Skeets about history, politics, martial arts, birbs and post-Soviet space. He/Him
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Future US presidents complain of a disembodied voice encouraging them to start trade wars or grope their staff
Unfortunately... en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operati...
Bay of Pigs III, however...
(sorry for the jump scare if you clicked that)
That's not to say the UK government website doesn't give you any warning at all. It does, but it's subtle.
-Hey, do you know what kind of questions foreign dignitaries visiting the US will have about the government? -They will definitely want to know how many handguns the Vice-President's grandma owned! -Yes, of course, how's this?
The White House's website actually does a much better job of communicating how competent and coherent the actual organization is. Look at how shitty this is:
I'm a little annoyed at the government of the UK because their websites are really good. Like, very informative, easy to navigate, written in plain language. Whoever designed them did an amazing job. Which is extremely misleading given how shitty the UK government is in reality.
That's clearly Vance, though. Like, he picked this one: www.whitehouse.gov/administrati...
"from Adolph Hitler to Mohatma Ghandi, vegetarians helped shape the 20th century..."
Putin spent five minutes alone with Trump and was like "hmm, on second thought..."
Also, make all those new ICE officers clean up garbage too
His speech cuts off as he does this
His poorly-tailored suit collapses in a heap like Obi-Wan Kenobi's Jedi robes after Darth Vader kills him in Star Wars
Genuinely how? They pretty clearly intended to regime-change ("denazify and demilitarize") Ukraine and incorporate all or most of it into a union state along with Belarus. I don't think the Russians would have gone for it if they knew they'd still be stuck in trench warfare three years later.
Would you say that Russia's military performance against Ukraine has been in any way commendable
Johnson treated being Prime Minister as more of a side hustle to his lifelong passion of raw-dogging as many different women as possible, which explained many of his failings. It's less clear why Starmer, who appears to have had sex roughly twice in his life, is floundering so hard.
Seems good for everyone involved except the country waging a war of conquest against a smaller neighbor
Fortunately, Germany is part of a transatlantic military alliance and a continental union that could back it up
It's kinda both, and the West could absolutely do things to free up Ukraine's manpower or constrain Russia's if it wanted to.
Why not? The Ukrainians have traded more-or-less evenly with the Russians with a relative trickle of Western aid (especially compared to what Washington gives Israel for use against paramilitaries equipped mostly with small arms). The West could do much better, given sufficient political will.
Whether invading Afghanistan was the best option at the time (to say nothing of occupying in for 20 years) is another question, but still.
Kinda weird to put those two in the same category, since the invasion of Afghanistan was UN-sanctioned and the justifications related to the Taliban sheltering al-Qaeda were largely accurate, in comparison to Iraq 2003 where the UNSC said "no" and the justification turned out to be total bullshit.
Russia doesn't publish estimates of civilian deaths in Ukraine and prevents third-party observers from counting them independently, something Israel has also started doing in Gaza. Human Rights Watch estimated 8,000 excess deaths in Mariupol in 2022 alone. www.hrw.org/feature/russ...
Just in general, "the US has wronged Palestinians, Iraqis and [insert others], therefore it can't/shouldn't help Ukraine or Taiwan" is fucking insane logic.
The Israelis have so far killed somewhere between 50,000 and 100,000 Palestinian civilians in Gaza since 2023, a number fairly close to estimates of Ukrainian civilians killed by Russia since 2022. It's quite a bit lower than the ~17 million civilians murdered by the Nazis in all theaters.
They are, though. Ukraine is able to resist, partly thanks to Western military assistance. You want Ukraine to stop receiving Western military assistance so Russia can get on with it.
The second best time to think about that is now.
What does that have to do with Russia massacring civilians in Ukraine?
Neither the West nor anybody else should want to live in a world where international security guarantees are meaningless and powerful countries can conquer their weaker neighbors at will.
And you think Russia would have been gracious and merciful after finally overcoming Ukrainian resistance?
And Russia would have wrought the same bloody acts of subjugation against all of Ukraine as they did in Bucha, Irpin, Mariupol and half a hundred other places.
Russia's 2022 assault on Kyiv was repelled by predominantly Ukrainian arms. Significant Western arms shipments, notably in the form of artillery and tanks, came after Ukraine had foiled the initial Russian offensive.
Care to explain your reasoning?
Well, if it's true, it means your earlier claim that the West prolonged the war is wrong.
Do you think the Ukrainians wouldn't have fought to preserve their independence? Or do you agree with Putin that Ukrainians are just delusional Russians who need to be brought back into the fold, by force if necessary?
Do you dispute this characterization of Russia's demands in April 2022?
Russia's demands constituted surrender by another name. Ukraine was never going to agree to them, and Russia was unwilling to compromise on those two areas. See here: www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder...
You're missing a few. Russia also demanded that Ukraine vastly reduce the size of its military, to about half of its 2021 strength. Russia, who had invaded Ukraine two months prior, would be treated as a neutral security “guarantor state” of Ukraine, able to veto international security assistance.
Weird response. Why don't you describe the peace terms Russia was proposing? This is pretty important to your argument that the West is perpetuating the conflict, I suspect.
Someone should check the pipes at Number 10 for lead. It would explain a lot
You can judge him on what he says and does though, yeah? I assume you're one of the people who thinks that Russia and Ukraine were on the verge of peace in April 2022, but that Boris Johnson vetoed it. Care to describe the deal Russia was offering?
The Israelis are trying to make Gazans "voluntarily emigrate" to Jordan or Egypt or wherever else. The bombings, shootings and hunger are mainly to put pressure on Gazans (who don't want to leave) and other Arab countries (who don't want to take them). They say so openly (and yeah, that's genocide).
Gaza is a small place, so the destruction is concentrated and you can see, despite Israel's best efforts, just how many homes have been demolished. Ukraine is a big place, so the killings and destruction are spread out among towns and villages. In both cases, the occupier hides the death toll.
Israel's actions and motivations more closely resemble Russia's than Nazi Germany's. Neither believes uts victims constitute an actual nation or culture. Russia wants to assimilate Ukrainians at gunpoint while Israel wants to expel- sorry "encourage voluntary emigration" of Palestinians at gunpoint.
In all cases, one can observe or anticipate purges of political or cultural leaders (see Russia's kill lists from February 2022 or Israel's various assassination campaigns) and mass deportations to break up local communities. The death toll in this kind of activity is usually high, esp. in wartime.
China, Israel and Russia deny the existence of Taiwan, Palestine and Ukraine as distinct nations or cultures. It follows from that (sometimes explicitly) that any attempt by those peoples to form national or cultural institutions is inherently illegitimate and must be viciously suppressed.
He was weirdly bad on immigration (a warning sign, as it turns out), and Cameron of all people called him on it, nut Brown also didn't lay the groundwork for Brexit, so there's no honest way to put him below Cameron.
I always forget about him. Yeah, he definitely goes above Cameron.
I suspect specific questions about the Russian invasion of Ukraine will be met with silence
In 5-10 years, we will learn that Whitehall missed a health and safety inspection due to budget cuts after the 2008 financial crisis, and that the water from the taps had like 2 micrograms of lead per liter.
It occurs to me that the two best UK Prime Ministers of the 21st century were probably Tony Blair and David Cameron, which is a *terrifying* thought.
Ukraine's clear choice is to fight no matter what, until such a time as Russia either leaves or negotiates on terms Ukrainians can accept. Western weapons simply make the process less painful for Ukraine and more painful for Russia.
Oh, this is interesting. When and how do you think the Ukraine war could have ended?
I think it's a reasonable way for an incumbent hegemon to think in the absence of major challenges. In more recent times, however, it seems like US policy makers let the worst case scenario get in the way of the most likely one.
The majority of Taiwan prefers the status quo of de facto independence, thus a unilateral declaration of de jure independence from Taipei is unlikely. The PRC's leadership talks openly about invading anyway, however. Maybe it's just talk, but the strength of Taiwan's security guarantees matters.
I feel like this probably goes back to Vietnam, like so much other bizarre mental hangups in US natsec
I mean, the US seems to currently be leaning towards helping neither, and it sucks!
I would rather the US helped one of them than neither.
Israel, like China, is a nuclear-armed state. Palestine, like Taiwan, is a polity that the US does not recognize as a state. Why should the US help one but not the other? The consistent position - accepting that the comparison is not totally 1:1 - would be that the US should help both.
It would no doubt be very interesting to understand how the Jordanian Bedouin have adapted their traditional cultural practices to the modern world. However, the usefulness of this example in a discussion of police reform in a country that lacks those cultural practices is not obvious.
Also, while the hunter-gatherer mode of production appears to have had some genuine advantages over subsistence farming, the hunter-gatherer societies we have data on had something like 1/4 of adults dying violently.
OK, so, the oldest documented societies that we know about had judicial systems and mechanisms for enforcing laws and punishing criminals at the municipal level or higher. If you think that is categorically different from policing, you need to explain how.
Surely it would be Bay of Pigs 3.0 at this point? en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operati...
OK, why don't I just ask you what you think is happening
It's enough to occupy one of Venezuela's offshore islands or peninsulas, but God knows what step 2 would be after that. And as much as the Trump DOD are kinda shitty, they did have the presence of mind to send a carrier strike group when they decided to bomb the Houthis a while ago.
They have one MEU (like 2,200 ground troops) staged there, which is... odd? On one hand, the idea that seven ships and a brigade-strength element are there to "stop drug smugglers" is absurd. OTOH, as much as Venezuela is not a military powerhouse, that's nowhere near enough for regime change.
"have you guys tried sucking less?"
The concept of "police" is basically just asking "what if our paramilitary thugs were a little less drunk?"
Look, it's still better than the US example, where it looks like the GOP members are having a heated argument over who gets to sit next to Lauren Boebert.
British MPs do actually fight sometimes, I just didn't include it because their fights are objectively lamer than the ones I posted above
Liars tend to provide too much detail because they're anxious about gaps in their stories?
They probably felt they needed to get ahead of questions about why someone else was in the car or something similar
Ah, but in a fair society, Jeffrey Epstein would not have possessed the individual resources to traffic so many young women. Thus, his crimes would have been impossible unless he somehow found dozens of like-minded individuals to help him out. Oh, he actually did have dozens of accomplices? Huh.
Like cops but more drunk
If you were lucky, the noble and his armed guys wouldn't give a shit about 90% of civil and criminal disputes in your village and leave most law enforcement to informal local organizations, who were simply incompetent rather than outright malicious
Most villages had a watch of some sort and a council with the power to charge villagers with a crime. Mostly peasants policing peasants because the last thing aristocrats cared about is whether one dirt farmer stole another dirt farmer's sheep or whatever, but they could still sentence you to death.
Yeah and even then, if you're using the same oven every time, you'd develop a good sense of how much fuel to use and how long to wait for the ideal bread-making conditions. Blacksmiths figured out how to make heat-treated spring steel based on trial, error and vibes, and bread is easier.
I've had a decent amount of bread made from pre-modern recipes and it has basically all slapped. Pre-industrial people ate bread or porridge for like 90% of their meals, so I'm willing to grant that they were probably good at making it.
"knee him in the balls and put the pen in his eye!"
Sorry, I think the last one is actually Uganda
In contrast, this is the closest thing to a fight I was able to find for the US Congress
It's so easy to veto stuff in US politics that American politicians lost the skillset for playing rough. Parliamentary systems know what's up, though. (in order: Ukraine, ROK, Japan, Tanzania)
This is the Trump administration, I'm not sure they think that far ahead. If they did, though, Punto Fijo has a harbour and an airport that would probably work once occupied. Or the Trump administration could tell the troops to steal shit from the locals like a weird LARP of Conan the Barbarian.
The Paraguaná Peninsula in northwestern Venezuela is close to the Columbian border, relatively isolated from the rest of the country, and home to the world's third-largest oil refinery... No idea what you'd gain by occupying it, but I recon an MEU with supporting elements could do that comfortably.
Hegseth, reading about Operation Gideon and thinking "hmm, yes, Jonathan Goudreau was onto something"
Yeah, but the elder Bush sent 28,000 troops to topple him. Venezuela isn't exactly a top-tier military power, but I think it would be obvious to anyone in the Pentagon they'd need more than 2,200 marines to do the job.
It's being reported, but the White House's position appears to be that it sent four MSCs, an amphibious ready group carrying 2,200 marines and a fast-attack sub to "stop drug traffickers" I get the feeling journalists are as confused as we are
On paper, Egypt's air force should be able to give Israel a run for its money in the air. In practice, I think the IAF would beat them, but it wouldn't be free. Jordan's air force seems more experienced than Egypt's, but with just 50-60 F-16s I doubt that would make much difference against Israel.
The IAF strikes on Damascus in July landed pretty close to the Presidential Palace. They weren't directly trying to kill him, but clearly weren't too worried about the possibility either. IIRC the Trump admin was (hilariously) trying to rope Israel and Syria into an anti-Iran alliance at the time.
I guess they could occupy the Paraguaná Peninsula and occupy the (per wikipedia) three oil refineries located there. Which seems a bit underwhelming for an invasion, IMO
Are they going to invade Venezuela with 2,200 marines? That seems a little low, even if Venezuela is not exactly a military juggernaut.
Venezuela is not exactly a military juggernaut, but it is a nation of 28 million people with more than 100,000 active military personnel. I think it would take more than seven ships and 2,200 marines to knock them over, pr at least to make it a sure thing.
Is it common for Democratic administrations (or even GOP ones other than Trump) to stage an MEU and supporting assets off the coast of Venezuela and say nothing about what they were doing there?
Ah, you're talking about something else
I had a lot of fun with it too! One of the biggest problems IMO is that the game is bad at making the player lose. You'll often get to a point where you run out of resources and can't expand, but you still have a trickle of income just big enough to hold the line semi-indefinitely.
If Biden did this, people would also be confused because it doesn't make a ton of sense. Enough ships to be threatening, but (so far) not enough to actually go through with an invasion. No public statements about what the administration wants, no attempt to sell whatever it is to the public.
It's interesting to ask, because I guess the first step is to define "meaningful war." I don't think Afghanistan counts. A successful invasion of the USA definitely would, but I don't think even the Trump administration could fuck up that badly. I guess it's hard to corner a major maritime power.
