Flowersignup
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User ID: 3556
This is a profoundly embarrassing action IMO regardless of whether or not he's secretly pro Russian (as many internet accusations are saying) or if he's just being reactionary about Zelenskyy.
And that's because US foreign policy decisions seemingly being driven not by wider strategic objectives or alliances but by the personal feelings and sentiments of a president upset about if you wear a suit or only say thank you X amount of times and not Y is a terrible way to go about any sort of long term planning. This of all things seemingly being the excuse to pull such a major trigger, an argument that happened in public is just saddening. He's been building it up to a while but what a lame reasoning to finally start turning.
Even if it's not the actual reason, such a strong appearance is just another point in the slowly growing "Don't trust the US to not change on an impulse" concern for business and international decisionmaking. Risk is one thing, instability is another and these types of actions like "Oh we're definitely doing tariffs for real guys nope never mind oh wait we are nope never mind" or "oh he didn't say thank you enough, ok pulling out of support" and other back and forth unpredictable actions do add up.
Flowersignup
2d ago
I think the most disturbing type of argument around Ukraine is the one that pretends to be doing it "for their own good". Like "Why don't you want peace, why don't you want peace? Why do you want your people to die?" to the victims of a dictator invading their home, bombing their cities, kidnapping their children and stealing their land. If they aren't settling for your offer it's probably because they don't think your offer is good enough to actually protect them. They're in desperation, if an offer was convincing they would take it. So why not?
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They've been promised security before, they gave up their nukes for it. They sign a deal that Russia won't punch them in the face, Russia violates it twice and if they don't want to just sign another without a stronger third party guarantee, it's not because they don't want peace. It's because they know Russia can't be trusted.
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They don't think American investments means much, before the war there was that joke rule of "no two countries with a McDonald's have ever been at war" which was essentially emblematic of this concept. That international business interests for peace were simply too strong for a country to overcome, and yet the war happened anyway.
If someone doesn't want to support Ukraine fine, there's lots of other bad stuff we ignore and don't help out with. But those people spreading this idea that "they must want to be invaded and die so not helping them is actually the best help", I just find that really sickening.
Flowersignup
3d ago
I'm gonna give the benefit of the doubt and assume you aren't a native speaker because conversion in this context would never be used "changing a person's feelings about how open they can be" and more about "changing them from being straight to being gay" like we see in conversion therapy trying to do the opposite and "cure homosexuality" and make people straight.
Most people here in the US (and I assume most of the native English speakers) understand that because conversion therapy has been practiced by religious groups against homosexuality for years. Now the end result has been suppression (because they fail) but no one says "You're trying to convert X!" when they mean being more accepting.
Flowersignup
3d ago
If your standard of evidence for something being widespread is "I saw it on Twitter" you do you I guess.
I assume by being on TheMotte you are aware of concepts like lizardman constant, the Chinese robber fallacy and nutpicking.
Yes out of 3.8 million teachers I'm sure some of them are nutjobs in completely insane and weird ways. The question isn't if you can't find a few instances of teachers doing something insane, but if it's common enough to be worth worrying about.
Even if just .001% of teachers do something, you still get 38 who try it. Which is say don't use a single newsworthy instance to try to argue something happens often.
Flowersignup
4d ago
i don't see why you get to singlehandedly set parameters for what counts as evidence.
There is a difference between trying to accept people for what they are and trying to convert them. For your religious example, allowing prayer vs forcing prayer.
The standards of evidence for a school trying to religiously convert children does not include "We don't stop teachers and kids from praying before class on their own"
Really? Is that what happened with abortion?
Yes that massively shifted the abortion conversation both when it happened and for a very long after. You can even see the remnants of how the ruling pushed it into a states rights where Trump won on a platform promising no nationwide bans.
Flowersignup
4d ago
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"Hatching eggs" is a trans thing, not a sexuality thing as the original comment is about and what my reply is for.
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I've not seen that much but even if there are a few teachers who do so, as there are apparently 3.8 million public school teachers in the US a few examples would not be much proof of a common issue by itself. Likewise you can find examples of teachers dating students or heck, things like this case of a superintendent trying to mandate a prayer video. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/oklahoma-officials-religious-department-schools-classroom-lawsuit/. It's not that they aren't problems of teachers pushing LGBT identification or dating kids or mandating prayer videos (they seem to exist given the articles on it) but if it's a few hundred/thousand people out of 3.8 million it's not much at all. I don't know the exact amounts so I'm open for evidence that suggests it's a decently large percentage.
Flowersignup
4d ago
The CDC says a quarter of high schoolers are LGBT, a dramatic increase from what it used to be. Acceptance (and celebration) of LGBT students has resulted in more of them. That is what happens when things are accepted and celebrated in societies. Why would it not? Why do you think LGBT is a special case? In what sense have those students not been converted?
How is that "conversion"? A student being more open about their feelings is not the same as a student having previously been fully straight and having turned into bi or gay.
And as you yourself say "Why would it not?". Of course they are not a special case, we would expect at least some amount of an increase in behavior when it becomes destigmatized. But I would never refer to that as conversion, rather that's just more openness. Maybe this is just a disagreement about the wording, I take "conversion" to be more along the lines of "trying to change their actual feelings" rather than "changing their willingness to be open".
Now conversion could be happening alongside it, boosting the numbers up. But that's not evidence for it occuring.
This is both a single instance and presents little evidence that the child was "converted" rather than a teacher trying to be accepting of a student who said they were trans. You don't have to believe that children or teenagers could be transgender to understand how those would differ in intent.
Also this is about trans people, the original comment is about homosexuality.
But then, something happened around 2010 and one side just stopped fighting.
Yes that something was a Supreme Court case legalizing same sex marriage across the entire country under the concept of civil liberties. Of course you stop fighting as hard when the supreme law of the land says that it's legal.
And within 15 years, almost everything about this consensus was proven wrong.
What evidence do you have for this? I don't see any large scale proof that a large number of gay people are trying to actively "convert" straight kids into same-sex marriages when they're adults. And don't be citing campaigns based around accepting LGBT students, it needs to be widespread proof that they're trying to convert children since that was your wording.
Evidence could look like a gay version of conversion therapy where straight kids are sent to centers to shame them into gayness, or maybe a large lgbt organization like GLAAD admitting they want to turn straight kids gay. Or something along the lines that there is an active and widespread attempt to take straight children and make them homosexual instead of a genuine (even if poorly executed) attempt wanting gay teenagers to be accepted.
Sports gambling? Mistake theory.
Marijuana legalization? Mistake theory.
Or perhaps, people just have different values for civil liberty like the libertarian viewpoint and the negative externalities of a freedom to gamble or smoke weed is not convincing enough for them to change their mind on that. It's not a "mistake" for people to have different views on a trade-off between freedom from government restrictions and societal health.
Flowersignup
5d ago
That was the source you gave for your information.
Flowersignup
6d ago
Your reply seems to have little relevance to the post beyond the "DOGE" keyword. The question of "Who is the acting administrator" is not answered in any shape or form by arguing for or against the legality of DOGE itself.
It's so egregiously irrelevant outside of the keyword connection that I have to wonder if you actually read the OP to begin with.
A random worker writing a letter trying to appeal to parents is not some full job description of everything they do. If that's genuinely what you got your idea of park service work from then you should reconsider how you source your information and beliefs going forward.
And this is abstractly valuable. Do you think this means they should be able to demand that people make sacrifices in their own lives to give money for this?
Another topic you don't seem to have any knowledge about. Maintaining a healthy ecosystem and biodiversity isn't some abstract value, it helps keeps the world we're living in stable. This is the system of our world and we are not yet an interstellar species. A nd it helps with things like pharmaceutical research. So much of the medicine we have right now comes from random plants. Famously aspirin came from Willow bark originally but we also have stuff like heart medications from Foxglove research. You can find tons of examples like this from random plants and animals. Likewise you can get from basic internet searches plenty of studies talking about this very thing https://aacrjournals.org/cancerdiscovery/article/14/3/392/734905/Biodiversity-Medicine-New-Horizon-and-New https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5735771/ etc etc etc you can look up for plenty of examples.
Actually gonna make an account just for this comment.
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I highly doubt there's a guy whose only job is to sit around and talk about flowers all day. I've worked with state botanists and park rangers before and I can assure you that they're tracking and recording all sorts of information about plant health, species diversity and stuff like that too on top of the typical work of making sure that people are following the rules (one place for example called Rocky Face Mountain in NC has a lot of endangered and rare plants so people come trying to collect them which endangers the populations there).
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Even if that's all they did was sit around and tell tourists about plants all day, that would still a job regardless because public education is a form of work. Again, it's not just what they do, they're expected to do all sorts of different things but "telling tourists about the flowers" requires a bunch of domain knowledge about the local flora, which is a lot more complex than you might think. Especially since we tend to set up a fair bit of these parks in areas where biodiversity is high like Yosemite or the aforementioned Rocky Face. Our parks are like museums, but of nature. People love museums, people love zoos, and people love the parks and they like hearing and seeing and learning about cool things on the parks. We have one mountain (I forget the name I only went twice) where they have a bunch of signs set up on the trails explaining the history of the mountain, various plants, etc and it's actually a pretty popular spot for school trips.
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It does actually happen in the private sector. One of my biology professors had personally met and worked with Tim Sweeney when he bought up a lot of land in NC for preservation. I didn't hear too much details on what they did (after all it was just a side topic in class) but lots of people like nature and they like knowing about nature and preserving nature.
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Their work helps to create awesome resources like this https://auth1.dpr.ncparks.gov/flora/index.php. I don't know the other states resources but we have entire databases around what plant species occur in what counties, their various different attributes and descriptions, etc. Natural plant diversity is an important part of the ecosystem, from the beetles/flies/bees that pollinate them to the herbivores that eat them, to the carnivores that eat those. Also good proof that they're not just "telling tourists about flowers"
Which leads back around to how they are under a lot of threat, even plants that are famous worldwide like the Venus fly trap exists almost entirely within a 50 mile radius of Wilmington NC, and despite how easy it is to get legal seeds and plants now they still have to monitor and track for poachers and illegal collectors threatening the local populations. Hey, that related back to part 1!
So one of the older members of the Tories, Graham Stuart, has publically declared "We have to consider the possibility that President Trump is a Russian asset.". While these accusations have certainly been made more before, I don't think I've seen it so straightforward from parties that are traditionally allies for the Republicans. Graham isn't the only Tory seeming to turn either, Robert Jenrick (who once said if he was American he would vote for Trump and went to his inauguration) and Nigel Farage are two other examples of traditional conservative allies in the UK who have been increasingly critical of Trump's stance on Russia, although not as far as Graham Stuart has gone.
Which got me thinking, let's set aside all these accusations themselves and look at what I think is a better question.
If I was a secretly Russia aligned president who had been elected while hiding those views, who knew that I could not just take blatantly pro-Russia stances but I could perhaps slowly nudge public opinion of my supporters to be more friendly towards them and less friendly to Ukraine while taking pro Russian action under cover, what kind of things would I be doing and saying?
Main thing, I'd slowly start to split and incite America's international allies. A stable West is one of the main things that Russia is scared of the most. Destabilize NATO, NORAD, ANZUS, etc.
I'd have some underlings talk about how Russia shares conservative values eventually taking this discussion to the big stage and mentioning one or two things we can get along with. Play up the similarities we have with Russian culture while attacking the culture of other western democracies.
I'd continually frame it as a waste of money, claim Ukraine has been committing fraud and focus on total values instead of the main thing that has been given of outdated weapons and technology. Argue that it's just so much money that it's in the US's best interest to stop funding because they're using it on other things anyway.
I'd hide it all under a veil of trying to end the war. I'd direct blame towards the Ukrainians saying they aren't willing to compromise and that they don't want to end the assault on them, say that they aren't trying hard enough to stop being from conquered and killed. Instead of asking who is killing the Ukrainians going off to fight (Russian forces), I'd instead center it on Ukrainian leaders being responsible for the deaths.
I'd slowly ramp up the discourse more and more, trying to make each step seem natural and more of a reaction from the previous. Picking an early fight gives me cover for picking the next one which gives me cover for the next and so on.
I'd start a trade war with allies using classic protectionist rhetoric (an easy cover to deploy) while ramping down sanctions and trade restrictions on the Russian markets. Slowly putting American business connections back into Russia and away from western allies.
None of these on their own is necessarily a sign of pro Russian beliefs or actions, the point after all is to make for plausible deniability. Anything I do will be under reasons (protectionist rhetoric, "preventing fraud with the aid", etc) that ostensibly aren't pro Russia, as I slowly ramped up public opinion to turn on the west and view them as enemies.
The ambiguity and slow ramping is the point, make the callouts start from the radicals to give the appearance that accusations are always baseless and train people to ignore them from historic allies and partners. Make anyone who says this seem crazy by acting unpredictability and everyonce in a while lurching back to Ukraine when the heat turns up, but never going back fully. Slowly cranking more and more to Russia.
So for discussion what sorts of things would you do if you were a secret Russian operative in the White House trying to stay disguised? How would you try to manipulate American opinions over time while not being too blatantly obvious about it that you don't have built in deniability?
And then the point of the exercise, how does that differ with what we're seeing now? Do these actions line up like Stuart says and we should be considering the possibility, or do they not match and it's just alarmism from the Tories?
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