681–690 of 879 posts
I often use President Carter's legacy to educate young & idealistic Democrats about how to be a progressive populist, in the traditional meaning of those words. I ask them to lookup how much money Obama raised from Wall Street tycoons to be elected and how much more he has pocketed from them by giving banal speeches about "hope" & "change", vs how much Jimmy Carter did. Most young Democrats (college or 20 somethings)…
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What's ironic about this is that Egypt no longer poses a threat to Israel because of these peace agreements and reliance on American foreign aid. If this were not the case, Israel likely would not be a position such that they could pursue military attacks against Gaza and war in Lebanon.
My view of the future is that Israel’s borders will probably continue to expand opportunistically for the forseeable future. This is a doctrine known as Greater Israel. At some point the Egypt-Israel relationship could deteriorate and Israel could expand in that direction again. Overall expansionist/conquest urges are back in with Russia, US under Trump and Israel. We will probably see China also get into the act.
Talking about Israel, the 150th country in the world in size, in the same breath as China, Russia and the US - five of the largest countries in the world, is very weird.
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How did Lyndon B Johnson not make your list? Beside the Vietname war he seems like the best President for innerpolitics.
> Beside the Vietname war that's a pretty big "besides"
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Yes, at this point. At the time, they were not.
Seriously everyone critiquing 40 year old projects like they just had PVs laying around in the 70s.
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Since I've been asked a thousand times by leftists, I'll try to answer. I feel like at least the right recognizes they're going further right. > Democrats have moved to the right on topics like border control and immigration Yes, because it's become such an apparent clusterfk they had no choice but to. It's not much different than a child covered in Nutella, with Nutella all over the table and floor telling their par…
The trans topic is a wedge issue that has absolutely no impact on 99% of people. Many of the things people like to bring up when complaining about "a shift to the left" are fringe ideas even on the left, and are amplified by right-wingers who are trying to paint the left as out of touch with reality. Having said that, age-appropriate sex ed in elementary school (e.g. talking about bodily autonomy and consent) is actu…
I agree this is what appears to have happened but I still can’t follow the logic. What happens next? Who builds the next system and why should we expect it will be any better?
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It is similarly the indigenous land of the Palestinians.
Like Americans and Canadians are not indigenous people of Northern America and Australians are not indigenous people of Australia, they are not. Arabs in Palestine are descendants of colonizers and settlers enabled by the colonial powers.
> Arabs in Palestine are descendants of colonizers and settlers enabled by the colonial powers.
Oh and they didn't even speak the same language, they had to revive it.
Right. Makes sense.
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> (like Carter banning nuclear waste reprocessing which set back that entire industry) How did this set back the whole industry? Experience since then, even in France, is that reprocessing is uneconomical. Understand that Carter's executive order was rescinded by Reagan, and yet reprocessing has gone nowhere since then in the US.
Because the waste issue became a problem for every new commercial project, and well, waste is rather unfortunate by itself. Reprocessing remained in France and UK, so it mustn't have been that uneconomical - I guess that the investment/approvals required to open a new site were too much.
The world has converged on the most economical solution to spent fuel: dry cask storage. This is not an ultimate solution, but it forecloses no ultimate solution, and by delaying any such expensive step it minimizes the net present value of the cost of dealing with the waste. In the meantime, the spent fuel gradually cools off, rendering any future ultimate solution easier.
Reprocessing can be seen as a fossilized remnant of an earlier failed vision of where nuclear power was going to go. The vision was that nuclear power plants would be cheap, lots of them would be built, and then uranium would start to run out. Fuel would start getting expensive, so we'd have to move to breeder reactors. Fast breeders burn plutonium, so you want to start them with Pu separated from the earlier thermal reactors (and then continue to fuel them with Pu they themselves produce.)
But this vision never came to pass. Nuclear power plants turned out to be expensive and uranium remained cheap (and enrichment got cheap). Reprocessing ended up unneeded and unwanted. It really did serve as a cover for proliferation, too: Japan now has enough separated reactor grade Pu for about 1000 bombs. It's not as good as weapons grade but it can still serve for weapons if boosting is used to ameliorate premature initiation of the chain reaction.
There's an inversion of cause and effect here. Nuclear didn't fail because we didn't reprocess, we didn't reprocess because nuclear failed. To invert the actual causation is an example of cargo cult thinking.
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Trump followers alone is nowhere near enough to win an election in the USA. It was somewhat easy to win this election. you had post-Covid economy coupled with half-senile 80+ year old grandpa who was replaced by a candidate not a soul voted for. however, when you are up for re-election (and midterms as 1/2-way gauge of how the country thinks you are doing) the buck stops with you. there is no “booo, it is not my faul…
While I agree on your point regarding midterm reckoning, I'm afraid people DID vote for Trump, he even won the popular vote - which is mind numbing: Americans actually WANTED to install a proven criminal and rapist as president.
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I don't see how this is a self-contradictory position. Women who've decided to call themselves men are in fact still women.
Your position is that this is about protecting women's spaces and making them feel safe and dignified. Your position is also that somebody like Buck Angel must use the women's bathroom, because he is "in fact still a woman." My assertion is that this is contradictory, because forcing somebody like Buck Angel to use the womens' bathroom will make women and girls feel less safe, not more.
Consider prisons, for example. There have been many cases recently of male criminals being transferred to the female prison estate, on the basis of their self-declared so-called "female gender identity", who have then raped and in some cases impregnated women incarcerated with them.
It should be obvious that the same risk is not present from other female prisoners. Even if they happen to look very butch and/or hirsute. So keeping prisons single-sex is clearly a much better policy for incarcerated women.
Even for bathroom spaces, the prospect of laws that penalize males who decide to use female bathrooms is good news. This is because the threat of negative consequences for such behavior makes it much less likely that any such males will even bother trying, which means that women in general will not only be safer, but also can feel safer, because they know that any individuals encountered in these spaces are almost certainly female. Even if, like Buck Angel, they don't conform to feminine stereotypes.
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My view of the future is that Israel’s borders will probably continue to expand opportunistically for the forseeable future. This is a doctrine known as Greater Israel. At some point the Egypt-Israel relationship could deteriorate and Israel could expand in that direction again. Overall expansionist/conquest urges are back in with Russia, US under Trump and Israel. We will probably see China also get into the act.
The idea that you're driving here, that Israel is some kind of expansionist "empire", is, frankly, ridiculous. Have you ever actually looked at a map of the middle east? Israel makes up 0.1% of the ME. Egypt is 46 times the size of Israel. If you look at a map of the ME, Israel is barely a dot on there. Talking about Israel, the 150th country in the world in size, in the same breath as China, Russia and the US - five…
It doesn’t matter what size Israel is. It has a super equipped army unlike any other country in the region and its population is growing while many countries around it are failed/fragile states (eg syria and Lebanon and sort of Egypt.). And if Jordan is forced to take a few million Palestinians from the West Bank it could become a failed/fragile state too.