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Dean


				

				

				
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joined 2022 September 05 03:59:39 UTC

				

User ID: 430

Dean


				
				
				

				
6 followers   follows 1 user   joined 2022 September 05 03:59:39 UTC

					

No bio...


					

User ID: 430

...did you forget a negative and mean to say 'if Trump wins'?

A significant part of the drama of the last decade of American politics centers around the modern Democratic party's collusion with various state and non-state actors to perpetrate a series of conspiracies and smear campaigns to a degree not seen in political generations for the purpose of making Trump lose no matter what. Russia-gate wasn't simply an election-year smear, but a sustained multi-year conspiracy that was on national television so often that the Democratic party convinced a plurality of itself that it was true. Well-established precedents in various legal subjects were tossed or ignored in the name of lawfare against policies, nullification theory was directly resurrected in the name of resistance, and entirely new and novel legal theories were embraced in the name of prosecution and attempted disqualification. There are a whole host of tactics and escalations that have been unleashed on Trump that are not even close to matched when he was in a position of actual power.

If Trump is destroyed, the message is not clear or firmly set that 'heads I win tails you lose' election will result in the person doing it's total annihilation, because the Democratic coalition has been doing that for most of the last decade would not have been annihilated. Trump's defeat would be a validation, not a discreditation, to that style of politics.

That the country governments are on good terms with Russia and would actively aid in a manhunt is less relevant than the fact that those countries- and borders- have less state capacity to launch an effective manhunt in a time-relevant manner.

If you're willing to walk for a few days, most borders in the world remain largely unmonitored and easy to bypass. Border crossings are (relatively) heavily monitored, but going 10 miles away where there are no roads will generally be lucky to have a fence, if that. After that, basic identity-tied document swap faciltiation (new IDs, credit cards, cell phones, and someone with a truck waiting for you) and you can generally drop off the net more effectively than in Europe.

The border crossings are completely closed. The border is a completely different question, especially for the sort of people who might not want to go through the publicly monitored entrance/exit.

Aside from the border being closed, I would assume that Finland takes a dim attitude towards mass murderers, even if they're mass murderers of Russians.

Finland has one of the largest unmonitored borders in the region, as only the SE-most is actually populated and monitored. You could literally walk across most of it and the only thing to notice would be if your vehicle was obviously abandoned near the road. The first the Finns would really be aware of is if you walked into their cities... which might get you turned over, or maybe not, but if you can stage the weapons and such to conduct a major terrorist attack, you can stash the hiking gear and supplies to go cross-country.

Ukraine, on the other hand, is a barely-functional society for which "hating Russia" is a number one priority, and trying to lay low in Ukraine for long enough to figure out how to get to IS controlled territory in some shithole in the caucuses or central asia is a plan that's at least a plausible level of dumb.

To get to Ukraine from Russia, you have to go through mutliple no-civilian zones, drive through a papers-please occupational region, and go through two generally parallel trench systems with a minefield inbetween.

The far, far simpler option than either of these is, of course, to go through the caucuses or central asia, or just hide in rural russia for awhile.

Kind of indicative they didn't have meaningful contacts in Ukraine.

If you're on the run from Russian authorities, trying to flee across the most militarized part of the Russian border with the most civilian control points, an occupation state apparatus tailored to identifying and mitigating dissident mobilization and ability to move, entire deployed military formations with contiguous trench fortifications, a country-wide mine field, and then rushing the armed defenders with standing 'shoot on sight' orders is...

...well it's a bold strategy, but not a particularly intelligent one when the country in question has demonstrated the ability to covertly operate well within Russian territory for extended periods of time.

There are three general sets of US sanctions / trade restrictions on Cuba, which for political convenience/tradition are often grouped together under the misnomer of 'blockade.'

Group one, and the longest and the original source of the blockade moniker, is the Embargo. The Embargo restricts US citizens, companies, and foreign subsidiaries of US companies from doing trade with Cuba outside of specific Humanitarian niches (i.e. food). The Embargo doesn't legally stop others from doing so, and while there have been arguments to the effect that it was a soft-ban- mainly because of past US threats to stop giving foreign aid to countries that did non-food business to Cuba- this is neither a blockade nor an obstacle to those who saw greater value from business with Cuba than in aid from the US. Foreign companies, including European ones integrated with (and thus at risk to) the US economy can and have done trade with Cuba without sanctions retaliation, especially in the last 3 decades since the Cold War. Rather, the reason the Europeans and Chinese and others don't invest much in the Cuban is that Cuba is notoriously bad at paying back its loans, and has been since the cold war when it was a regular frustration of the Soviets, and the early-2000s belief that foreign companies could get into the Cuban market before the American companies did but reap the American money flowing into Cuba weren't worth the steady losses. The countries continuing to offer Cuba loans or sell things in exchange things for IOUs are typically doing so for ideological interests / strategic concessions (Venezuela, Russia, China), rather than economic.

Group two, and sometimes cited but rarely carried further on inspection, are the more targeted sanctions, typically on senior leaders and for humanitarian abuses. These are not massive impacts on the broader economy, but do limit the ability of Cuban party elites and security officials to establish themselves as Russian-style oligarchs in the international system, as they become non-viable business interests even as they monopolize business opportunities at scale, but few people seriously argue that a Venezuela or Russian oligarchic model is some moral imperative as a step forward and that non-sanctioning these people would create some significant material change for the population.

Group three, and the one that modern Cuba actually would have the most grounds on saying impacts them but which is the furthest from the traditional Embargo rhetoric, is Cuba's status as a state sponsor of terrorism under post-9-11 counter-terrorism-finance legislation. For those unaware, that's the actual and wide-reaching legislation which unlike the Embargo isn't just for US-actors, but very much an international 'if you want to do business with or through the US, you won't with the countries on this list' dynamic. No one actually denies that Cuba's Cold War history of waging revolution would qualify, or that Cuba hosts people or groups that qualify for the list, there's just irregular (and usually weak) pressure that it just shouldn't matter that much / that Cuba is really hosting them to facilitate peace. Cuba was on the list pretty much from the start of the post-9-11 changes, but since the state list is as much a political tool as anything else, Obama dropped Cuba in 2015 when it was pursuing normalization with the expectation of a Hillary hand-off (which, implicitly, would have meant an election win where the Cuban vote in Florida didn't derail the Democrats), but Trump won and... didn't actually re-apply it until 2021, right before leaving office, and the Biden administration has maintained the same core assessment for upholding it that Cuba wasn't cooperating to general expectations. So not actually a partisan wedge issue, and not a 'anything but the predecessor' American policy decision.

Overall, the US Embargo had an effect but was mostly a propaganda deflection for the Communist system, general sanctions aren't particularly relevant, but the state sponsor of terrorism restrictions have real teeth... but, of course, have to compete with the point that Cuba is still run by the same sort of people who believe state control of the economy is a moral as well as strategic security for the party-state.

Americans have an exceptional ability to get involved in every corner of the planet.

This is the motte, and yet not the same as an implicit claim that the Americans are exceptionally involved in every corner of the planet, let alone in every administrative decision of the planet, let alone vis-a-vis the ability of local actors.

That the Americans have more ability to project power to distant corners than others is quite different than that Americans have more ability to be involved than local powers who may not be able to project far, but are actually local.

Given that the exceptional US ability to get involved in every corner of the planet is dependent on having allies and partners in every corner of the planet able or willing to facilitate their involvement, the ability of the US to effectively influence needs to be compared to places where it lacks critical enablers- and thus who they are.

If there is a village in Afghanistan that isn't ruled by them, they will bomb it for 20+ years.

Interesting claim. Identify the villages, please, and why the bombings were on grounds of not being ruled by the Americans, as opposed to other reasons that other non-US powers wouldn't emulate if placed in equivalent contexts.

The US is in a league of its own when it comes to starting wars and meddling in other countries.

Are we conflating wars and meddling as the same category, and are we comparing to historical trends?

If it's just in terms of starting wars, the US is unexceptional in historical terms. The only interesting point in relative terms is its relative ability in the Pax Americana, which is notable for being one of the most peaceful periods in human history precisely because the US had- and exercised- unique ability to pick conflicts.

If the argument is simply in ability to meddle in non-war-instigating forms, this is a reflection of evolving technology and economic growth over time, which the American system coincided with and encouraged, but which is not a uniquely American pathology in nature. The Americans certainly conduct more cyber-espionage than the colonial empires of old ever did- this is because the colonial empires lacked computer networks to spy on, not the willingness.

If the argument is simply about the size and capability of the US, because it's big, that's neither an argument of moral inclination nor an argument that the size and capability actually have been disproportionate in starting wars and meddling relative to the size and capability of other actors.

Not all problems are caused by the US but the US is a driving force behind instability.

'Driving force' is a meaningless term bar a relative comparison of forces, which you have not and consistently do not provide comparisons to.

And how do you think running Venezuela into the ground by sanctioning them will impact migrant flows?

Why should anyone believe that US sanctions are 'running Venezuela into the ground' relative to the effect of the Venezuelan governance?

The Venezuelan government even 20 years ago was led by a clique who struggled with basic concepts like 'if you dictate that private businesses sell items at or below cost of procurement, private businesses will stop stocking items' or 'if you send people with guns to take over specialized businesses, the business people with specialized knowledge will leave.' It instituted a deliberate system of personality cult, attacks (literal and legal) on opposition actors and political opponents, and cultivating gangs as a national security strategy who then went on create a domestic security climate on par with Iraq. It routinely picked diplomatic and economic fights with its biggest trading partners while willfully and eagerly trying to align with countries less known for their quality of governance and far more known for their police states and party-empowering corruption. These were all chosen through the agency of Venezuela's own governmental leaders, for two arguably three political generations now. The same general clique of incompetents is still in power, and has been for long enough for an entire demographic cohort to have grown up under their management.

By contrast, you believe the relative impact of the US sanctions is...?

(This is a direct question, by the way.)

For all that you regularly like to cite US malfeasance as the cause of whatever cause of whatever blowback of the hour, I don't believe I've ever seen you actually provide a position of relative blame of US actions vis-a-vis other actors. Without any sense of relative allocation of input to output, this is just the cliche hyperagency/hypoagency paradigm that leaves agency with the US while everyone else is a passive recipient of their will, where even their own policy decisions are forced upon them by the US rather than, well, chosen both in response to and to shape US policy themselves.

While this is certainly flattering to US prowess in the same way that anti-semetic propaganda is empowering for the mythical Jew, it's not particularly well informed, and rather patronizing to the many invested and career anti-american politicians around the world who work hard to make their own policy disasters with hefty externalities but do so without American direction or demands. Give them their credit!

The refusal to be alone in a room with a woman that wasn't his wife, yes. That it was on grounds he couldn't be trusted is the partisan strawman.

I agree that he wouldn't change his spots to passive-aggressive. He's too pugnacious to conform to the Motte's selection effect.

Making an alt doesn't work well in the sense that it's liable to be detected, but it works fine in the sense that there is a venerable and proven record of it working for known / suspected / mods-openly-identify-person-as-alt-but-don't-take-action case. A reoccuring point from past mods when identified alts were raised in the past is that if someone Alts after being banned but isn't currently breaking the rules that got them banned, then their change in behavior is 'Mission Accomplished.'

The identitarian wing most relevant here isn't the Arab-American community, but the faction within the democrats which tries to mantle the Arab-American community more broadly in the Progressive-Democratic spaces- specifically The Squad members Representative Rashida Tlaib, a Palestinian-American (per her wiki) who's power center is in Michigan, and who is closely associated with Representative Ilhan Omar, who is from Minnesotta as a Somali-American. Both women are openly muslim part of their taglines (the first two muslim women to serve in the US Congress), and both align/slot themselves as the Arab-American representatives in the Democratic progressive stack.

I wouldn't call this a power play per see- there is plenty of genuine dismay at the war- but it's less anti-war and more anti-side-Biden-supports. And the purpose is not to actually harm Biden- there is no meaningful harm from 'uncommitted' voters in a primary he wins- but rather as a warning shot to bolster political leverage. The implicit (and, by proxies, explicit) threat is that if Biden doesn't compromise to them and work to compel the Israelis to end the conflict, then they won't support him in the election against Trump. In effect, it's attempting to coerce a bribe for support. This flows from the principle that their support is needed for Biden to get the votes to win, and also that Biden meeting their terms won't lose him more votes in the process.

The issue for Biden is, of course, that where the votes are will matter. It's not a national-level issue, it's an issue of what matters in the electoral swing states. Michigan is one of those swing states- which increases the viability of the threat- but Minnesota is not- decreasing the national level argument.

As for whether Gaza will be a live issue by the time of the summer election season- probably not. I'd argue it's not even a live national issue now- it's a Democratic internal issue, and one that is in the process of being smothered by party-institutional power and connections. While things still come up about it- like this article wave related to a largely irrelevant pro forma primary- the institutional wing has largely asserted itself over the Squad-wing, both because of who runs the party (Biden's wing, where Biden is very pro-Israel) and in the name of not driving off the Jewish wing (which includes some key party influencers who were shook hard by progressive-wing acceptance/support for Hamas after Oct 7).

The NYT had a recent article on some of the internal Democratic party dynamics and infighting regarding the war. Take it for what it's worth, but the NYT is definitely framing the pro-Palestinian wing as the underdogs, and the NYT is often more credible in this sort of piece on internal democratic affairs.