domain:arjunpanickssery.substack.com
If you mean directly, the last time I recall was some media interview or townhall in 2023 I believe, or otherwise early in the campaign season, in which Trump was making one of his claims that he'd get talks and get both sides to agree to [generic good term] deal. The interviewer/moderator asked what he'd do if Putin didn't agree, and the immediate response that Ukraine would get more aid.
That was generally unremarked at the time, and has long since been buried in the sea of media articles by Trump opponents (and some supporters) that try to insinuate / claim he's threatening to cut off aid.
If you mean indirectly, as in by proxy associated with him, the latest notable version that was used in international media to claim a Trump intent to cut off because of reportedly favorable reception was in June 2024, when former Trump National Security Council advisors Kellogg and Fleitz briefed Trump on a strategy to bring about cease fire talks. This was formally rejected by the Trump campaign as unofficial/unauthorized/not to be considered authoritative, but this proposal is what most 2024 media reporting alludes to when they claim Trump is considering cutting off aid to force a cease fire.
This is the document, which is hosted on the America First Institute.
While typically characterized as the 'peace at any cost' / 'force Ukraine into a ceasefire' plan, what the report actually says is pretty mild.
Specifically, it would mean a formal U.S. policy to seek a cease-fire and negotiated settlement of the Ukraine conflict. The United States would continue to arm Ukraine and strengthen its defenses to ensure Russia will make no further advances and will not attack again after a cease-fire or peace agreement. Future American military aid, however, will require Ukraine to participate in peace talks with Russia.
To convince Putin to join peace talks, President Biden and other NATO leaders should offer to put off NATO membership for Ukraine for an extended period in exchange for a comprehensive and verifiable peace deal with security guarantees. In their April 2023 Foreign Affairs article, Richard Haass and Charles Kupchan proposed that in exchange for abiding by a cease-fire, a demilitarized zone, and participating in peace talks, Russia could be offered some limited sanctions relief. Ukraine would not be asked to relinquish the goal of regaining all its territory, but it would agree to use diplomacy, not force, with the understanding that this would require a future diplomatic breakthrough which probably will not occur before Putin leaves office. Until that happens, the United States and its allies would pledge to only fully lift sanctions against Russia and normalize relations after it signs a peace agreement acceptable to Ukraine. We also call for placing levies on Russian energy sales to pay for Ukrainian reconstruction.
In short- by the standards of 'the Trump Plan' (as detractors and advocates characterize it, even though Trump has never formally endorsed/agreed to it), the Trump plan is to give Ukraine more aid. Ukraine aid is conditional to participating to peace talks with Russia, no peace deal required, but concessions to russia such as NATO denial and verifiable security deal guarantees are dependent on Russia accepting a peace deal. Full Russian sanction relief is separately conditional on a deal acceptable to Ukraine, but aid to Ukraine is continuous so long as it participates in talks.
The claim that Trump's plan is to cut off aid to Ukraine until it agrees to a ceasefire is dependent on reading coverage of the plan, not the plan itself, or anything Trump has said (which in 2024 has been strategic ambiguity).
Bartender_Venator
2hr ago
I seem to recommend a lot of history podcasts here, but I'll plug When Diplomacy Fails's current series on the July Crisis. Covers a lot that popular accounts don't, including the historiography around the run-up to war.
Having had a British education, I mostly found it surprising how much British diplomacy appears to have been done by a small cabal acting behind the backs of the public, who intended to manipulate the country into a largely unnecessary rivalry with Germany. However, this seems to have been a general trend - the high diplomats of many of the Great Powers were effectively off the leash and playing all kinds of too-clever-by-half schemes which then blew up in their faces (and Germany was particularly guilty of letting Austria-Hungary do this).
My historical understanding is stronger on colonial politics than internal European diplomacy, but I will point out that the continuity of England's balance-of-power politics is generally overplayed (because her balance-of-power diplomacy in 1914 looks superficially similar to 1815). In reality, much of the century before Russia's defeat by Japan in 1905 was based on colonial rivalries, in particular with Russia in Asia and France in Africa - it was only when Russia was revealed as a paper tiger that British policymakers began to look around and realize that Britain's worldwide imperial politics may have been coming at the cost of security in her backyard. My reading is that the British mistakenly believed that aligning with France and Russia would provide a stable balance of power instead of creating two evenly matched blocs ready for war, and totally missed that, in trading off imperial security for European security, she would lose both to long-term rising powers on the periphery (the US and a revitalized Russia). The breakdown of the Dreikaiserbund/Reinsurance Treaty was also a symptom of myopia, with the Great Powers focusing on short-term concerns rather than the greater long-term dangers of revolution and irredentist nationalism.
So, I guess the takeaway is that policymakers have to think long-term. Which, uh, good luck.
grognard
Intel Pentium III 450 / Nvidia Riva TNT2 Ultra / Corsair 128MB PC133 / ABIT BH6
2hr ago
Look into 3D printing a gun. Get a gun by all means necessary.
xablor
2hr ago
In my weak defense, I do actually try to correct myths and encourage more comfortable bellyfeel about nuclear power policy, when the opportunity presents naturally. Actually mobilizing someone to vote, or trying to convert someone to my candidate, no, though.
marinuso
2hr ago
In that case, the bugs would be in the social media apps/websites, not in the operating system's text rendering routines. That's a much better place for them to be. Websites are very restricted in what they can do, and on mobile platforms so are applications.
It also would never have gotten anywhere near this situation to begin with. In the olden days, forums displayed emoticons by doing replacements on strings like :) or :smile:. There's really not that much that can go wrong with a system like that. (Often enough these codes still work in fact, but they are now replaced with Unicode rather than an image.)
Unicode emojis have two big problems. The first and biggest is the design, they were made to be composable, as the designers foresaw that it would be extended and apparently considered that a good thing. For example, [woman] + [sunglasses] gets you a woman wearing sunglasses. I remember the reaction when the 'pregnant man' emoji came out, but really, what else should [pregnant] + [male modifier] do? That's not crazy, it isn't even trying.
You can have a cutesy couple, [man] + [heart] + [woman]. Or you can have a cutesy gay couple, one of whom is pregnant, and both are wearing sunglasses, [man] + [sunglasses] + [heart] + [pregnant] + [male modifier] + [sunglasses]. They could each additionally have a hairstyle, hair color and skin color defined. At this point it's becoming a design flaw that they didn't include the equivalent of parentheses to formally specify the order of composition (though let's not give them ideas). And we want to put this all in the operating system's text rendering routines. Define them all in fonts! As ligatures! Madness, I tell you.
The only limit is that unofficial combinations don't need to be supported (though you are certainly welcome to try), as long as you can display the component parts in order. For example, an old enough system is going to render [pregnant] + [male modifier] as a pregnant woman and an Ares symbol.
Which brings me to the second problem, the Unicode Consortium. There's a single body that decides this, and it can be lobbied, and is it ever. Everybody wants their pet issue represented, and they've really got no reason to deny anyone, because the design already allows it. In the olden days this wasn't a thing. You try convincing phpBB to add your thing, and MSN, and AOL, and whatever else there used to be.
This is why I liked this decision, because it means sanity won at least once. Consider the alternative, that you could say "cutesy gay couple, one of whom is pregnant, one is black with curly hair and one is white with short red hair, with a bald Asian boy and a white girl with long, straight dark hair". This kind of composition is already allowed, but could've been made mandatory to support, in the dark mirror universe.
Turniper
3hr ago
A flippant response to your flippant critiques: Have you ever actually engaged in real political coalition building or donated five figures to a candidate? Unless you have a viewership in the tens of thousands at minimum, all the ink you'll ever spill on politics is utterly worthless compared to a single vote. Voting, and being polled about their voting intent, is the only degree to which the average citizen ever actually influences politics. Disgust about wokeness matters little if it's not enough to make you vote against the democrats. A protest non-vote only matters insofar as polling suggests to candidates a way in which they can win your vote. The hardcore pro-life share of America is well under 40%, but they got an overturn of nationwide law that was broadly popular and largely considered settled because in large part of the fact that so many of them are single issue voters means they cannot be ignored.
Sure, you can complain without voting. But guess what, it's not just your dad who won't take you seriously. It's also anyone who matters. Because people who don't vote are not a constituency anyone serious about winning cares about.
SSCReader
3hr ago
Less flippantly, if no leaders on offer will implement policies or styles/frameworks that you'd prefer, then participation at all indicates a mandate, and refusing participation expresses protest.
As someone who has run elections I can tell you not voting is not seen as expression of protest. How could it be? We can't tell if you don't vote because you are protesting politicians being terrible, or just too lazy, or dead in a ditch just before election day, or were on a drunken bender in Vegas. And frankly, we don't really care. A spoiled vote, we at least have to record although generally, we don't count up why it was spoiled. So if you write "None of the Above" in general it just gets recorded as spoiled, and goes in with those who were spoiled by accident. So your dad is also wrong here I think, though at least we in theory we could count those spoiled on purpose if it were written clearly, and anyone cared enough to do it, so he is perhaps slightly less wrong than you here.
zataomm
3hr ago
I'm sure this meta-argument is not original to me, but I'd say that morality is just how humans are wired, so if you want to achieve an outcome that involves getting a lot of people to do something (e.g. vote), it makes sense to appeal to their moral intuitions. Since I want to achieve libertarian outcomes, I'd rather libertarians spend time and energy convincing each other that they should vote, "because voting is the right thing to do," rather than engaging in these kinds of exercises about how voting is a waste of time.
The standard libertarian rejoinder to "well, what if everyone thought that way?" is that your voting doesn't cause anyone else to vote, so why bother? But that's not really true, since humans are social animals, and when all your friends and the people you admire are doing something, you naturally want to do it as well. If all the cool kids are voting, you want to vote like them! You could do cost/benefit analysis to figure out whether voting is really worth it, but you're never going to win an election by doing that.
anti_dan
3hr ago
Your interest rate will not be particularly favorable unless the bank is confident that even if the stock significantly devalues you will still pay them back.
There is a reason that this "strategy" is mostly just a speculative law review article and like 1 example. No one complaining about bie borrow die has ever demonstrated that its actually being used to any large extent.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
3hr ago
Yeah, but "fear of being reported" does not boil down to being reported to the police. When MeToo was at it's peak, we've had progressives unrinonically argue that no one should ever hit on a woman at work, to the utter shock and horror of our local Europeans, for whom it's it would imply lowering the birthrate from "dangerously low" to "extinction level".
ThisIsSin
The boob tube emits harmful XXX-rays
3hr ago
"muscle cars" as such disappeared after California and other US states enacted all sorts of emission regulations in the name of protecting the environment and so on
Muscle cars simply became their own segment; they simply stopped putting V8s in everything.
What does more HP have to do with luxury?
Past about 300-400 you don't actually need any more. Stuff you want and don't need is generally 'luxury', like 500 screens, massaging seats, etc.
Anyway, I find the concept of a "non-V8 muscle car" sort of laughable.
Larger turbo-4s have at this point totally eclipsed the V6 (even in trucks). I think the only company that still offers one is Nissan (and that's because they're reusing an old design- the Z is not a new car). Most cars that have V8s are turbos now too (trucks not so much), so instead of 300-400 HP you're getting 600-700.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
3hr ago
Cheney and Romney are the prototypical examples of Blue Tribe Republicans.
iprayiam3
3hr ago
To his side: I don't buy that duty === illegal not to. I think that's a weak counter from you.
I also don't think his perspective necessarily means everyone should have to vote. I think it can just as easily be used to say: "The people who ought not be voting, ought not be complaining".
I think you can make a strong argument that a healthy community involves conscientious involvement and any political movement requires coordinated civic action; thus not voting is defecting.
I don't necessarily buy this argument, but I don't think it's remotely as vapid or axiomatic as you are claiming.
Dean
3hr ago
Do Russian diplomats really read this forum? News to me.
Do Russian diplomats need to read this forum for your proposals to be unworkable because of poor modeling of the interests and concerns of participants?
In any case your model of the motivations of the belligerents is not the same as mine so I don't really think we can reconcile the reasoning for any of this.
Sure we can. We can work to justify the models based on key actor behavior, contexts that the proposed models will work within, and past iterations.
For example, you made a concession that if Putin is interested in clay instead of all his declared war goals, then peace is a non-starter. I noted that it is impossible for Putin to achieve all of his declared war goals, and that in lieu of those he has significant interest in the clay in order to declare victory. You have not disputed these points on all of Putin's war goals. If Putin has many interests in the conflicts, and many/most have fallen away, then the reason to continue the conflict remains the rest- which includes the clay.
This is a synthesis, not a refutation of your model, and thus allows the conversation to reach your own conclusion. Putin cares about the clay, and thus peace is hopeless.
From this point, we can discuss what that means for reasonable peace talks (which have a purpose even when an adversary has no interest in fulfilling them), assumptions of terms they can be approached with, and so on.
I will say however that taking the current declared terms from both sides as immutable gospel as you do here is absurd. Diplomacy never works like that.
Fortunately I am not arguing on the immutable gospel of declared terms, but rather past iterations, interests, and incentives... which is how diplomacy routinely works, absurd as that may seem to you.
Moreover, you seem to be trying for a flawed reasoning of what is or is not considered subject for negotiation. Just because initial declared terms are 'never' final terms doesn't mean all parts of initial terms are subject to concession. Plenty of terms are not subject to trading way short of total capitulation- which is not the context Russia is faced with in the timeframe being alluded to. As such, the basis by which currently held Russian territory would be traded away with requires justification rather than going without saying, particular in light of past Russian policies in regards to frozen conflicts and relevant historical analogs to broad-front indefinite cease fires.
anti_dan
3hr ago
Because actual answers would inform the public that she is to the left of their loony neighbor that everyone laughs about when he starts waxing poetic about Chavez at the block party after his 2nd Mike's hard.
Lizzardspawn
3hr ago
Wilson was The first tier player and he overrode his allies desires for more realpolitik based solution.
A good summary can be found in the The New Face of Diplomacy: Wilson and the Treaty of Versailles chapter in the Kissinger's Diplomacy
xablor
3hr ago
I'm currently having a debate with my dad.He asserts that voting is a civic duty, and that if you don't vote you can't complain about outcomes.
I disagree with both halves:
-
voting is commendable, but supererogatory, and in practice futile compared to lobbying and coalition-building
- If it's a duty, why don't they arrest you for not following through? Failure to comply with taxes and selective service both get people very angry.
- If it's a duty, why is it made practically harder than the intrinsic difficulty of developing an informed opinion? There is no Voting Day or Weekend, there is no guarantee of no reprisal for taking time off to do it.
- Tangential rant: why the fuck is the most powerful country on the planet apparently incapable of deploying world-class secured online voting? Why is the single fundamental operation of ensuring political legitimacy treated so unseriously? You have to show up in person? And you're authenticated by showing a $15 license-like thing at best? Scribbling on a register? Scribbling on a mailed-in slip?
- If I'm honest with myself there's an element of go-to-hell rebellion. Duty is meaningless if you didn't sign up for it with full comprehension, and you can take your cultural-indoctrination-by-bullying and shove it. I'd happily trade my federal suffrage for my federal tax burden.
- An individual vote isn't much power at all. In an age where a junior senator can be bought for $10K, you properly 'vote' by organizing a Fun Run and starting a war chest, or finding a way to enhance or steer an existing one. Voting by voting is a loser's game.
-
it's obviously viable to hold an opinion on how a leader you didn't vote for is acting. Flippantly, it's like atheism: you didn't vote for every other pol, why is the one in power different somehow? Practically, we don't say you can't hold an opinion about your driver falling asleep if you're a passenger.
- Less flippantly, if no leaders on offer will implement policies or styles/frameworks that you'd prefer, then participation at all indicates a mandate, and refusing participation expresses protest. Especially in the US federal system, where there is no "none of the above" option.
- He assures me that spoiling your vote in protest implements this, so long as you Do the Voting Ritual. I don't trust the opaque interpretation of unknown officials, and these days don't trust that it won't be used in some vote hack.
- You don't vote for high leadership's direct actions, you can't predict what decisions they'll take for reference situations, there is no standard expression of personal style. You're already an ignorant passive passenger once the vote is cast, why is intelligently and deliberately refusing to vote somehow special?
- Less flippantly, if no leaders on offer will implement policies or styles/frameworks that you'd prefer, then participation at all indicates a mandate, and refusing participation expresses protest. Especially in the US federal system, where there is no "none of the above" option.
There's mutual incomprehension, here, and frankly he doesn't seem sophisticated in his thinking; it's just repeating a slogan with the vehemence of a moral axiom, pure meme replication, pure social force on force. Can someone steelman his side for me? Mind read if you need to. Can someone steelman my side for me?
jeroboam
3hr ago
Yep. Say what you will about China replacing essentially all domestic manufacturing, but China is damn good at making cheap stuff.
It's kinda mind-boggling how cheap some stuff is today.
Just for one random example, you can buy a blender today for about the same price as it cost in 1970, and it will be delivered to your door cheaply in less than 48 hours.
Trump has also said that if Russia did not agree to his terms he would give more assistance to Ukraine, so the presumption would not only be unfounded, but false.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
3hr ago
The Cincinatti defensive coordinator has found a way to break Patrick Mahomes' otherwise excellent football brain. This has happened in pretty much every game in the Burrow-Mahomes rivalry era. Kudos.
But y'all gotta focus on beating the rest of the AFC North now. You can't re-play the Chiefs every week and, if you try to, you'll lose games you shouldn't.
I think the Burrow-Mahomes rivalry is good for football, so I hope Joe Cool stays healthy. Draft some damn linemen, homie!
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
3hr ago
You get a latin-english and follow along. The good ones have kneel/stand/sit directions. This creates an understanding of the Mass in Latin, though it would be inaccurate to say you have any real control of the language. Prayers in Latin help as well.
The ceremony is so much better. A big issue with Novus Ordo masses is that they have an odd 1970s folk musical esthetic. Acoustic guitars and piano. "Hymns" that are woo-woo and highly emotive. Combine this with an all around casual disposition - A lot of altarboys don't actually know the order of mass and respond to subtle cues from the priest.
At a good Latin Mass, especially a High Latin Mass, all of the altarboys have been drilled on the order of mass and know their movements to a "T." It's a similar vibe, in my opinion, to a silent drill platoon. The garments are more elaborate and so it conveys a deeper seriousness to everything.
hydroacetylene
3hr ago
Probably, yes. And there are distinctively black socially conservative religious movements, such as NOI and the black Hebrew Israelites. For some reason these groups are no more popular with the religious right than with anyone else, despite being sociologically pretty similar. On the other hand black KJV-onlyists seem popular with their evangelical counterparts despite predictable voting differences.
I would be very interested in examinations of the outcomes of kids born in these groups.
The beauty of the whole system is that you now suffer the consequences even without even ever being arrested. A woman can make a social media post about you and you get all of the social stigma of being guilty without any of the due process. Most people who suffer from this are simply thankful that only their social life, career, or both were destroyed and that they aren't in jail.
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