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HlynkaCG

old man yelling at clouds

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joined 2022 September 05 17:58:45 UTC

Failed repeatedly in his attempts to die a hero and has now lived long enough to become the villain.


				

User ID: 659

Banned by: @cjet79

BANNED USER: /comment/193024

HlynkaCG

old man yelling at clouds

12 followers   follows 0 users   joined 2022 September 05 17:58:45 UTC

					

Failed repeatedly in his attempts to die a hero and has now lived long enough to become the villain.


					

User ID: 659

Banned by: @cjet79

In 2016-2020, Russia hadn't even prepared for annexing the Donbas, let alone invading Ukraine.

The problem with this take is that by the summer of 2015 Russia had already annexed the Donbass and Crimea in all but name, or have you forgotten all the talk about "friendly green men" from 2014?

The Russians problem seems to be that they drank their own Kool-Aid. They seem to have seriously underestimated the degree of support that Euromaidan enjoyed on the ground in western Ukraine and seemed to genuinely believe that if they landed some paratroopers in Kiev and seized the Rada they'd be welcomed by the populace as liberators rather than with a hail of gunfire and molotov cocktails. That shock of expectation vs reality seems to have set the tone of the war going forward. Ukraine may eventually lose this war but Ukraine losing doesn't necessarily mean a win for Russia.

It's in the process of conquering the second largest country in Europe and would have succeeded if Trump had been president.

Lol wut?

Either Trump is critically destabilizing the region by allowing US sales of advanced Air Defence systems to Poland, publicly entertaining the possibility of Ukraine Joining NATO, and undermining the Russian economy by increasing US energy exports to Europe. Or he's secretly in Putin's pocket. Which one is it?

In either case the Russian military has been revealed as a paper tiger and clearly aint conquering shit. The best they can hope for at this stage is to turn Eastern Europe a desert and call it "peace".

Honestly, this was my first thought as well.

Do you know who the West Bank belonged to before Israel took it in '67? How about Gaza? Hint: The answer isn't "Palestine". What I'm suggesting is that if the Arab League and their cheerleaders/apologists in academia had genuinely wanted the 1948 partition to be respected they would've respected the 1948 borders.

Vae Victis indeed.

As it stands, it's a mess and nobody's reactions are doing any good.

I disagree,

In fact I would argue that Abbott has decision making throughout this mess has been consistently good/correct from both a legal/game-theoretic perspective and a Christian/Moral one.

From a purely legal standpoint the White House's case is much weaker than it's being made out to be as, in theory at least, in order for the supremacy or preemption clauses to take effect there would have to be a meaningful discrepancy between the law as passed by congress and the law as enforced by state officials. Those laws are still on the books even if the Feds aren't enforcing them.

From simple "good governance" perspective Abbott is representing the will/interests of his constituents.

From a Christian perspective helping those who wish to migrate reach places where they will be welcomed and cared for (IE those cities that have declared themselves to be Sanctuaries) is an act of charity.

Finally, from a game theoretic perspective offloading the costs of a policy onto those who support said policy is just the obviously correct move. That Democrats have reacted badly and are now throwing a temper-tantrum does not change the fact that Abbott and the wider Texas Legislature has acted well.

Edit: I keep forgetting that there are 2 't's in Abbott

Er, Biden has a very strong legal leg to stand on.

I don't think Biden and Garland's case here is nearly as strong as people keep saying it is.

The White House's argument rests entirely on a single assumption. Namely that it is illegal for a member of a Municiple or State Police force to enforce federal laws, Ditto military police (who are ordinarily considered federal cops) attached to the National Guard unless their command has been federalized and explicitly ordered to do so by the president.

That's not something that's actually written in a statute anywhere, it is an assertion being made by White House based on the preemption doctrine. It is not clear to me that Texas making it a state crime to violate federal immigration law as a pretext to use State Law enforcement and National Guard to erect fencing and make arrests is actually prohibited by the supremacy clause. And it is not clear to me that it even violates the preemption doctrine because in theory there would have to be some discrepancy between the law as passed by congress and the law as enforced by the state in order for it to do so and federal immigration laws are still on the books.

It seems to me that the obvious offramp is for Texas to simply do nothing, wait for the feds to start tearing down the fences/wire, and then film them doing it. With the purposes of making sure the footage is seen in every state during every commercial break from now till November while also redoubling the bussing efforts.

It seems to me that the Feds don't really have a winning move here as anything other than letting Abbott have this one seems more likely to blow up in their faces than to stop Abbott.

Why wouldn't he?

Is it really imperialism though if Jordan and Egypt consented to being invaded?

It's kind of sad that you think that link helps your case. "U.S. President Joe Biden has inherited a relatively peaceful Middle East", How'd that work out? Maybe the reason the accounts were frozen in the first place is that they'd been using them to fund Hamas and the Houthi.

Being a liberal, this might blow your mind, but states with higher rates of integration have higher rates of intermarriage. Contra the popular narrative, New York and California are substantially more segregated and stratified than states like Florida Alabama and Georgia are these days.

That y'all are quibbling about 14 billion sent to Israel while glossing over the 90 billion Biden and Obama sent to Iran (none of which was spent arming the Houthi's we pinky promise) is why guys like me refuse to take the blue-tribe's positions on the middle east seriously.

You say that but per your own words it is also "better to hold your nose and vote democrat than be mistaken for a faux news watching drumpf supporter".

Like I've said the last 3 times we've had this conversation, Kolmogorov Complicity is just Complicity.

Color me skeptical.

I believe that our more vocal wignats would all flip on a dime if a real threat to the gay agenda or the H1B visa regime were to present itself because as much as they might hate black people and the establishment, I imagine that they would hate their own ox getting gored even more.

I've got no hard data, at least none that self-respecting academic would accept as valid, but anecdotally the stretch from 2008 to 2012 saw a significant shift in the culture surrounding retention with all the "Perform To Serve" bullshit coming to a peak around that time. 2010 being the peak definitely fits a vibe.

The Wagner Option

What does loving cock have to do with... Ohhh... Different Wagner. Nevermind ;-)

I'm reminded of the Wojak meme where the pink haired lesbian is ranting about mixed race marriages and a white guy with black girl is like "what's "mixed" about it? I'm a 'Bama Fan, she's a 'Bama fan, and we've known each other since the 6th grade. It's not like I married a Tennessee girl you heathen."

Ok that makes more sense, I think I misread/misinterpreted your previous comment as suggesting that Catholics weren't big on adoption to which my knee-jerk reaction was basically "Say Whut?"

Sorry dude I don't think this passes the smell test. Abolitionism was already gaining steam (Hehe) well before the industrial revolution, and "people are shitty" is wholly general argument.

I view this thread and the one about Poseidon Archer above as further evidence that Id-Pol makes people stupid.

Your framing is interesting but your, and the authors', fixation on the Melanin content of recruits' skin is causing you to ask the wrong questions, and become blind to the obvious.

As others have pointed out, the core of the US Military since World War 2 has been the multi-generational "Lieutenant Dan" types, and this is especially the case in the middle-management and critical skill positions, Pilots, Senior NCOs, Nuclear Engineers, that kind of thing...

The topic of "Retention" is probably worth multiple effort-posts in itself so I'm going to stick to the cliff-notes but the conventional wisdom post-Vietnam has been that Retention was more important than recruitment when it came to maintaining capabilities. That paying a fat re-up bonus was a small price to pay in comparison to the 1-2 punch of losing experienced troops as well as having to recruit and train new ones. There seems to been a shift away from this approach in the early 2010s (some of which I witnessed first-hand). The idea, on paper at least, was to move towards a "leaner" more "agile" and "economical" force based on the principles of Just-in-Time production. The theory was that fewer people sitting idle and less equipment downtime would mean more getting done, in practice what it meant was dudes burning out, and lapses in maintenance and training due to lack of slack in the system. Mutiple fatal mishaps in the US 7th Fleet ought to have been a clue but like I said this issue and the associated political wrangling could be a series of effort-posts in itself.

What does that have to do with recruitment numbers though? Well, that's where the "Lieutenant Dan" types come in. The naive take is that recruitment, is about selling military life to high school kids. The Savvy take is that it's about selling it to the troops because if the troops are sold they'll stay in, and you'll get a shot at their kids to. Burnout doesn't just lose you one man it runs the risk of losing you his friends and family as well. Simply put it's guys like me, that is a decorated combat veteran with an honorable discharge and multiple male heirs, that the DoD should be courting and yet it seems like it's guys like me that the DoD with all it's [current year] DEI bullshit seems most hell bent on alienating.

Look at Benghazi was handled.

Look at how the withdrawal from Afghanistan was handled.

Look at just how few shits our so-called "elite" give about the lives of American service members.

Why would I entrust my sons to these people?

As @remzem observes downthread, the woke don't really think long term.

You need to remember that most of the posters here are not Republicans, they're Gilfoyle-style Silicon Valley satanists. They like Trump for accelerationist reasons and because they find him entertaining, but if there were a serious threat of a Republican president actually enacting a socially conservative agenda most of them would swing so hard into the Democrats' camp that they'd make you look like the second coming of Ronald Reagan in comparison.

there aren't actually any Trad-Cath adoption agencies.

Only because any agency that refused to toe the liberal line on abortion and sexual orientation got its' ass shut down 20 years ago. The purge of church-run orphanages and adoption agencies, ostensibly for the children's protection, was a whole thing during the late 90s and early 2000s. CCB was the last holdout, and they closed their doors in 2006.

Can you try to put in a bit more effort?

Into what? As @Dean points out, That you would prefer that things were different does not make them so. I would prefer to be billionaire and to still have the body I did in my 20s. So it goes. That it seems "worse" is not actually a rebuttal to anything I've said.

Why do you think Amy Coney Barrett adopted Haitian children if there was no fixation on race?

Catholicism.

ACB is a wealthy catholic woman and Haiti is a majority catholic country with a surplus of catholic orphans in catholic orphanages in [current year] where US child services tend to frown upon faith-based adoption in general and that of Trad-Caths in particular.

What's with that?

As a general rule, Republicans do not share the Democrats' fixation on race essentialism.