remzem
9d ago
After they scolded him for not being thankful enough Zelenskyy has gone on a tantrum on twitter doing a copy pasted thank you to every world leader other than Trump. lol
remzem
10d ago
American hyperagency strikes again!
Okay if it's not our war then it shouldn't make much of a difference if we just pull all funding and stop providing intelligence?
remzem
10d ago
As opposed to, say, holding a peace summit with Russia without inviting Ukraine to the table, which didn't legitimately hurt relations?
I mean the Europeans had peace summits with the Ukrainians without inviting Russia. At least the US and Russia having a meeting about their proxy war involves the actual players instead of completely irrelevant countries.
remzem
11d ago
Not really true, Putin has offered deals on Russia's rare earth minerals in it's new territories.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4gdx7488g5o
Seems unlikely to happen either way, any meaningful security agreements and Russia just continues grinding Ukraine down and refuses to deal. On the other hand westerners are still adapting to multipolarism and the idealism they could afford under the old unipolar order being gone. So making a deal with Russia for any sort of resources would be a hard sell right now.
remzem
11d ago
That's an interesting neocon fantasy, but the text was leaked https://kyivindependent.com/exclusive-the-full-text-of-the-final-us-ukraine-mineral-agreement/
remzem
11d ago
It's a nothingburger. The more important stuff to watch is how the US and Russian talks go.
The full text leaked https://kyivindependent.com/exclusive-the-full-text-of-the-final-us-ukraine-mineral-agreement/
and it states that only new mineral reserves will go to the fund. Which won't be happening any time soon given the condition of Ukraine.
The Government of Ukraine will contribute to the Fund 50 percent of all revenues earned from the future monetization of all relevant Ukrainian Government-owned natural resource assets
It's also not to repay us for all the money Biden wasted, it's just to invest in Ukraine.
Contributions made to the Fund will be reinvested at least annually in Ukraine to promote the safety, security and prosperity of Ukraine, to be further defined in the Fund Agreement. The Fund Agreement will also provide for future distributions.
It provides zero security agreements either. Basically it was an attempt by the deep state to further entangle the US in it's Ukraine mess. Except Trump didn't want to provide security, and Zelensky didn't want to give away 50% of it's current mineral wealth to crony capital US contractors that'll "rebuild" Ukraine while skimming off tons of the money for themselves, USAID style. Not without security guarantees at least.
So the deal got watered down to nothing.
remzem
14d ago
This still doesn't make sense to me, debt spending isn't an alternative for increasing the labor pool. The debt will have to be repaid or it will simply spiral and the welfare state will collapse, and Germany is even more constrained by being part of a shared currency whereas the US is not and the dollar benefits from being the world reserve currency so our money printing decisions are our own and costs can be foisted off on the rest of the world to some degree.
There's also a limit to productivity based on labor that doesn't change by throwing more money at it. If you want a bunch of infrastructure projects military or otherwise and your labor pool is limited spending more money would increase demand for foreign labor and the pull factor, not reduce it.
This is all hinging on the neoliberal assumption that more immigration is an economic boon in the first place as well. When it comes to Europe and most of their migrants being MENA or sub saharan this doesn't seem to be the case.
remzem
14d ago
So the conservatives won in Germany and the change will be they will rack up debt by increasing spending. All to finance an empire's war, that already tanked their economy and that is already lost.
Sounds pretty Germany yeah.
remzem
15d ago
Haiti's problem is human capital, in that it has none to speak of.
Ukraine's problem is its a poorly partitioned state. You have ethnic and cultural Russians in the east and south and the ultranationalist Ukrainians to the west and central, then some other lesser groups like random Hungarian communities or Romanian in the west as well. It's torn between two groups pushing in polar opposite directions. It's not Russian enough to fully join Russia's orbit, and not Ukrainian enough to join the west (though arguably Ukrainians aren't western enough to join the west) not in it's entirety at least. Solution would be to just give the Russia speaking parts in the south and east, from Odessa to Kharkiv to Russia. Then integrate what is left with Europe.
remzem
18d ago
NATO started the war in 2014 by instigating a color revolution and replacing the elected leadership of Ukraine with western puppets. This should be a question of little doubt. Round and round.
Depends on how you're defining "it"
"Russia invaded Ukraine" Is a fact.
"Russia started it" (the invasion) Is a fact.
"Russia started it" (the war) is not a fact.
The definition of starting something isn't as clearly defined and the cause of the Ukraine war is more complicated than who threw the first major blow. They were already in a frozen proxy war after the events of 2014 with occasional shelling prior to the larger invasion.
Finding the exact causes for historical conflict is always more complicated. This is why the propaganda machine keeps trying to reduce it to simplistic terms. "Mommy! Timmy punched me!!!" type child reasoning. Any unbiased adult with any experience with people is going to question what Jimmy did to piss off Timmy.
Like Incanto I find the patronizing obnoxious.
remzem
26d ago
Afghanistan and Syria withdrawals last Trump term come to mind. Generals bragged about playing shell games in Syria with troop numbers.
https://nypost.com/2020/11/13/diplomat-says-officials-misled-trump-on-troop-count-in-syria/
“We were always playing shell games to not make clear to our leadership how many troops we had there,” James Jeffrey, US special representative for Syria engagement, said in an interview with Defense One.
Different branch of gov, but basically the same idea. Leave wiggle room and you leave them room for to wiggle out of the order.
remzem
27d ago
Feels like this analysis is suffering from a lot of presentism. Or is including a lot in order to achieve it's political goal; singling out identity politics as a unique evil. I don't think this really holds up on closer examination though. The holocaust's identity aspects weren't unique to Nazi Germany. Jewish pogroms had already been common in the late 19th and early 20th centuries in Eastern Europe and weren't seen as especially noteworthy. It's true that ancient people didn't have the same justifications, but they lacked knowledge of genetics. Really Nazi Germany was just an evolution of the same feuds you cite, incorporating newer ideas about identity, namely genetics, along with industrial advances that led to a much larger scale war and much larger scale pogrom.
The concept of Nazi Germany as uniquely evil wasn't even really a thing during and shortly after ww2. After the war things were more pragmatic, we needed West Germany to oppose the USSR and we even recruited Nazis via Operation Paperclip. The Nazis as a unique evil was mostly spun due to it's utility not due to any morality. This happened later, around the 60s and 70s. That's when a lot of holocaust documentaries and the modern beliefs about the holocaust and Nazi Germany as the most evil of evils became more widespread.
The US was fully embracing its role as empire at this point and tabooing white identity politics served these interests. Also had the civil rights movement, Hart-Celler and all that garbage happen around the same time.
remzem
30d ago
They need to audit the judiciary. Similar to how the libs tried to smear the supreme court for all of Biden's term. That didn't work out so well, but! there are only 9 justices and only 6ish Republican judges on the supreme court. They probably don't want to piss off the swing votes so that leaves only 4ish to dig up dirt on.
There are over 800 federal judges. Find a dozen or two with serious corruption and you could completely tar the entire system in the media. You'd have enough ammo to just keep releasing discrediting info on them for the whole term as they try to block your corruption purges and the more they attempt to stop things the more they look complicit with the corrupt state bureaucracy.
remzem
30d ago
Now that you mention it it's pretty funny to think of this from the pov of Indians. Vivek got removed from DOGE after his anti-american tweet. Big Balls is removed and then rehired after his anti-indian tweet.
remzem
1mo ago
That's not how it works. The democratic parts of the American government are set up in a rock-paper-scissors type way. Where if any one part of government tries to get something done another one can block it with everyone just pointing fingers at each other to shift blame. This is to ensure that democratic priorities never get addressed so that the unelected bureaucracy can work on lobbyist priorities unhindered.
remzem
1mo ago
This sort of imperialist belief that you can just displace millions of people and create new countries by decree without considering the blowback is what got us this mess in the first place. If the natural local balance of power doesn't allow for a people to exist, then it will only be able to exist via continual foreign intervention.
The only real solution to fix the mess the brits created is to cut the funding and let things take their course. Either Israel can genocide the place and take it, or they get washed away in the tide of a religion that outnumbers them 2 billion to 15million.
remzem
1mo ago
Might be the dumbest idea he's ever had. I think the Greenland thing has far better odds of happening. It'll crater his America first image, lose support with basically every voting group other than wealthy foreign donors and the small amount of zionist republicans. Even if he could magic all the hostile Palestinians out of there in an instant, he'd still be a powerless lame duck faster than much progress could be made on moving all the rubble that needs to be cleared to even start building.
Yeah that was not subtle. I couldn't stop rolling my eyes at this book in general, and the modern immersion breaking references, but there were a lot of
I think what bugged me the most was something that bugged me about a lot of the other plotlines too, namely the timing
Also the entire recreance just turned out to be
remzem
1mo ago
Finished reading Wind and Truth, fifth Stormlight Archive book. It was really not good. Books 3 and 4 had gone downhill so I wasn't expecting too much. Just figured I'd read it since it's the last book of the planned 1st arc. It was rough though. I'm not even sure where to begin criticizing it, every part has issues. It's got some culture war issues, but mostly because Sanderson up to this point has been a prude Mormon author so it feels inconsistent with his previous books. The character arcs go in uninteresting directions that feel like they have low or no stakes and often end pointlessly. Sanderson has never been a great prose writer, but in this book it's bad enough to constantly distract from the story.
It’s a shame, really, because it was refreshing to encounter a fantasy author who delivered straightforward fantasy without forced modern DEI themes. Books 1 and 2 were honestly quite good—classic, heroic epic fantasy done well. However, none of the setups in those books ever pay off. The built up character conflicts just get dropped. The love triangle just fizzles out, and a character's controversial decision is barely addressed. It’s like the characters stop interacting after Book 2. They all seem to have gone on heavy psychiatric medication and started cognitive behavioral therapy, blunting all their emotions and the actions those emotions might inspire. Instead of living and acting through their feelings and getting the self-discovery potential those actions could lead to, they just become distant and introspective, endlessly dissecting their issues in a repetitive, stagnant, psych 101 for dummies style. It's all tell and no show.
I kinda wonder if Sanderson just wants to get to his long term over arching cosmere stuff more than he wants to write good books. So everything is getting the short stick and forced into unnatural feeling storylines to keep things on track. No time to write these character interactions, gotta introduce random new cosmere lore! Which is ironic for a series whose moral was supposed to be, "journey before destination."
Kosovo?
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