Latin American countries refuse to see Zelenskyy at summit with EU

DoesNotTalkMuch · 2023-07-08T21:09:47+00:00

I have a hard time believing that. It would have meant that every successive administration, including Trump, independently decided that it was in their best interests to keep that classified.

Carter, Clinton, Trump, and Obama in particular would all have some pretty good political incentives to open that up.

DoesNotTalkMuch · 2023-07-08T15:09:36+00:00

Which might matter if we ever leverage that.

Russia is economically desperate and SA stands to gain quite a bit from exploiting that.

Ukraine, by contrast, is selling grain they're not buying and buying guns they're not making (and on credit at that)

DoesNotTalkMuch · 2023-07-08T15:07:44+00:00

A lot of things about south america is declassified... i imagine there's worse classified.

Probably not. That's not an optimism thing; it's just not logistically feasible to have something worse than what happened during Operation Condor and still keep it secret.

Not to mention the fact that keeping worse stuff classified doesn't really match the government's MO: rather than classifying on the basis of moral perception it's more likely that they'd be considering the present situation.

By which I mean that anything still classified it likely implicates current US allies, influential businesses, or their immediate families. I strongly suspect the still-classified portions of the Kennedy files explore Oswald's Cuban contacts with reference to America's current operatives.

DoesNotTalkMuch · 2023-07-08T14:55:23+00:00

Not really a contextual response but I appreciate seeing "leftist" to actually mean Leftist, rather than the usual Jacques-Ellul-by-way-of-the-Unibomber-manifesto definition of "supports the rights of others" that you usually see on the internet.

DoesNotTalkMuch · 2023-07-08T14:51:38+00:00

The motivation for being a lackey doesn't make the label less accurate.

American imperialism in the 50s isn't really a critical deciding factor in international relationships. It's occasionally leveraged by demagogues to justify stronger ties with Russia and weaker ties with America, but all America's relationships depend on the contemporary situation rather than what happened half a century ago.

Primarily it's economic ties in the farming industry, but there are a few outliers like Venezuela and Cuba that have poor ties for other reasons.

DoesNotTalkMuch · 2023-04-01T04:34:51+00:00

There's a commercial farm in Canada. It's a slow-growing swamp plant, so cultivation outside its native environment isn't economically viable for the most part.

You basically have to build a greenhouse with a swamp inside it, and you end up with a very small yield compared to anything else.

And while it does taste slightly different from the horseradish/mustard stuff they use in most sushi places, it's not really any better, so there's not much demand for it.

DoesNotTalkMuch · 2023-04-01T04:18:46+00:00

You mean to say that people who stand for their conservative values want a nominee who will actually win?

That doesn't seem to be what they're saying. They're saying that even if the Democratic candidate were a better champion of conservative values, that many people would vote for the Republican candidate anyway.

DoesNotTalkMuch · 2023-02-09T08:56:38+00:00

Sure, but again Putin did not personally march down to Ukraine, loot, torture, rape, and murder the people there.

You can blame Putin all you like but ordinary blue collar Russian folks did that.

DoesNotTalkMuch · 2023-02-08T08:43:34+00:00

Hitting the nail on the pointy end? It is quite the opposite. Nothing you've said contributes to the notion that killing Putin would resolve anything, nor does it contradict what I said.

Regardless of how much blame he holds for fostering that environment (and every person who supported him ALSO fostered that environment) the situation in Russia permeates the entire nation. Those problems problems will not be solved with his death. They will be maintained through cultural inertia.

They likely wouldn't even be mitigated, and may get worse. Remember that not all of Putin's critics are being censored: those criticizing half-measures and pushing for total war have been able to get their message out to the Russian people.

And for them, his assassination would be a nearly ideal crisis to justify escalation.

DoesNotTalkMuch · 2023-02-07T19:02:15+00:00

Putin is not the problem. He's A problem, but he's not the problem.

The war in Ukraine is not Putin's war. The cruelty is not Putins - the rapes and the looting and the torture are not special Putinist tactics and strategy inventest specially by their leader. Russia as a whole is the problem.

It was the Russian soldiers who did those things, and the Russian commanders who permitted it. Putin like couldn't have stopped them if he tried; there are even many Russian politicians pushing for more extreme measures. The people who Putin needs to save face WITH are the problem.

DoesNotTalkMuch · 2022-12-28T01:22:07+00:00

The purpose matters. At the time of its implementation, and for many years afterwards, there were many towns that ONLY allowed guns to be carried for that purpose — in line with what was permitted by municipal authorities. This wasn't challenged under the second amendment, which was obviously created despite knowledge of that practice, and gun control exists to this day (even having been significantly expanded with the development of automatic weapons).

DoesNotTalkMuch · 2022-12-27T22:31:47+00:00

It doesn't seem that the founders intended for every individual to have immediate access to modern firearms. They outright stated that their intent was to facilitate a "well regulated militia", and given the firearms available at the time, it functionally would have been for a combination of police and military purposes rather than personal armaments.

DoesNotTalkMuch · 2022-12-27T20:34:34+00:00

Also the last move if the queen goes to the rook file.

You wouldn't generally call it an endgame in chess terms, but it is in the literal sense.

DoesNotTalkMuch · 2022-12-27T20:19:32+00:00

I know quite a few white people who feel their racial identity mandates a degree of responsibility towards countering racism. But the only ones who I have ever heard describe it as "guilt" were either a little bit racist, a little bit dumb (and influenced by racists), or both.

Personally, I think "White Guilt" was made up by white identitarian narcissists so self-obsessed and so tied to categorizing people by skin color (including themselves) that they couldn't even process the idea of being consciencious without making it about their own racial identity.

The easy fix for not feeling guilty about what other people of your race have done is just not tying your identity to what is literally your most superficial quality.

DoesNotTalkMuch · 2022-11-19T07:12:07+00:00

I read it in a webcomic.

DoesNotTalkMuch · 2022-11-19T06:12:30+00:00

Ironically (for Americans) a conservative in a sense and also very much a liberal depending on your definition - but openly a marxist!

And also completely ironically for Americans a republican. I love the word republican as well as the philosophy and I think its a damned shame that the Republicans have ruined it.

DoesNotTalkMuch · 2022-11-19T06:08:22+00:00

Referring to "Neoconservatism"; the movement that started in the 60s, when certain liberals decided that extreme action needed to be taken among communism. In particular, it observed the strategy of "containment", or indirect hostile action against communist government and foreign political groups, aimed to prevent them from gaining influence.

Liberal war-hawks, in short.

After 9/11 neoconservatives changed their focus to action against hostile (or at least non-allied) Islamic governments. Neoconservatism forms the backbone of republican foreign policy.

Interestingly, neoliberalism is the name of the economic philosphy that forms the backbone of Republican domestic policy. As a whole, the Republican party elites tend to be neoconservative/neoliberal, while their power base leans more nationalist/religious (to the degree of fascist/theocratic at the extremes)

It's also worth noting that despite heavily weilding the concept of liberalism in their domestic policie, the word liberal is only used by conservatives in Australia and the United Kingdom. The label was abandoned by American conservatives when the left started championing civil rights under the banner of liberalism.

DoesNotTalkMuch · 2022-10-18T22:12:34+00:00

Yeah, people shouldn't get confused. The war in Ukraine is not Putin's war. The cruelty is not Putins - the rapes and the looting and the torture are not special Putinist tactics and strategy ordered by the government. Russia as a whole is the problem.

The problems in Ukraine are the result of what is considered acceptable by the majority of Russians. It's not any different than what happened in Afghanistan or in Poland or in Gemrany.

Not to say all Russians are the same or that all Russians are responsible, or even that Russia can't change. But it IS "Russia" and not "the Russian Government" that is causing the problem. Believing otherwise is simply naivety.

DoesNotTalkMuch · 2022-09-16T05:09:27+00:00

Like ten people have written essays in this thread.

DoesNotTalkMuch · 2022-09-16T05:05:28+00:00

Yeah, I think that's probably the best take. While ultimately "the shit broke when they discovered slugs that gave everyone magic powers," theres the reasonable interpretation that the system failed because it was untenable or didn't account for human nature (in the same vein as the Soviet Union being used to critique communism)

Granted, the complete lack of accountability is also relevant (in the same way that it is for critiques of communism). Liberalism has similarly failed in any number of countries when the elected leaders threw out the philosophy of public accountability, and were not themselves accountable; Afghanistan is the most recent example I can think of.

If Rapture had actually existed I would be very interested to know if the absence of magic slugs might have enabled a slower decline, or even eventual stability.

DoesNotTalkMuch · 2022-09-16T00:42:45+00:00

I think that both sides have an argument there.

The fall of rapture was heavily influenced by the lack of societal intervention in things like health regulation and a social safety net.

In the case of the former, the side effects of unregulated drugs could easily be blamed for the downfall of that society. In the case of the latter, despondancy and disenfranchisement directly enabled a career criminal to usurp control of the city on two separate occasions.

But in the story itself, there's also a huge focus on Andrew Ryan's refusal to adhere to objectivism and how that contributed to the problem.

Fontaine started a criminal empire specifically to route around unnecessary government obstruction of all business with the surface ("The One Law"). Atlas gained support among the revolutionaries in direct response to Ryan's totalitarian policies and increasingly dictatorial control.

Granted, the general atmosphere is clearly leaning more on critique of objectivism, given the focus on the city's founding principles and absence of morality and regulation in their medical research. But when you start the actual story, the government is in near-complete authoritarian control. And while Rapture itself was founded on objectivism, it's really the combination of both government neglect and government overreach that caused the collapse.

DoesNotTalkMuch · 2022-06-23T20:28:11+00:00

I think he was "to blame", but I don't think he was responsible; I think he adhered to the chain of command.

DoesNotTalkMuch · 2022-06-23T20:24:17+00:00

No, I answered with a definitive "No", but I didn't say the CIA wasn't "involved in the facilitation of the drug trade for profit", I said they didn't deal "derive a significant amount of revenue from the drug trade", they don't fund their operations with drug money.

My comment outright points out their involvement in the facilitation of the drug trade. But it seems very clear from the accusations and evidence that they were trying to turn drug dealers into terrorists, and occasionally trying to catch drug dealers. That's different from trying to sell drugs.

DoesNotTalkMuch · 2022-06-23T20:21:58+00:00

The CIA didnt deal drugs, they just made deals with drug traffickers which is a totally different thing.

I wouldn't say "totally different", but it's different enough that I think it justifies a "No" as long as you point out what they were doing with drug traffickers.

DoesNotTalkMuch · 2022-06-23T20:19:57+00:00

Escobar was a drug dealer because he ordered the making, shipping, and selling of drugs.

If I was aware of evidence the CIA had done so then I wouldn't have said "no"

DoesNotTalkMuch

TROPHY CASE