411–420 of 453 posts
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> I would think email is a lot easier than a webform. why
Not sure about you, but when I submit a “contact us” form, I am about 10% sure someone will actually read it. When I send an email that isn’t bounced back, or better yet, get an auto reply with a ticket number, I’m a lot more certain it’s going to get read.
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This is a dangerous fallacy - "it has always been bad, so it can't get worse".
I was merely try to express that things were bad and some progress has been made, however, that does not mean that things cannot get bad again. Both progress and regress are rarely a straight line.
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Let's say for a moment he did. Shouldn't that be fixed rather than now abused further? If your justification for Trump doing something is that "Biden did it first", then that means Biden is no worse than Trump. It means Trump just just following along the path Biden laid for him to the same goal.
No. If you don't use a weapon that your enemy will use, you will lose. It's a matter of survival.
Following that thought path literally anywhere just leads to the party in question being actively worse than the thing they claim to fight against.
A competent leader would see something abusable, an opportunity for corruption, and take steps to prevent its abuse.
Weak, corrupt leadership sees an opportunity for corruption and says "$core! They did it fir$t!". And that's how we lose. All of us I mean.
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Deflection at its finest. At least as a thought exercise, consider the possibility that the US administration was _always not great_ on its own merits, not as the fault of whatever foreign boogeyman-of-the-day.
You're right to be skeptical of "boogeyman" narratives. The baseline should be that US administrations can be flawed on their own merits. The problem is that the "flawed" hypothesis fails to explain the specific vector of these anomalies. This isn't random incompetence; it's a persistent, multi-year pattern of actions that consistently align with the strategic goals of a single US adversary. This pattern required him…
Lots of people seem to think Trump is some sort of king or going outside the law. Fact is he was democratically elected and working within the system of checks and balances established by our founders. Congress can stop him from doing things but the democratically elected congress allows him to continue. So they agree with his actions and are doing their job. Checked and balanced. The courts can stop him and indeed h…
You are coming to a wrong conclusion due to a misunderstanding of what the separation of powers means. I will first try to illustrate with a thought experiment, after which I believe you will agree that there is something wrong in your reasoning, and then I will demonstrate where your logic went wrong. --- Thought experiment: Suppose a dear loved one is brutally murdered by a relative of the current democratically el…
Tariffs are due to be deliberated on during this session by the supreme court and as such checks and balances will have an opportunity to act.
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This is often described in terms of adherence to democratic norms, but I like your framing better. If we have to distill the problem down to its simplest essence, it's the political parties. In particular, it's the existence of the two political parties, whose priorities have transcended those of the Republic itself (mostly the members' self interest). It just so happens to be the Republicans in power when the conseq…
The essence of the problem is not political parties, we've had them for hundreds of years and nothing this bad has happened. The actual simplest essence of this problem is malignant narcissism and cult-like behavior embedded in political parties. Donald Trump is an actual cult leader (Jim Jones was also a malignant narcissist), MAGA is an actual cult (not just a cult of personality), and they are also ostensibly but…
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Unfortunately taking over a dominant party was the easiest way to have a "different" party that could actually win. Both parties have built a mountain of obstacles to prevent a third party from ever getting close to challenging them.
I wonder, then is there a path to getting what you want by making the parties more democratic rather than making more parties?
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>If Congress had a full Republican majority during Nixon’s years, he would not have been impeached. That's at best "unclear". Attitudes were different, and there is some evidence of principled intentions even by the Republicans. If I were pressed for an answer, I'd say that the Republicans would have impeached, just weeks later than the Democrats. But, during that era Congress still thought itself coequal to the pres…
> They still defend him to this day Older democratic voters generally do seem to defend him but a growing number of younger democratic voters seem to identify his actions as tantamount to statutory rape, and support his impeachment in principle. The establishment Democratic politicians also generally seem to defend him or at least refuse to condemn his actions, but most of the politicians also lean older. Most people…
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Any large standing military will typically oscillate between a wartime footing where aggression and risk-taking are rewarded versus a peacetime (garrison) footing where avoiding politically embarrassing mistakes is rewarded. The problem is that when the next war starts the careerist officers who were promoted during peacetime produce disastrous results. It then takes several lost battles until they are replaced with…
I agree with you here, that maps to my understanding of what they're intending to do as well. I'm of the opinion that standing militaries are almost never justifiable at scale. A country may need a skeleton crew keeping some semblance of military infrastructure functional, but we should never need a military scaled up for a fight during peacetime. We need a populace that is healthy and skilled enough to enlist with b…
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I agree with you here, that maps to my understanding of what they're intending to do as well. I'm of the opinion that standing militaries are almost never justifiable at scale. A country may need a skeleton crew keeping some semblance of military infrastructure functional, but we should never need a military scaled up for a fight during peacetime. We need a populace that is healthy and skilled enough to enlist with b…
That's a quaint idea but the notion of having a small cadre of experienced professional personnel who could rapidly train up new recruits in wartime stopped being relevant in the 1980s. The complexity of equipment and doctrine has increased so much that it now takes years to train people. Too long to wait in a crisis.
The standing military the US maintains today only dates back to WWII, and is exactly what Eisenhower was warning us against.
Equipment complexity is theoretical at best. I'm not aware of a war between comparable militaries since WWII. My expectation is that if or when that happens, equipment ceases being the determining factor pretty quickly in favor of boots on the ground and logistics. History, at least, supports those being the deciding factors.