Supah_Schmendrick
No bio...
User ID: 618
Supah_Schmendrick
26d ago
Isn't that "rein" with no "g"?
Supah_Schmendrick
27d ago
Fair enough. To be clear, I didn't ask the question rhetorically or as a "gotcha." I'm not even sure there is a single "correct" response there.
Supah_Schmendrick
27d ago
No, just actively supplying the harmful chemicals/drugs.
Supah_Schmendrick
28d ago
The US until recently occupied Afghanistan flooding Russia with heroin
China does this with fentanyl and precursor chemicals in Mexico. Does this give us a casus belli against the Chinese?
Supah_Schmendrick
28d ago
How much aid would you provide? Weapons? Money? No-Fly Zone? Air support? Troops on the ground? Nuclear umbrella? Something else?
I'm not sure about exact numbers. But sending weapons or monetary support is reasonable. (not doing these things is also reasonable - we don't, and shouldn't fund every conflict around the globe). Putting US soldiers/sailors/airmen in direct combat with the Russians seems like a bad idea which we should avoid.
What is the end-state your policy is aiming for? A ceasefire? Deter subsequent Russian invasion? Restoration of Ukraine's original borders? The Russian army destroyed? Putin deposed? Russia broken up? Something else?
I wouldn't say no if Putin fell; his government is rather odious. But I don't think that should be our goal because we don't have a reasonable way of accomplishing it without incurring disproportionate risk.
The more reasonable goal would be empowering the Ukranians to resist as long as they want to resist; even though the Ukranians haven't covered themselves with glory in the way they've handled e.g. the Donbass, Russia is the overall aggressor here, both in general (trying to force the Ukranians into their sphere of influence) and in specific (the "special military operation"). As we want to discourage military aggression for territorial expansion or political subjugation, enabling the attacked party to resist more effectively would seem to generally be a good (though not mandatory) thing.
Is there an end-state or a potential event in the war that you think would falsify your understanding of the war, and convince you that providing aid was a bad idea? Another way of putting it is, do you think your views on the Ukraine war are falsifiable, and if so, what evidence would be sufficient for you to consider it falsified?
I would need some evidence that Ukraine was generally the aggressor in this matter, e.g., the "special military operation" launched by Russian in February 2022 was either a false flag, or that the Ukranian government had been substantially harming Russia in some way sufficient to constitute a real casus belli prior to that.
Supah_Schmendrick
28d ago
Both republican and democratic defense secretaries are speaking out about Trump firing senior military leaders in an unprecedented fashion.
Even if we grant everything else in your comment, what does this have to do with "democracy?" Is it undemocratic for a civilian head of state to exercise control over the leadership of the professional military?
Supah_Schmendrick
28d ago
"Social trust" isn't just between a population and its rulers, but also between the members of the polity themselves. Perception of crime, "thickness" of social bonds, community engagement, etc. That also has been going down thanks partially to increasing diversity but also thanks to the internet which has everyone staring at a screen instead of each other and staying in instead of going out.
Supah_Schmendrick
28d ago
He's a Willie Brown disciple? I thought he was a Getty guy...
Supah_Schmendrick
28d ago
Newsom is thoroughly integrated into the Democratic apparatus: he's not someone who has built a brand on any kind of independence or heterodox thinking.
He did in fact originally build his brand on being a cutting-edge progressive on woke-ish issues; he was the mayor of San Francisco who started issuing same-sex marriage licenses in open violation of then-applicable California statute as a way of ginning up a test case.
Supah_Schmendrick
28d ago
The blank slateism is what convinces them that a boy brand like Star Wars is just as equally marketable and valuable if turned into a space princess brand.
I'm not sure it's blank-slate-ism; it could equally-well be pure greed in the form of "Undecided Whale"-chasing frantically casting around for a moral-sounding justification post hoc after flops.
Supah_Schmendrick
28d ago
Even shorter: it's treating that Simpsons bit with Principal Skinner that's become a meme — "Am I so out of touch? No, it's the children who are wrong." — as a marketing/campaign strategy.
No, it's catering to the most-engaged activist base and internet discourse, which disproportionately leans Sanders-y or woke.
Supah_Schmendrick
29d ago
Canadians can’t agree with each other now, you think they’ll like their politicians better when they’re in Washington?
That's the thing, though - joining with the U.S. allows the provinces-cum-states to work more closely with their other American analogues, alleviating the need to work only with each other. There would be little need for Alberta to agree all that much with Ontario under a new 60-State US; Alberta would have Montana, Wyoming, and all the other high-plains states to economically integrate and make common cause with, while Ontario quickly becomes NY 2.0., wiring itself into the grand BOS-WASH PMC corrior of the Northeast. Even Vancouver just becomes another PNW left-coast-progressive housing-challenged city.
Supah_Schmendrick
29d ago
Now this...this is the kind of content that keeps me here.
Supah_Schmendrick
29d ago
"Federal Government Requires City to Upgrade Creaky, Dirty, Outdated Sewage Treatment System" is not a banger headline likely to inspire outrage.
Supah_Schmendrick
29d ago
Because this leads to photos of children being separated from their parents by law enforcement, which makes a majority of voters sufficiently sad/uncomfortable to vote against it.
Supah_Schmendrick
30d ago
So when you protest the actions of, say, the Chinese government in West Turkestan/Xinjiang, the appropriate action is to vandalize the local Szechuan takeaway joint just because it happens to be run by a coethnic? That's stupid.
And yes, there are mostly-secular "as-a-jews" who have fully-aligned with the progressive quasi-religion. This is not new; this was the story of the Trotskies and the Kurt Eisners and the Bela Kuns and the Rosa Luxemburgs, and it's now the story of the Peter Beinarts and Norman Finkelsteins, and even much of the modern Reform movement, which, not-unlike many of the mainline protestant denominations, has broadly de-sacralized and merged into the general progressive mainstream. Not for nothing has it been called "the Democratic Party at prayer". These folks are tokens in the anti-zionist movement providing identitarian PR cover the same way Robin DiAngelo and other "white-privileged allies" are for the "antiracist" movement.
Supah_Schmendrick
1mo ago
Yes, hence my edits in the quote.
Supah_Schmendrick
1mo ago
Here's the problem:
JewsCubans/Irish are a very small minority. Anti-semitismCastroism/Orangism being of central concern in the Western mind is not like preferences for the Indian lower castes or black Americans, it's a product of ideology and/or elite power.
Or it's that geographically-concentrated diaspora groups are pretty good at organizing and affecting policy, like any other politically-serious interest group.
Ah yes, that's why they're smashing up jewish-owned businesses [1], [2], [3], [4], are going after the main jewish student services organization on college campuses - hillel - and yell at protests things like "go back to Europe" and "go back to Poland."
EDIT: But even if the protests were immaculately limited to the Gaza conflict, the fact that we have a substantial diaspora population here means that it will have a political impact, just as there were conflicts between different factions of Ethiopian immigrants/diaspora in the U.S. over the recent Tigray War, there were big Armenian protests in LA over Artsakh, the Cuban expat community has long-exercised outsize influence over the U.S.'s Cuba policy, etc.
Supah_Schmendrick
1mo ago
Roughly as many jews live in the U.S. as do in Israel.
Without getting into the weeds here, I think you've slightly misjudged the call of the question. The issue isn't "who started the mudslinging," or even "was the anti-Romney campaign particularly egregious" - instead what is being asked here is "what were the inflection points which activated the Trumpian base sufficiently for him to arise in 2016?" The anti-Romney campaign is one possible answer, regardless of whether the Dem's rhetoric was in part accurate, or if the heat wasn't a substantial change from what came before.
Personally I think the Romney campaign was a lost opportunity, not a Trumpian precursor. Proto-Trumpian folks did not get all that excited about Romney; they were the ones boosting Newt Gingrich and Herman Cain and Mike Huckabee and Rick Santorum in the primaries. A Romney win, if followed by competent government (a huge if in the modern-day) was probably the last serious chance the GOP's "respectability" faction had to wrest the party's momentum away from the insurgent TEA-party/populist wing which ultimately coalesced under Trump.
Supah_Schmendrick
1mo ago
Most of the soldiers fighting in Ukraine weren't old enough to vote for the security agreements in the 90s
Although given reports that the average UKR soldier is now in their 40's, they might not be far off.
Supah_Schmendrick
1mo ago
You're also missing - the need to appease various institutional interests in his own government; the desire to not be seen to back down or "lose"; epistemic closure brought on by only interacting with friendly media; and others.
Supah_Schmendrick
1mo ago
There's also the specter of US soft-blob money (USAID, State, etc.) money drying up so people scrambling for new grifts over to hard-blob (DoD, NATO, security services generally).
Oh, that's deeply unfortunate.
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