JTarrou
2d ago
Ok mate, if you don't want to make the connection, I'm not going to do it for you.
JTarrou
3d ago
Op says "healthy memetics", and you read that as "stagnant memetics"?
What are you actually saying here?
JTarrou
4d ago
Or it could sound like China.
It's interesting that you equate a stable population with stagnation and lack of social mobility. Care to say more about why you think that is?
JTarrou
5d ago
Obviously it's incompetence, the question is whether the brass at the FBI intentionally put their dumbest guy on the case so they could continue to tie it to Trump for five years. Or is this just how they roll?
Just as obviously the Secret Service's performance protecting the president is dogshit, the only question is whether they intentionally put the dumbest hundred and fifty staff all on his team, or if their performance is representative of the SS.
Either answer is pretty bad.
JTarrou
6d ago
Europe is and always will be our friend
Europe isn't a country and we've been enemies with most of Europe one time or another. We're friendly now because none of them have an economy or a military that supports their self-image as "first world nations". Their choices for international big brother are Russia and us, so they side with us, but they hate us for it. The US' ability to influence international politics and project military power is a thumb in the eye for nations who used to be able to do similar things.
They gave it all up for cradle-to-grave welfare, 20k average incomes, tens of millions of muslim migrants and a military capacity roughly equivalent to my family reunions. The nation that once gave the world the Rollo and Harald Hardrada now gives the world Greta Thunberg. A seafaring adventurer of a different sort, it must be said.
Samuel Huntington wrote in the mid-90's about Ukraine, Russia and the Crimea during the period where the recent status quo was negotiated. He was saying back then that the natural opposition of civilizational forces was going to result in the reabsorption of Ukraine into Russia, or else the amputation of the Crimea and the related areas which were heavily Russian ethnically. This is just another one of those colonial states that didn't get partitioned correctly when the empire pulled out.
This was always in the cards, as is the natural tendency for locally dominant military powers to seek to control/influence the countries that border them. The US has an interest in who is in charge of Canada and Mexico. If the government is objectionable (or impotent) enough, we send troops in.
None of this justifies Russia abrogating its treaty and invading their former colony. It reinforces the bad lessons we're teaching about nonproliferation. If Ukraine hadn't given up their nukes for a pinkie promise from the Russians and the US, they might have had more options. But we deal with the world as it is.
The best case scenario for Europe is that Ukraine and Russia hammer out an ugly peace, Trump takes the blame, Russia takes the eastern third of Ukraine, NATO pushes to the borders of Russia itself, completing the European wall and saddling Putin with a festering international relations problem about the annexed provinces. This is also IMO the most likely scenario.
This is a bad outcome for Ukraine and the US, but far from the worst. Ukraine will have to become a de-facto dictatorship and military speed bump for Russia's next try. Or it could just collapse internally and become a semi-failed state.
The real winner in the whole idiotic project is China, who isn't involved and is able to test all their new gadgets while getting Russian oil at pennies on the dollar and turning the Russian economy into a Chinese fief. The days when a rapproachment between the US and Russia could counterweight China in Asia are over, China has secured their only big land border with an indebted and politically isolated Russia.
Russia, to my mind, has won the most pyrrhic of victories. Yes, in a decade they've been able to detach a few provinces from a weak and hilariously corrupt Ukraine, provinces that were 75% Russian to start with. And in return, they're going to get Nato up on their borders, their natural resources are in hock to the Chinese, the Europeans are scared shitless and looking for someone to surrender to, and it's probably going to be Trump.
The US position is getting better in Europe and worse in asia/Africa. It is unlikely we can stop China from expanding their asian hegemony. But with this Ukraine gambit, a lighter version of the Iron Curtain will be re-established, this time not in central Germany, but right up to the Russian and Belorussian borders.
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