SecurityCube 360 Pro

The Russian Federation being granted the former USSR’s permanent seat was conditional: the Russian Federation was required and expected to uphold the responsibilites that the USSR had, as well as the USSRs treaties and agreements. Failure to uphold those commitments would mean the Russian Federation was in breach of their agreement with the UN and should lose the seat formerly granted to the USSR.

Sure. But the mechanism by which the UN functions is such that the Security Council has extensive veto power over most actual policy set by the UN. Consequently, any effort to challenge Russia on its failed obligations or to penalize or remove them would be subject to… Russian veto of the action from the Security Council.

That’s because the UN doesn’t exist to set policy against its primary member states. The UN exists to allow member states a neutral(ish) space to negotiate international policy amongst themselves and to organize against non-members and non-state-actors. Even if you could kick a $1T/year economy and largest sovereign landmass on the planet out of the body… who would benefit? Its not like removing Russia from the UN makes the country not-a-state. It’s not like the BRICS wouldn’t continue to coordinate amongst themselves independent of the UN. All you’ve done is cut the cord to the Little Red Phone that helps a future Russian President and a future American President from hashing it out before they launch nukes at one another.

The USSR, interestingly enough, had signed many treaties recognizing the borders of its successor states before it was dissolved, one of which being Georgia. Thus the actions of the Russian Federation in Georgia in 2008 violated one of these USSR agreements they are required to uphold. This was a direct violation and one that is technically grounds for removal of the UN, at least removal from a permanent seat.

You can single out the USSR on this technicality and hold Russia to it. But then you could single out the US for its extensive violation of the Geneva Convensions or its withdrawal from the Paris Climate Accords or any number of other historical treaties and associated promises.

You could single out the US for the Hague Invasion Act if nothing else. But we won’t, for the same reason nobody’s seriously interested in ousting Russia (or China or the UK or France for that matter).

This isn’t the G7 (formerly G8) where “We’re embargoing you, why are you even here?” would be the response to any Russian delegation. This is the body that exists to negotiate member states out of nuclear war. If anything, the Security Council should have significantly more members, given how nuclear weapons have proliferated over the last 70 years.

Maybe getting Pakistan and India on the panel could avoid the last great Pyrrhic Victory of human civilization.

We didn’t use to.

Come on, dude. Do you think Simeon II - the former Bulgarian Tsar - was elected to the Prime Ministership five years after returning from exile because he was just an incredibly popular guy? Do you think its a coincidence that his government’s policies of sweeping privatization had anything to do with his habit of stuffing his minister roles with the same kind of Chicago School ghouls that helped Augusta Pinochet and Juan Orlando Hernández and Dilma Rousseff loot Latin America?

Nevermind Orban on Hungary or Lech Kaczyński in Poland or… hell… Boris Yeltsin in Russia. Nothing says “we’re above board” like firing artillery rounds at your Parliament until you get your way.

There was some run-of-the-mill corruption but most perpetrators kept a low profile or got caught.

There was a pogrom against opposition leadership that capped off the Cold War with a bloodbath of mafia violence orchestrated by foreign intelligence services. And then a few of the more naked fascists - your Milosevics and Mikheil Saakashvilis - got pulled down to prove the post-Soviet “Rules Based International Order” wasn’t total bullshit.

But the collapse of the old Soviet system unleashed all the worst excesses of capitalism on an utterly unprepared public. We’re seeing a fascist backlash in eastern europe as a direct response to the public revulsion at EU era over-exploitation.

I feel like I’m looking at a scene from The Reanimator.

Post Soviet Eastern European states are all like this.

Laughs as I cast Tenser’s Transformation

That is the plan.

The track pads on the steamdeck are excellent for emulating a mouse.

They were passable at best. Finicky and imprecise more often than not.

What is up with Valve and their obsession with those stupid touchpads? I hated that on the old Steam D-Pad. Hypersensitive seemingly every moment except when you needed it to be.

The XBox and the PS figured out how to make traditional controllers very well. Nintendo loves to get freaky with it and does a better than average job of innovating in the space. But Valve just seems to want to cobble together spare parts into a janky whatever the hell this is. I don’t get it.

Whomever is making these things, you don’t have to keep doing this. Just be normal!

Yeah; the response should be that a “reject all” button must be displayed next to the accept all button with equal prominence

I’ll do you one better. “Websites should default to the minimal cookies option, with settings confined to a website option menu that does not occlude the entrance page.”

“The Banks Russians are out of money!” rides again.

Who is reporting this?

The National Security Journal

Reuben F. Johnson has thirty-six years of experience analyzing and reporting on foreign weapons systems, defense technologies, and international arms export policy. He is also a survivor of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. He worked for years in the American defense industry as a foreign technology analyst and later as a consultant for the U.S. Department of Defense, the Departments of the Navy and Air Force, and the governments of the United Kingdom and Australia.

Why not just give us your government badge number, dude?

So if I was to name names, I would be putting my head of the block for the Crime of Libel.

“Hello I’m an anonymous person on the Internet and if I say anyone’s name I will literally be murdered, so you just need to Do Your Own Research”

It’s different groups of people with different interests.

Also doesn’t help that the cookie banners were a kind of malicious compliance. They were made deliberately difficult to navigate around when you didn’t immediate hit “accept everything unequivocally”.

That the response to this malicious compliance is a retreat rather than a doubling down suggests the EU regulators are compromised by the industry and this isn’t a popular reform in any meaningful sense.

No they aren’t. Games flop all the time and the companies don’t quit this bullshit. No business executive has ever walked out of a tense call with their investors and re-committed themselves to being nicer to the staff. You’re delusional if you think people not buying a game results in the quality of life of that game’s staff improving.

What improves the lives of game developers is going indie and doing well. What improves the odds of doing well as an indie developer is producing games that can compete with the GTAs absent the absurd marketing budgets. That requires a symbiosis between indie games media, indie developers, and early adopters. But the gooner gamer is at the end of the line in any event. They don’t even know the game exists until it gets a splash ad on the Steam Store.

Your retail consumer market is a consequence of industry practices, not a cause.

ya’ll are taking sex too seriously.

I will stop taking sex seriously when it stops being special. If I only have 20 minutes to properly enjoy intimacy once every two weeks, it is going to be fucking magical. Joke sex is for when you’re in the cuddle puddle in college, knowing there’s half a dozen other hotties down bad you’ve got to get through before the end of the week. Once you get older, you realize sex needs to be professional. There’s special outfits. There’s devices. There’s ritual. You read books on it. You get degrees in it.

If you’re not having fun and if you’re afraid of saying the wrong thing and looking awkward or silly, you’re with the wrong person.

Have you ever tried to cum at 40? Fun is for people with a second load in them in another thirty minutes and a three day weekend with nothing to do. Fun is for people who aren’t sneaking this out while the kids are down for a nap. Sex in middle age is Seal Team Six shit. Yeah, we’ve done the drills. We know what to expect. But now we’re in the field and we are on the clock. We get in, we do the deed, we hit the extraction point, and maybe we have time for a cigarette by morning… assuming everyone comes out alive.

You can’t possibly be naked with someone and not feel a little silly

I will hang from that sex swing and not even crack a smile.

people are actually looking forward to a game

Hype around a game is directly related to the marketing budget. If people are looking forward to the next edition in a franchise, it is inevitably because they’ve been bombarded with “NEW THING! NEW THING! NEW THING!” radio/TV/streaming ad reels for months prior.

All that aside, yeah our countries hate unions and hate workers and everyone in power hates you and wants you to die.

We’re going to replace all the working class schlubs with AI, haven’t you heard?

why do the right thing when you can buy a new shiny toy

It’s not like they’re plastering “We Busted A Union To Get This Game Out Six Months Late” on the packaging. The overwhelming majority of retail customers have no idea how the sausage is made. Those that are curious enough to ask typically aren’t the ones going in on the “Rape And Loot Simulator” franchise to begin with.

Gotta get off this hobby horse of blaming the anonymous gooner gamer at the bottom of the food chain for decisions made in a smoke-filled board room long beforehand.

Delaying the game another six months cost the company a full 3% on their market cap and god knows how much in long term costs.

Employers seem ready to slit their wrists if it’ll get blood on a union organizer.

You think the Brits would do that? Appoint a single family to a powerful position of authority and let them just loot the national treasury generation after generation? Cause I find that very idea offensive and suspect you’re just another Tankie Wumao Corbynite Bot.

I mean, it comes back to Dunbar’s Number. We care much more for individuals in our immediate circle than for “people” in the abstract.