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Altherion

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  1. I don't think that's what the decision says. The text of Section 5 of the 14th Amendment is: The Congress shall have power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article. The Court does not specify that Congress has to vote on every single instance of determining what is an insurrection. All it is saying is that based on this enforcement clause, Congress (and nobody else!) must come up with the rules for this with respect to federal elections and these rules will apply for every state rather than each state deciding who is disqualified.
  2. I don't think there is a lack of scientists or engineers in the US. The problem is that addressing climate change or building a better future is not something that makes a great deal of money so the number of jobs in these fields is relatively small and the few that exist are not very spread out (i.e. one would have to move to get them). Thus, many scientists and some engineers go into finance or tech where their training is not particularly relevant, but the jobs are more plentiful. In other words, the issue is not with the 2000s, it's with today. The people with money are much more interested in AI and novel financial trickery than they are in climate change.
  3. I don't think that was the goal -- and this is a good thing because if it was the goal, then it would have been effectively using executive control of the prosecutors to influence a future election which is one of the hallmarks of states that claim to be democracies, but are actually autocratic.
  4. I don't like to speak ill of the dead, but your statement is an extremely charitable interpretation of his actions. There is some confusion here because that method of suicide is indeed sometimes an effective way of sending a message. However, it is usually effective because it draws attention to something that is either not known by the general population or is not discussed in polite society. In this specific case, neither of these is true: the situation in Gaza is by far the single most publicized conflict in recent years with every minor incident reported and every medium-sized development on the front page of multiple news sources around the world. The problems with that conflict do not include a lack of attention; it's mainly intractable because the principals really hate each other, but each is limited in their ability to destroy the other and because there is a large number of interested parties pulling in opposite directions. Nothing about that is changed by that kind of stunt; it's not a sacrifice for the sake of others, it's just a sad way to make a scene.
  5. That is why I said "mostly". They have not fully driven them back, but the areas that the Russians still hold are much less than they held in the beginning of the war. Also, the Russians have some momentum, but in absolute terms, the land they have recently captured is likewise much, much less than in the initial advance. Well yes -- long term planning is a forgotten art in many (most?) Western governments. It certainly no longer exists in the US (which is by far the single biggest arms manufacturer supporting Ukraine). There is some long term planning for after the war (a while ago, JP Morgan Chase signed some agreements with Ukraine regarding the rebuilding once the war is finished), but it's sporadic. There's no leader or group of leaders who are capable of creating and executing a grand plan that is more than 1-2 years in scope. That said, that doesn't mean that there is no plan at all. As I said, the idea is to let the Russians expend their arsenal against Ukraine and that seems to be working quite well. The distant (i.e. past the next election) future is not really something today's politicians plan for.
  6. There is a strategy, it's just not a very pleasant one. Ukraine has been given just enough weapons to mostly drive the Russian forces back, but no more than that. The West gets to sit back and watch the destruction of Russian ships, tanks and planes (mostly mediocre ones, but also some that are pretty advanced) with no risk to Western lives or even the need to demonstrate the capabilities and limitations of our own advanced weapons (the stuff we give to Ukraine is from the previous generation at best).
  7. Rather predictably, the US campaign to deter the Houthis from attacking ships in international waters solely by targeting their weapon stockpiles is going rather poorly:
  8. Every leader must deal with the consequences of prior leadership. The issue is that Biden has been either unwilling or unable to... chase the chickens off, so to speak. He has arguably not created any major new problems directly, but his responses to unfolding events have not been notably effective. There's war in Europe, there's war in the Middle East, there's inflation at home, many cities are overwhelmed by the influx of migrants... and there's simply not much Biden appears to be willing or able to do curtail any of this (well, maybe except for the immigration -- there are rumors he's considering executive action). Biden is very, very lucky that his opponent this fall will almost certainly be Trump.
  9. They had plenty of martyrs before and it did not appear to do them any good so I doubt this case will be any different. Navalny was covered much more extensively in Western media, but there were plenty of politicians, journalists and activists who were simply killed throughout the past two decades. Here's an early example from 2006 and here's a later one from 2015; these are relatively famous ones, but you can find others for any year. Russia has never valued human life even to the limited extent that Britain, France and Germany did and the contemporary version is even more divergent in this regard. With the exception of the people at the very top, the Russian government has no compunction regarding killing people and opposition figures are naturally not part of this exception.
  10. Few people foresaw the exact timing correctly (and those who did were probably just luck with their guesses), but it was only a matter of time. Their catastrophic defeat in WWII and the subsequent American redesign of their society convinced the Japanese to try a new, non-militaristic path... but it is now abundantly clear that the world is not well suited to such an approach (it was clear even before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, but after that, it's simply unmistakable). Thus, the Japanese will rearm and given the nature of that society, they will probably do it well.
  11. To be fair, the US media is covering the escalation in considerable detail (I linked to it a few pages back) and people I've spoken to in real life are aware of this. It's only this thread on this board that for some reason appears to be obsessed with the various trials of Trump and other Trump related material to the point where few other things get discussed for more than a few posts.
  12. It doesn't matter. He didn't just leak the tax info of Trump, he also leaked it for a bunch of other rich people. As a general rule, anything that harms rich people in the US will be punished severely regardless of the party affiliation of those assigning the punishment. I am actually somewhat surprised that they only managed to charge him with enough to get five years.
  13. Biden is in a difficult position due to the drone attack that killed 3 American soldiers and wounded more than 30. The US strategy so far has been to rely mostly on defensive measures: However, there is no such thing as a perfect shield and even if 1 in 150 attacks gets through, people still get hurt or, as in this case, even die. The US either has to accept the losses (which is, among other things, politically terrible for the current administration) or retaliate in a way that gives the attackers pause... but this of course risks a wider conflict. Biden has said that the US will retaliate, but it's not clear how limited such retaliation will be.
  14. Because it injects money into the economy without any concurrent production of goods or services. It would be different if the handouts were financed by taxes because in that case, the money is being redistributed. However, when the handouts are financed by debt, the government is effectively increasing the amount of money in circulation without having changed anything else. It's true that as long as the handouts are relatively small in scale or at least constant from year to year, the effects are fairly negligible. However, this is not what happened during the pandemic and everybody wound up paying for it through inflation.
  15. Your first sentence is correct, but the second is more wrong than it is right. Yes, spending on productive infrastructure is dis-inflationary... but how many countries have used the pandemic spending to improve their productive infrastructure? A large fraction of it was direct handouts to individuals and businesses (which are purely inflationary) and infrastructure spending was almost entirely focused on a few sectors (e.g. computer chips) and even that partly fell victim to corruption. Yes, there was once a time when governments could build massive amounts of infrastructure that were useful for all and did not cause inflation, but for Western nations, this has not been the case for several decades.
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