#hot take but we don't need new rt content if it's just going to mean more crunch more abuse and more labor violations

[anneapocalypse]

"Burnie Burns buys back Rooster Teeth" cool! and what steps will he be taking to make restitution to all the former employees and contractors RT abused and stole wages from under his leadership? 🤔

[fapangel]

I thought Trump was on good terms with Russia, and I don't even mean that as a dig. Like, you mentioned this before, that he wasn't chomping at the bit to go to war with Russia or something. So why provoke somebody that Russia is obligated to speak up for?

Because 1. they’ve been provoking us constantly since the conflict in Syria began, 2. if we bitch out again Putin will just keep pushing for more, 3. Russia’s not going to war with us, because we’d stomp their slav assholes square, and 4. we cannot fucking tolerate the wanton use of WMDs. 

1. It’s been extensively documented that Russia’s not bombing ISIS at all, mainly because America (backing the KPG Kurds) are already doing that for them, and ISIS is also fighting the moderate (non-fundamentalist, non-insane) rebels - and Russia’s only goal is to save Assad. If their habit of bombing every single fucking hospital they can find - including the hospital that was treating the victims of that last gas attack - didn’t clue you in, all Russia cares about is saving Assad, and perhaps increasing the flow of refugees to Europe to continue fostering tensions, division and divide. The moderate rebels they’re bombing are people we’re training - and helping, on the ground, with special forces, military advisers and other sundry troops. This has been the latest Cold War proxy war from the outset, and anyone who thinks otherwise is willfully blind. 

It goes deeper than this, however- the Russians have made a show of flaunting even the appearance of co-operation or mutual respect as NATO, Russian and Syrian aircraft all operate in the same crowded airspace. They haven’t just bombed “moderate forces,” they’ve done so after deliberately ignoring repeated radio calls on the established “deconfliction” channels, as a “fuck you” to show exactly what they think of us. This is in addition to repeated aggressive harassment from their aircraft directed at ours. (This is entirely aside from their harassment and brinkmanship elsewhere in the world, like buzzing our ships in the Black Sea.) So if Putin gets miffed because we gave his asshole buddy Assad a slap on the wrist, too fucking bad - not responding would enbolden Putin and Assad even more, and result in far, far more death and far more refugees - which are contributing to a widening political crisis that’s directly shaking many of NATO’s member nations, and thus playing into Putin’s hands. 

2. Putin way of murdering people and waging war has been called “hybrid war,” but it’s not really that different from the way things were done in the Cold War - the CIA certainly used direct action more than a few times, after all. Putin just applies it on a larger scale; his “subterfuge” is paper-thin and obvious bullshit, but provides just enough cover for cowards and fair-weather allies to bitch out of joining NATO in any substantial response. The Middle East has been a bone of contention between Russia and America for many, many decades - it’s why we put up with those crazy theocratic fuckbag Saudis in the firs tplace; they’re not wanton-murder-crazy and we needed the bases to wage the Cold War. And the Gulf War. And Operation El Dorado Canyon, Operation Praying Mantis, and the other hojillion hot-spot responses the region’s seen. 

This is just the latest move in a very, very long game, and for the last eight years we’ve had a hand-wringing mealy-mouthed “diplomat” letting Putin swing his cock around the Middle East, expanding his power and influence in the region that includes most of the world’s oil reserves and two of it’s most vital economic chokepoints (Suez Canal and the Hormuz Strait.) The recent “security conference” between Russia, Syria and Turkey - which the US wasn’t invited to - was just the latest example of how the US was being sidelined, marginalized and diminished. Obama’s eventual response to the chemical attack was to agree to a “deal” overseen by Putin to “remove Assad’s chemical weapons,” which, again, put Putin and Russia in the position of ultimate arbitrater, power-broker and deal-maker. This isn’t just muh opinion, either: many people have observed that Putin was running rings around Obama in diplomatic and strategic maneuvering. Even CNN said so. A change was clearly needed. 

3. See my post below about the Admiral Gigglefuck vs. Arleigh Burkes for an example. And hey, that’s just one example. I could delve into the vast military power disparity between America and Russia, but suffice to say they have one broken-down pile of shit “carrier” that launched a handful of strikes off the shore of Syria and lost several planes to bad pilots and mechanical failures before being towed away like the tiny pile of shit it is, and we have eleven nuclear-powered fleet carriers. The Russian military is so weak that their shills have resorted to deep-throating RT propaganda about their bombsight computers making “unguided bombs just as good as Precision Guided Munitions” to explain why it takes an entire plane’s payload to maybe kind of hit one target sorta, when an American plane can loiter overhead dropping bombs one at a time, killing ISIS with every button press. Most of their navy is rusting Soviet relics and their air force isn’t much better. There’s no way in hell that a full-scale - or even a limited - conventional conflict is going to work out well for them, and we both goddamn know it. This idea that we have to tip-toe around because Russians might bitch and whine and throw a tantrum is pretty fucking hilarious. What are they gonna do? Fuck with us? We’d bury them deeper than the Romanovs. Stick that in your shoe and bang it, motherfuckers. 

4. This is the most important point: we absolutely cannot tolerate the wanton use of WMD by a hostile, dictatorial regime against their own people. THIS AFFECTS US. WMD exists, and is sought after, because it completely changes the dynamics of power. Just as it did in 1945, it enables a single aircraft to annihilate an entire city. No matter how small, how weak, or how outmatched a nation is, they can suddenly guarantee their own existential survival if they have these horrible weapons at their command. They’re David’s Slingstone. However, that same power and ease of use means that the only real defense against them is Mutual Assured Destruction - the threat of retaliation in kind. This two-edged sword regulates them only to preserving existential survival - a weapon that guarantees your death if you do use it, but guarantees your enemy’s death if he tries to kill you, by conventional means or otherwise. 

And that’s it. That is the only goddamned thing keeping the wanton, widespread use of Weapons of Mass Destruction in check - the great and abiding fear on all sides that they stand a hell of a lot more to lose if they use it than they do to gain. This is why poison gas was never used by the Germans in WWII, nor the Allies, for instance. In Desert Storm, we even warned Saddam that using his chemical WMD against our troops would be met with tac-nukes in return. Because, again, that was our only real option for keeping his own in check - the threat of retaliation. That aura of taboo, that fear of letting the genie out of the bottle, is all we have to keep the holocaust at bay - and that’s a damn thin line indeed. 

So when some murderous bastards start using it, routinely, on their own people - because their people cannot respond in kind and enforce MAD - then someone has to do it for them. If you say it’s “not our fight, who cares,” then you open the door to a path you do not want to walk. Next it’s North Korea eyeballing the South and saying, well, it’s not America’s fight - it’s not even their fucking country, is it? And South Korean/American relations are pretty shitty right now that we’ve found out their leadership was run by a fucking religious whackjob cult for the last decade, and the new guy is a limp-wristed dove. 

WMD does, indeed, affect us. It’s too powerful not to. I’ve covered the impact of the immigration crisis on NATO, but have you considered what a nuclear detonation on the Suez canal would do? Egypt’s not our fight, but it’d sure as hell affect our interests. Or imagine if Iran decides to get into it (again) with the new Iraq, and decides they want to be the ones lobbing the chemical warheads instead of the ones suffering them this time. Will America take exception? Nah, it’s not their fight. 

The genie has to stay in the fucking bottle. Anyone trying to let it out has to be stopped. End of fucking story.