functor
1mo ago
Is it really that bad that 25% of students get individualized coaching? The IQ spread between a student with an IQ of 70 and one with an IQ of 130+ is far too great to teach them together.
The speed at which students will learn 9 years worth of material will vary vastly and the pain points and bottle necks in learning will vary vastly. It isn't at all surprising that at least 25% of students will be out of sync with the curriculum.
Rather the opposite, North America has too few countries. Quebec should be independent, California should be independent, The south should be independent as a minimum. Giant states are hard to keep together and don't work well. There is too little cohesion, decisions are made too far from the ground and the interests are too different.
There used to be a British colony, it split in 1776, then fought a war against itself in 1812 and then split again in the 1860s. The current state is that American politics is a mess with people living in completely different realities.
functor
1mo ago
The idea that this would have been some great injustice towards the Iraqis and Afghans doesn't make sense. There is no moral superiority in not annexing territory and granting citizenship.
functor
1mo ago
It really made sense after WWII when the US was 50% of the world's GDP, had fighter jets while most of the world was technologically barely in the 1800s and had nukes.
The US portion of global GDP and population has steadily been falling as the rest of the world has been catching up. China has greater industrial output than the US and are not a century behind the US in tech, in fact they are a head in certain fields. Other countries such as Vietnam, Indonesia, India, Saudi Arabia etc have developed at a far faster rate than the US. In 1950 the US was the sole supplier of many industrial goods, today the reliance on American products is reduced as there are alternative suppliers for most products.
Invading countries is substantially harder today than it was in the past. Britain could take a quarter of the world, no country could hold that much territory today. Defensive technology is simply too good. Even Houthi rebels have ballistic anti ship missiles.
The US won't be able to maintain its status as an exceptional unipolar hegemon in a world in which the US isn't as exceptional. The US might be more powerful than a specific country but isn't powerful enough to be everywhere at once. They simply can't enforce a world order globally. They can enforce it in a subset of the world but the US would be stretched thin trying to enforce it everywhere at once.
functor
1mo ago
so the issue wasn't murdering a million Iraqis, wrecking the country for generations and level the countries infrastructure. The great crime would have been giving them two senators, social the protection provided by the US constitution? If anything the crime was not giving them some form of citizenship. The British empires had tiers of citizenship which granted colonials some basic rights and a basic status. Why aren't people in occupied parts of eastern Syria given any recognition by the US government?
Afghanistan was colonized for 20 years yet no Afghan had access to the US legal system or bill of rights. Veterans of a de facto US military can't get access to the VA.
functor
1mo ago
This hasn't been that widespread. We are told 5% of the population belong to these minorities yet there aren't 4 million gay prisoners in Iran. The handfull who end up in prison seem to either be agitators, pedofiles or people who are doing their best to provoke the system.
functor
1mo ago
Why is LGBTQ so important for liberals in terms of foreign policy?
For example, when debating Russia, arguments often amount to Russia is evil because they aren't onboard with pride. Russia isn't putting LGBTQAASASFDSFDSFDSFDSFSD people in concentration camps, they simply seem not to have pride flags while having a don't ask don't tell attitude. Why does that infuriate liberals that much?
Countries in the middle east can engage in all sorts of questionable behaviour but, often it is a lack of LGBTQ flags that infuriates the left. Again, they aren't mass-executing LGBTQ people or having concentrations camps, they simply don't celebrate it or want it rubbed in people's faces.
It seems like existence of pride parades seems to be a key benchmark for judging the moral virtue of a country. Why is this benchmark so central?
functor
1mo ago
It is because soldiers need equiptment. The US is the logistics chain for a force 3x times what was in Iraq during the surge and that force is fighting far harder. That is an enormous sustainment challenge.
functor
1mo ago
Is china occupying Mexico and using its troops to gaurd druglabs and plantations?
functor
1mo ago
The US until recently occupied Afghanistan flooding Russia with heroin and putting American air bases close to Russia's nukes. The US has been invaded Libya, Syria, Iraq and Yemen. It is clear that the US would attack Russia if it could. American politicians would attack or topple Russia if they could. The US is hyper expansionist and extremely aggressive. There is a clear reason why the Russians wouldn't want them on their border. If caring about countries outside your border is paranoia, why does the US care so much about latin American countries?
functor
1mo ago
Ukraine's military is a quarter of the US military. Sustaining the Ukrainian military is like sustaining the US military at the height of the Vietnam war for three years straight in a far more intense war.
Once the war ends the US and other backers of Ukraine have to reconstitute a military far larger than any other non Russian European military from ruins. The scale of the problem is simply too vast.Ukraine was on track to becoming an endless black hole that would require unsustainable amounts of resources for decades.
functor
1mo ago
Sweden has 3 brigades to defend 1500 km. Sweden's military is remarkably under dimensioned. Finland has a more sizeable military but needs the force at home. Moving the military to the other side of Europe leaves the home front vulnerable while providing Russia with a reason for war.
functor
1mo ago
Tens of thousands of Ukrainians fought in Bakhmut, a town of 100k people along a thousand km long line. They lost.
France, Britain and Germany would truly struggle to deploy tens of thousands of soldiers in a high intensity conflict in Ukraine. They would struggle to defend a single city. There is no European army that could hold a sizeable portion of the front except for Ukraine/Russia. The scale of the Ukraine war is vastly beyond what any European leaders have imagined for decades.
functor
1mo ago
Compare how the Chinese have played things compared to the neo-cons.
During the cold war Sino-Russian relations were tense and the countries had sizeable portions of the militaries on each other's borders. Russia pancaked itself during the 90s and instead of abusing Russia the Chinese were rather generous. Russia had treated China poorly and the Chinese responded by being respectful. Today China has almost no troops along the Russian border and they can buy the natural resources between Turkey and Alaska, or Norway and North Korea at a discount.
Meanwhile the west has embargoed it self from one of the largest resource producers in the world and has to sustain a military 25% of the size of the US military fighting a high intensity war against Russia while having to maintain a separate military force capable of defeating Russia on Russia's northern flank. Russia has become an endless black hole for western military resources that is going to cost mountains of equipment and manpower for decades. China isn't paying this incompentence tax.
The US spent two trillion playing 8D chess defending its strategic resources in Iraq. The Chinese bought oil fututures and let the Iraqis buy infrastructure from China with the money. Today the Chinese have stronger ties to Iraq than the US has with a percent of the budget. The US is spending far more in the middle east than China, with dubious results. The US strategy of dominating the world through military means simply doesn't work. The best strategy for the US is to do what China does.
functor
1mo ago
Funny how tens of thousands dead in Gaza is collateral damage. A tiny, tiny fraction of the deaths when taking Kiev and people are losing their minds. They should go investigate the Libyan war, Afghan war, or the unprovoked full scale occupation of Iraq. Far, far worse than Bucha.
functor
1mo ago
I have heard people talking about wanting to set up a SWIFT-alternative to defend the liberal world order. They basically want to create a woke version of BRICS.
They see American unipolar order as dangerous, so they want to create an alternative one in order to save the ideology of the American liberal world order.
functor
1mo ago
In Sweden we had a mass shooting where a man was kicked off welfare and then decided to kill 10 people at a welfare office before finishing himself. He screamed "not everyone should work" before letting off a few rounds. His energy seems to reflect the European attitude on paying for a military.
Currently the attitude in Sweden is beyond bizarre. John Bolton would be considered a tankie right now. Their, is just fanatical worship of the US military industrial complex combined view of any being in opposition to the US as a fundamentally evil. I have never before seen people justifying the invasion of Iraq and Vietnam at the scale happening now. The average Swede has been turned into a Dick Cheney, except they only see the world as good vs evil.
At the same time as they want complete and utter American domination of every corner of the world they are shitting all over Americans and talking about boycotts. To make matters worse, most people can't give any legitimacy to any other view point. There are true believers in the neo con project, people who are fundamentally evil and those who are brainwashed by Russians.
functor
2mo ago
Small oversea territories provide little value to a high cost. The UK has to be able to control and defend a bunch of insignificant islands half way around the world. This ranges from peacetime patrolling of fisheries to a potential falklands like war. Having small islands doesn't provide any real strategic benefit, it just provides a few thousand citizens for whom providing NHS services will cost a fortune and provides the military with a continuous headache.
The UK would be far better off if it stopped larping global hegemon and simply accepted that it is a mid sized country like Holland and stopped getting involved in far away places.
functor
2mo ago
Do they actually need to hire conservatives? Just kicking our a lot of liberals would achieve the objectives. DOGE's prime objective is to deplatform leftists and they are doing so at an incredible rate. If the left lost its armies of professional activists they would be heavily undermined. Killing USAID doesn't just hit wokeness in America, it hits wokeness globally. The issue with building a right wing bureaucracy is that bureaucracies naturally tend toward the left.
DOGE just needs to turn thousands of full time activists away from their activist career and give them new careers selling real estate, managing paperwork at a hospital or SEO-blogging.
For those on the fringe right, imaging what the right could achieve with tens of thousands of full time activists with billions in funding and top tier connections. Now imagine losing that.
My prediction is that we are going to find that a lot of people aren't actually as woke as we thought. They just played around with it. The people who wanted to defund the police would never walk through the ghetto at night alone with no police. The middle class posers talk about body positivity and trans rights while being skinny and living hetronormatively. They love diversity on twitter but live in an all white neighbourhood.
functor
2mo ago
- Israel is an unsustainable state. Their population minus Palestinians and ultra orthodox who are a net drag on society is equivalent to that of Denmark and their land area is equivalent to New Jersey. At the same time they are more or less at war with everyone around them. They have two million Palestinian citizens that fundamentally hate them and they are at a numerical disadvantage compared to the Palestinians.
They are in a similar situation to south Vietnam, the Rhodesians or the French in Algeria. Their state is inherently going to be stuck in a mess that is slowly going to bring it down.
The idea of resettling the ghetto population of Europe in Palestine was incredibly poorly thought through. At least the British chose Australia to dump criminals in which was far more viable as a state.
functor
2mo ago
In any case the US must advance and legitimate Israeli objectives.
Why? what exactly does forever wars in the middle east and refugee crises deliver to the US? What is legitimate about an Israeli claim to Gaza?
But it is inclusive if we rebrand it as special ed.
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