Most successful assassin in modern history, maybe all of history?

He killed Abe for his UC ties, and a short few years later, no more Japanese UC.

Has any other politically motivated assassination so directly, and spectacularly, achieved it’s aims?

Well, yeah.

Europe is continent sized piece of land. Russian tanks rolling into Moldova is a bit different than Poland, or Germany.

Different politically, militarily, and strategically.

Even then, I can’t see Putin biting off any more at this particular moment. Time will tell if Trump significantly eases sanctions to a degree that would enable him to speedily recapitialize.

Of course, I didn’t believe he’d actually try and take Kiev, so I’m not going to sit here and cosplay as a Kreminologist.

That is beyond an incredibly generous interpretation of their comment. In fact, that would have been a reasonable comment to make. But again, that wasn’t what they said.

Google is only useful for local shopping results, and even that is barely true anymore. I can’t recall the last time they returned a relevant result for any other type of search query.

The first half of the page is AI/ads, and the rest is SEO optimized trash.

Using udm=14 just means the result page has more room for SEO garbage.

A long history of military dictatorships, followed by the many flavors of Peronism, is actually how Argentina managed to downgrade themselves from developed economy, to a developing one. Which is also what created the conditions that swept the current government to power.

I’m not saying the current administration is helping the situation, just that their economic policies have continued a long standing tradition of gross economic mismanagement.

"Google Quantum AI"

No. Just no.

Money isn’t the issue, at least not a real limiting issue. Any major European leader crying about it, should go suck on a tailpipe.

The real limiting factors are existing European stockpiles, and limited industrial capacity for things like high volume munition and artillery shell production.

To borrow a phrase that is fast approaching cliche, the enshitification process has begun.

They sent out a trial balloon by updating licensing to move further away from an open source model, with a wide range of implications.

They’ve now backed off claiming “it was a bug”, but it’s not like their MBA’s are business strategy wunderkinds. They’re just rehashing the same old strategy, and going by the downvotes my comment received, there’s still an audience that believes them.

But who are they kidding? This isn’t going away, and when someone shows you who they are, you should believe them.

Like I said earlier, the only variable is the timetable. The destination is a foregone conclusion.

My renewal is coming up. I’ve been a premium customer for probably 7 years or so, I’m not renewing.

This wasn’t a bug, this was a toe in the water to gauge the temperature.

Like it or not, this means they’ve chosen a path, and nothing is going to stop them from going down it. The only variable is the timetable.

Hezbollah is as much a terrorist organization as the Asov battalion is.

That is to say, you may not like their politics, but they’re resistance groups formed to fight against an occupation.

To that end, Iran is their sponsor, so of course their is coordination between the two, especially at the highest levels.

The irony, is that you’re saying this not even two weeks after thousands of consumer electronics were turned into bombs, and detonated inside Lebanon, and then multiple residential buildings flattened via airstrikes, both actions taken by the Israelis.

I guess to you, any civilians killed in those instances were just collateral damage, and definitely not victims of terrorism.

So…you couldn’t even be bothered to read more than a few paragraphs?

The Communist Party has long been the ultimate decision maker in China. But after Mao died, Deng Xiaoping and his successors built some checks against excessive power, hoping to avoid a repeat of Mao’s turbulent rule.

The party and government systems worked in tandem. Party leaders often set broad policy, and government ministries and agencies refined and implemented their goals, sending feedback to the leaders.

Dictatorships don’t have legal and systemic checks against the autocratic rule, which is why Xi removed them.

You’re using a lot of words, but they’re based on your lack of understanding post-Mao CCP goverence that Xi upended when he seized power.

But I’m done going back and forth on this. You should feel free to go on believing that I am wrong, and that you are right, because I have no confidence that you would read any dry academic writings on the topic that I respond with, as you couldn’t even make it through a few hundred words of a NYT article.

Your first link shows exactly why the CCP wasn’t a dictatorship in the era the preceded Xi, and your second link has nothing to do with that era at all.

I have an academic background in this field, so the idea that my understanding is based on reading a single sentence, or a few Wikipedia entries, is amusing.

Here’s a nice simple infographic article that would be a good starting point before jumping into any dry academic readings.

I know it’s cliche, but I really think you need to go look up the the definition of dictator.

Or, crack a political science 101 book and skip right to the section on political systems.

Or maybe your misunderstanding is just a lack of knowledge of how China’s government structure functioned post-Mao, pre-Xi.

Whatever the reason, I think you need to do a little bit of reading, but it’s not like you’re alone in this misconception so I don’t mean this as an insult.

Words have meanings, and the word you’re looking for is authoritarian, but that doesn’t mean it was a dictatorship.

They were a one party system, that had regularly transitioned power at scheduled intervals for decades. Which means they were not a dictatorship, until Xi stopped those transitions of power.

The modern context of Japanese and Chinese expansionism in this particular area is similar in some ways, but very different in other ways.

Regardless, I agree that China doesn’t have the legal right to seize territory, but that doesn’t mean I shouldn’t understand their perspective.

It also doesn’t make the idiotic reductionist take that this is all “capitalism”, any less idiotic.

All that said, I also understand that great powers tend to only talk about international law when they are applying it to countries they view as beneath them, or inferior.

In this case, China is coming into its own as a regional hegemon, assuming their relatively new status as an outright dictatorship doesn’t fuck that up. To do that, it has to push out American naval power, there’s no alternative for them.

So, if Xi’s one man politburo figures out how to walk and chew gum, while also driving a successful regional expansion, I don’t think yours, or my, quibbles about international law will make much difference.

Luckily, whether he’s capable of juggling all that successfully, is still an open question with a lot of doubt.

That statement is so incredibly wrong in this particular context that it’s actually impressive.

Well, maybe not impressive, but it does show off your ability to speak authoritatively on a topic that you know absolutely nothing about, except of course for your firm conviction that capitalism is clearly the only thing motivating it all.

Are you saying that national security strategies, and war in general, didn’t appear in this world until capitalism emerged?

It’s about expanding their ability to project naval power in general, but more specifically, trying to to build effective defensive counters against potential future naval blockades and maritime containment e.g. Island Chain Strategy

That’s oversimplified, and there are other aspects to it, including domestic political cultural ones, but naval power and national security is the most significant.

I am not taking any position on justification, legal standing, or strategic prudence for this strategy.

There are any number of white papers, from both Chinese and American security organizations/think-tanks, that will cover the subject in much greater depth if you’re interested.

I’m aware…but it’s still not the reason they are attempting to expand their territorial waters…

Except, China is not trying to expand its territorial waters “because capitalism”…