Stellula
4d ago
Do people undergo experimental heart surgery because they don't like how their heart looks?
If there was an experimental heart surgery which changed the color of a patients heart from vaguely red to bright pink, I wouldn't support people doing it. I definitely wouldn't support impressionable teenagers who read about this on the internet doing it.
Stellula
6d ago
Looks like Goldberg released the chats and, yeah, what Hegseth posted was inappropriate.
Stellula
6d ago
Well today we had congressional testimony where they claim there was nothing secretive shared, and that signal was approved for the type of use they were doing.
So maybe everybody is lying. Certainly everybody involved here has an incentive to lie.
Stellula
7d ago
I don't think the Trump admin would trust using a secure message system developed by the NSA.
Stellula
7d ago
But it doesn't say that. In fact, when they talk about any actually sensitive military planning type things, they explicitly refer anybody in the group to an appropriate channel:
At 8:05 a.m. on Friday, March 14, “Michael Waltz” texted the group: “Team, you should have a statement of conclusions with taskings per the Presidents guidance this morning in your high side inboxes.” (High side, in government parlance, refers to classified computer and communications systems.) “State and DOD, we developed suggested notification lists for regional Allies and partners. Joint Staff is sending this am a more specific sequence of events in the coming days and we will work w DOD to ensure COS, OVP and POTUS are briefed.”
Stellula
7d ago
The journalist says he has these, but what are they, specifically?
“We could probably hit them with a $big_cock_american_missile as earlier as tomorrow morning given that the USS American president is off the coast of goatherdistan” is specific timeframes, weapons packages, etc. and doesn’t say anything that isn’t also publicly available.
Call me skeptical.
Stellula
7d ago
It seems like this was obviously “leaked” on purpose. Nothing they’re saying here is in any way secretive and it sounds like regime taking points, not planning.
Stellula
11d ago
There’s a podcast called “Sold a Story” that’s worth listening to if you have a kid that age learning to read.
Basically the “sight reading” thing looks like students are progressing, but then soon hit a wall they can’t get past because they weren’t actually learning how to read just how to identify words.
Seriously check it out. Very well done, and also infuriating with regards to how education trends are pushed.
Stellula
14d ago
The brief summary is that many of the people who run your government and dictate the shape of your life are very bad people who do not share your values or care about your life or the life of your children.
Stellula
14d ago
I cannot recommend highly enough the very in depth podcast series that Darryl Cooper (aka Martyrmade) did on this topic a few years ago.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=yrm8aOmQg-o
The only caution here is that this is a bit radicalizing, it seems very well sourced, and does not paint a pretty picture of the way that sex-blackmail has been used for the last 50 years in the west.
IANAL so this one seems really obvious to me. You aren't a citizen, you are here on a greencard. I would not expect to be able to go to Germany and stage a protest against their government, or "occupy" one of their schools and expect to be able to stay.
There's also something obvious here: you aren't a citizen. If you don't like what we're up to over here, then leave on your own.
I'm also getting a bit frustrated at the lengths to which the concept of "speech" has been stretched. It seems like there is a line somewhere between publishing a newspaper and "occupying" a public building where what you're doing stops being speech and starts being something else.
Also, to put some things together.
Khalil was an organizer of a protest at Columbia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_Columbia_University_pro-Palestinian_campus_occupations
The protest was organized by a group called CUAD: https://instagram.com/cuapartheiddivest/
CUAD has called for, among other things, the "Eradication of Western Civilzation": https://nypost.com/2024/08/17/us-news/columbia-universitys-anti-israel-group-seeking-total-eradication-of-western-civilization/
America is my home. If you come here and want to protest to destroy or "eradicate" it, I think it's reasonable to deport you. You can keep calling to eradicate my home, but you can do it from your own country, and not by "occupying" any of my universities or public buildings.
Stellula
24d ago
They're trying: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orania
Stellula
1mo ago
it's not clear why Zelenskyy should give away so much without something -- anything at all -- in exchange, presumably a security guarantee.
How are you coming and taking about this at all when you haven’t read anything about it, or even listened to the interview that js the topic of discussion in this thread?
Seriously what motivates this?
Zelensky is not giving away so much without anything at all. Trump and his proxies explain that giving us access to these minerals (Trump mistakenly at the beginning of the interview calls them “raw earth minerals”) gives us “skin in the game” and an obvious strong financial incentive to protect Ukraine.
But I’m actually asking: what is the motivation to talk about this without knowing anything about it?
Stellula
1mo ago
Did you even watch the video? It’s 40 minutes long. Most of it is them talking about the diplomatic solution theh seem to have found, and Trump just keeps hammering that we need to find a peaceful end to the war.
Vance’s comment was a brief reiteration of this point, and Zelensky then escalated it into an argument by implying that he wanted to blow up the deal because he (a politician who has cancelled elections in his own country, btw) doesn’t believe in diplomacy.
England and Germany are also both authoritarian regimes that don’t respect secular liberal values. Australia locked people in quarantine camps against their will only FOUR years ago. Canada debanked a bunch of truckers because they were honking their horns. Various states in the US will de facto kidnap your children and castrate them.
At some point the west needs to remind itself what it means to be the west and what we’re supposed to be defending. Free speech, free expression, free association, parental rights, bodily autonomy; these are non-negotiable.
Russia doesn’t support these things either, and is clearly an authoritarian pseudo-democracy, but “the west” just keeps slipping, and the lack of contrast between us makes it harder to rile me into supporting a war to defend our values.
Stellula
1mo ago
That is not what happened though? I don’t mean as an interpretation, I mean that is very objectively just not the course of events.
Trump said something about the importance of diplomacy, and how tough words don’t mean anything.
Vance interjected basically just agreeing with him, but adding a jab at Joe Biden.
Zelensky then turns it into an argument by implying that you can’t be diplomatic with somebody like Putin. Zelensky points out that regardless of diplomacy, Putin has been slow invading Ukraine for 10 years now. Zelensky says “so what kind of diplomacy do you mean?”
Jd: “I mean the kind of diplomacy that’s going to end the destruction of your country”, and then goes on to say he thinks it’s inappropriate to try and litigate this in front of the press (I think he’s right).
Stellula
1mo ago
Yeah I don’t think so. We’re telling the rest of the world that they don’t get everything for free anymore.
Ukraine can’t show up in our country, yell at our president, and try to shame us into giving them more money. JD rightly pointed out that Zelensky was in PA campaigning for KaHa in October. That kind of thing is not acceptably any longer.
This is an interesting one screens different show situation.
Some see: https://www.themotte.org/post/1701/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/303464?context=8#context
I see: Zelensky revealed as a child. Continues wearing his costume, refuses to negotiate, starts throwing a tantrum in from of the people funding his war, refuses to show any grace whatsoever. JD asking if he has said thank you was the perfect “out” for him to backtrack, explain how Ukraine is forever indebted to the American people, and how Ukraine owes us their existence and has a friend forever as a result of the help we’ve shown them (wether he actually thinks this or not).
But he doesn’t. He just keeps pushing, and Trump and JD, who hold ALL of the leverage in this situation, respond predictably.
The mineral deal is a deal that helps Ukraine, not the US. We don’t need their minerals. They need us to come and protect them from Russia.
My worry is: this pushes us closer to WW3. We need people building off-ramps (like what Trump is trying to do here), not entrenching themselves further (what Z is doing).
Stellula
1mo ago
That was a reference I gave to a story that has been in the news, and the one that I alluded to.
You’re wrong about where I get my characterization of federal workers. Especially parkies.
we need to save the environment
Correct. The people who we hired to do it should take their job more seriously.
Stellula
1mo ago
I think that federal contractors and weapons manufacturers should be under even MORE scrutiny than park rangers and USAID trans-musical directors, and I assume (hope) anybody taking a salary from the military is already under intense scrutiny all the time.
This argument doesn’t move my needle at all.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/national-park-ranger-fired-dream-job-emotional-viral-letter/
Here's a quote from this person's letter:
"I am the highlight of your child's school day. I am the band aid for a skinned knee. I am the lesson that showed your children that we live in a world of gifts- not commodities, that gratitude and reciprocity are the doorway to true abundance, not power, money, or fear," Gibbs wrote. "I am the one who taught your kid the thrush's song and the hawk's cry. I am the wildflower that brought your student joy. I am the one who told your child that they belong on this planet. That their unique gifts and existence matters."
You're right, it sounds like some of the other things they do other than talk about plants is talk about bird songs.
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"
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?
I'd say that they have a responsibility to recognize that demanding we all pay for this stuff is a privilege, and recognize that as much as they might not enjoy, they might have to do things like send 5 bullet points describing what they do every week. I think it would be reasonable to ask them to send an email every day detailing what they did. I've certainly had various slack bots and things that have asked that of me, and I didn't throw a protest or pen and melodramatic letters about it.
I'm lost in the analogy now. What?
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