quiet_NaN
54m ago
I will grant you the Kirk shooter being a leftist (a trans activist, though raised as a Mormon (and gun enthusiast), IIRC).
Calling the Trump shooter a leftist is a bit of a stretch. As he had made bomb threats before I would rather categorize him as "crazy" than "central leftist".
These are the same people who rioted in 2020.
My feeling was that the rioting was mostly done by various opportunistic criminals, while the SJ activists mostly stood on the sidelines and celebrated their empowerment or something. I would be extremely surprised if either of two people recently killed by ICE was credibly implicated in committing felonies during the BLM riots.
The most strategic thing Trump could do would be to get the ring leaders locked up.
I think you are confused. There is no Antifa version of Bin Laden who decided that agent Crooks should go forward with trying to shoot Trump, or who assigned Goods to "hampering ICE" duty on the day she was shot.
quiet_NaN
1hr ago
-I think conservatives should use incidents like this to raise attention to the fact that the media, and the left (but I repeat myself a bit), comparatively give so little attention to the victims of illegal immigrants and recidivist criminals out on the streets from liberal policies.
The typical victim of an illegal immigrant might be killed by an illegal the Democrats did not deport after he served some sentence for a crime (not sure what their exact policies were).
Note that the Biden admin generally did not use federal taxes to buy guns for illegals and paid them a federal salary to engage in behavior where they were somewhat likely to shoot people, so we might want to hold Trump's ICE to slightly higher standards.
The people getting into incidents with ICE are much less "innocent" than the random victims of recidivist criminal nutjobs or illegal immigrants let out on the streets by liberal policies.
Is that so? The central case of an illegal murdering someone is not a serial killer murdering some random women. It is likely either an acquaintance or romantic partner of the criminal or a member of a rival narcotics gang. Also, we do not generally rank murders by how innocent their victim was, so we do not need to get into discussing if a woman who elects to date a man who previously committed violent crime is more or less innocent than a woman who tries to hamper ICE through nonviolent means. A judge might be a bit more lenient when a murderer kills the rapist of his sister in revenge than when he guns down a random stranger in the streets, but at the end of the day either is murder. "He was a bad person, the world is better off without him" is not an argument we let anyone make in court, and I see no reason why we should let ICE make it.
-Conservatives tend to get into the weeds about whether or not a shooting was "justified", instead of simply pointing out that almost all of the unwanted tragic incidents that relate to politics are mainly committed by the groups which are the chief recipients of liberal sympathies.
I would not euphemize killings as "unwanted tragic incidents".
Furthermore, I think "killings that relate to politics", which I imagine you imagine as "killings by illegals, prior offenders whom liberals released, and killings related to political protests" is unfortunately a bit broader. In 2019 (the latest year for which the FBI has data), there were 13,927 homicides. Of these, 10,258, or some 73.6%, were committed using firearms. The degree how easily firearms should be available is clearly political as much as which offenders should be released. I am sure that somewhere in the 13927 murders, there is one which it totally non-political, not touching illegals, prior offenders, narcotics, firearms, sex work, domestic violence, housing policy and so forth, but for practical purposes it seems simpler to assume that most murders will touch policy somewhere.
(Your point technically stands, Blacks commit disproportionally many murders (mostly on other Blacks), and are certainly recipients of liberal sympathies. As most of the Blacks in the US are not recent immigrants, it just does little to motivate the removal of illegals.)
-I think the jobs quota needs to be portrayed as universal protection for every ideology. And to emphasize that free speech is completely protected, I think quotas should be proportional to the ideology of the audience.
I think you would need a new SCOTUS for that. Citizens United clearly established that companies enjoyed free speech. Seems kinda hard to exempt media companies from that.
To be honest, "X% of the NYT readers are conservative, therefore the NYT should have X% conservative commentators", seems rather un-American to my European ears. Are you sure you are on my side of the pond? In fact, it seems slightly worse than just extending affirmative action to political ideology, because it would incentivize consuming media to neuter them. Imagine millions of liberal college students hate-watching Fox News so that they can force them to carry their viewpoints.
Quite frankly, in human history, it has never been easier to broadcast your viewpoint than it is today. You have social media companies run by people with very different political leanings. Anyone can open a blog or substack or video channel. MAGA-adjacent billionaires are spending billions to acquire platforms to get political clot. Big Tech has kissed the ring of the Donald and seems unlikely to offend him by shadowbanning MAGA content. Crying that CNN would not hire you seems as petty as some pink-haired liberal crying that Fox News would not hire them. There are a ton of other options, and the audience only reachable by traditional TV is growing smaller every year.
quiet_NaN
2hr ago
I am not saying that there were no media trying to fan the flames, but what did end up riling the BLM protests was videos of what a jury would later rule was a cop murdering a Black suspect over minutes, while his cop buddies prevented onlookers from interfering.
Against a setting of COVID lockdowns, this was clearly enough to start race riots. The parts of the media itching for blood did not have to do a lot of spinning, distributing the video via the usual platforms (which is their job) was quite sufficient.
quiet_NaN
3hr ago
Another random thought.
I remember when gun control laws limiting the ownership of AR-15s were dubbed "scary gun laws". The implication being these laws simply ban weapons guns the left thinks look scary. I am sure that some of the laws were focusing on the wrong characteristics, like Clinton's Federal assault weapon ban focusing on flash suppressors.
Still, looking at the Uvalde timeline, it is very apparent that pink haired leftists who have never held a gun in their lives are not the only ones who consider AR-15s "scary guns":
He's got an AR-15. He's shot a lot ... we don't have firepower right now ... It's all pistols
It seems to me that this was a major factor in the cops being reluctant to open/breach the door and engage the shooter.
I am not a gun expert, but I think there are some points which make a semiautomatic assault-style rifle much scarier than a handgun in a firefight. The 5.56x45mm is likely a lot more capable of defeating body armor than 9x19mm. If you are wearing body armor while facing a handgun, you can reasonably hope your opponent is shooting common JHPs, no such hope with an assault rifle. A rifle will enable a shooter to fire accurate shots in quicker succession than with a pistol. The magazine size is less likely to be a tactical limitation than for a handgun.
Sure, the cops will have AR-15s which fire bursts (once they fetch them from their vehicles), while civilians are restricted to semiautomatic versions, but it does not seem that this is a big difference in deadliness.
The primary purpose of an AR-15 seems to be to take out a guy in a firefight who dressed for the occasion. (Secondary purposes like sports shooting have been invented, but these seem like an excuse to own a cool gun to me. If you allowed Texans to own hand grenades, they would invent a 'sport' involving their use as well.) For home defense, they seem overkill -- the central example of a criminal home invader is some junkie carrying a stolen handgun, not a close quarter combat team in body armor.
So the point of civilian ownership would be that it is a rifle near the cutting edge of current military technology which will enable civilians to effectively engage government forces. Some consider this beneficial in itself. I think it is a bit of an odd place to set the border between prohibited and allowed technology, though.
An AR-15 might be used to effectively engage police departments. But any government (tyrannic or otherwise) faced with an insurgency (e.g. anti-government forces openly carrying long arms) will not rely on police departments to combat them. Against an infantry armed with small arms only, any commander would use armored vehicles (which are impervious to AR-15s) and helicopters (which are at least very hard to shoot down using rifles). Luckily, there are relatively cheap weapon systems which enable infantry to combat either effectively: RPGs and MPADSs. Any infantry force faced with even a third-rate military would want either. Simply having a credible threat against vehicles and aircrafts will limit the use your enemy gets out of his tens-of-million-dollar toys.
Of course, either could also do a lot of damage in the hands of someone bent on killing a lot of civilians, e.g. by shooting down an airliner, and legalizing them would by necessity also legalize high explosives. Still would be a more logical place to draw the line than at semi assault style rifles, IMO.
(Realistically, an US insurgency powered by 2A weapons would stick to the cities, hiding among a civil population a federal government might be reluctant to bomb. I just don't think AR-15s would play a big role. They are not very concealable, for one thing.)
quiet_NaN
23hr ago
I could take rhetorical cheapshots and point to its history of laws.
Come on. Two (small!!1) World Wars, one reference-class-defining genocide and now we are the bad guys forever?! Most of us were not even born back then, and the ones who were had absolutely no idea what that guy and a handful of his followers were (allegedly!) doing, should we be really blaming a whole people for a few bad actors, etc.
(I jest. As a left-leaning German, I am perfectly fine with Germany firstly being known for being crazy genocidal for the next 10 billion years or so. I would slightly prefer for us to be known for having been crazy genocidal but become civilized (and strongly prefer for that distinction to continue to hold, naturally), but I will take what I can get.)
Or I could point to the heresy laws that are on its books now.
Nasty old § 166 (warning: Kraut WP), yes. Some 15 convictions a year, apparently. Should we get rid of it? Totally. Does it mean that German law, or the French/Continental tradition of law in general, is ipso facto not a standard for civilized people and not worth more moral regard than the mutilation rites of some cannibal tribe? I think not.
Driving a truck is not inaction, come now. This isn't hard.
Physically speaking, it is. Well, not going up to speed. But if you let go of the gas once you see the kid, you should be in the clear. In your frame of reference, you are at rest, and the kid is recklessly approaching you at 100km/h. Not applying any force and having your truck follow Newton's first law of motion seems like a textbook example of inaction.
The thing is, society restricts the use of trucks. Once you have started up a truck, you are obliged to take further action to keep it from harming bystanders, a process known as driving. While driving, you can and will go to prison for mere omissions of action.
Likewise, there is a widespread understanding that ending up in charge of a baby (either through your or your partner giving birth to one and not giving it up for adoption or through adopting one) will force you to take some actions on pain of imprisonment. "Oh, I simply did not feed her, can't punish me for not doing something" will not convince anyone.
Or in countries which do have a draft (which includes god's own country, in theory), you can take a young man and make him perform all sorts of dangerous and morally questionable actions on pain of imprisonment. (I'm not personally a fan of that one, but it is widespread.)
Or consider the Kindergarden teacher who goes on record "yes, I saw Kevin play with a fork in the power socket, but to be honest he was the single most annoying kid in the class, so I merely watched and made sure that none of the other kids were touching him. Smelled terrible, though. Anyhow, good thing we don't punish omissions, right?"
quiet_NaN
1d ago
To be fair, according to the timeline there were only 19 of them, sitting on their backsides for the better part of an hour while kids were bleeding out. And there were multiple border patrol agents, per official reports.
It seems that Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District (UCISD) Chief Arredondo was in charge for most of the situation, until the CBP breached protocol by going in and saving the remaining kids.
If their is a villain in this story apart from the shooter, it seems that guy is it.
Now, I know nothing about how schools in Uvalde work, but I would be surprised if that guy was actually the one with the most tactical experience in gunfights. A protocol where a school cop is in charge seems bad. (Funny side note: Germany (and Europe in general, I think) does not have police units for schools. Even large universities do not have their own police units. Instead, we rely on municipal police departments.)
But also, it means that 18 of the 19 cops were following procedures in so far as they were obeying the orders of their commanding officer.
This is not a case like the Floyd murder, where Chauvin's colleagues were convicted of abetting manslaughter. Arredondo was not obviously engaging in a criminal act. Ideally, the other officers would have voiced their disagreement with his tactical decisions, but at the end of the day, a police operation is not a democracy where cops vote on what they feel their next tactical step should be.
Even if they were all telling him "that guy has an AR-15, don't make us go in there", that makes them cowards, but there is generally no law against that.
OTOH, from the timeline, it seems like Arredondo belongs in prison. Oh, and if the acting UPD chief did have the authority to overrule him he should join him.
quiet_NaN
1d ago
the pacific theater of WWII
I am not an expert, but I am dubious. I mean, it certainly was existential for the US territory of Hawaii, but losing control of Hawaii (or even Alaska) would not have placed the US in an existential crisis. Did imperial Japan really have the manpower to take even California, never mind fight their way towards the East Coast at the end of a very precarious logistics trail?
quiet_NaN
1d ago
An air traffic controller who fails to stop two planes from colliding will merely have failed to act.
A teacher who keeps his mouth shut about the sexual abuse of a kid merely fails to act.
A doctor who does not render assistance merely fails to act.
A lifeguard who falls asleep and lets a kid drown merely fails to act.
A truck driver who fails to hit the brakes when someone is standing in front of him merely fails to act.
In Germany, we have a general duty to rescue. If on my way home, I see a car crashed into a tree, and decide that I will not miss the start of the Tatort for some stranger, I could go to prison for up to a year for that. I can report that I do not feel very enslaved by that rule.
quiet_NaN
1d ago
I see roughly three levels of response for professionals. You can fail to do your duty. You can do your duty. You can be heroic. I will admit that the lines are not always very clear.
It is easiest to recognize clearly heroic actions. The unarmed street vendor who rushed that Australian beach shooter. The civilian running into a burning house without protective gear to save another.
But there is no clear line separating heroism from doing one's duty. If you abandon your MG nest because the enemy is firing rifles towards your trench line, that might be seen as a dereliction of duty by most -- a soldier who curls up behind cover any time there is lead in the air is not very useful, after all. If you get hit, I would personally consider your duty to man your post discharged, and consider a decision to continue to fire (and likely learn how many more shots it will take to disable you really soon) as going beyond what can be expected. (If I would consider it as 'heroic' depends on the specifics, most warfare conduct being roughly zero sum.)
Of course, different cultures have different expectations there, and some did and do expect people to have a duty to engage in suicide missions.
And in the military, where most state-sponsored gun use tends to take place, a failure to do your duty is generally seen as worthy of criminal punishment. Historically, pretty harsh too, especially when your self-preservation instinct got a lot of the wrong people killed.
I will grant you that cops are not soldiers and we actually require them to have a vast skill set to employ outside of Rambo violence, and that even most militaries today are very reluctant to actually hang someone for cowardice even if they caused deaths on the wrong side (though I would imagine that Ukraine would be a lot more willing to do so than the US in GWB's oversea wars).
quiet_NaN
1d ago
Even given SCOTUS precedent in Castle Rock, "This decision affirmed the controversial principle that state and local government officials have no affirmative duty to protect the public from harm it did not create" (WP), I think there are legal workarounds. My parsing of that sentence is that they have no implied legal duty. You could just add a law to the books that a police officer who fails to stop a victim from getting hurt because he deviates from standard police protocol without sufficient excuse will get punished. We do punish air traffic controllers who fail to prevent planes from colliding (even if they did not set the planes on a collision path), or teachers who fail to report sexual abuse of kids.
Even if the ruling applied more broadly, e.g. that no official could ever be held responsible for stopping a harm they did not create, and any law to such an effect was void (which would severely limit what tasks we could trust officials with, e.g. an EPA chemist might decide to just affirm that all measurements are below thresholds instead of actually running his measurements -- he did not create the harm, after all), I think there would be some workarounds.
A city could only hire cops who are also willing to work as civilian guards concurrently, and give them the obligation to protect people in their capacity as civilian contractors. Or you could try some legal trickery to make them national guards and place them under the UCMJ (or state level equivalent), then issue them a general order to follow standard procedures to keep civilians safe. § 892 is very broad in what punishments you can get, after all.
But also, the fact that there is no affirmative duty for cops to protect you is not in itself very relevant. The relevant question is, when you call 911 to report an intruder in your home, what is the probability that the cops will respond "not now, baseball is on"? Them getting in trouble over failing to act will not resurrect you.
If the probability of a grossly unprofessional response is high, then that is indeed a reason to rely more on self-defense. Just the fact that it would be legal (but still involve professional repercussions, the Uvalde officers will probably not find a PD willing to employ them again) is not particularly relevant.
For example, I do not know if an EMT who decided they can make a quick detour to McDonald's while responding to a medical emergency would face criminal charges. Knowing the answer to that question is not very relevant to the amount of first aid I would want to learn. OTOH, if I knew that ambulances were notoriously unreliable, that would certainly motivate me to learn more first aid and keep more supplies ready.
In the end, it is a numbers game. You have to weigh the probability that you will use a handgun to defend yourself (which is certainly related to the competence of your local PD) against the probability that it is used to kill an innocent, either because your toddler finds it, a tinder date who is a lot crazier than you thought finds it, you use it recklessly while dead drunk, etc. Looking at statistics, gun deaths from accidents and civilian self-defense are actually quite rare, and the likeliest use a non-criminal will find for a gun is suicide. (Which might be an argument for or against gun ownership depending on your other beliefs.)
quiet_NaN
1d ago
Obviously the details are quite different,
Yes they are!
but I have trouble imagining generic bright lines that don't lean heavily on verboten characteristics: "of course the white woman wasn't trying to be a spree killer."
The best place to stop her if she was a spree killer would not have been to stand in front of her vehicle. Ross did only fire after she had hit him (slightly, because she was not aiming her car for him). If she had aimed for him, he would have been under her SUV before he had fired her first shot.
A person sitting in a car, even a bloody SUV, is not a similar level of danger as a armed suspect entering a school. You do not need to rely on protected characteristics to tell the difference. Some suspects are an imminent danger to the public and it is reasonable to require cops to risk their lives to stop them if it decreases the expected value of innocents dying. Some are not.
If Goods had already injured someone with a gunshot, then entered and locked a classroom, and shots had then be heard from the classroom, I certainly would have wanted Ross to breach that classroom and shoot her if she threatens him, not assume that as a liberal middle-class middle-age woman, she was likely only firing blanks from a prop gun and not trying to hurt anyone.
quiet_NaN
1d ago
Speaking as a German, I have a relative who became a cop and I am totally fine with that. It is an important job and we need qualified and well-adjusted people for it. I would be much more reluctant to admit to admit having a relative working in marketing or yellow press journalism, actually. (Of course, Germany might have a different police culture than the US. While I did have unfortunate interactions with police, on the whole my experience is that they are generally friendly and competent.)
quiet_NaN
1d ago
But a sane US leader isn't going to attempt to take over Canada
That is very contingent on political factors. Two years ago, I would have said that no sane US leader would try to take Greenland from Denmark, either. These days, the question boils down to how serious one should take Trump's threats and what one thinks of his mental health.
Get rid of NATO, and Canada:US is not totally dissimilar to Ukraine:Russia. In both cases, the smaller country is culturally similar to its bigger neighbor, and most of the people speak the language of their neighbor. A shared land border makes an invasion logistically feasible. The big neighbor outspends the little one by a huge factor (6.5x for RU:UA pre-open-war, 30x for US:CA). Both are non-fundamentalist, industrial nations with low TFRs whose populations are unlikely to engage in asymmetrical warfare against occupiers at a similar rate as the Taliban did, especially if the takeover was done quickly without a lot of bloodshed.
Of course, Canada is much larger than Ukraine, but also more urban. The military advantage of the US is much larger than Russia's, most of their cities are close to the US border (Ottawa is less than 100km from the US, while the distance between Russia and Kiev is about 300km) and I do not see vastly outnumbered Canadian forces turning their cities into Gaza by trying to defend them one block at a time. Nor do I think that their rural population, cut off from critical resources like gasoline and maple syrup would be very willing to forgo their creature comforts to fight a Talibanesque insurgency for a few decades.
Like Greenland, Canada has a lot of lands in the arctic whose resource exploitation will become more feasible due to global warming. Also like Greenland, its northern parts cover relevant ICBM paths towards the US. It also has lots of fresh water which might be crucial for regions of the US due to climate change.
I do not think that Putin was insane to try to enact a regime change in Ukraine (though opting for a long war when his surprise attack failed was obviously a bad call), merely evil. Likewise, if Canada and the US drift apart politically as RU and UA did, I would think it evil but not insane of a US president (or emperor) to try to annex Canada.
quiet_NaN
2d ago
The point would not be to win, it generally rarely is with nuclear war. The point would be to make the victory unappealing to the aggressor.
For example, Putin thought he could enact a quick regime change, install a Russia-friendly oligarch and turn Ukraine in another Belarus. If that had worked, it would have been a big win for him. Today, even if Ukraine surrenders unconditionally tomorrow, it would be a Pyrrhic victory for him, given the stockpiles, lives and funds he has sunk into his war, and the fact that it would take two generations to persuade Ukrainians to see Russians as their countrymen rather than their occupiers.
Again, this does not help you against a madman who does not care about grand strategy, and is willing to lose against China just to show Canada how to behave. But you should generally treat your opponents as sane, even if they provide evidence to the contrary, because it is in their interests to be seen as vindictive madmen.
quiet_NaN
2d ago
Hot take: if a parent is unable to spend a child's UBI on the child's needs, we have a fix for that. It is CPS. Anyone who can not be trusted with cash but only food stamps lest their kids starve is patently unqualified to raise kids.
quiet_NaN
2d ago
I think that there are plenty of beneficial services which are not self-sustaining. Primary and secondary education. Police (whom we generally prefer to do more useful stuff than running speed traps to increase city revenue). Perhaps sanitation. Maintenance of toll-free roads.
Public transportation is just another one in that list. The real reason we have fares is not because it pays for the service, but simply to keep the homeless out.
Some things are just natural monopolies, and it makes sense for the government to run them. Having three different competing highways or sets of train tracks between SF and LA is obviously not going to happen.
Looking at a city's public transport system in isolation and seeing that it is running at a loss does not tell you anything useful. Public transportation is great for moving people around in dense urban areas. Get rid of it, and people will overwhelm the roads with their cars. You can then either increase tolls until half of them can no longer afford to drive to the city, or simply let people waste hours per day in traffic jams. Either will have big repercussions: rents downtown will rise, rents in the suburbs will go down as they become infeasible for city jobs.
Of course, a city could price public transportation to provide services at cost, at least as long as it was also willing to raise tolls for cars by a similar margin, surge pricing and all. This would likely also rise the prices of coffee (because you need to pay more to staff to cover the increased costs of commuting). Or you might even experiment with leasing particular bus or train lines to competing companies (as long as you avoid the failure mode of a monopoly raising prices as high as the market will bear).
Nothing I said is suggesting that the WMATA is run particularly well. Often taxpayer-funded services are not. If you can't have the market, you can at least have audits. How full are their busses. What is their administrative overhead? (Before or after you established auditing requirements, though?)
quiet_NaN
2d ago
A simple plan like "government check for $1k shows up in your bank account every month" is still a very shaky proposition. The quick math there is something like 220 million working age adults x $1k per month x 12 months = $2.2 trillion per year. This is about 1/3rd of the total federal budget. And this is assuming incredibly minimal overhead. Would that be the case, or would the "Department of American Income" be staffed with, oh, let's say about 13,000 "administrators" who each make between $100k - $125k?
I think one of the main advantages of UBI is that there is far fewer qualifications to check. For most government benefits, you have long, messy, expensive processes to prove that you are actually eligible. UBI would thus cut down on a lot of caseworker load for social security for able-bodied persons. (We would still want extra programs for severely handicapped people, because telling a blind paraplegic to live on the same budget as a healthy person is cruel. But outside of Somali-Americans (among whom the incidence of autism in kids is shockingly high, IIRC), the fraction of people who require additional benefits beyond UBI should be small.)
I get that you are skeptical if it will play out in practice like this. I do not think the caseworkers for unemployment benefits would be very receptive to receiving UBI themselves instead. And between department bosses, the number of employees is often how they measure their dick size, so whoever is in charge of them would also have plenty of incentive to find a point why it is essential to keep every one (or hire even more).
quiet_NaN
2d ago
Actually, it can be illegal. A doctor whose defense is "Yes, so I confused milligrams and micrograms and so injected the patient with 500x the maximum dose, silly me" will end up in jail. So will a civil engineer who miscalculated a bridge because he assumed that a bus would weigh no more than 50kg.
Nor is this limited to academic professions. A truck driver going 80km/h in a 30km/h zone and running over a kid will go to jail. So will a lifeguard at a swimming pool who falls asleep on the job and lets someone drown. (I will grant that both of these examples are of criminal negligence or recklessness.)
My gut feeling is that if 30% of your profession would have made the same mistake (e.g. not tested for a rare disease, not spotted a badly visible tumor in an MRI image, failed to take a life-saving shot or missed that shot), we can not really send you to prison for being subpar and unlucky (unless you were doing something illegal at the time, like going above the speed limit).
OTOH, if 99% of your profession would have made your mistake with a lower frequency than you would, then it is less of a "you got unlucky to get into that situation" or "you got unlucky and made a mistake that anyone might have made with a small probability" and more of a "the victim got unlucky by having someone so incompetent as a professional", and I generally have no problem with punishing people for that. (This is assuming that 1% of the professionals in most professions have a grossly inadequate skill level, which in my experience is a conservative estimate.)
quiet_NaN
2d ago
And how many brigades is Carney raising, 'to build our strength at home'? What about H-bombs, is he making any of those? Long range missiles? Attack drones?
I think there are two or three countries in the world which might invade Canada or parts of it. Obviously the US, China and perhaps Russia.
Oversea invasions are hard logistics-wise, and oversea invasions into the backyard of another superpower who has a self-interest to not let rivals gain a foothold are harder still. (Though relying that the US would follow its strategic interests might be foolish. There is probably a world in which China allies itself with Trump by marrying a kid of some CCP functionary to one of his kids. Still unlikely.)
Before Trump, the US invading Canada or parts of it were not much of a concern for political reasons. Now with Trump openly contemplating actions which might utterly wreck NATO, that has changed, because wrecking NATO would also be a major downside of taking a piece of Canada.
If the US wants to take one of the big Canadian cities near the border, I think an extra brigade or ten will not help Canada much. I like your idea about hydrogen bombs, though. As a bonus, Canada would not even need long range missiles, there are plenty of targets in convenient reach of SRBMs. Hypersonic tech might be useful though. Or just lots of decoys.
The strategy could be: If you invade one of our cities, we will nuke a single city of similar size, thus turning the net outcome negative for you. If you retaliate proportionally, that will be the end of that round of aggression, otherwise we will respond proportionally (up to our stockpile size, naturally).
Of course, having more countries with nuclear weapons makes the world more dangerous. Which is doubtlessly a reason why previous US presidents embraced defensive pacts like NATO, where most members have no need to develop nukes.
And at the current stage, Canada does not need nuclear deterrence. But if you extrapolate between MAGA from a decade ago over MAGA today to estimate MAGA in a decade, you might find that you want to have figured out the Teller-Ulam design and built a stockpile by then. Not that I think Canada is trying at the moment, but optimistically that might change if Trump invades Greenland (or Iceland, by mistake).
quiet_NaN
3d ago
For the most part, this rhymes with "I hope one of the immigrants you love so much rapes your daughter so you will realize how they are". Certainly a vile sentiment, but also not threatening violence, merely condoning.
Of course, referring to the kids as "little fascists" carries for me a strong connotation of "they do not deserve to live", which is an even worse statement than "in the grand utility sum, updating the beliefs of their father weighs more than their lives". Kinda rhymes with "the way that slut dresses, she is asking for it anyhow".
He also previously told her that it would be a good thing if more police officers were shot, because then they’d be more reluctant to shoot others.
TIL. This is actually the most damning of all the scandal in my mind for an AG candidate. Not that he thinks that more cops should get shot, that is merely vile.
But that he seems to think that cops live in a magic happy world where they are detached from gunshot violence, the way the operator of a predator drone might be detached from the reality of explosions, and that therefore getting them more exposure to gunshot violence will increase their empathy and make them more reluctant to rely on firearms.
I may be talking out of my armchair from the other side of the pond, but to me it sounds like this guy is out of his fucking mind. I think that even without any cop getting shot, they likely have far more exposure to gunshot violence than I would wish upon anyone. I would expect that most cops have found themselves rendering first aid to a gunshot victim, trying to stop them from bleeding out from a gut shot while waiting for the EMTs to arrive whose job it is to deal with that particular kind of shit. No cop who shoots someone will do so in the expectation that they will simply de-spawn like in some kid's video game.
While I am sure that there are cops who have shot civilians in cold blood, the central case of an unjustified police shooting to my mind is a traffic stop where the young black suspect suddenly reaches into the glove compartment to get his license, and is shot because a cop thinks he is reaching for a gun. The question if the incidence of this will go up or down if more cops are shot on the job is something which could be answered by any five-year-old.
quiet_NaN
3d ago
... this format is degrading to the discourse, the worst form of strawman, and completely ignores the objections other people are raising.
What people were implying was basically "Jones is not legitimate because he is evil". To which I responded by pointing out that the legitimacy of an AG is not tied to his non-evilness.
Beyond that, we have more than a single joke
The rest does not technically cross the line of threatening to kill someone (though the "little fascists" comes close, but then again the Republicans might not be the ones to cast the first stone wrt dehumanizing language). "I wish your kid died in your arms so that you would learn what it is to lose someone to gun violence" is not a nice sentiment, but it is also markedly different from "I will gun down your kid so you get to experience gun-inflicted grief firsthand".
Two Dem state senators responded to the scandal by claiming that "Jay Jones has demonstrated the character, compassion, and vision that the Office of Attorney General deserves".
You make it sound like they were praising his statements about Gilbert. What they actually said before was:
Like all Virginians, we were deeply disturbed by Jay’s comments and we condemn his words without hesitation. Let us be crystal clear: There is no place for political violence or violent rhetoric in our public discourse, and Jay must take accountability for his actions. But [...]
Again, what did you expect to happen? That they would announce that they were all going to vote for the Republican candidate out of disgust?
Sometimes you may privately think that your party colleague is an asshole and still endorse him publicly.
Presumably, when it became public knowledge that Trump was bragging about groping women in situations of unclear consent and had paid for fucking a porn star while married, the Christian Right was not very thrilled about it. But still, few if any of them endorsed Clinton over it. I think that the sentiment was likely along the lines of "He is certainly a sinful man and a sex pest, but if he gets Roe overturned that will stop a lot more sin."
In both cases, the relevant voters (while probably not thrilled about the scandals either, for the most part) ended up believing that there were bigger things at stake than the scandals.
quiet_NaN
3d ago
I would argue that the IRBO only really emerged during the cold war.
America was the world's sole nuclear power for years after the war
Contrary to common belief, nukes are not the "I win" button. Japan's war had gone very badly and they were facing an invasion, getting nuked was simply the last straw. "The killed 100k Russians when they nuked Leningrad, better make peace before they kill another 100k of my poor countrymen" would not have persuaded Stalin out of all people.
If the US could have defeated the USSR by prolonging WW2 for a year or so, I think they would have done so, not for the right of self-determination of anyone but because any fool could see that the USSR would become their rival superpower. But they had just spent a lot of lives and productivity on winning a big war. Telling the Americans "change of plans, you already freed France from the Nazis, no you get to free Poland from the Soviets" would not have been popular, especially if you consider that plenty of intellectuals were leaning communist.
quiet_NaN
3d ago
I will grant Mark Carney that his assessment of the IRBO is correct. The US was always the one animal which was more equal than other animals. The difference of international reaction when W did with Iraq what Saddam had tried with Kuwait is pretty obvious.
However, US hegemony in North America, Europe and Asia was heavily reliant on soft power, so that the IRBO was at least a plausible fiction there. Compare and contrast with Empires before. Nobody could say with a straight face that the Roman, British, or Soviet empire was based on respecting the autonomy of nations and the right of self-determination of peoples.
All abstract ideals, like the IRBO or human rights, are what our caps-heavy Pratchett character would label BIG LIES. They never describe exactly what it, but are essential to coordinate on what ought to be for anyone interested in crawling out of 'inadequate' equilibria. Presumably after WW2, what preserved the borders in Western Europe (say between Belgium and the Netherlands) was less a deep respect of the IRBO learned overnight and more the fact that everyone knew that if they tried to make war the US would come down on them like a million pound hammer. Today, the specter of US retribution is not required any more to keep Western Europe in line, the IRBO is firmly alive in our heads. Anyone who proposes that perhaps we should move a border by a few dozen kilometers by just sending a conquering army (a behavior which was totally normal for almost all of the time since humans first settled down) will be treated like they had gone fucking insane. "You want to wreck European trade which has made us more prosperous than we were ever before and instead go back to the old days when significant fractions of whole generations died in ditches just because you don't like the way the border runs? Have you lost your mind?"
quiet_NaN
3d ago
Come on. The form "If you are in a room with ${BADDIE1}, ${BADDIE2} and ${JOKE_SUBJECT}, and you have a gun with two bullets, you would shoot ${JOKE_SUBJECT} twice" is a well known joke template which I have heard first around 2000 or so. Anyone who reads this as "Jones is clearly threatening to unearth Pol Pot and Stalin (or Hitler or whomever) to enact a bizarre situation in which he kills Gilbert with an almost empty handgun" is clearly misreading this on purpose.
You can tell this pretty well from how the recipient of the message reacted. It was not "OMG, Jones has threatened to kill Gilbert, even provided a specific method ("shoot twice"), better get the police involved before he does it." It was "WTF, Jones is joking about killing Gilbert. Cringe, terminally poor taste. Better keep that on file, might come useful later."
Also, going from "he threatened to kill Gilbert (and his family), Gilbert is a political opponent, I am also his political opponent, ergo he wants to kill me" is not following a path of valid logical inference.
There is a lot of behavior which is a Bad Idea which might get you killed but still no excuse for murder.
We do not let the guy who kills his ex get off the hook because her decision to date a guy with a criminal record and anger management issues.
In this case, if the body cam of the cop (which was clearly on, right?) shows that from his perspective, it looked like the suspect was going to reach for his gun, then I will file this under "sometimes people do risky things and tragedy ensues". If it does not show that, I would be inclined to convict on murder 2 from the videos I saw.
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