“World hegemon says that two nations in conflict need to negotiate a peace settlement to end the killing”

Libs: “Fuck no everyone should enlist and we should be killing more and more and more until there’s nothing left and even then we will never surrender!!!” :foams at the mouth:

Downvoters better stop malding and start arguing

It’s a farce.

There are never only two choices. It is impossible to actually construct a real world situation where in there are only two choices. Even in an elementary school, given a test with only on question on it and it only has two answers, you can eat the test, scribble on it, punch the computer screen, walk out, etc.

Even in prison with guards pointing guns at you and putting you in a position to do either A or B you have options.

However, the concept of lesser evil is a shallow abstraction of the real world experience of pragmatism. Amongst all of your options, what course of action leads to the most desirable outcomes?

This is a real thing. We do it all the time. People in positions of grave responsibility have to do it with consequences and constraints that are absolutely gutting. Let’s say the war has already started, well, now you have to make decisions about how to avoid losing the most strategically important objectives, even if that means people dying. In fact, the strategies employed in war force decision makers into these sorts of choices as a matter of course - an opponent knows you don’t want to make certain sacrifices and will therefore create pressures that trade off those sacrifices with strategic objectives. Sometimes it’s not even that they believe you’ll give up the strategic objectives but the delay you have when choosing will give them an advantage, or the emotional and psychological toll of being put in such situations repeatedly over a long campaign can create substantial advantages.

Lesser evil is rhetorical sophistry or mildly useful thought experiments when exploring the consequences of ethical frameworks in academia.

This is why I am not all that excited for Zohran’s tenure. I am excited that he got the votes, but the reality is he will not have the power to do what he intends to do because realpolitik drives NYC.

That’s not the calculus here. The problem is that the NYPD has a budget larger than the DPRK’s entire military including their nuclear program. The NYPD is also a bunch of thugs, extortionists, rapists, assassins, kidnappers, and torturers

And that department runs the security detail for the mayor and the mayor’s entire family. The mayor is required to be in their proximity at almost all times. They drive him around, they escort his vehicles, they manage crowds every day around him.

The pragmatism isn’t limited to getting votes. It’s life or death.

Downvoters gotta stop malding and start making arguments

What are we, Russian?

Here’s the Rand paper: https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_briefs/RB10014.html

It’s called

Overextending and Unbalancing Russia

Assessing the Impact of Cost-Imposing Options

And here’s an excerpt from their own executive summary:

Providing lethal aid to Ukraine would exploit Russia’s greatest point of external vulnerability. But any increase in U.S. military arms and advice to Ukraine would need to be carefully calibrated to increase the costs to Russia of sustaining its existing commitment without provoking a much wider conflict in which Russia, by reason of proximity, would have significant advantages.

It wasn’t slave labor, exactly, but it was massively exploited labor. 75 years ago China was easily the poorest country in the world and it’s people were living in the equivalent of $1/day, possibly less.

However, the entire goal of the socialist program was to alleviate that poverty and exploitation, not by enslaving people but by developing the country’s economic and industrial base.

Today, Chinese people have a higher average purchasing power than US citizens do. That means the average Chinese family can afford to buy more goods and services than the average American family. Wealth inequality is also way lower in China than in the US which means that way more of Chinese people have better purchasing power than USians do, simply because that’s how averages work. The US raises the average by making very few people very wealthy and China raises the average by making their billion residents sustainably and incrementally more wealthy.

As for slave labor, the US imprisons more of its people than any other nation on the planet and all of those prisoners are subject to slave labor and massive debt burdens. Official US slave labor from prisons produces over $11Bn in goods and services, much of which goes to the profits of for-profit prison management companies.

China has no such system.

Here’s the first paragraph.

It was a cover-up.

The Russiagate scandal has long been one of the most convoluted, hard-to-follow news stories of all time. It even has multiple names thanks to its peculiar chronology. From 2016 until April 2019 — while Democrats still held out hope of “presidency-wrecking” revelations that would topple Donald Trump — it was generally known as the Trump-Russia scandal. After Special Counsel Robert Mueller broke the hearts of MSNBC audiences by issuing a report without new indictments, attention began to be cast on the scandal’s fraudulent construction, how it was propped up by political spying, illegal leaks, and WMD-style intelligence fakery. Trump and others began to call it Spygate or the Russia hoax, but the name that stuck was Russiagate.

This is hardly word salad. It’s pretty straight forward. Sentence 1 describes the topic - a scandal, a news story, convoluted, hard to follow, superlative. Sentence 2 sets up the rest of the paragraph - it has a weird timeline, and also a bunch of names by which it’s been called in the news media. Sentence 3, despite using an aside demarcated by em-dashes, is very straight ahead - it was called this from when to when. Sentence 4 establishes the setup for Sentence 5 in which another name will be revealed - the setup is that there was fraud, spying, and spy games. Sentence 5 closes the thread by revealing the second name was spy-related, and concludes by bringing it back to Sentence 1 and says this is the name that stuck.

World salad? Absolutely not.

But, I can imagine why you think it’s word salad:

• Democrats still held out hope of “presidency-wrecking” revelations
• Mueller broke the hearts of MSNBC audiences by issuing a report without new indictments

These 2 phrases are emotional and they indict any reader who felt these emotions. The author is speaking directly to the emotional manipulation that so many in the country (and abroad) were put through and not attempting to soothe the reader in any way.

And this type of writing is so slippery to the closed mind that they end up not being able to make sense of any of these words, imagining instead that the author is both rabid and vapid, as a defense against having their minds changed.

I think you might be missing the historical context here.

Here’s an example:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/sep/30/fascism-in-america-book-trump

This one is a lot more thorough and damning:

https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/10/16/the-u-s-did-not-defeat-fascism-in-wwii-it-discretely-internationalized-it/

But the upshot is, the US is the agglomeration of the Dutch, English, Spanish, and French empires - all empires that enslaved and traded people as property, that pioneered new forms of social control, that committed genocide and mass atrocities. The US is not a break from those things, it is a continuation of those things. Those things all informed modern Euro-fascism that peaked in the 1930s under Germany and Italy. Hitler explicitly wrote in Mein Kampf that he was modeling his program on American innovations in social control and economic extraction. German propagandists directly lifted American techniques. The first ever gas chamber for mass murder was invented by the French during the Haitian rebellion.

And when the Axis lost in WW2, the US worked with the Vatican to save, relocate, and integrate Nazis into its empire around the world. When the US created NATO it staffed it with Nazi officers who were hellbent on fighting the USSR, which created a culture inside NATO that was driven by Nazis. And one of the major operations of NATO, Operation Gladio, was focused on finding, organizing, arming, and training Nazi sympathizers and neo-Nazis all over Europe.

America isn’t at risk of becoming fascist. It has always been a particular form of fascism, not easily recongizable as fascism for those of us who are not the target of its police and military, but easily recognizable by the subaltern both domestically and globally. Stop waiting for it to look exactly like 1939 Germany before you call it fascism.

Intermittent fasting + keto diet + eating less + constant hydration. If you add some exercise to that, you will see very fast early results. It won’t get you all the way, but a month straight of that and you will easily see fat reduction.

Punch a tree until it falls. Make an axe out of wood. Use it to chop more trees down. Find shelter for the night. Build a crafting table. Wait until sunrise. Run around until I find sheep. Kill them for wool. Make a bed.

Yeah, because those societies are shaped by their failure to manage dark triad personalities in the first place. Pretty obvious.

Money. Plan and simple. The right wing is the side with all the money and they spend it on producing propaganda regardless of its economic viability. Just look at Prager U’s financials. They pay dozens of content creators to pump out content even though it’s not profitable. There’s not enough money in the left wing to counter that.

Mind, I don’t count Democrats as left wing.

You think an M-L community is supportive of Trump? Where do you get your thoughts from?

Congress is stacked against Democrats. There really isn’t anything they can legally do until they regain the Senate or the House

Except praise ICE, I guess. It doesn’t really matter that Congress is stacked against the Democrats. They’ve shown everyone who they are and what they stand for and it’s not clear in the least that they would behave significantly differently if they were in power. From Biden building the wall to Kamala saying “Do not come”, and all of the messaging of the Ds since they lost and now 75 Ds voting to praise ICE…

Despite? Really?

https://www.newsweek.com/75-democrats-house-antisemitism-resolution-ice-gratitude-2083177

75 Democrats just voted to express gratitude towards ICE.

https://www.newsweek.com/75-democrats-house-antisemitism-resolution-ice-gratitude-2083177

They’re actually going to work and doing their job, not sitting on their hands. The reality is that most Dems are just part of this ongoing process and have no intention to resist it, even if they had power.