DingleberrySoup
Stool Mastication Enthusiast
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User ID: 180
DingleberrySoup
Stool Mastication Enthusiast
1yr ago
The only true pathway to peace for Ukraine is NATO accession, which requires defeating the Russians.
From this perspective, the US is absolutely seeking peace.
Can someone explain to me why this has turned into such a legal issue?
The state issued these loans that Biden is attempting to forgive, did it not? I would've thought it would go without saying that the state would then also have the power to forgive them. It's not like debt forgiveness isn't something countries don't routinely engage in, so this whole thing has left me perplexed.
DingleberrySoup
Stool Mastication Enthusiast
1yr ago
I don't think so either, I was responding to the poster claiming that "the forceful expropriation of wealth" is an extreme position when that's the expected behavior of every state since the dawn of civilization.
This is nonsense and you completely lack perspective. I've never owned a car in my life, which is completely normal here, coming from a small European city.
DingleberrySoup
Stool Mastication Enthusiast
1yr ago
While I appreciate your honesty, I don't recognize your right to dictate what other people build on plots of land that aren't actually in your backyard.
I posit that aiding Ukraine is in fact the anti-war position, just as handing a weapon to a man who's being mugged is "anti-mugging".
DingleberrySoup
Stool Mastication Enthusiast
1yr ago
there does appear to be a wide scale attempt to infiltrate and subvert Christianity
They said this about the Arians, and the Waldensians, and the Lutherans, and the Fourth Congregation Southern Baptist Communion Restorationists.
Surely this time, though.
DingleberrySoup
Stool Mastication Enthusiast
1yr ago
So what gives?
I don't think it's all that complicated. If they lift all restrictions right now, they're looking at a death toll potentially in the millions because their vaccine doesn't work (embarrassing in and of itself), and they're worried that the population will blame the party for this whole predicament (which they should).
The CCP is kicking the can down the road, or digging a hole for themselves. Whichever analogy you prefer.
Urbanization is what pulls fertility rates from 8 to 2.
There's no contest here, it's just urbanization. Looking at anything else is penny-pinching over decimals, while the elephant in the room is right there.
No it’s the migrants’ choice.
No it's not. Migrants choose to go to countries (through the asylum route) where they're unlikely to be deported (government policy) and where they're allowed to get into a benefits program and/or the job market (also government policy). It is entirely a government's choice to receive them, and a choice that EU countries are in fact free to not make, i.e. Denmark ever since their Social Democrats took power.
DingleberrySoup
Stool Mastication Enthusiast
1yr ago
This reads to me like a nation-scale version of the broken window fallacy.
I see them as perhaps the most ideologically confused people on the spectrum today. They wear the cloak of socialism while extolling authoritarian dictatorships, their words are like those I'd expect from Soviet career-bureaucrats with the KGB breathing down their necks. Because what else could possibly keep all these self-contradictions together?
It's not just that I disagree with them, I don't get them. I get why a dedicated right-wing culture warrior in the US today might support Russia's invasion, their reasoning is at least coherent. The only way I can make sense of tankies doing the same is if their fundamental moral axiom is just "USA bad", but that seems excessively uncharitable.
DingleberrySoup
Stool Mastication Enthusiast
1yr ago
Yes, thank you!
We are at Rome in 410 right now
If we're doing Rome analogies, I find the Crisis of the Third Century to be more apt.
The warrior emperors did not really have a great time in the Dominate era of Rome. Emperor Aurelian took back the seceding provinces in the 270s, sure, but then he was assassinated by the political system he left festering, and Rome was right back into crisis. If you're really intent on sticking to the 5th century, Emperor Majorian was another one of these types. He did basically the same thing as Aurelian in the 450s, and then got assassinated by one of those Gothic warlords you were pining for. So be careful what you wish for.
What truly saves a declining empire is not the great warrior and his army, it's the great reformer who cleans his room. The empire was lucky that Diocletian saved the empire with his pen after Aurelian failed with his sword. Nobody like that came after Majorian.
DingleberrySoup
Stool Mastication Enthusiast
1yr ago
higher birthrate of immigrants it is practically a given that the Replacement is going to happen come hell or high water.
Immigrant birth rates always normalize to the local level within a generation or two.
DingleberrySoup
Stool Mastication Enthusiast
1yr ago
I know it sounds like a Monty Python skit, but there it is...
DingleberrySoup
Stool Mastication Enthusiast
1yr ago
If we end up like the Greeks in Turkey or the Greeks in Lebanon, there is no recovering.
Or like the Germans in Königsberg? Russia is one of the worst offenders in this respect.
DingleberrySoup
Stool Mastication Enthusiast
1yr ago
The US blowing up Nordstream has always struck me as an extraordinarily risky gambit. There may be an economic motive, but if it were uncovered that the US is directly responsible for acts of terrorism on critical infrastructure in the heart of Europe, the diplomatic fallout would certainly outweigh whatever the US would make from the added natural gas exports.
Granted, I don't know how risk-tolerant the US covert-operations apparatus is. I also didn't think Putin would invade Ukraine.
DingleberrySoup
Stool Mastication Enthusiast
1yr ago
I would focus my efforts on substantially increasing the country's housing stock and limit immigration to mostly construction workers.
It's absurd on the face of it to argue that being the top dog is somehow "not beneficial" to you.
Yes, being powerful is good. Being weak is bad.
To get into some specifics, even if the US were entirely self-sufficient (it isn't), the amount of inflation the US exports to the rest of the world through the dollar's status as the global reserve currency is hard to overstate. That's one of many things.
If Russian resources sustain China for a long war or open up a second front in Europe, we have only ourselves to blame.
This comment read very much like something a committed offensive realist would write until you got to this point. All states allegedly are by their nature ruthless actors that will stop and nothing to advocate their own interests, but you, America, you have been a naughty boy and must get on your knees and welcome the whip to atone for your sins.
This is a masochistic perversion of offensive realism.
IIRC around 50k new comers
It's a good example because they're overwhelmingly not from those regions you thought Ukraine would have to cope with. Which is what I thought was your issue.
Do you really imagine if 16 year old Sam was going to vote in a local or national election, he'd vote for a different candidate than the Democrat his parents were going to vote for?
I imagine most 16-year olds would vote Democrat because they're in roughly the same environments as 18-year olds and would therefore vote similarly. The fact that their environments encourage voting Democrat and not Republican is ultimately downstream of the Democrats being more effective at messaging to young people. That's just politics.
I'm not really sold on lowering the voting age, mind you, as the same-age-for-everything idea is very appealing. But I'm completely unconvinced by this idea that 16-year olds in particular would just ape after their parents and completely disregard all the other pressures around them.
DingleberrySoup
Stool Mastication Enthusiast
1yr ago
If you give children the right to vote, the majority of them are just going to vote for whoever their parents tell them to.
What justification do you have for believing this? An 18-year old's vote is going to be heavily left-leaning pretty much no matter where you go in the democratic world, but you think the 16-year old vote would instead track the 45-year old demographic? Why?
The "extreme" way to read this slogan is that the extremely rich should be killed, in which case your indignation would be justified.
The reading that extremely rich people should have their wealth "forcefully expropriated" (AKA taxed) is a position I would consider moderate, and perfectly reasonable in societies with a high enough level of economic inequality.
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