RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
No bio...
User ID: 317
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1yr ago
Indeed, there's a schism over LGBT between the declining progressive English Anglican Church and its more hardline African branches which now far outnumber the home source: https://www.theamericanconservative.com/church-of-england-crack-up/
“All the evangelical denominations are growing, except for the Brethren,” he writes. “By contrast, all the mixed denominations are declining, with the liberal ones declining the most.
Pretty sad that there's no future for these religions in the countries in which they were born! 1% of UK's 18-24 year olds were Anglican, apparently.
Since I assume most members of this forum are atheists, most would not look any deeper into the motivations or presentation of this ad campaign with any closer analysis than they would any other form of Christian evangelism.
On the contrary, I find the progressive arguments for Christianity pretty repulsive. It's just signalling 'enemy, enemy, enemy'. I'm with AOC on it making fascism look benign, the woke are more correct than the mainstream on this at least.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1yr ago
The idea is that Russia has an actual claim on parts of the country. It used to effectively be part of Russia. Khrushchev transferred Crimea in the 50s to the Ukrainian SSR for example. There were and are many Russian-speakers in the eastern provinces of the country who were unhappy that their language and autonomy was being suppressed by the government in Kiev. That's why some broke away and started fighting in 2014. The country as a whole is full of Russian speakers.
Because you know, if I wasn’t no kind of expert, if I didn’t know nothing about snakes, I might just of said: the Ukraine was part of the USSR when I was a kid and the USSR is Russia. Ukraine is basically Russia the way Canada is basically America. America is related to the two of them basically the way China is related to America and Canada.
That's what he's implying here, albeit very unclearly and in such a way as it sounds like he's saying the opposite. If you have actual claims on the country in question, then you have a reason to invade. If the country is populated by your co-ethnics who are being mistreated, then you have a reason to invade. If there are enemy powers egging on said country, then you also have a security threat.
The US does not have claims on Moldova and Georgia in the same way that Russia does. There are not actually large American minorities in Moldova and Georgia, the latter of which came under attack (hence the 2008 war). Note that the account you'll see on wikipedia today and the account of the independent EU-commissioned report written in 2009 are very different!
Can anyone explain how US security is threatened by Russia invading Georgia? It's not, as is revealed by a simple glance at a map.
Not a "regime change" type invasion, a la USA vs. Iraq '03, not a "peacekeeping" invasion. A "Russia wants some of the land currently controlled by Ukraine to be controlled by Russia instead" invasion. A good, old-fashioned war of conquest for resources. The kind of war that, since 1945, the industrialized West (or "first world") has tried very hard to make sure nobody is allowed to wage, especially not in Europe.
If you actually have claims on the land and people in question, then you're fine to move in and conquer the area. The land in question was owned by Russia/USSR 35 years ago and it's peopled by Russians today - thus Russia has a claim to it.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1yr ago
Well I did say 'in part'... There are lots of other poisons getting into Western culture and causing different harms.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1yr ago
There's actually a rather interesting Yudkowsky essay in an obscure part of the Sequences, where he unintentially obliterates trans ideology IMO. It's not enough even to change the chromosomes, hips, skin, face and so on...
You'd have to rewire the parts of the brain that do sexual pleasure so you're not hooking up a vagina to the penis-pleasure part of the brain. There'd probably still be some male part of you that wants to penetrate women, you'd have to change that too. There are whole bits of the Y chromosome that aren't found in the X chromosome, so you'd have to take those out. What does taking out parts of your chromosome mean for the brain circuitry relying on them?
What would happen if you had a male-type brain hooked up to a female body? Something bad, probably. I believe male brains have slightly bigger volume, so you've got some practical engineering issues too (though studies differ on this). And how do you design the intermediate stages of transferring the male brain to a female brain (the equivalent of neuron-by-neuron upload)?
What happens when, as a woman, you think back to your memory of looking at Angelina Jolie photos as a man? How do you empathize with your past self of the opposite sex? Do you flee in horror from the person you were? Are all your life's memories distant and alien things? How can you remember, when your memory is a recorded activation pattern for neural circuits that no longer exist in their old forms? Do we rewrite all your memories, too?
Sounds complicated, doesn't it? It seems that to transform a male brain into someone who can be a real female, we can't just rewrite you as a female brain. That just kills you and replaces you with someone re-imagined as a different person. Instead we have to rewrite you as a more complex brain with a novel, non-ancestral architecture that can cross-operate in realtime between male and female modes, so that a female can process male memories with a remembered context that includes the male brainware that laid them down.
You certainly wouldn't have the experience of being a woman either, going through high school and gossiping with the girls or other female experiences I don't know about because I'm not a woman. It's an intimidatingly vast problem. One day we might have Miss Tiffany Lewis [she/her, woman], female body (Made in China), male mind, remastered memories, phase three psychotherapeutics. And yet we might still have TERFs saying 'if you weren't born a woman, you aren't a woman, simple as. No matter how many factory-made memories you buy, you don't have our authentic female experiences.'
I'd rather we took up vast bodies of steel and inhuman power, let's leave all this behind.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QZs4vkC7cbyjL9XA9/changing-emotions
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1mo ago
People here underestimate the power of hatred.
Elements from both sides do all kinds of unhelpful terror bombing - Ukraine had drones attack random office buildings in Moscow. They tried to blow up Dugin. They torture eachother. There's a rather infamous video of somebody castrating a prisoner. They dehumanize eachother: orcs, hohols.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/11/15/both-russia-and-ukraine-tortured-prisoners-of-war-un
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1mo ago
Israel's the worst ally the US could possibly have, their competence is irrelevant.
Consider the invasion of Iraq. You might naively think that Israel would be really useful, sending troops to help the Coalition in their mutual goal of destroying Saddam Hussein's regime? No, of course not. They didn't lift a finger to help the US. Of course they sent some false intelligence to suggest Iraq actually had nuclear weapons, of course they flexed their influence to encourage the invasion. They just didn't do any fighting.
Why? Because the Arabs hate Israel and it would've let Saddam reframe the war as yet another Arab-Israel war. He tried doing that in 1991 by throwing some Scuds at Israel. Israel's presence would've made things worse for America.
There's no convincing reason to think that Israel would help against Iran, based on past practice. If they did help it would probably be net-negative in creating more opponents for US forces. Dumping Israel would make it much easier to work with Saudi Arabia, Iraq, the Gulf, Turkey, Egypt...
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
3mo ago
Well, are the Palestinians justified in attacking Israel?
One common tactic they have used is to declare territory, including privately-owned Palestinian land, as “state land.” The Israeli group Peace Now estimates that the Israeli government has designated about 1.4 million dunams of land, or about a quarter of the West Bank, as state land. The group has also found that more than 30 percent of the land used for settlements is acknowledged by the Israeli government as having been privately owned by Palestinians.
Israeli authorities have also made it virtually impossible in practice for Palestinians in Area C, the roughly 60 percent of the West Bank that the Oslo Accords placed under full Israeli control, as well as those in East Jerusalem, to obtain building permits. In Area C, for example, authorities approved less than 1.5 percent of applications by Palestinians to build between 2016 and 2018—21 in total—a figure 100 times smaller than the number of demolition orders it issued in the same period, according to official data. Israeli authorities have razed thousands of Palestinian properties in these areas for lacking a permit, leaving thousands of families displaced. By contrast, according to Peace Now, Israeli authorities began construction on more than 23,696 housing units between 2009 and 2020 in Israeli settlements in Area C. Transfer of an occupying power’s civilian population to an occupied territory violates the Fourth Geneva Convention.
In addition, Israeli forces have regularly fired on Palestinian demonstrators and others who have approached fences separating Gaza and Israel in circumstances when they did not pose an imminent threat to life, killing 214 demonstrators in 2018 and 2019 alone and maiming thousands.
About 1,300 complaints of torture against Israeli authorities have been filed with Israel’s Justice Ministry between 2001 and June 2020, which have resulted in one criminal investigation and zero prosecutions.
While 80 percent of the Mountain Aquifer’s water recharge area lies beneath the West Bank,[304] Israel directly extracts about 90 percent of the water that is withdrawn from the aquifer annually, leaving Palestinians only the remaining 10 percent or so to exploit directly.[305] In monopolizing this shared resource, Israeli authorities sharply restrict the ability of Palestinians to directly exploit their own natural resources and render them dependent on Israel for their water supply. For decades, authorities have denied Palestinians permits to drill new wells, in particular in the most productive Western Aquifer basins, or to rehabilitate existing ones.
A report published by the United Nations International Children's Emergency Fund (UNICEF) and the Palestinian Hydrology Group in 2011 said that the Barkan Industrial Area settlement, near Ariel, “is notorious for flushing its leftover chemical waste onto Salfit villages.” [359] The report further states that “this chemical waste is thought to include petrochemicals, metals and plastic” and notes that “heavy toxic metals are linked to an endless list of conditions, from diarrhoea to diabetes, hyperkeratosis, organ failure and cancer.”
The Palestinians have a bunch of complaints about being suppressed and undermined. If I were Israeli, no doubt I would agree that it was right for Israel to win, vae victis, they don't matter as much as we do. But I'm not Israeli. We, the Western world, are not getting anything out of this conflict, we're paying so that another nation can do imperialism.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
4mo ago
If you wish to minimise human suffering, focus on winning the war and defeating Russia to the point where it stops launching such stupid and wasteful wars in the first place.
We, the West, cannot win this war and should not try. It simply is not going to happen. All this rhetoric has done and all it can do is make an angrier, more threatening Russia with a bigger chunk of a more devastated Ukraine.
Firstly, the Russians will scale up their war effort symmetrically with our commitment to Ukraine. This is what they did in the past, mobilizing more troops back in September 2022. If we send more weapons, they'll increase their mobilization. The weapons we've sent have already exhausted much of our stockpiles, as has been admitted by many of our senior leaders.
“We built up this mountain of steel for the counteroffensive. We can’t do that again,” one former US official explained. “It doesn’t exist.”
So we cannot even send aid without seriously weakening readiness. Western military '''industry''' is very slow to produce new weapons and it seems that Russian military industry produces more than all of us combined in certain key areas. Artillery is the king of battle and the Russians have a lot more of it:
They've got superiority in shells: https://www.businessinsider.com/russia-ammunition-manufacturing-ukraine-west-officials-2023-9
They've got superiority in drones: https://bulgarianmilitary.com/2023/11/30/ukraine-produces-50000-fpv-drones-per-month-russia-300000/
They've had superiority in aviation through the whole war, the Ukrainian air force is reduced to flinging a trickle of standoff missiles from inside SAM cover. It's hard to see what a few F-16s can do to change this situation, seeing how many SAMs the Russians have, along with their many air superiority fighters.
Secondly, Ukrainian manpower is rapidly being depleted. They're drafting women now (only with a medical background to start with), along with the old and infirm men. Even if the Arsenal of Democracy actually worked properly, there is not a sufficient number of fit Ukrainians left to use the weapons we give them to take any significant ground, let alone their 2022 borders, let alone 2014 borders. Encouraging their best units to attack into deep defensive belts against an enemy with air superiority and more artillery probably had something to do with this. Russia started off with more manpower and retains this advantage. How can Ukraine possibly win the war if their counteroffensive got nowhere, now that their manpower is reduced and aid is running out?
Thirdly, Ukraine is not a strategically vital front to us and the Russians know this. They enjoy escalation dominance and if they were losing they could deploy nuclear weapons and compel the Ukrainians to back down. Ukraine is vital to Russia, it's the Black Sea, contains many of their coethnics, it's a country they fought immensely hard to retake back in WW2 and their direct neighbour. Britain, France and especially the US are far from Ukraine, it simply does not matter in the same way as it does for Russia. There's no scenario where they can credibly threaten nuclear weapons to counter Russia. Poland does care deeply but has little power. The knowledge that they know it's more important to them is a great source of Russian strength, since they know they just have to wait for us to give up.
The front with China is far more important to the West holistically and deserves a higher priority. Taiwan is strategically vital in terms of bases, semiconductors, leverage over East Asia. Spending more effort in Ukraine distracts us from the real issues. The nightmare scenario is depleting reserves in Ukraine, losing there and then losing in Asia as well.
The reality is that if the Ukrainians didn't want to fight, they wouldn't fight and certainly they would not fight with the tenacity and resourcefulness that they've shown.
True, they've certainly fought hard. But victory in this kind of war, where both sides are determined, goes to the side with more men and munitions. I also note that there aren't nearly so many videos of Russians being dragged out of their homes by draft officers.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
10mo ago
Rule 1 of coups is not to announce them before you do them. The element of surprise is essential, as is being in the capital ready to go (not a thousand kilometers away in Rostov). Prigozhin didn't seem to have anyone outside Wagner supporting him (or if he did they didn't do anything). This is very strange.
I think this was a fake coup that was used to lure out Putin's enemies. Either Putin knew about this and decided to let it happen, in a controlled way, so as to unmask the disloyal, or he plotted it with Prigozhin himself. The governors and oligarchs who were not swift enough to give Putin their support have probably been marked down. Prigozhin is now disqualified as a competitor to Putin after withdrawing, even if he doesn't end up irradiated. Wagner is being dissolved as an independent actor, its soldiers mostly being integrated into the Russian military.
There's a precedent in the 2016 Turkey coup and the 2021 Capitol incident (how could a mob of unarmed protestors possibly get inside a hardened-against-terrorists building against the will of the government and why did they leave when the government activated the alarm system telling them to do so). A weak coup attempt can function like a vaccine, immunizing against political threats.
Furthermore, were seven aircraft shot down? There are photos circulating of a downed helicopter and a communications plane - are these contemporary, geolocated images?
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
11mo ago
That the Israelis won a couple of battles by the time the C-5s started landing doesn't make the aid useless, the extra aircraft and supplies made it much easier for them to counterattack. One can be much more aggressive when your losses are sure to be replenished.
And of course, it was America that pressured Israel into ending that conflict on terms that were extraordinarily generous (far more generous than any American government had ever previously been in victory in a major war) to the defeated parties.
The Arab war goal was to retake the Golan Heights and Sinai peninsula which they lost when Israel attacked them in 1967. The US persuaded Israel to give up Sinai and bribed Egypt extensively to accept the deal, to sign a peace treaty with Israel. Partly this was due to Soviet pressure on the other side. Golan remains in Israeli hands. The US foreign aid budget to Egypt increased enormously (as it did when other Arab states recognized Israel and signed peace treaties). All the generosity here is flowing from the US to Israel, by bribing its enemies to stand down and persuading the Israeli govt not to bite off more than they can chew.
It's the worst deal in the world. The US got massive enmity from the Arabs, in exchange for forever paying bribes to Egypt, Lebanon and so on so they wouldn't be quite so angry with Israel. And endless military aid to Israel, so they can bomb and invade their neighbours whenever they like.
If the US simply stopped meddling in the Middle East, stopped reflexively prostrating before Israel (the Iraq War was heavily motivated by the perceived need to destroy Israel's enemies), the US would be a lot better off. On the pure logic of national interests, the US should favoured the Arabs (who are numerous and have oil) over the Israelis who are few and lack oil.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1yr ago
It's not a reframing, it's the correct framing. The US decided to base missiles in Turkey and the Russians didn't throw a massive tantrum about it, they behaved quite reasonably. They felt threatened but they didn't try to blockade the country, botch an attempt to invade the country or threaten to invade it again, or give ultimatums. This is a mature and statesmanlike approach to a potential nuclear crisis.
Kennedy gets far too much credit, he chose to invent a crisis over something that was easily ignorable. At least he cooled the Joint Chiefs of Staff who wanted to start bombing and invade immediately.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1yr ago
Fully agree. In addition, many people somehow graduate school whilst being 'functionally illiterate'. This suggests that they're a massive waste of time, failing their supposed goals.
https://www.apmresearchlab.org/10x-adult-literacy
more than half of Americans between the ages of 16 and 74 (54%) read below the equivalent of a sixth-grade level.
I've heard people argue that clearly the sixth-grade level of literacy is too high or that it's an unrealistic standard - but then what is the point of the seventh grade? What is the point of teaching people Shakespeare if they can't understand it? I think Shakespeare was a huge waste of time, yet I can appreciate parts of it, there's some interesting wordplay.
1 in 5 adults have a literacy proficiency at or below Level 1. Adults in this range have difficulty using or understanding print materials. Those on the higher end of this category can perform simple tasks based on the information they read, but adults below Level 1 may only understand very basic vocabulary or be functionally illiterate.
20% are functionally illiterate. I suppose this includes a great many people who don't know English at all since they weren't born in an English speaking country. Even so, this is pretty bad. I've seen too many videos of Americans being asked basic questions and knowing nothing. For example: https://youtube.com/watch?v=g2oMv93EUpY or https://youtube.com/watch?v=Ufmcubp2szg or https://youtube.com/watch?v=wu7RXlIEbog
Eagle eyed viewers may notice that white men are not prominent in these clips, there's obviously a cherrypicking process where the people who answer correctly aren't included. Hbd is clearly a factor here. But still, I would've thought it would've thought stuff like 'what country did the US gain independence from' would be universally known in the US. It should be all but impossible for our youtuber to find a native English speaker who doesn't know what country the US got its independence from.
(As an aside, ChatGPT has human intelligence - there's no doubt about it. Issues with anagrams and making funny jokes pale in comparison with the gaping stupidity and categorical ignorance 'Asia is a country' of many Americans.)
There ought to be a slash-and-burn approach to education. It's not just America, other parts of the Anglosphere are deteriorating in a similar fashion. In the immortal words of Donald Trump, we need to shut everything down until we know what is going on.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1yr ago
How does a random weirdo get into the house of the third most powerful person in the US?
In addition to their power, the Pelosis have over $100 million! Doesn't that buy you enough home security to keep out random weirdos in San Francisco, a city notoriously full of random weirdos who break into houses and cars?
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1yr ago
Hilarious video, reminds me slightly of this: teen insulting media after being arrested for a robbery https://twitter.com/i/status/1565960655626199040
On a serious note - this is a tiny war crime. The real crime is going to Afghanistan and staying to pointlessly fight as long as we did. Australian troops were only there to improve relations with the US. Australia has no strategic interests in Afghanistan whatsoever. Him deciding to kill a few people for fun or morale reasons is just the micro version of Australia going to Afghanistan to look good in the eyes of our big and powerful friend. And the macro version is US generals lying to the world because they were too embarrassed to admit defeat back in the late 2000s, dragging out this utter farce for another decade.
At least Roberts-Smith had some skin in the game, more than can be said for the politicians and generals who accepted all the rewards and none of the costs of that stupid war.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1yr ago
Well no the US isn't supporting Islam. But he was saying it's 'not supporting the establishment of religion' generally. I'm saying US support for Israel is motivated by the Israel lobby in the US, who is primarily motivated by religious feeling.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1yr ago
Did you miss the part where I described how US aid went up an order of magnitude as they signed treaties with Israel?
Why would the US not care about Egypt in 1974, like them 10x more in 1975 and then even more in 1979? If you were right about the shipping, you'd expect aid to be consistent through that whole Cold War period. Or at least it would rise when they open the Suez canal, which it did in 1975. Your theory explains only the 1975 surge but not 1979. And then there's Jordan too, a country not known for its shipping lanes.
If it's just Egypt and just 1975, maybe they're buying the shipping lanes. But Egypt and Jordan, just after they sign treaties with Israel? The common denominator is Israel.
Don't say I don't understand Middle Eastern history when you haven't even understood my post.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1yr ago
I think Hanania and the rest of the 'another 100 years of US hegemony, liberalism has won, end of history for real' is totally wrong.
Everyone (Hanania especially) seems to have gone insane over China's lockdowns, saying it's a neurotic, autistic society. If it's neurotic and it works, then it's not that bad. China didn't have huge death tolls like the US or the rest of the West. The US had about 3000 deaths per million, the Chinese had 4. Even if they're lying by an order of magnitude, they still did an immensely better job at avoiding deaths than the West did. If long COVID turns out to be real and significant, they win there too.
China isn't suffering from stagflation right now like the rest of the world. They have inflation of about 2%, there are worries about inflation being too low. This is because they didn't print huge amounts of money as stimulus. And the damage to the Chinese economy? According to the Asian Development Bank, Chinese growth will drop to 3.3% this year thanks to Omicron and these lockdowns. US growth is somewhere around 1.5% and there's a recession looming. The US and the rest of the West is being forced to raise interest rates to reduce the growth that we paid for with stimulus.
The Chinese got higher growth than we did, with less stimulus. And they won't have to pay the price for that stimulus in inflation.
All in all, China's response to COVID is probably the best in the world. If it turns out that COVID was just the beginning of a new epoch of biowarfare, then they obviously will come out on top there too. And then there's the overwhelming strength of their industrial capacity. The Chinese actually know how to build things, America does not. The program to build the Seattle bike lane will apparently take as long as the entire space race, pic related.
/images/16675172852794697.webp
A French company abandoned the US high-speed rail effort to go somewhere with less political dysfunction - like North Africa:
Now, as the nation embarks on a historic, $1 trillion infrastructure building spree, the tortured effort to build the country’s first high-speed rail system is a case study in how ambitious public works projects can become perilously encumbered by political compromise, unrealistic cost estimates, flawed engineering and a determination to persist on projects that have become, like the crippled financial institutions of 2008, too big to fail.
Let's not forget the $8 Trillion the US spent on the War on Terror, which it decisively lost. The Taliban rule Afghanistan and Iraq is now falling into the Iranian camp.
China didn't have protestors trying to storm Zhongnanhai last year, China doesn't have homeless people with 18 prior arrests raping joggers in their richest, most prestigious city. Leading Chinese politicians do not have their spouses threatened by hammerwielding weirdoes in their own home. China actually surpassed the US in life expectancy this year.
Now American private enterprise has done a pretty good job in technology, in rocketry and so on. But that's not really the role of the state. Not losing wars, maintaining public order, achieving stable economic growth, building infrastructure, maintaining public health, these are all standard roles for the state. China does better (often vastly better) in these sectors than the US, is perhaps worse on the environment while education is unclear (and a lagging indicator).
If anyone's ideology has been discredited, it's the US's anarcho-obstructionist liberalism, not China's party-state.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1yr ago
Other actors make decisions based on their perception of the context and conflict and relative cost-benefit, not yours. That people do not share your cost-benefits-contexts does not mean the premise that they did it is any sillier than the idea that the US used an overt exercise months ago to lay mines to sabotage German infrastructure in response to for a checks notes Russian partial mobilization, as opposed to any actual sign that the Germans were actually going to restart a pipeline the Americans had already pressured them to stop. Or only laying mines, covertly, after such a resumption, thus mitigating the risk that other actors/collectors, including the Russians might discover the mines in routine maintenance/monitoring over the course of several months.
There were German protestors demanding the pipelines be turned back on. I don't know if you've seen German gas prices recently - they're pretty high!
https://www.yahoo.com/news/germans-call-nord-stream-2-050655816.html
The US was testing sophisticated underwater unmanned vehicles along with its mine-clearance exercises, exercises which presumably involve laying mines. It's easy to imagine that a few of them stay under, hidden to the best of their ability on the seabed, awaiting the order to strike. If they're discovered by anyone before they strike - well the US was conducting exercises there and they lost a few drones! Mechanical problems, these things happen. If you think I'm envisioning big obvious mines stuck directly onto Nordstream, visible to any inspection, then perhaps your familiarity with these capabilities is less than you think.
This is, whether you feel it is or not, very silly.
You know perfectly well that there's a difference between false knowledge 'the Ukrainians will collapse easily', cruelty such as 'let's ensure this guy we hate has a torturous half-life' and random bizarreness like 'let's blow up our own pipelines'. The latter is not like the former.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1yr ago
You seem to blame jews for things like the war on terrorism started by Bush, a white republican and supported by the majority of whites or the cold war that was about competition for hegemony between empires.
There's plenty of evidence for Israeli interests being a major motivator in the invasion of Iraq.
Philip Zelikow, a member of the president's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (2001 - 03), executive director of the 9/11 Commission, and counselor to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice (2005 - 06 ) , told a University of Virginia audience on September 10, 2002, that Saddam was not a direct threat to the United States. "The real threat," he argued, is "the threat against Israel." He went on to say, "And this is the threat that dare not speak its name, because the Europeans don't care deeply about that threat . . . And the American government doesn't want to lean too hard on it rhetorically, because it is not a popular sell.
General Wesley Clark, the retired NATO commander and former presidential candidate, said in August 2002 that "those who favor this attack now will tell you candidly, and privately, that it is probably true that Saddam Hussein is no threat to the United States. But they are afraid that at some point he might decide if he had a nuclear weapon to use it against Israel." In January 2003 , a German journalist asked Ruth Wedgwood, a prominent neoconservative academic and a member of the influential Defense Policy Board (chaired by Richard Perle), why the journalist should support the war. I could "be impolite," Wedgwood said, "and remind Germany of its special relationship with Israel. Saddam presents an existential threat to Israel. That is simply true." Wedgwood did not justify the war by saying that Iraq posed a direct threat to Germany or the United States.
In mid-May, Shimon Peres, the former Israeli prime minister now serving as foreign minister, appeared on C N N , where he said that "Saddam Hussein is as dangerous as bin Laden," and the United States "cannot sit and wait" while he builds a nuclear arsenal. Instead, Peres insisted, it was time to topple the Iraqi leader
The Israelis were also sending the US concerning intelligence about the Iraqi nuclear program, which turned out to be false after the invasion. They encouraged the war to advance their own strategic interests.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1yr ago
Burning your own boats is one thing, burning someone else's boats is another. That's what the Trojans tried to do to the Greeks when they were sallying out!
If your crazy girlfriend convinces you to stop driving and you reluctantly accept, that's one thing. If she blows up your car, that's another.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1yr ago
Absolutely, you would need to use dozens of weapons or more. They would be effective at destroying entrenched infantry and break up any large-scale counterattacks which require concentrated forces. But the Russians have thousands of weapons.
But why does everyone think would be overwhelming pressure on the US to intervene and join a nuclear war?
Imagine you're the US president. There's a nuclear war going on between Russia and a country you're not obliged to defend by any kind of treaty. The country with the single biggest arsenal in the world is using somewhere between 0.2-1% of its tactical nukes. The remaining 1990 tactical weapons are held in reserve, ready to be used against you. The remaining 4000 strategic weapons are obviously pointed at you. The whole Russian arsenal is on very high alert because this is a major crisis.
Why do you join and make yourself a target? Do you think the Russians, after just launching nuclear strikes, will back down now? After they've done extremely costly signalling to show their desire to win? What benefit does joining a nuclear war have for the US? Why is it worth it? Everyone here seems to think the US should or would intervene but I can't understand why!
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1yr ago
I blame central banks and policymakers. They printed trillions of dollars in stimulus as though this wasn't going to cause inflation. They kept doing it, pretending that they had some kind of plan. Remember 'transitory' inflation?
Now they're using a demand-side tool on a supply-side problem. Much of the inflation we're dealing with stems from a geopolitical decision to suppress Russian energy exports. Waging proxy wars against our energy suppliers has been tried before. That caused the oil shock of the 1970s. Why are we doing it again? The Russians seem to be making more money than before, exporting energy to Pakistan and India who then sell it on back to Europe at higher prices.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/russian-oil-producers-stay-one-step-ahead-of-sanctions-11654076614
If I were in charge of our strategy, I'd give the Ukraine war the Yemen treatment - no more than lip service over human rights so we don't anger our energy suppliers. Energy is important, you can't just blacklist one of the world's largest energy suppliers and pretend it won't effect everything else.
High energy prices will raise inflation and crush the economy. Central banks will raise interest rates to fight inflation and crush the economy.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1mo ago
When will it stop?
Sometimes I think this is all a simulation designed to imbue some kind of pathos. The bizarreness of it all seems unnatural, in a surreal kind of way.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
3mo ago
Is it really so hard to not brag about your crypto wealth online? That's literally all you need to do to prevent this scenario. It's not like people can tell, it's not like expensive jewellery or art.
Alternately you could leave America and live in a civilized country where armed robbers won't come and threaten your kneecaps if you don't hand over your crypto. The way of civilization is not to have your choices be governed by the whims of violent, anti-social thugs. We are the ones who are supposed to be enforcing our will on them.
Entertainment? So they're integral to directing and writing the biggest hits in cinema, writing the best selling novels, making computer games? The biggest twitch streamers and youtubers are black?
The places blacks do well are in highly centralized domains like music, acting or sports, not making any kind of sophisticated content.
More options
Context Copy link