Quite. There were also two manned flybys before the Apollo 11 mission, with Apollo 10 testing every condition but the actual landing. Even gravity and ground conditions weren't unknown by then, since the Soviet Luna missions had already obtained the relevant data. Namely, that the Moon is literally hard as rock all over, making for a far more suitable landing surface than most terrestrial environments.
This is one of the best arguments against the moon landings imo. Though I think/hope it was real.
You can look at it this way - when the US introduced the Space Shuttle, the USSR quickly made its own copy, improved even. It didn't use the shuttle's engine for launch, only the boosters, and it could also land on autopilot. They used it for exactly one flight, and then it was scrapped because it had no advantages over disposable carrier rockets.
The manned moon missions were kinda like that - great for bragging rights, decent for collecting samples and some other scientific purposes, but otherwise not too essential for the actual strategic goals of the space programs at the time - that is, making space guns. So it made sense to scrap the program once the novelty wore off.
Moreover, the landings date to the Nixon era - which explains why the then left-wing conspiracy circles (and the media supporting the left, as usual) would try to discredit them, as the achievements of the most eeevil president before Trump. Ironically, the only other nation capable of conclusively proving them as false - by showing radio signal triangulation data from the transmissions - was the USSR, which had every reason to try and discredit this American achievement, yet even they didn't force the matter.
Finally, nowadays there are even private observatories powerful enough to distinguish the landing equipment - lander, rover and all - so either the telescopes contain a magic invisible screen projecting Da Big Lie... or, sometime in the past fifty years, someone did go out there to put them.
Really, out of all the conspiracies to investigate, I've never gotten why the moon landings ever became such a big issue to begin with.
Pretty much. And using a dodge that lets it run the parade, since payments are made by conversion using the daily ruble rates - which are now all but higher than before the conflict. In short, not only did the EU cripple its own ability to pay for gas using its own currency, now it'll actually have to pay more for the same quantities, because it has no control over the ruble exchange rates. There's your "cucked" right here.
Speaking of which - I can understand the "Russia bad" mentality as a whole; military conflicts can be seen through multiple perspectives where the good guys and bad guys aren't always the same; and that's fine. But it takes a whole new level of mental gymnastics to try and entertain the "Russia cucked" mindset - even the western legacy media isn't that deranged. Especially when the matters are economic - inanities like this are the reason why all education systems should have basic financial literacy classes at least at the high school level.
I can definitely see where you're coming from. Online, most people can easily get absorbed into an opinion bubble - which then goes into a feedback loop, leading to extremists and outright wackos being regarded as the representative sample. At that point being a moderate anything is all but an insult.
That said, the case may be that the kind of people who are most vocal and active in the thus-formed echo chambers, are also the kind you'd otherwise ignore in the physical world - that is, in real life. The scruffy street preacher shouting "the end is nigh" while smelling of three different kinds of toxic mould - that's someone you'd simply tune out and walk past without even thinking about it. But behind a keyboard, and with couple of just-as-batshit blogs to cite for reference, that preacher can sound almost convincing.
To contrast, the kind of person who tries to stay informed on both sides of most issues, generally keeps their opinion to themself and can discuss their differences with others in a civil fashion - they simply don't need that sort of echo chamber for validation, so they don't hang around them in the first place.
Instead, if you want to find people like that online, your best bet are the various crafting, DIY and hobby sites, food and drink forums, etc. Places where politics isn't really on the agenda, so the kind of people that wear it on their sleeve simply don't hang around.
In my impression, this particular bit of the overall narrative - that Russia is militarily inadequate or inept - is actually favored by both sides. It's essentially proclaiming that Russia poses no threat to NATO/EU, so that the western nations won't get itchy trigger fingers and heat up the conflict further.
As a result, the global situation stays generally calm, with only economic and diplomatic sanctions, which have turned out to be token gestures at best, now that the ruble is going back up.
And in the meantime, Russia can continue to operate in Ukraine, while your average legacy and social media consumer can drool in waiting for the weak and incompetent Russians to surrender and run away... any day now... just a bit longer... You get the point.
If anything, it's rather refreshing that it's the leftoids that are getting hung up on the "two more weeks" deal for a change.
To be fair, the same can be said of the Russian and Ottoman empires - as late as the 18th-19th century, they could easily be described as "medieval with guns", leading to their collapse in the early 20th century. Like China and Japan, they too exhibited a top-heavy social structure, and adherence to tradition for its own sake, allowing for next to no innovation unless it was literally at gunpoint. But when innovation was encouraged, Russia emerged as a global superpower, while modern Turkey is among the most powerful NATO countries.
Meanwhile, medieval Europe was far more diverse in terms of nations and ethnicities, leading to frequent clashes - which is one driver of innovation, another being trade of manufactured goods. European nations never got the chance to be isolationist, like the Russians, the Chinese, the Japanese etc. - so they had to innovate constantly in order to stay afloat.
And vice-versa, periods where China and Japan had to adapt to new circumstances, especially intra-cultural conflict - like the Warring States period in China, or the Sengoku era in Japan - saw innovation in fields from art to metallurgy and architecture, simply because those who didn't innovate, also didn't live long enough to leave a legacy. Now, whether that's a strictly cultural factor or it has an underlying genetic template, is a matter for discussion all its own.
Could be. Consensus cracking and false flag jobs are a common tactic when you want to discredit all criticism, no matter how valid a lot of points are. Look at 9/11, for instance - there's the "inside job" theory, with numerous documented ties between Bin Laden and the Bush clan, the WTC director and his whole family just happening to skip work on that day etc. ... and then there's the "no planes" theory, which adds nothing substantial in terms of why the act was committed, and mostly serves to alienate anyone looking for reasonable discussion.
That said, a simpler explanation might be that general-purpose controversy sells better than detailed argumentation. That is, you'll get a lot more attention with topics like "evil elites/bigots want to kill us all", compared to "inconclusive or deliberately obscured results on vaccine safety". It's kinda like what's called channel decay - like how the History channel went from actual historical content, to a Nazis by day / Aliens by night festival of inanity - simply because these programs got the biggest ratings while requiring the smallest investment.
You can see the same phenomenon even here, with posts of the "evil elites" variety getting way more likes and comments than anything more substantial, and thus hogging the top rankings. Decay like that is hard to reverse, though I'm glad someone's trying.
There's nothing a bigot loves more than a fixed vertical social stratification of everyone in the world.
There's nothing a bigot hates more than a fixed vertical social stratification of everyone in the world... where he's not on top.
Looking at the various racial IQ charts, I'm just glad that people are recognizing the significant intellectual superiority... of Asians. Really, pretty much every chart that bigots like white boy here like to tout about how much smarter white people are than black people, also shows Asians as even smarter. Who knows, maybe some day even white boy here will learn to know his place in the world. Though I'm not holding my breath on that one.
Yeah, that's pretty much the extent of your ideal world - lil' speshul white boy, inherently above all dem black and brown people... which is why you get paranoid at the thought of someone else being just as inherently above yourself - and whether that's Jews, some other race, or the space lizards from Alex Jones's fever dreams, that's a matter of preference.
Enjoy your paranoia, I'm sure you'll keep getting plenty of fuel for it for the foreseeable future.
They want you dead, they want your children raped and killed, and they think its funny. Remember that.
Just for the sake of comparison, though, what do you want with them? That is, what's supposed to be done about them? How is the world supposed to look like? Because most of the time, the same people that engage in mouth-foaming scaremongering about the evil Jewish elites ruling everything, are also the ones that jerk off at the thought of their own kind being in charge, banning all religions other than their own, possibly purging or subjugating other races and ethnicities, obviously banning miscegenation as well... basically the same shit with a different logo.
If anything, this mentality reminds me of how liberals reacted to Trump running for president. At first, they were outright giddy at the idea - he was a ridiculous clown, someone to mock at leisure, clearly having no chance at an actual victory. And then he started gaining support, far more than most republicans usually do. And then he actually, conclusively, won. And then these same liberals went completely off the rails, because their entire worldview was demolished, so they hung to every kind of made-up conspiracy in order to protect their already fragile sanity.
It's the same shit here - entitled white boy with no other professional qualifications or personal qualities, seeing he's not actually owed anything after graduating from school, while the other kids he thought himself oh-so-much-better than, all got decent jobs and higher social status than him. Well, clearly there must be an evil conspiracy at hand, right? Because if all was right, then clearly it would be white boy here who would be on top, without even working at it, right? ... Yeah, right.
First off, thanks for adding some real flavor to the forum. Looking forward to some interesting discussion... or an infantile slap-fight, but that's also part of the fun.
Now to the topic at hand. For one, my impression (coming from the Balkan region) is overall in the opposite direction, with some caveats. Summers have become milder, but longer, winters are definitely warmer than usual, spring arrives practically in an instant around late March, while the fall is actually just a slow transition from rainy summer to cloudy winter. In short, I think the region is moving from four-season seaside temperate climate, to something approaching three-season sub-tropical.
Respectively, I'm interested in at least the general geography of locations where the sun has grown "hotter", so to speak. It could be that the overall matter is atmospheric, rather than astronomical. Possibly a shift in ocean currents and related trade winds. Which, mind you, does tie in with the kind of events that would cause tsunami, like the one in Fukushima.
In general, between the "evil fossil fuel-burning humans" crowd and the "it's just a mild winter, bro" brigade, it's rather curious that the matter of climate change has rarely if ever been discussed with relation to plate tectonics. I suspect certain discoveries there could provide evidence that conclusively disproves man-made climate change... which is why nobody in the legacy media or the controlled opposition would touch it with a ten-foot pole.
You're not the only one. Aliens, crop circles, pyramids, moon landings, Illuminati - sure, most of them aren't what you'd call pressing issues of the day, but at least they're fun to discuss. To contrast, even the conspiracy section here seems to default to "generic evil elites want to kill us all", without a detailed theory on the hows and whys.
On a tangent, it's crap like that which put me off "conservative" media as well. Instead of an actual different point of view, a different perspective or focus on different current events, it's basically a negative-color image of mainstream sources, only with more pearl-clutching on religious matters.
So yeah, I'm with you on this one, and I'd love to join in on discussing something with a bit more flavor, so I'll be checking up to see if anything comes along.
Big talk from the guy who decided to "kek" on the news about Russia only accepting rubles for gas payments.
For that matter, just look at the sudden bounce back of the ruble after the announcement of no-dollars-needed trade deals with India. It's almost as if the supposed collapse of the ruble was either expected or outright desired by the Russian government, since then it could buy up all the excess at a pittance... and now sell it at any price it wants. Did your amazing powers of foresight ever consider that, or are we supposed to expect yet another crash... sometime this century or so?
Sure, whatever helps you sleep at night.
Outside dreamland, however, Russia has either taken over or simply destroyed the actual sources of military capability in Ukraine - namely, power plants and fuel silos. What do you think was blowing up in the background of all those videos that littered social media for the past month - fireworks factories? And without fuel or power, all the tanks it claims to have captured, all the equipment it has received, is about as useful as a piece of scrap-made modern art.
Then again, Ukraine could always simply ask for fuel from the EU. I'm sure Germany will have at least some to spare after buying it from... ah, right. Never mind then.
So... a military operation focused on destroying Ukraine's military capabilities, winds down after destroying Ukraine's military capabilities (which is why Zelensky's whining about not being sent enough weapons). Not exactly a surprise, unless you've been drinking your own semen Kool Aid, expecting a full-blown invasion when it was never stated as a strategic goal to begin with.
In my impression, the real goal of the war is to serve as an excuse for the various economic sanctions, the cutting of business and political relations between key national blocs - basically Cold War 2.0.
So now I'm looking at the finer details, to try and figure out how the theatrical spin will go. Including how the conflict will be declared "over". At this point, the options I see are:
-
Putin getting "deposed", with a successor, perhaps Medvedev but I'm not too sold on him, taking the reins while continuing to cool relations with the west.
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Zelensky going off his meds, declaring total war while antagonizing the west for not helping him enough, so that when Russia effectively takes possession of the country, it's seen as a necessary evil.
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Zelensky getting "killed" as a martyr, with Putin becoming the official evil bogeyman of the west (sorry, Pooh Bear), solidifying the new opposition of international blocs for the foreseeable future.
Mind you, I'm also noting this happens in the year of the American mid-term elections, combined with dirt on Biden and his Ukraine ties crawling into the limelight, and even Trump getting extra screentime again. Though again, these are mostly musings that I haven't begun to fit into a comprehensive theory.
Ukraine have everything to do with Russia. It is single etnicity. You could take any Russian and in 99.99% he will have Ukrainian relatives, and vice versa.
I've been meaning to ask something related to this. It's not quite a theory yet, more like a musing. So far, the Russian armed forces have both decimated the Ukrainian military bases and defenses, and, for some reason, littered the country with Z-marked military vehicles and assorted gear. Which, as we're meant to believe, are being appropriated by the remaining Ukrainian fighters on a daily basis.
So my question is - how can anyone tell if a Z-marked tank is crewed by Russians or already appropriated by the Ukrainians, given that to most foreigners, the two look and talk exactly alike? Right now, there are even news and social media posts about Russian troops "defecting" to Ukraine, tanks in tow... which is a great way to get your family in the gulag in an actual war, so unless the guys in questions are incubator-grown clones or really pissed at their folks, that's not a likely move.
What I'm musing is, this might be a way to saturate the area with Russian troops under the pretense of defecting - not pretense before the Ukrainians, since they'd likely know the difference, but pretense before foreigners, who wouldn't. So that at a certain point, these brave defectors from dictatorship can quietly occupy all the crucial strategic assets like power plants and water lines, and the world at large wouldn't realize it before it's too late.
Overall, the whole Z thing is something unusual, so maybe that's one way to explain it. So far, however, it's only a musing, not a complete theory by any means.
Well, that settles that.