*nonchalant whistling*

I didn’t know these “talks” were in Saudi Arabia.
Why the fuck would Zelenskyy go to Saudi Arabia for any reason? It’s a place well-known for murdering visitors that recently signed a military agreement with Russia.

Putin has kompromat on Musk. I guarantee it.
- I'm so fucking tired of hearing about the guy with a Twitter comments history that looks like it came from the child porn section of 8chan being targeted with kompromat. There's literally nothing you could say about Elon that will make him look worse than any five minute clip of him speaking in public.
  "Trust me! Putin has a picture of him fucking an IVF sample bag with his mechanical penis while watching clips from Rick and Morty! He's sitting on a stack of Consumer Protection reports that say the Cybertruck project is losing $1M every day and kills 14% of its owner base! If this gets out, he's done for."
  No he's fucking not. Such a disclosure would only make him look cooler among his base of support. And his investor bro friends would high five him in private while simply ignoring it during the next quarterly report.
- Sergei lavrov is a weird choice to claim competency.

I love it, competent leadership is...
Showing up. Such a high bar.
- People who have no idea how competence works, and none of their own, tend to assign it sort of randomly or based on strange criteria. He may genuinely believe that Russia has incredibly competent leadership, because of nothing more than they make things simple and everyone else makes things complicated.
  Until I learned the whole story about Musk's takeover of Tesla, I had no idea how bad and overconfident he was at engineering and business, but once I learned that, a lot of things started to make a lot more sense.
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zeRjVH66vdQ
  
  Until I learned the whole story about Musk's takeover of Tesla, I had no idea how bad and overconfident he was at engineering and business, but once I learned that, a lot of things started to make a lot more sense.
  Yeah, my cousin used to work at SpaceX, and it’s sort of an open secret that they need to actively keep Elon away from the engineers. They have entire teams of people dedicated to shoving menial decisions and distractions in front of him, so he doesn’t have time to wander over to the engineers. Like as soon as he steps out of his office door, there are multiple people whose sole job is dedicated to subtlety redirecting him off to other non-critical wings of the building to keep him distracted. Because if he ever talks to the rocket engineers, he’ll try to one-up them by dropping some asinine “we’re going to do it this dumb way instead” decree that requires them to scrap their entire current project and start over from scratch (for the third time this week.)
  
  Nah, he is Putin's puppet, just like trump. They have him on something too probably. Remember when he tried to assault a massage worker?
  Here’s a look at Musk’s contact with Putin and why it matters
  A person familiar with the situation, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive matter, confirmed to The Associated Press that Musk and Putin have had contact through calls. The person didn’t provide additional details about the frequency of the calls, when they occurred or their content.
  
  I think his Twitter showing is where most of us learned how bad he is. Forums over sample tech people and his dumb as a rock takes on tech exposed it all.
- I think not going is competent leadership by Zelenskyy.
  “Yeah ok I’ll just walk right in to the lions den then durp durp”
  
  Oh yeah, there's no way he can legitimize this and he would if he showed up.
- I mean it tracks for him, it's literally all he's ever done
  
  Good point. You can't make objective judgements of talent when you have a silver spoon shoved so far up your butt everyone lies to you about how you're doing. You just don't have the base of experience.

Putin is gonna die soon. Like dude, I could die tomorrow or maybe in 40 years, but Putin has a leg in the grave. Its not a matter of if, its a matter of when. And the when part is soon enough.

You mean that they can land an airplane? Is that what makes them competent?
- He means departing a plane without falling, or having toilet paper on his shoe, or getting his ass beat by an umbrella.
- He's talking about being a passenger on an airplane.

It's almost like he's a screaming drugged out pile of shit with all our fucking money

Is he praising Russia though? Seems like he's praising trump for arranging the negotiations.
There's so much real shit to talk about I don't understand the obsession with deliberately misinterpreting stuff to make up fake things to get mad at.
The subtext is he's calling Biden incompetent by praising trump's competence. As compared to what, implying trump is incompetent in comparison to Russia? Why would he do that?

Insane Clown Country.

Ah yes, the same government that put a price on the heads of American soldiers in Afghanistan?

Ushakov: "The main thing to do xcom/MarioNawfal/st...

I hate that there aren't actual timestamps on these.

I’m confused. Russians are great, but you’re sending guns and bullets to Ukraine…who are fighting Russia?
- Yeah the Ukrainians have some nerve fighting the Russians when all the Russians are doing is invading their country.
  
  No, WolfmanEightySix is saying that Elon is saying that "Russians are great", yet the USA government is sending bullets to Ukraine.
  Why would they praise Russia, while helping Russia's enemy?
  That's how I understood it anyway.
  
  So why are the USians so pally with Russia? Cause that’s how it looks….
- Are they sending guns and bullets to Ukraine? I thought Musk and Trump were redirecting all of that to Isreal while deciding how to split Ukraine's resources with Russia and themselves
  
  Might be out the loop on this one. The USA government has been quite busy, I can’t keep up.

russia leapfrogging large economies to become the 4th largest in the world while under ??? how many us sanctions? how do you explain it if not affording them their competence at meeting those challenges imposed?
- Russia is either the 11th largest economy or the 8th largest economy. It depends on which reputable source you use. In no world is it the fourth largest economy. It's not even larger than California's economy.
  
  It has the eleventh-largest economy in the world by nominal GDP and the fourth-largest economy by GDP (PPP) (purchasing power parity)
  its a fair point you make, there are various and contested metrics for comparing economies.
  even acknowledging and conceding my argument is contestable and just one of many ways to perceive the claim, i have not done enough and must now eat my downvotes, fair play, i'll keep trying to bring better reasoned arguments that don't rely on simply dismissing my opponents as radical or irrational and continue to eat the downvotes, i just want others to see what it looks like when you actually try to have a conversation in some of these corners.
  what i say is not the message so much as your reaction
- You never answered me the other day when I asked you how many human rights organizations you were a member of. Why is that?
  
  because you're a troll who thinks trump is out to genocide your gay daughter. - that was your response to my being critical of democrats for genocide... frankly, i don't trust you to be fair enough to engage with and you've been targeting me quite a bit.
- GDP is a funny thing. So because Russia's currency has cratered like a Boeing aircraft, the PPP-adjusted value of its GDP has skyrocketed. That doesn't mean it's doing well.
  Russian inflation is at 10% and its government is spending almost half its federal budget on the war, and still not winning. 11% of the world is Russia, by far the largest country on Earth, and yet the total amount of revenue its government has to spend half of on that war is just above Spain's, which might explain why it is failing to defeat an enemy which it outweighs, outnumbers, and is outspending all by at least 10 to 1. Its standard of living for ordinary people is 50th in the world, roughly even with famously pleasant places like Kuwait and Romania (And no hate to people who live in those places, just saying your government is badly representing your interests. Give me another year here in the US and I might well be in that part of the list alongside you, or lower.)
  I have no room to be giving criticism to any government, living in the US as mentioned, but if you are holding up Russia as an example of competent government you are reading the chart upside down.
  
  its doing a lot better than the us gives it credit, you can admit that surely. 'still not winning' is certainly debatable because you need to be winning before you've won... that victory looms very clearly on the horizon when compared to ukraine and the west's ambitions falling short. so if russia is not winning, ukraine must not be losing, either.
- Oh damn, what a sick alternate timeline. Too bad I am not able to see this for myself
  
  ah yes, two sides of an argument surely cannot exist at once.
- It's not the 4th largest economy in the world, but it does contain 11% of the Earth's habitable land. It would be sad if they couldn't create a large economy with all that land.
  
  by some metrics no, others yes. as i mentioned before and you're free to take issue with: gdp as measured by purchasing power parity places it at 4th largest.. we like to lambast russia for being a weak economy but what of the rest of our european allies? who is doing better than russia?