ZanarkandAbesFan
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User ID: 2935
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
1d 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
1d 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
1d 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
1d 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
1d 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
2d ago
I'm pretty sure progressives are mostly young.
ZanarkandAbesFan
2d 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
3d 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
3d 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
5d 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
8d 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
8d 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
8d 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
9d 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)
Your point of view is consistently that of a wealthy, entitled person who sees the police as her personal gendarmarie whose job it is to keep the riff-raff from inconveniencing her life in any way. From that point of view, yes, anarchy is a much greater threat than tyranny, because tyranny will mostly leave you alone, while anarchy threatens you. Not to get all "woke" (har) but this is exactly why "privilege" dialog took root. There was originally a legitimate point to it. You consider the lower classes to be undesirables to be kept away from you, and the only thing you fear is revolting peasants. So nearly any level of state crackdown is acceptable to you because only at North Korean levels would it actually threaten your lifestyle. Whereas those beneath you understand what tyranny will do to them.
I don't agree with the general argument you're making. In first-world countries, wealthy people generally have less to fear from increasing steps towards disorder than poorer people, as they can afford things like private security and to live in areas with non-violent and conscientious neighbors. It's poorer people who live next to violent crackheads who have more to lose when the local mayor decides to enct policies that make it impossible to lock up the person who just break into your house because of racism or whatever. This is also reflected in revealed preferences: it's almost always richer people who vote for soft-on-crime, restorative-justice (read: anarchic) policies and candidates while poorer, less educated voters choose candidates with a much more hardline attitude towards criminals.
ZanarkandAbesFan
9d ago
(2) There exists a Mossad operation to make Pahlavi the Shah (paywalled, Haaretz seems to be a mainstream Israeli newspaper.)
I'm not Israeli, so I don't have much sense of the media landscape over there, but from what I've seen Israelis on Twitter say Haaretz is basically their version of the UK Guardian: a firm disciple of the international progressive cause which means they can only ever be overtly hostile when writing about themselves or the west more broadly. Notably, their journalists sometimes seem to get caught being paid by Qatar.
This isn't to say I don't think the Mossad are active in supporting less hostile parts of Iranian society (they'd be fools not to be). But I suspect the pro-Shah sentiment of the recent protests exists for many more reasons than Israeli involvement.
The Guardian recently decided to publish an opinion piece written by the Iranian foreign minister. I don't think the Guardian editorial staff are dumb enough to plaster their website with "WE LOVE HAMAS" or "DEATH TO THE WEST" but it's pretty clear where their sympathies lie when it comes to the Israel+US vs Iran+proxies conflict.
ZanarkandAbesFan
15d ago
I've recently started Robin Hobb's Assassins' Apprentice. I read and enjoyed The Liveship Traders ages ago so thought I'd give her earlier series a try.
ZanarkandAbesFan
15d ago
But how can Greenland make noises about independence with a straight face when its economy would collapse without the huge subsidies that Denmark sends to it?
The same reason many people in Scotland and some in Wales want independence. The emotional allure of self-determination overrides economic concerns.
ZanarkandAbesFan
17d ago
Time is a pretty good proxy for competence. Time is also money. Maduro was a thorn in the US' side, and for a minimal investment of time and money the US is at the very least going to get someone marginally preferable to Maduro running Venezuela. That's a good deal.
ZanarkandAbesFan
17d ago
What foreign policy losses has Trump incurred?
Being very focussed on propaganda was fairly priced in to my view of the country. What you're describing does sound fairly excessive though.
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