Stellula
6d ago
They're trying: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orania
Stellula
12d 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
13d 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
13d 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
13d 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
15d 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
16d 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.
Stellula
17d ago
Public servants have the pleasure of serving outside of the strictures of capitalism. The park service guy whose job it is to tell tourists about the flowers every day has an absurd privilege that this is what his job gets to be.
The idea that these people are seething THIS much about simply being asked what they do is infuriating to me. The American taxpayers work as de facto indentured servants for almost a third of their working lives to pay the salaries of these people. The balls for them to freak out and do these petty protests (hang a flag from the top of El Capitan) is ridiculous and embarrassing.
You’re a public servant. If you don’t want to be accountable to the actual president of the United States, then go try your luck getting a job telling people about the flowers in the private sector. You might be surprised at how many jobs there are for that with a typical HR structure (my guess is: 0. The closest would be working as a grounds keeper for some oligarchs garden, maybe?)
Stellula
18d ago
How far should this go? Could women sell their 1 year olds? 2 year olds? Could a woman sell her 12 year old boy to a man who really want to have one?
Stellula
18d ago
I just want to echo an agreement here. And also: what the hell is wrong with these women? You have a child. It grew inside of you for 9 months. It shares your DNA. It will cry until you come to feed and hold it.
I just don’t think it’s possible to explain to people who haven’t experienced it the bond that a child has with its mother (substantially different than its father). This woman had a kid, then sold it to two men, one of whom is the father.
This is so vile. I agree that I struggle to find something as vile as this. This is equivalent to severe child abuse, and is by all measures child trafficking.
Stellula
20d ago
It's like saying "this person can't be a commie because their parents are rich" as they're waving a hammer and sickle flag on video.
Yes it is kindof like that. To take it further it would be a bit like saying: "you can't be a communist if you explicitly argue against communist ideology and start a podcast and spend 3+ hours per day arguing about why communist ideology is bad."
We need to have a discussion some day about what was the actual bad thing about the Nazis.
Was it the Hugo boss uniforms?
The music?
The German language?
Swastikas maybe?
Is nationalism itself bad?
I’ve always understood that the bad thing the Nazis did was load 6 million people or so onto train cars and drive them to industrialized killing factories. The bad part was hunting down people they didn’t like and killing them. It was all the torture and death and so forth.
edit: guys I'm being a little hyperbolic here. Of course the atrocities of the Nazis went substantially beyond just the holocaust. I'm saying that it wasn't the uniforms, or the colors red black and white, it was the violence. When people call Elon Musk, for instance, a Nazi, it comes across as stupid.
I keep seeing people get called “Nazi” for like…waving at a crowd? Which is very clearly what Steve Bannon, an explicit Zionist, is doing here.
I’ve listened to hundreds of hours of him taking. I like Steve Bannon quite a bit. He is definitely not a “Nazi” in any meaningful way that aligns with anything the Nazis did which was historically significant. Bannon is a pro workers rights, anti big government, anti CCP, Christian Nationalist. The first speech he gave after prison was about how the justice system is racist against black people and we need to fix that. During the summer of Floyd he was taking about George Floyd as a victim of globalism, and while he obviously condemned the riots, he was sympathetic to that exact same things the rioters were upset about.
When Ukraine was invaded, he gave a long monologue about how Zelensky was being brave and defending his people, and how the US was leading him down the primrose path towards the place he is now.
He literally went to prison for his principles.
Bannon is one of the good guys. Hard to put into any of the buckets commonly talked about around here. He was definitely not giving any sort of Nazi salute here.
Stellula
20d ago
Bannon’s podcast has an incredibly powerful audience. It’s basically a political activism organizing meeting every day.
Maybe not a “king maker”, but he’s a big deal. Much more than just a talking head.
He’s talking about the claim that there was a peace deal to address the disputed eastern territories and that Zelensky, at the recommendation/pressure of Boris Johnson, rejected it.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/apr/22/boris-johnson-ukraine-2022-peace-talks-russia
Stellula
1mo ago
What’s the likelihood that this just ALL flops back in 4 years?
Just one giant omnibus EO that every flipping presidential party signs which renames the gulf of America, Mount McKinley, Fort Bragg, re-establishes affirmative action, cancels the keystone XL/Stargate/Moonbase etc?
I’m kind of in shock that for the first time in my life a politician actually seems to be looking out for me, but I’m still cynical. We have about 1200 days to run as hard and as fast as we possibly can, but after that then what?
Stellula
1mo ago
I mean…yeah that’s pretty vague. Yeah if somebody is shouting “heil” and throwing their arm out like that it’s a problem, but I don’t think we should maintain a ban on holding your hand up above chin level or anything like that.
If you search YouTube for “Nazi salute”, this is also almost every result.
The reason I’m searching is: I don’t actually know what a “Nazi salute” looks like. From what I can tell, it doesn’t really have any specific characteristics other than holding your arm out with your palm flat. But this is basically identical to the way that anybody would wave at a crowd.
The whole thing is so stupid. The bad part about the Nazis was the whole extermination of the Jews thing, not the Hugo Boss uniforms, or the hand gestures.
And there’s really no question that Elon Musk is not trying to exterminate all the Jews. It seems like he was waving in a weird spergy way.
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.
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