanche handed to him, and he did nothing with it. Fucking. NOTHING. Sure, it’d be a very dark and dangerous move if he had just straight up offed orangeboi and his cabal of psychopaths, but he knew exactly what the danger was. It was a domestic danger. That’s one of the two dangers that are explicitly mentioned in the oath of office for the presidency, and he fucking airballed it. He had 4 years and one attempted armed insurrection to demonstrate the clear and present danger that these fucks presented, and then he had another 4 years as fucking president to build a fucking firewall against this, and failing that, to make the (admittedly harrowing - perhaps moreso than any since the civil war) choice to eliminate the fascists. Yes; there would have been conflict and violence - likely a significant amount, to be perfectly honest. But I would argue quite fucking strongly that the scenario I’m outlining would have had a FAR less catastrophic long-term outcome than what we’re seeing unfold in front of our eyes, in both a national and global sense. Because the way things are going, the western rules-based order is bleeding out at our feet, and I genuinely don’t expect this country to last the decade as a contiguous nation. And that has pretty fucking catastrophic implications in ways that I doubt most people have thoroughly considered. The implications for nuclear proliferation and possible/likely exchanges alone as a result of the fragmentation of the country and its military assets are bowel-loosening to consider.

I am, very genuinely, hanging my hopes on some group of admirals and generals and high-ups from the alphabet agencies overthrowing orangeboi and executing them for grand treason, because that’s what’s happening right now. That’s what this is. I am not exaggerating. I have no idea if or how that would even unfold. It would be messy. The country would never be the same. But the country already isn’t ever going to be the same. The rubicon has been crossed, and anyone who can do anything about it is sitting around with their thumbs up their asses.

I do think that the smart money is on getting out while you can, if you can.