ZanarkandAbesFan
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User ID: 2935
ZanarkandAbesFan
14hr ago
There was this story about members of the UK labour party volunteering for Harris. It probably doesn't amount to an example of the British Government getting directly involved but I'd say it's pretty poor form nevertheless.
ZanarkandAbesFan
14hr ago
And as far as I can tell, he only wants Greenland because he didn't win the Nobel Peace Prize and because it looks big on the Mercator projection.
The Nobel prize thing is probably the most farcical part of this whole circus. If Trump thought that the Nobel Peace prize committee of all groups was going to elevate him with that sort of honour, he's a lot less bright than I thought.
ZanarkandAbesFan
14hr ago
Moreover, it's obvious that there's a fraction of the American right (a powerful fraction? Who knows, but it tends to become evident in times like this) that just plain hates [Western] Europe. This issue cannot be even discussed, as Euros pointing it out immediately leads to the said rightists going "you're imagining it, you're gaslighting us, nobody here even THINKS of Europe at all [post le epic Mad Men meme here], we just hate cucked European governments, Europeans have always hated us so we're only reacting now" etc etc.
If one was online 20 years ago, the same fraction was hating on [many countries of Western] Europe back then, too, for not joining the Great Freedom Crusade for Freedom, with somewhat different arguments (the word "cuck" hadn't been invented back then, after all), but clearly still similar impulses. Indeed, it seems likely that many of the warblogger readers and Bush diehards of those days are now Trump diehards, doing the same stuff as back then but believing it to be somehow different because Trump is so so different from all the preceeding libs and cucks that it's completely different when the same things happen over and over again.
Are these the same groups of people? The sense I get of the type of American who really hates Europe is that they're mostly highly online Gen-Z types. Most of them weren't alive when the GWOT started.
ZanarkandAbesFan
14hr ago
Trump appears to have now given up on getting Greenland altogether and dropped any threats of tariffs.
"The art of the deal"
ZanarkandAbesFan
19hr ago
Removing the last and a good chunk of the second-last part scraps the deal and you will need to enforce it with full coercion and foil all attempts at getting out from under the boot. It is symptomatic of Trump's foreign policy that he complains about the lack of local populism and cultural protection, then immediately makes the parties that agree with him look like cucks.
The UK doesn't have great alternatives just now. Any attempt to build bridges with Europe seems to run into Macron trying to cuck Britain even further. Maybe this sort of thinking is why the current government is being relatively accommodating to China's new embassy?
The same reason they had to ask Tim Walz if he was an agent of the Chines government because he lived there for a while and took kids on field trips there afterward.
Did they ever ask Tim Walz that?
ZanarkandAbesFan
2d ago
They'd come by every month and everyone would have to line up and take photos that presented China as a good place to live/work in.
Being very focussed on propaganda was fairly priced in to my view of the country. What you're describing does sound fairly excessive though.
My assertion is that I have yet to really see any anti-Trump writing that acknowledges him as a complete person, pretty much everything I've seen for ten years now has been exaggeration and stereotyping of his worse attributes and behaviors.
A much, much less lower bar ("say anything nice about Trump at all") has never been cleared by anyone I've interacted with in real life and rarely here.
As someone who thinks Trump is decidedly less virtuous than average, I can actually think of fair few nice things to say about him: he seems quite forgiving, he can be generous with praise, he's got a sense of humour etc.
ZanarkandAbesFan
2d ago
People angry about having to sit through DEI sessions really underestimate the level of shit-eating that's required in places in China.
Can you describe what you're talking about? This is a genuine question; I don't have any direct knowledge of what living in China is like. If I were to guess I would assume a certain amount of obsequiousness towards the Xi and/or the CCP is required but I imagine this feeling a lot more tolerable than being forced to pray at the alter of DEI (I sort of picture it as being similar to having to recite the pledge of allegiance or something).
Of course if you're a Uighur living in Xinjiang I'm sure the situation is quite different.
ZanarkandAbesFan
2d ago
Systems with high power individuals at the top run at the behest of that individual, and this is much more true or China than America.
Xi seems much brighter than Trump, though.
Trump rambles and sometimes jumps erratically between different trains of thought but whichever token he's outputting at sentence position n usually bears at least some relation to token_n-3. Biden during the 2024 debates was much worse.
For what it's worth I think peak Biden was probably smarter than peak Trump.
ZanarkandAbesFan
2d ago
While it was undoubtedly an act of grotesque malfeasance to hide Biden's state, even if we grant the most pessimistic assessments of Biden, he wasn't nearly as far gone nor as overtly harmful to the nation
Biden was indisputably further gone. You may have preferred his admin's governance, but he wasn't capable of putting complete sentences together.
ZanarkandAbesFan
2d ago
Basically, getting rid of Trump would be an act of selfless, patriotic self-sacrifice that the modern GOP is incapable of.
You could say the same thing about the democrats and Biden.
ZanarkandAbesFan
2d ago
But they ALSO tend to portray interracial couples with the male being black and the female white
I wonder why it's this way around.
ZanarkandAbesFan
3d ago
I'm pretty sure progressives are mostly young.
ZanarkandAbesFan
4d ago
You imported a million zillion Third Worlders who were supposed to prop up your pension systems but mostly just pump up the rape stats.
To be fair, progressives in the US would love to do that as well (well, not the rape part). The main difference is that the USA is much further away from MENAP than Europe is.
ZanarkandAbesFan
4d ago
I'm going to go with a perhaps controversial opinion here and say there is no doctrine here at all
I was going to post something similar about Trump not having any coherently formulated foreign policy but I think you can still make the argument that his various decisions do reflect an underlying pattern, even if that pattern is purely reflective of his psychological profile rather than an explicitly thought-out philosophy. Whether the most appropriate word for this is doctrine or something else is maybe a different discussion.
ZanarkandAbesFan
4d ago
Do the Europoors understand how insulting and alienating this is given their concurrent begging for US help against Russia?
Trump insulted Denmark first (and by extension, everyone invested in the European project) by announcing that the US is going to take Greenland. Claiming to be hurt by the European response is hard to take seriously.
ZanarkandAbesFan
7d ago
The Haredi are mostly high-IQ Ashkenazim, if I understand correctly. They may not be useful now, but they do constitute a growing reservoir of human capital if the state can ever manage to get enough of them to take part productively in society.
ZanarkandAbesFan
9d ago
I don't doubt that incompetence has a large role to play, but I think sanctions have to be somewhat responsible. I don't think you can claim for instance that their economy would be just as bad if they were as free to take part in global trade as Germany.
ZanarkandAbesFan
9d ago
National pride doesn't provide working electricity or keep you warm in the winter. The current protests in Iran seem to mostly be caused by the dire economic situation, which has only come about due to sanctions.
I also think a mistake you might be making is assuming that the primary aim of sanctions is to spread democracy in the first place, rather than as a means of weakening an enemy state so it's less able to harm you. A state that's poorer is one that's less able to buy weapons, pay soldiers, fund an air force etc.
I'm not an expert on Iran or military matters but from what I see on Twitter it doesn't look like the US is carrying out the expected movements of troops/hardware you'd expect to see before a military intervention. My weak prediction is that Trump does nothing, the protests are harshly suppressed and Trump claims "credit" along the lines of "If it weren't for my warnings there would have been a lot more bloodshed, let me tell you".
That being said, I'm not sure how long the Iranian regime can carry on in its current form. The grand masterplan of:
1/Economically immiserate yourself for 40+ years for the sake of picking a fight with Israel and the USA
2/Get militarily humiliated during the first direct conflict with these two nations
3/Seethe
4/Profit
Seems to have hit a very visible snag around the last step and I don't know how long the regime is even going to be able to recruit enough people to fill its security apparatus to the extent necessary to continue keeping a lid on public frustration while it's abundantly obvious that essentially none of their citizens benefit from the country being run like this.
ZanarkandAbesFan
9d ago
If you want America to commit to yet another military intervention in the middle east, I think you should provide something pretty close to a guarantee.
Why? Surely it can be justified on the grounds that almost any replacement is going to be better for the US + allies than the current one.
ZanarkandAbesFan
10d ago
If you're white, and if black and brown people give you warm and fuzzy feelings—those feelings are not only unreciprocated—but reciprocated in the inverse direction.
Interesting that Hispanics and Asians also rate every other group above whites (although "Asian" as a category is so broad as to be almost useless)
Well, the US had a part to play in that neutering.
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