US Politics: He's Trump, he's Trump, he's Trump, he's in my head

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

7 minutes ago, Trebla said:

Yes.

"Holocaust centers". 

Just when you think there isn't any way to make it worse.....

[James Arryn]

You can actually see the flickers where he momentarily apprehends the yawning chasms towards which each of his word salad flurries propels him, desperately alters course only to repeat the process. His final retreat into unfinished thought and possibly sincere gratitude to the reporters tossing him a map and anvil had a slight ring of pathos. 

[Prince of the North]

17 minutes ago, Kalbear said:

Like minutes?

 

 Uh, yeah, I wish I could say this is unbelievable but the truth is...it's utterly predictable...

[aceluby]

Just want to say that the US has never been good at post-war for the last century.  I wouldn't even qualify WW2 as a success in that regard.

We're REALLY good at blowing shit up though.

[Kalbear]

2 minutes ago, aceluby said:

Just want to say that the US has never been good at post-war for the last century.  I wouldn't even qualify WW2 as a success in that regard.

We're REALLY good at blowing shit up though.

WW2 was incredibly successful. Japan and Germany were both rebuilt as major allies and partners of the US, and achieved that fairly quickly. Japan in particular is an incredible success story given its total nonhistory of democracy up until WW2. 

Really, if you think that's a failure then there's basically no value of success that will be accepted.

Also, WaPo reports that the US administration is putting more evidence out that indicates that this was an air-dropped chemical attack in Syria. If that's the case and you're still thinking conspiracy, you're going to have to work extra hard to figure out how the US is in on it.

[Kalbear]

Note also that the above article actually gives a good reason why Assad might have used chemical weapons: because they were going to lose an airbase. 

Quote

 

While senior officials declined to say whether they had clear evidence that Assad himself had ordered the attacks, they said that the Syrian military had used the weapons to prevent the loss of a key airfield that was threatened by recent rebel advance on the strategic city of Hama.

“They were losing in a particularly important area and that’s what drove them,” said one of the senior officials.

U.S. intelligence showed that the opposition rebel forces were able to penetrate within a couple of miles of Hama and the key Syrian air base. The base, in particular, has been critical for launching planes used to fend off rebel attacks throughout central Syria. “So that is an air base that the regime had to calculate that it could not lose,” said a third U.S. official.

 

 

[Manhole Eunuchsbane]

7 minutes ago, Kalbear said:

WW2 was incredibly successful. Japan and Germany were both rebuilt as major allies and partners of the US, and achieved that fairly quickly. Japan in particular is an incredible success story given its total nonhistory of democracy up until WW2. 

Really, if you think that's a failure then there's basically no value of success that will be accepted.

Just wanted to second this, big time. The U.S. came out of WWII as the foremost Western Superpower both economically and militarily. You couldn't have hoped for a more positive outcome if you had a magic lamp.

[DMC]

8 minutes ago, Kalbear said:

WW2 was incredibly successful. Japan and Germany were both rebuilt as major allies and partners of the US, and achieved that fairly quickly. Japan in particular is an incredible success story given its total nonhistory of democracy up until WW2. 

Really, if you think that's a failure then there's basically no value of success that will be accepted.

Plus the Marshall Plan rebuilt Europe.  Yeah if you don't think post-WWII was a success, there's no such thing as success.

[BloodRider]

 

6 hours ago, OldGimletEye said:

The fact that Lucas et al., the founders of the RBC models, assumed instantaneous market clearing by price has, in my view, has always made their project suspect. I think that is just wrong methodologically and a case of “an extraordinary example of how, starting with a mistake, a remorseless logician can end up in bedlam.”

They make the same convenient "mistake" in the labor market, too.  If we are always at full employment, and every employer always pays a market clearing price, then one is right to proceed with more caution on minimum wages.

Only we never are, but be damned if you can get them to admit it.

I hate Mises to pieces.

 

[Dr. Pepper]

I was just reading something this morning about how Trump has been losing KKK support recently and I joked to my gf that that administration will probably do something like holocaust denial or fire Kushner to get that base of support back.  

Spicer never fails.

[Fragile Bird]

4 hours ago, OldGimletEye said:

Okay a few things here:
1. If you are going to engage in this type of prolonged bombing campaign, I want realistic assessments of civilian causalities, which seems to me is never forth coming.
2. If the bombing campaign doesn't work, then what happens? I want to be told what happens next? Do we send in ground forces. How many and where.
3. And how does this undermine international law, making the US looking hypocritical. What's the legal justification?

The fact is the we, the American public, haven't been getting this kind of information. The Samantha Powers of the world, I'd submit, just tend to hand waive it. And we ought to demand more.

I didn't ask the US to bomb every airport in Syria, I meant the bombings of hospitals alone would be justification, in response to questioning the bombing of one airport.  All your questions are absolutely valid.

[maarsen]

37 minutes ago, Kalbear said:

WW2 was incredibly successful. Japan and Germany were both rebuilt as major allies and partners of the US, and achieved that fairly quickly. Japan in particular is an incredible success story given its total nonhistory of democracy up until WW2. 

Really, if you think that's a failure then there's basically no value of success that will be accepted.

Also, WaPo reports that the US administration is putting more evidence out that indicates that this was an air-dropped chemical attack in Syria. If that's the case and you're still thinking conspiracy, you're going to have to work extra hard to figure out how the US is in on it.

The Allies were able to put in new governments into both Germany and Japan due to the fact that any Germans or Japanese who refused to accept the situation  had no friendly bordering  country to go to and regroup and prepare an insurgency. They were surrounded by enemies. 

[aceluby]

31 minutes ago, Manhole Eunuchsbane said:

Just wanted to second this, big time. The U.S. came out of WWII as the foremost Western Superpower both economically and militarily. You couldn't have hoped for a more positive outcome if you had a magic lamp.

Obviously the US came out great, there's no denying it.  But you also can't deny that half of Germany and most of eastern Europe was under USSR control for 40+ years and that the post WW2 politics led to a major arms race where the entire world was gripped in fear of a nuclear holocaust.

But yeah, if you ignore the rest of the world we're awesome at post war stuff.

[Manhole Eunuchsbane]

6 minutes ago, maarsen said:

The Allies were able to put in new governments into both Germany and Japan due to the fact that any Germans or Japanese who refused to accept the situation  had no friendly bordering  country to go to and regroup and prepare an insurgency. They were surrounded by enemies. 

They were also mostly lacking the sort of religious fervor that has fueled these sorts of insurgencies. And you could argue (especially in the case of  Western Germany) that they were treated considerably better by their conquerors than they were by their former regime.

[Manhole Eunuchsbane]

1 minute ago, aceluby said:

Obviously the US came out great, there's no denying it.  But you also can't deny that half of Germany and most of eastern Europe was under USSR control for 40+ years and that the post WW2 politics led to a major arms race where the entire world was gripped in fear of a nuclear holocaust.

But yeah, if you ignore the rest of the world we're awesome at post war stuff.

How were we supposed to have controlled the Soviets? Outside of declaring war on them, which would've been a disaster of epic proportions.

[aceluby]

7 minutes ago, Manhole Eunuchsbane said:

How were we supposed to have controlled the Soviets? Outside of declaring war on them, which would've been a disaster of epic proportions.

Why do we have to control them or declare war on them?  We had countless opportunities for diplomatic relations that we started shitting on before the war even ended.

But really, it's besides the point and getting off topic.  Even if you think it was the most awesomest awesome that was ever awesome, which I happen to disagree with, that's one time since WW1 with little to nothing to show for being even half way decent at anything after blowing people up since.

[Manhole Eunuchsbane]

Just now, aceluby said:

Why do we have to control them or declare war on them?  We had countless opportunities for diplomatic relations that we started shitting on before the war even ended.

But really, it's besides the point and getting off topic.  Even if you think it was the most awesomest awesome that was ever awesome, which I happen to disagree with, that's one time since WW1 with little to nothing to show for being even half way decent at anything after blowing people up since.

The Soviets broke the back of Nazi Germany. They bore the brunt of Nazi atrocities even more so than the Jews did. They were clearly not interested in diplomacy at the end of the war. They were going to extract their pound of flesh from their half of Germany and any of the other Eastern European countries that joined with Nazi Germany and they didn't give a flying fuck as to what the West had to say about it.. Furthermore, the West was in no position to force such diplomacy. At the time Berlin fell to the Soviets, they were the foremost military power on the continent. Believe me, we didn't want any piece of that bad action. Really, the Nazi prosecution of the war on the Eastern Front made any such diplomacy a pipedream.

Um, The Allies handling of the fallout of WW1 basically guaranteed WWII. The diplomacy there was truly horrific. I'm not trying to say WWII was awesome in any sense, but the statescraft behind the recovery was damn near brilliant. I don't think you could've asked for a better political handling of the post war situation than was provided by the West.

[James Arryn]

19 minutes ago, Manhole Eunuchsbane said:

How were we supposed to have controlled the Soviets? Outside of declaring war on them, which would've been a disaster of epic proportions.

Ironically it could be argued that the entire post-war/Cold War period itself was exactly due to the attempt to 'control' or to be more historically precise 'contain' the Soviets, as per (misunderstood) Kennan and very understood Clifford-Elsey, which essentially launched a whole new tone of hostility and pseudo-war that lasted decades, cost untold lives and cam close on several occasions to costing us the planet.

[Manhole Eunuchsbane]

1 minute ago, James Arryn said:

Ironically it could be argued that the entire post-war/Cold War period itself was exactly due to the attempt to 'control' or to be more historically precise 'contain' the Soviets, as per (misunderstood) Kennan and very understood Clifford-Elsey, which essentially launched a whole new tone of hostility and pseudo-war that lasted decades, cost untold lives and cam close on several occasions to costing us the planet.

Eh, I don't think the West was ever going to find any sort of ideological middle ground with a Stalin era Soviet Union. They were only an ally as long as you had a monster like Nazi Germany to center on as a universal enemy.  

[James Arryn]

10 minutes ago, Manhole Eunuchsbane said:

Eh, I don't think the West was ever going to find any sort of ideological middle ground with a Stalin era Soviet Union. They were only an ally as long as you had a monster like Nazi Germany to center on as a universal enemy.  

They didn't have to be an ally or an enemy.

Granted two imperial mindsets will probably eventually run out of neutral space if given enough time, but those mindsets don't have to be givens and there are still better paths to the one chosen. In fact that arguable architect of the whole containment policy himself, and the first real Soviet alarmist in the USG (Kennan) himself said that power players took his advice and hyper-escalated it, and that without that a much less hostile state of disagreement was readily within reach. He personally thought that the US had neither the need nor the licence to set about 'containing' communism in the global sense, and that it did so more out of a desire for power/acquisition than because of any inevitable idealogical rift*. It's sort of hard to wrap your brain around the idea that it's not really the US's planet to control/police as that assumption has basically been the bedrock of USFP since the Long Telegram.

*which is not to say he didn't see a rift...he was in fact one of the men who really believed there was and spent a lot of time convincing people of same. But streaming that towards a war mentality was not at all necessary, and it's been in the rear view mirror for so long that people now kind of assume it had to be this way. But it was, very clearly, a deliberately chosen path.