JTarrou
13hr ago
Depends on who you think is being fucked with. Greenland, Denmark, or Russia?
JTarrou
21hr ago
It is possible that the world order is turning towards one in which Great Powers (USA, Russia, China, and maybe the EU) hold influence over the smaller countries in their vicinity.
Perhaps you could point me to the time in history when this wasn't the case? There is no turning, there is no change, there is not even a policy difference. Only rhetoric. As you note, the US has had a military and resource interest in Greenland for a century. We already have access, we already took the place over once. The only thing that's new is Trump saying things on Truth Social. Trump is vocalizing actual US policy, as opposed to the fake policy everyone else pretends we're doing for PR reasons. Real international politiks are real.
JTarrou
22hr ago
I think your model of "isolationists" needs some nuance. Very few people believe in zero US military action anywhere in the world at any time. We have a lot of security issues on our plate as global hegemon. We have a lot of national interests, and a lot of disagreement over what those are.
All presidents preach a less involved foreign policy than they actually produce once they're in office. What voters and "isolationists" seem not to like is long, expensive, bloody, drawn out conflicts. By that metric, Trump's military actions have been notably limited, most of all the Maduro op. The success of the operation sort of cuts out the legs from any isolationists arguing against it. Similar to the Iran bombing, which all the isolationists said would be WW3, and........wasn't.
JTarrou
1d ago
He could also have shot to wound
This is stereotypically the response of someone who knows absolutely nothing about firearms, violent encounters, the law around use of force or really anything at all relevant to a police shooting. It is so perfectly wrong that it delegitimizes anything else a person might say about the subject. It misunderstands the law, the morality around use of force, the physical capabilities of small arms and the reasonable limits of police training.
JTarrou
2d ago
The fundamental question seems to be whether prediction markets are basically gambling or basically banking. For prediction markets to work at scale, they have to be on the gambling side. The question is whether people's innate risk-aversion leads them to treating it more like banking, which ruins the point of a prediction market in the first place.
The whole point of a prediction market is that people with inside knowledge will exploit it, thus leading to shifts in the odds line, thus leading to that insider information being communicated to all of us, anonymously through the price signal.
JTarrou
4d ago
It's just bait. Most kids aren't that enjoyable for most adults to interact with, plenty of exceptions of course. You're not supposed to say it because society has a guilt complex over how anti-natal we are. Here's the basic truth, so long as the kids are fed, clothed and housed reasonably well, not sexually or physically abused, the parents have done their job. Decent parenting isn't this crazy life-destroying thing that people make it out to be as if "tiger momming" was a good idea. You don't have to spend thirty-six hours a day enriching your kid. All that bullshit is posturing for other parents, not for the kids.
JTarrou
6d ago
There's another big one: Our military speaks spanish and doesn't speak the six thousand dialects of the middle east. Having reliable communication with the locals is a pretty big deal.
JTarrou
6d ago
Did the bombing of teh Iranian nuclear facilities start a general war? Trump has ordered a fair few military actions, but none of them so far have lead to a wider conflict. Every time he does this, or engages in some sabre-rattling diplomacy, everyone shrieks that he's starting WW3 and wasn't he supposed to be anti-war?
Well, can't know what's in Trump's head. What we can know is the track record. I oppose a general invasion of Venezuela and hope that isn't Trump's plan. As far as a night of bombing and snatching a foreign head of state? It's cool if you get away with it.
See, I think it's Russia, and Denmark is just happy collateral damage.
But I am generally in favor of rubbing Europe's nose in its failed sovereignty and the consequences of demilitarizing.
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