functor
3d ago
In other words lets defend the interests of AIPAC and the ADL while allowing free speech for attacking white people. Funny how cancel culture was so problematic for republicans until it went against AIPAC interests.
functor
9d ago
They couldnt take a city in a year and pacify it even with exceptional brutality and completely cutting off Gaza from the rest of the world.
functor
10d ago
Israel is fighting a small group of arabs with no logistics and failing to do so while consistently pestering the US for support.
functor
10d ago
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Maga is a coalition of various groups Trump has managed to get onboard by promising them various things. He has an issue that he has Tulsi Gabbard, America first nationalists and voters who have nothing to gain from warmongering in the middle east in the same coalition as Israel-first jews. They are at odds with each other.
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Bombing countries to fight insurgencies doesn't work. Laos was bombed harder than any country in WWII with little effect. Afghanistan was bombed relentlessly for 20 years with US troops on the ground coordinating the fire. Bombing Yemen is not going to be more effective than bombing the taliban was.
functor
12d ago
In many cities it is as fast if not faster. Also for most things people don't need public transit, a short walk is faster than being stuck in a car. The mindset of a car being convient because it allows people to travel far comes from people living in a dead suburb.
functor
13d ago
Cars don't give freedom. They are the most regulated form of transport. They require licenses, insurance following strict rules on the road and high costs. Most of the time a driver is stuck in traffic. Police spend more time controlling drivers than any other mode of transport.
The issue in the US is a black crime issue. Instead of solving that issue the US has revamped its cities to socially isolate people by wasting vast sums of money on cars. The result is urban sprawl with low social cohesion with fat people driving around in cars with cops controlling them.
functor
13d ago
No issue on a cargo bike. Also I prefer fresher food that buying tens of kg of food that is meant to be stored for years.
functor
13d ago
Why do you even need an SUV to buy things? You could just walk a few blocks in a sensible city and get whatever you need. The SUV solves the problem the stroad created. The issue is that people live in suburbs that have the greenery and freedom of a city while having the services of a rural area forcing people to drive places.
The car based city layout makes people obese, is ugly as sin, and isn't functional as it is incredibly demanding to maintain.
functor
14d ago
Streaming is generally seen as reactionary and antiliberal in the public system.
But it is inclusive if we rebrand it as special ed.
functor
15d ago
Is it really that bad that 25% of students get individualized coaching? The IQ spread between a student with an IQ of 70 and one with an IQ of 130+ is far too great to teach them together.
The speed at which students will learn 9 years worth of material will vary vastly and the pain points and bottle necks in learning will vary vastly. It isn't at all surprising that at least 25% of students will be out of sync with the curriculum.
Rather the opposite, North America has too few countries. Quebec should be independent, California should be independent, The south should be independent as a minimum. Giant states are hard to keep together and don't work well. There is too little cohesion, decisions are made too far from the ground and the interests are too different.
There used to be a British colony, it split in 1776, then fought a war against itself in 1812 and then split again in the 1860s. The current state is that American politics is a mess with people living in completely different realities.
functor
17d ago
The idea that this would have been some great injustice towards the Iraqis and Afghans doesn't make sense. There is no moral superiority in not annexing territory and granting citizenship.
functor
17d ago
It really made sense after WWII when the US was 50% of the world's GDP, had fighter jets while most of the world was technologically barely in the 1800s and had nukes.
The US portion of global GDP and population has steadily been falling as the rest of the world has been catching up. China has greater industrial output than the US and are not a century behind the US in tech, in fact they are a head in certain fields. Other countries such as Vietnam, Indonesia, India, Saudi Arabia etc have developed at a far faster rate than the US. In 1950 the US was the sole supplier of many industrial goods, today the reliance on American products is reduced as there are alternative suppliers for most products.
Invading countries is substantially harder today than it was in the past. Britain could take a quarter of the world, no country could hold that much territory today. Defensive technology is simply too good. Even Houthi rebels have ballistic anti ship missiles.
The US won't be able to maintain its status as an exceptional unipolar hegemon in a world in which the US isn't as exceptional. The US might be more powerful than a specific country but isn't powerful enough to be everywhere at once. They simply can't enforce a world order globally. They can enforce it in a subset of the world but the US would be stretched thin trying to enforce it everywhere at once.
functor
17d ago
so the issue wasn't murdering a million Iraqis, wrecking the country for generations and level the countries infrastructure. The great crime would have been giving them two senators, social the protection provided by the US constitution? If anything the crime was not giving them some form of citizenship. The British empires had tiers of citizenship which granted colonials some basic rights and a basic status. Why aren't people in occupied parts of eastern Syria given any recognition by the US government?
Afghanistan was colonized for 20 years yet no Afghan had access to the US legal system or bill of rights. Veterans of a de facto US military can't get access to the VA.
functor
18d ago
This hasn't been that widespread. We are told 5% of the population belong to these minorities yet there aren't 4 million gay prisoners in Iran. The handfull who end up in prison seem to either be agitators, pedofiles or people who are doing their best to provoke the system.
functor
18d ago
Why is LGBTQ so important for liberals in terms of foreign policy?
For example, when debating Russia, arguments often amount to Russia is evil because they aren't onboard with pride. Russia isn't putting LGBTQAASASFDSFDSFDSFDSFSD people in concentration camps, they simply seem not to have pride flags while having a don't ask don't tell attitude. Why does that infuriate liberals that much?
Countries in the middle east can engage in all sorts of questionable behaviour but, often it is a lack of LGBTQ flags that infuriates the left. Again, they aren't mass-executing LGBTQ people or having concentrations camps, they simply don't celebrate it or want it rubbed in people's faces.
It seems like existence of pride parades seems to be a key benchmark for judging the moral virtue of a country. Why is this benchmark so central?
functor
20d ago
It is because soldiers need equiptment. The US is the logistics chain for a force 3x times what was in Iraq during the surge and that force is fighting far harder. That is an enormous sustainment challenge.
functor
20d ago
Is china occupying Mexico and using its troops to gaurd druglabs and plantations?
functor
21d ago
The US until recently occupied Afghanistan flooding Russia with heroin and putting American air bases close to Russia's nukes. The US has been invaded Libya, Syria, Iraq and Yemen. It is clear that the US would attack Russia if it could. American politicians would attack or topple Russia if they could. The US is hyper expansionist and extremely aggressive. There is a clear reason why the Russians wouldn't want them on their border. If caring about countries outside your border is paranoia, why does the US care so much about latin American countries?
functor
21d ago
Ukraine's military is a quarter of the US military. Sustaining the Ukrainian military is like sustaining the US military at the height of the Vietnam war for three years straight in a far more intense war.
Once the war ends the US and other backers of Ukraine have to reconstitute a military far larger than any other non Russian European military from ruins. The scale of the problem is simply too vast.Ukraine was on track to becoming an endless black hole that would require unsustainable amounts of resources for decades.
functor
23d ago
Sweden has 3 brigades to defend 1500 km. Sweden's military is remarkably under dimensioned. Finland has a more sizeable military but needs the force at home. Moving the military to the other side of Europe leaves the home front vulnerable while providing Russia with a reason for war.
functor
23d ago
Tens of thousands of Ukrainians fought in Bakhmut, a town of 100k people along a thousand km long line. They lost.
France, Britain and Germany would truly struggle to deploy tens of thousands of soldiers in a high intensity conflict in Ukraine. They would struggle to defend a single city. There is no European army that could hold a sizeable portion of the front except for Ukraine/Russia. The scale of the Ukraine war is vastly beyond what any European leaders have imagined for decades.
functor
25d ago
Compare how the Chinese have played things compared to the neo-cons.
During the cold war Sino-Russian relations were tense and the countries had sizeable portions of the militaries on each other's borders. Russia pancaked itself during the 90s and instead of abusing Russia the Chinese were rather generous. Russia had treated China poorly and the Chinese responded by being respectful. Today China has almost no troops along the Russian border and they can buy the natural resources between Turkey and Alaska, or Norway and North Korea at a discount.
Meanwhile the west has embargoed it self from one of the largest resource producers in the world and has to sustain a military 25% of the size of the US military fighting a high intensity war against Russia while having to maintain a separate military force capable of defeating Russia on Russia's northern flank. Russia has become an endless black hole for western military resources that is going to cost mountains of equipment and manpower for decades. China isn't paying this incompentence tax.
The US spent two trillion playing 8D chess defending its strategic resources in Iraq. The Chinese bought oil fututures and let the Iraqis buy infrastructure from China with the money. Today the Chinese have stronger ties to Iraq than the US has with a percent of the budget. The US is spending far more in the middle east than China, with dubious results. The US strategy of dominating the world through military means simply doesn't work. The best strategy for the US is to do what China does.
Rather the opposite. The ADL position is open borders, wokeness and diversity in the west, Israeli nationalism for Israel. The same billionaires who happily funded woke univerities and were pushing DEI in their companies want Likud running their own country.
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