mannism

[mannism @mannism]

Who’s that?!!

[Texas A&M Volleyball @AggieVolleyball]

Early lead in set 1👍

👍 0-0 🐱
S1: 7-4

#GigEm // #AggieVB

[mannism @mannism]

@adamyounggolf Yes

[mannism @mannism]

@Mike_kim714 What about the Memorial Park course in Houston don’t you like? Too much of an edge for bombers?

[mannism @mannism]

Would support:

[Jack @tracewoodgrains]

Excellent priority list for one of the most important projects in contemporary American politics: a hostile moderate takeover of the Democratic Party.

[Sean Davis @seanmdav]

A lot of people seem plagued with a misconception that wars start when the first gun is fired. This belief generally leads to the assumption that the first to fire is the bad guy and the first to get hit is always the good guy.

This is not true, and actually could not be more false. Combat starts when guns are fired and borders are crossed. But wars are started long before anything ever gets to that point. And preventing wars from happening requires an understanding of the factors and events that often culminate in military combat.

World War I didn’t start with the assassination of Franz Ferdinand. A long and complicated chain of events leading to global military conflict was set in motion long before that. World War II didn’t start with Germany’s invasion of Poland. It started with the terms of the Treaty of Versailles.

The Vietnam War didn’t start when U.S. ships were allegedly targeted in the Gulf of Tonkin. The end of French colonialism, the Geneva division of the nation along the 17th parallel, and the uneasy World War II alliance with Stalin—leading to the division of Europe—are what set the stage for America’s involvement in that war.

Which brings us to Ukraine. The war with Russia didn’t start in 2022 when Russia invaded eastern Ukraine. It didn’t start with the Crimean invasion in 2014. The most recent proximate cause of that war was the Western-instigated Maidan revolution (which precipitated the Crimean invasion) and the failure to fully implement the Minsk agreements that followed.

But even that is probably short-sighted, as you could look back even further to the 1997 Moscow-Kiev lease agreement regarding Russian military bases on the Black Sea in Sevastopol as being a major contributor to geographic tensions between the two countries.

To truly understand how we came to be where we are, however, you have to go back to the end of the Cold War, when the U.S.S.R. was broken up and redivided, and new countries were given geographical borders that often seemed completely arbitrary.

As university professor and former U.S. Pentagon official Mario Loyola noted, “When [Ukraine’s Soviet] borders suddenly became ‘real’ in 1991, amidst the collapse of the Soviet Union, Kiev found itself in control of a nuclear arsenal, the Black Sea fleet, Russia’s most important commercial and naval ports in the world (Odessa and Sevastopol), and tens of millions of Russians. U.S. diplomats realized the situation was dangerously untenable, and quickly pressed Kiev to return the nuclear arsenal and Black Sea fleet to Russia. Unfortunately, the adjustments stopped there, leaving Ukraine with a bigger bite of Russia than it could safely chew.”

The U.S. understood for a time that post-Cold War NATO expansion in eastern Europe was a major red line for Russia, especially regarding Ukraine. As a result, tensions eased. Until NATO started expanding again in the mid-2000s, that is.

Seven new nations, including Black Sea neighbors Romania and Bulgaria, were added in 2004. Ukraine began intensified dialog to join NATO in 2005.

Georgia, which also borders Russia along the Black Sea, began serious talks to be added to NATO in 2006. At this point, the only two Russian Black Sea neighbors outside of NATO were Georgia and Ukraine.

Russia unsurprisingly invaded Georgia just two years later while the U.S. was stuck in its own quagmires in Iraq and Afghanistan. In 2009, nearly 30 years after the end of the Cold War, two more countries were added to NATO.

This was the geopolitical environment when the West instigated the Maidan revolution in early 2014. And how did Russia immediately respond? By taking Crimea. That doesn’t seem so random or unprovoked anymore, does it?

Then comes Biden’s election in 2021, immediately followed by new Ukrainian demands to join NATO (recall that Biden was the U.S. government’s point man on Ukraine policy in 2014), which Biden explicitly blessed. Russia then invaded Ukraine in early 2022.

Does all this historical context make Russia the good guy? Does it make Ukraine the bad guy? Of course not. Because there are no good guys and no bad guys, and if shattering that comforting myth about international relations shocks your conscience, then I have some bad news for you: you’re not going to make it in this arena.

There are no heroes and no villains, no good guys and no bad guys. There are no permanent allies and no permanent enemies. There are just nations and leaders with competing interests. Sometimes national interests align, and sometimes they are in direct conflict with each other.

You can kick and scream and complain about this reality all you want, but it will not change the reality of war and combat. And the reality of war is that it begins long before anyone ever fires a bullet.

[Martyr Made @martyrmade]

RT to get @elonmusk to listen to Fear & Loathing in the New Jerusalem to find out what he's missing.

[mannism @mannism]

Kentucky competing with tu for worst visiting team pass list experience. See if you can find the Aggie fans…

[mannism @mannism]

I'm gonna just say this is awesome!

[Texas A&M Volleyball @AggieVolleyball]

🎥 The Showdown: Texas

#GigEm // #AggieVB

[mannism @mannism]

Please tell the producer to stop with the ridiculous camera angles. Volleyball is easy to shoot. Put a camera on the net and let it run.

[LSU Volleyball @lsuvolleyball]

Ready to Fight 👊

🆚 Texas A&M
🕐 1 p.m. CT
📍 The PMAC
📺 SEC Network +
💻 https://t.co/gBYKy436nI
📊 https://t.co/YhfA6tBva4
🎟 https://t.co/XKA6qoSuho

#FullForce | #FullFight

[mannism @mannism]

@adamyounggolf #Road

[mannism @mannism]

@martyrmade Reconciling your scripted thoughtful podcast character with your pugnacious sh1tposting twitter character is hard work.

[mannism @mannism]

I just really wanna know where I can get a Funko Pop.

[Devon Eriksen @Devon_Eriksen_]

Middle-class leftists don't really understand the difference between wealth and money.

That's because what they have is a job as a retarded commie journalist, which pays them money, which they put in the bank before spending it on Funko Pops, cannabis, dildos, and tofu.

They think wealth is "more money". And when they think about "more money", they think about all the Funko Pops they want but can't afford, and about how Elon Musk can afford more Funko Pops than he could ever use, that is if Funko Pops could be used for anything, which they can't, unless you count leftists' strange propensity for putting unexpected things in places they do not belong.

They don't understand that Elon Musk doesn't have some sort of special titanium credit bank card connected to a bank account with 260,000,000,000 munnies in it, for the buying of Funko Pops.

What he has is some businesses he started, and a bunch of dudes whose job it is to guess the value of things have arrived at the consensus that they are worth that much. That guess changes by the hour.

Leftists can't really wrap their heads around this idea, not in the intuitive sense that would allow them to engage with it as a concept. They can't imagine what it would be like to be in that position.

Why not?

Because if they could, they wouldn't be leftists. In fact, many people can, and therefore are not leftists, so leftists are really just the group of people who are self-selected for not being able to figure this out.

This is why they can, without blushing, describe "reusable space launch capability" as "unnecessary wealth".

They don't understand that if you took every share of SpaceX away from Elon Musk, and all the other shareholders, it would still be valued at 200 billion dollars (or whatever it is on the day you are reading this), but it would not magically transform into 200 billion one-dollar bills that you could give to left-wing journalists to buy more Funko Pops with. It would still be a bunch of factories, and designs, and offices, and employment contracts, and rocket engines, and stuff.

The reality is that the earn-spend-consume model of money that retarded leftist commie journos are familiar with has an upper limit. Once you've spent on much on yourself as you want, a ceiling which varies depending on your character, you need a new source of meaning and purpose in life.

You need to develop different ambitions.

Then your spending becomes not about what you want to have, but what you want to create. You build the things you want to see in the world.

This is where money becomes wealth. Money is used to buy things. Wealth is used to build things.

When you create something that a lot of people care about, it's valued at a huge amount of money, because money is a measure of fucks given.

So maybe, when you have enough money to buy a mansion and a yacht, you decide that what you really want is "reusable space launch capability", because you're a nerd who reads science fiction, and so you think it's a kind of dumb idea for humanity to spend all its time on one tiny dust speck in an infinite universe.

So you buy some computers and you hire some dudes who are good at designing things on computers, and then you buy some metal, and hire some dudes who are good at cutting metal and sticking it together, and pretty soon you're the proud owner of whole bunch of stuff.... computers and factories and tanks full of liquid oxygen and launch pads and most importantly, rocket boosters.

And no Funko Pops. Not a single one.

Now, it's worth more money than you started with, because the people who guess the value of things (it's called a "stock market") are starting to agree that this was maybe a pretty good idea.

So, on paper, you're richer than you ever were. But that's your not bank account, or your Funko Pop collection. That's the fact that you now control humanity's effort to leave the gravity well. And you control it because you built it in the first place.

Wealth inequality is a measure of technological progress.

It doesn't exist in low-tech societies where everyone is chasing antelope with a throwing stick and a stone-tipped spear. Because no one invents anything and there's nothing to own.

And it peaks in high-tech societies where enterprising people create entire economies ex nihilo by investing in a wild idea. Because things are being invented and people give a fuck about them, and so the innovators have a much higher net worth than the people who sit around eating processed snack foods and shopping for Funko Pops on the internet.

Reducing wealth inequality is a disaster, and typically requires one. If you reduce wealth inequality in a free market, you are either outright destroying growth enterprises, or transferring control of them to non-producers.

Which is what leftists really are. Useless journo flacks and cloistered academics who want to tear down the engines of tech innovation so they can buy more middle class consumer goods, until they tear down the engines that produce those, too.

The most important task in all of economics is keeping people who don't get shit done out of the way of people who do.

Leave humanity's orbital launch capability alone, Zaid.

It is already in the hands of the people who are best qualified to operate it. We know that because they are ones who built it in the first place.

Das computermachine ist nicht fuer gefingerpoken und mittengrabben bei das doomkompfen. Ist easy schnappen der springenverk.

[mannism @mannism]

@LouStagner Where did you get the chart?

[Texas A&M Volleyball @AggieVolleyball]

Second birthday alert of the day🚨 🎂

Happy birthday Margot, have the best day ever 🥳

#GigEm | #AggieVB

[Texas A&M Volleyball @AggieVolleyball]

Time for some Maroon Out madness in Reed ‼️

🆚 No. 17 Florida
⏰ 6:30 p.m.
🏟 Reed Arena
📺 https://t.co/NoWuxOJxLi
📈 https://t.co/lf3uXJv2CI

#GigEm | #AggieVB | @12thMan

[mannism @mannism]

Can't get enough of these - great job to the production staff that put this together.

[Texas A&M Volleyball @AggieVolleyball]

Dig Deep S1, E3: Winning ways

#GigEm | #AggieVB

[Texas A&M Volleyball @AggieVolleyball]

It's time for a Maroon Out ‼️

Friday's match versus No. 17 Florida is our annual Maroon Out match, the first 2,000 fans will receive a free t-shirt. For all the info on the match follow the link below, see you there Ags 👍

#GigEm | #AggieVB
https://t.co/CSGkOH5Yjb