remzem
3mo ago
Private entity, whose board of directors is appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate. Except for the Secretary of Defense, Secretary of State and President of the National Defense University who are ex officio members. Very private industry. Definitely not another CIA front trying to keep its regime change operations hidden away from public oversight.
remzem
3mo ago
substantive criticism = cheesecake_llama is a drug addict that broke their brain with drugs because I disagree with their political opinions?
remzem
3mo ago
Is there something about this post you wanted to discuss? or are you only posting it so you could quote autistic people making awkward digs at other autistic people? boo outgroup via proxy.
remzem
3mo ago
I think if we're all being honest there is an actual difference between wars of aggression by a major world power and in Europe than elsewhere in the world. Wars of aggression by smaller players is one thing but major players is another. I think it's in everyone's benefit that the major powers stop it, right?
Kosovo?
remzem
4mo ago
After they scolded him for not being thankful enough Zelenskyy has gone on a tantrum on twitter doing a copy pasted thank you to every world leader other than Trump. lol
remzem
4mo ago
American hyperagency strikes again!
Okay if it's not our war then it shouldn't make much of a difference if we just pull all funding and stop providing intelligence?
remzem
4mo ago
As opposed to, say, holding a peace summit with Russia without inviting Ukraine to the table, which didn't legitimately hurt relations?
I mean the Europeans had peace summits with the Ukrainians without inviting Russia. At least the US and Russia having a meeting about their proxy war involves the actual players instead of completely irrelevant countries.
remzem
4mo ago
Not really true, Putin has offered deals on Russia's rare earth minerals in it's new territories.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4gdx7488g5o
Seems unlikely to happen either way, any meaningful security agreements and Russia just continues grinding Ukraine down and refuses to deal. On the other hand westerners are still adapting to multipolarism and the idealism they could afford under the old unipolar order being gone. So making a deal with Russia for any sort of resources would be a hard sell right now.
remzem
4mo ago
That's an interesting neocon fantasy, but the text was leaked https://kyivindependent.com/exclusive-the-full-text-of-the-final-us-ukraine-mineral-agreement/
remzem
4mo ago
It's a nothingburger. The more important stuff to watch is how the US and Russian talks go.
The full text leaked https://kyivindependent.com/exclusive-the-full-text-of-the-final-us-ukraine-mineral-agreement/
and it states that only new mineral reserves will go to the fund. Which won't be happening any time soon given the condition of Ukraine.
The Government of Ukraine will contribute to the Fund 50 percent of all revenues earned from the future monetization of all relevant Ukrainian Government-owned natural resource assets
It's also not to repay us for all the money Biden wasted, it's just to invest in Ukraine.
Contributions made to the Fund will be reinvested at least annually in Ukraine to promote the safety, security and prosperity of Ukraine, to be further defined in the Fund Agreement. The Fund Agreement will also provide for future distributions.
It provides zero security agreements either. Basically it was an attempt by the deep state to further entangle the US in it's Ukraine mess. Except Trump didn't want to provide security, and Zelensky didn't want to give away 50% of it's current mineral wealth to crony capital US contractors that'll "rebuild" Ukraine while skimming off tons of the money for themselves, USAID style. Not without security guarantees at least.
So the deal got watered down to nothing.
remzem
4mo ago
This still doesn't make sense to me, debt spending isn't an alternative for increasing the labor pool. The debt will have to be repaid or it will simply spiral and the welfare state will collapse, and Germany is even more constrained by being part of a shared currency whereas the US is not and the dollar benefits from being the world reserve currency so our money printing decisions are our own and costs can be foisted off on the rest of the world to some degree.
There's also a limit to productivity based on labor that doesn't change by throwing more money at it. If you want a bunch of infrastructure projects military or otherwise and your labor pool is limited spending more money would increase demand for foreign labor and the pull factor, not reduce it.
This is all hinging on the neoliberal assumption that more immigration is an economic boon in the first place as well. When it comes to Europe and most of their migrants being MENA or sub saharan this doesn't seem to be the case.
remzem
4mo ago
So the conservatives won in Germany and the change will be they will rack up debt by increasing spending. All to finance an empire's war, that already tanked their economy and that is already lost.
Sounds pretty Germany yeah.
remzem
4mo ago
Haiti's problem is human capital, in that it has none to speak of.
Ukraine's problem is its a poorly partitioned state. You have ethnic and cultural Russians in the east and south and the ultranationalist Ukrainians to the west and central, then some other lesser groups like random Hungarian communities or Romanian in the west as well. It's torn between two groups pushing in polar opposite directions. It's not Russian enough to fully join Russia's orbit, and not Ukrainian enough to join the west (though arguably Ukrainians aren't western enough to join the west) not in it's entirety at least. Solution would be to just give the Russia speaking parts in the south and east, from Odessa to Kharkiv to Russia. Then integrate what is left with Europe.
remzem
4mo ago
NATO started the war in 2014 by instigating a color revolution and replacing the elected leadership of Ukraine with western puppets. This should be a question of little doubt. Round and round.
Depends on how you're defining "it"
"Russia invaded Ukraine" Is a fact.
"Russia started it" (the invasion) Is a fact.
"Russia started it" (the war) is not a fact.
The definition of starting something isn't as clearly defined and the cause of the Ukraine war is more complicated than who threw the first major blow. They were already in a frozen proxy war after the events of 2014 with occasional shelling prior to the larger invasion.
Finding the exact causes for historical conflict is always more complicated. This is why the propaganda machine keeps trying to reduce it to simplistic terms. "Mommy! Timmy punched me!!!" type child reasoning. Any unbiased adult with any experience with people is going to question what Jimmy did to piss off Timmy.
Like Incanto I find the patronizing obnoxious.
remzem
4mo ago
Afghanistan and Syria withdrawals last Trump term come to mind. Generals bragged about playing shell games in Syria with troop numbers.
https://nypost.com/2020/11/13/diplomat-says-officials-misled-trump-on-troop-count-in-syria/
“We were always playing shell games to not make clear to our leadership how many troops we had there,” James Jeffrey, US special representative for Syria engagement, said in an interview with Defense One.
Different branch of gov, but basically the same idea. Leave wiggle room and you leave them room for to wiggle out of the order.
remzem
4mo ago
Feels like this analysis is suffering from a lot of presentism. Or is including a lot in order to achieve it's political goal; singling out identity politics as a unique evil. I don't think this really holds up on closer examination though. The holocaust's identity aspects weren't unique to Nazi Germany. Jewish pogroms had already been common in the late 19th and early 20th centuries in Eastern Europe and weren't seen as especially noteworthy. It's true that ancient people didn't have the same justifications, but they lacked knowledge of genetics. Really Nazi Germany was just an evolution of the same feuds you cite, incorporating newer ideas about identity, namely genetics, along with industrial advances that led to a much larger scale war and much larger scale pogrom.
The concept of Nazi Germany as uniquely evil wasn't even really a thing during and shortly after ww2. After the war things were more pragmatic, we needed West Germany to oppose the USSR and we even recruited Nazis via Operation Paperclip. The Nazis as a unique evil was mostly spun due to it's utility not due to any morality. This happened later, around the 60s and 70s. That's when a lot of holocaust documentaries and the modern beliefs about the holocaust and Nazi Germany as the most evil of evils became more widespread.
The US was fully embracing its role as empire at this point and tabooing white identity politics served these interests. Also had the civil rights movement, Hart-Celler and all that garbage happen around the same time.
remzem
4mo ago
They need to audit the judiciary. Similar to how the libs tried to smear the supreme court for all of Biden's term. That didn't work out so well, but! there are only 9 justices and only 6ish Republican judges on the supreme court. They probably don't want to piss off the swing votes so that leaves only 4ish to dig up dirt on.
There are over 800 federal judges. Find a dozen or two with serious corruption and you could completely tar the entire system in the media. You'd have enough ammo to just keep releasing discrediting info on them for the whole term as they try to block your corruption purges and the more they attempt to stop things the more they look complicit with the corrupt state bureaucracy.
remzem
4mo ago
Now that you mention it it's pretty funny to think of this from the pov of Indians. Vivek got removed from DOGE after his anti-american tweet. Big Balls is removed and then rehired after his anti-indian tweet.
remzem
4mo ago
That's not how it works. The democratic parts of the American government are set up in a rock-paper-scissors type way. Where if any one part of government tries to get something done another one can block it with everyone just pointing fingers at each other to shift blame. This is to ensure that democratic priorities never get addressed so that the unelected bureaucracy can work on lobbyist priorities unhindered.
Nah, its his second term and he came back with a bigger win than he had in 2016. Can't point to Trump as being some erroneous figure that mind controlled millions of Americans into voting for him. Even in 2016 this was copium from the establishment, the polling data showed that he was more in tune with the voting base than the old guard neocons. Isolationist populism is here to stay.
If anything Trump is popular enough with his base that the more he pushes the more the Overton window will shift and the more things like torching NATO or militarily taking Greenland become acceptable. I mean we have conservative talk show hosts that are fairly main stream now noticing how odd it is that no other country is expected to be multicultural and to not have a dominant ethnicity or culture. That would've been unthinkable on a major platform 10 years ago. Its the kind of thing citizens had to whisper about anonymously in dark corners of the internet.
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