remzem
3d ago
I don't see how Syria made the US look weak and vulnerable. It just made it apparent that leadership was out of touch since he had no popular support for involvement in Syria and had to backtrack.
If anything Iraq and Afghanistan have done the most to make the US look vulnerable. They showed that a strong enough opposition can actually defeat the US military and this was a case of the US overextending. Too much chest beating.
Russia is harder to say since the information environment has gone fully 1984 and there is almost no factual information circulating in western media at this point about the conflict. Equal odds we are deluding ourselves about Putin's red lines.
remzem
3d ago
He also got outmaneuvered on Ukraine and with all the MIC Russian collusion agitprop had limited options when it came to Ukraine without giving their propaganda more credence and further tanking his reelection prospects. The Soleimani thing was pointless though and did nothing to better America's position in the ME and that's entirely on him. He's also definitely in Israel's pocket, but so is most of the US government, there's a reason we'll never get the full info on Epstein. Only politicians I can think of not owned by them without doing research would be the ones owned by Islamic interests and Thomas Massie.
remzem
3d ago
Nah it's 2024, you don't need to beat your chest and throw your spear threateningly in the direction of the rival tribe's line of warriors. We have enough nukes to destroy the world multiple times over. Speak softly and carry a big stick and what not. Trump's bravado stems more from insecurity and narcissism, which makes him easy to manipulate by the deep state.
remzem
3d ago
Most of his confirmed appointments seem to be Rubio tier or worse. Complained about the Cheney's during his campaign and literally appointed a Cheney loyalist and ex-advisor as his national security advisor. Trump's criteria for a cabinet member is how loudly nice they are too him, not their political policy.
Really the big question surrounding Trump's second term was, "Has he learned from his first term?" and the answer is clearly no. X seems to be in near open revolt after all the appointments and Thune getting voted Majority lead. He's gonna lose all the libertarian support, all the weird center-left? populist RFK support and so on. It'll be funny if he loses the house because he appoints to many people from it and republicans all lose the follow up special elections.
remzem
7d ago
Yeah they've been cooking this one for a while, started around the first assassination attempt. They were already seeding Trump with "intelligence" about Iranian assassination plots, after the first one (which was entirely homegrown) they fed this intel to the media to attempt to co-opt the backlash into fueling the deep state's global imperial ambitions. https://www.cnn.com/2024/07/16/politics/iran-plot-assassinate-trump-secret-service/index.html
Now we have this convenient arrest. Pompeo and his lackey Hook starting to worm their way back into Trump's inner circle. etc.
Probably a good chance this is the deepstate's new strat, similar to how they used the Russian pee tapes to corner Trump on backing out on their expansionist efforts in east europe.
Some other smaller deep state moves as well, like McConnell coming out and saying the filibuster will remain which was framed as being nice and magnanimous but will conveniently limit republican power. Then you have the proposed new senate majority leads with Thune and Cornyn both leading and being RINO deepstate ghouls. Senate of course has to confirm cabinet picks and so will have some influence there.
remzem
10d ago
For longer really, ever since people over corrected their priors on Ukraine's chances vs Russia after Russia failed to take Kiev in 2022.
It just solidified things more, there's uncertainty in anything even if all the facts point in one direction you can't account for every variable. If time passes and you continue to get the results you're expecting it becomes more likely you're correct. That's all.
Trump did so but only after a mass pressure campaign coordinated by the three letter agencies that painted him as a compromised Russian asset. Which conveniently for the MIC put Trump in a tough spot when it came to doing anything that could be construed as pro-Russia. This time after the whole Russiagate investigation fell flat it will be harder for them to pull off the same maneuver.
Johnson is a snake for sure though and it's a point against Trump's judgement that he was up there celebrating with him at the rally last night. Really a lot of Trump's next term is going to depend on whether he has finally managed to be able to tell friend from foe and won't just fire anyone that doesn't tell him what he wants while hiring every brown noser. Hopefully some of the better allies Trump has picked up can steer him away from the mistakes he made last time.
remzem
10d ago
Earlier this year I would've said it'll make a forced Truce more likely, but at this point I don't think the outcome of the election matters that much. The ball is no longer in the West's court after how disastrous this summer was for Ukraine. Ukraine's lack of manpower and conscription failures mean it's basically out of steam regardless of what the west does. There weren't many weapons systems left to deliver that weren't risking overly escalating things anyways. Unless maybe an EU country decides to throw their population into the FAB grinder which seems unlikely Ukraine is SOL.
It'll come down more to how much more Putin is willing to spend and what his goals are. I'm guessing at least the rest of Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporozhia and Kherson oblasts. If things really start to degrade even faster for Ukraine maybe Kharkiv and Odessa I'd put at the more maximalist goals, unless he thinks he can just regime change Kiev at some point.
The whole point of Russia invading was to prevent Ukraine from becoming armed to the point that it was a threat to Russia, and it seemed like they waited too long on that. There is no way Russia will sit back and let the US train up and further arm what is left of Ukraine simply due to a temporary cease fire. They aren't that dumb.
remzem
29d ago
I think they'd be pretty low. 82 is old, he'd be president til 86. After Biden that will be an impossible sell, Trump makes decisions emotionally but I think even he would see the futility in running in 2028. He also does listen to some of his closest advisors, family etc. and they'd certainly advise against it. I'd give it maybe 10% tops.
That said I'd give a return to pre-Trump election dynamics even lower odds than that. You'll have someone like Vivek or Vance running next. The neocons were jettisoned and joined the dems, Republicans are solidly the populist party for now and I don't see any changes in the political trends that caused the political realignment. If anything there will be long term effects of the recent mass migration that will fuel populism and racial spoils politics for decades to come.
remzem
1mo ago
there was nothing even remotely close to J6 on the Democratic side
because they are different groups so radicalism looks different between the groups? Repubs are populists, their reaction to disbelief with elections was to riot and generally distrust institutions even further.
Dems are statist bureaucrats and their response involved having all of the government machinery they control rebel against Trump, endless lawfare in the lower courts and district courts they control, government agencies continually leaking things to state aligned media. Laundering fake intelligence through "foreign" (really just parts of the state beyond Trumps jurisdiction) intelligence agencies back to the US so they could endlessly keep the Trump admin under surveillance. etc. Selectively enforcing laws and managing media coverage to encourage and legitimize their npc's riots while cracking down harshly on any opponent's riots (blm riots vs covid protests). Cracking down on access to positions in state institutions, things like diversity and inclusion statements being required in college's. Honestly the republican response to 2020 was pretty mild compared to the state's response to Trump in 2016.
remzem
1mo ago
I mean not actively voting against measures that explicitly disallow non-citizens from voting while simultaneously spending millions to fly migrants to swing states would be a start.
remzem
1mo ago
The last attack was actually quite different. There was much more communication between the US and Iran about the timing of the "attack" and it was seen as more of a way to regain face and be seen as doing something. Far more missiles were shot down and only a handful of impacts were recorded. This attack was launched with less forewarning and dozens or maybe 100s of missiles managed to impact as there was less of a coordinated response and Israel lacks sufficient anti-ballistic missile platforms to defend itself w/o the US.
remzem
1mo ago
I'm surprised Elon hasn't done anything with twitter. He's talked a lot about wanting to save free speech and keep the free marketplace of ideas going, except twitter's format is absolutely garbage for discussing and sharing ideas. From it's inception it was always more top down and geared towards established brands and personalities using it to soapbox or advertise. He spent all that money on the massive install base, but hasn't really done anything with it. Even for the people that have followings they tweet out to it's a chore. I occasionally will see for example that one motte user that quit and created the schism and now posts to twitter effortposting on there and they will have to break their posts up into multiple and rely on users knowing to use some 3rd party tool like threadreader to make it more legible.
You'd think it wouldn't cost that much to spin up some reddit clone but with alternative modding or some kind of free speech list of user's rights to balance mod power. Combine with twitter's userbase and now right wing people or even dissident left no longer need to ever frequent reddit.
ah it's a US vs UK thing then
here its federally defined as:
Penetration, no matter how slight, of the vagina or anus with any body part or object, or oral penetration by a sex organ of another person, without the consent of the victim.
if STDs were one of the main risks taken into consideration you'd think there would be more focus on male prison rape as male to male rape (anal) has a higher chance of spreading disease than PiV. Seems to me that here in the states the objections are more about putting people less able to defend themselves at risk of abuse.
remzem
1mo ago
Even the more strict definitions I'm familiar with usually just define it as forced penetration w/o a penis specifically mentioned. I still don't see why anyone would be relieved that male sexual deviants are forcibly fisting female inmates rather than traditional PIV though.
remzem
1mo ago
If transferring a male convict to a women's prison was made conditional on their having undergone a penectomy/vaginoplasty, I imagine the policy would be much less controversial than it currently is, as it completely negates the possibility of the male in question raping a female inmate (possibly leading to pregnancy)
This isn't true. It makes the possibility of pregnancy nil, though the hormone therapy probably already does this. They'd still have a strength advantage and could overpower and rape female inmates though. Just not with a penis, would have to use finger, fist, idk broomstick, etc. Honestly potentially more dangerous for the female.
remzem
1mo ago
Ok, but, seriously what's the point? I mean yes this is an obscure internet forum on which people advance their technical theories about political topics for no reason beyond being right on the internet and if that's the case then you can stop reading here...
On a bigger scale though when I see this argument employed on the internet in general it seems like proponents of the theory seem to think of it as some kind of "gotcha". I just don't really see it. If the woke or critical theorists all threw up their hands and said, "you got us, we are cultural marxists and will go by this term form now on," what do you expect to change? Socialism polls higher among 18-30 year olds than Capitalism. They're the main group that the woke try to persuade and recruit from. The red scare is a distant memory at this point. The woke didn't rise to power in the USSR or China, if anything these places seem resilient to their influence. They came to power in turbo USA, the most capitalist country ever finally ridden of it's cold war rival. You could make an argument that capitalism is just using cultural marxism and regardless of their roots they are just useful idiots (and many old left types do).
At best you're achieving some weak guilt by association, mostly that will work on people over the age of 65, at worst you're actually making woke sound cooler to younger generations. Just attacking how irrational woke ideology is seems far more effective than all the ink spilled over the cultural marxist label. Pointing out that the woke has its roots in marxism, and then just assuming that people associate marxism with bad and capitalism with good seems intellectually lazy. If conservatives want to win people over they need to be better about pointing out both the flaws in communism and admitting and fixing the flaws in capitalism otherwise at the current rate it seems like both communists and capitalists will be relegated to some stupidpol type forum where they complain about how both the actually relevant political parties aren't "true" left or right.
If anything the failures of both systems seem eerily similar. Focus on material gains neglecting cultural or spiritual growth and interests, using stats on increases in material wealth to hand wave away deep dissatisfaction and malaise. Focus on equality as a selling point (meritocracy in which all people can advance is implicitly part of the western social contract) motivating both groups into ridiculous beliefs, lamarckism for the USSR, blank slatism and "magic soil" in the west. Increasingly centralized power to increase efficiency and productivity, resulting in swaths of people losing agency and corrupt out of touch power centers. I guess i'm not a paleocon at all and more of a post liberal or something so i'm not typical right wing, but the boomer right wing type people need to fix these issues if they want people to just reflexively like capitalism and dislike marxism again.
remzem
1mo ago
I can get behind the use of cultural marxism in a sort of genealogical sense. It seems clear that early critical theorists saw themselves as marxist and were familiar with marxist theory, but as an actual descriptor of modern ideology it's always felt weak to me.
Basically, so it goes, cultural marxism is marxist oppressor / oppressed framework but applied to identity. Except really what is unique about Marx isn't the oppressor / oppressed framework, people have been writing about hierarchy and exodus from oppressors since ancient times. What made Marx unique was that he took the oppressor oppressed framework and interpreted it through a lens of economic materialism. All conflict no longer has to do with your identity or specific role in society it's all about economic output and who controls the means of production. As a descriptor the term doesn't seem to help much since modern political discourse seems less marx and more just a return to more typical conflicts. Different identity groups fighting and forming alliances to further their interests.
When it comes to how the term seems to actually be used in the real world it seems like early critical theorists happened to identify with marxism as it was the well known revolutionary theory that predated them so they were familiar with his arguments and inevitably drew from them. Paleocons seem to have latched on to the word at some point because it fits with their outdated views on the world being some sort of battle between capitalism and communism. Meanwhile most normal people just don't really care about the term since these days both capitalism and communism have shown their flaws and the distinction doesn't really offer them much utility.
The big divider these days seems less about private and public and more about centralization and decentralization. Both Capitalism and communism have centralizing features, communism explicitly and capitalism through things like natural monopolies, economies of scale and prohibitive start up costs, so people aren't too enthusiastic about the prospects of either and just tune cultural marxist talk out.
remzem
1mo ago
Yea this is a delusion the dems have been trying to sell themselves ever since Trump. They see themselves not as a specific group fighting for it's members interests, like the republicans do, but more like a religion like messianic figures that will bring about utopia if they can just get enough control and "eliminate" the external things dividing us. Reality is that Trump didn't start anything and the divisions had been brewing for a while. The things dividing us are us. Globalism has clear winners and losers, 20k Haitians get dumped on a rural town of 40k, but two bus loads would overwhelm Martha's Vineyard, etc.
Due to this they need a rationalization for why their universalist solutions aren't working or their self conception would break down. Similar to that Muslim meme people always post in regards to Europe where the bureaucrats are desperately asking what the Muslim wants, more healthcare, better housing and the Muslim says they just want Shariah. It's clear what the man in the meme wants, the increasingly desperate questions aren't for his sake. It's funny they made diversity one of the pillars of their ideology when they don't really believe it exists in the first place.
remzem
1mo ago
The lesson for Israel is to be very wary of technological shifts in warfighting, particularly if they represents shifts in power from demographically smaller states to larger populations - but I don't see any coming down the pike in the 21st Century.
Aren't they already here? As we've seen in Ukraine? Drones and intelligence gathering have basically obsoleted maneuver warfare and turned wars into a slugfest number game, you need a strong and wide EW net to advance now without getting picked off which means advancing along a wider front which favors numbers. Though the caveat here is that AI could follow on the heels of this as another technological shift. Feel like this would just make wars about industrial capacity though which is still sort of a numbers game.
AA also now struggles to deal with the saturation attacks possible with cheaply mass produced drones.
remzem
1mo ago
Yeah that'd still be pretty easy. You wouldn't need to sample every one. Just one per 50, a few per shipment, that sort of thing. I imagine they fear pretty much all electronics could be used for tracking since Israel or the US might drone strike them at any time and anywhere anyways.
remzem
2mo ago
I mean... wouldn't they just make sure to dismantle a handful of pagers before distributing them from now on? They'd have to pack the things with high explosives to get a result like this, would be easy to find, not much of a cost.
They'll likely short term want to change up suppliers if that info is compromised, but by blowing up all the pagers Israel has revealed this which means it can't be used in the future and if there are other capabilities downstream from this supplier compromised like wire taps etc. Now Hezbollah knows to toss the electronics.
This isn't even really an example of the markets rewarding companies. Their stocks went way up because the government gave them blanket immunity from liability to bring to market a technology that would normally take years of RnD and also preordered massive batches. This ended up being a failure of central planning because millions of doses went to waste after they failed to convince the court systems they could strong arm people into getting vaccinated and demand for the vaccines was lower than anticipated.
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