andrewrgross

This is uncomfortable to say, but the US President has pretty much unconstrained authority to control the diplomatic matters of most of our allies. It's not unlimited, but it's obviously enough that the President of the United States can -- if they choose to -- simply dictate the end of a proxy war. I think this is really more obvious common sense than some fringe theory, but for any skeptics, Trump demonstrated this by commanding Benjamin Netanyahu to accept a ceasefire deal he hated that Biden had ostensibly been trying to secure for about 7 months. The only difference between Biden's seven months and Trump's seven days was that Trump didn't ask. He just dictated what was going to happen.

That is... horrible. It's not a basis for international relations or peace or sovereignty or respect for allies...

But it is a frank demonstration that Biden could end the war in Ukraine at pretty much any time. Any month of the year that suited him, he could've picked up the phones and said it was time to strike a deal.

He couldn't end it on the terms of his choosing! The terms would've sucked at all points, but negotiated settlement was always an option. And at any point if he'd done that, I can guarantee you that Ukraine would've gotten a better "deal" than what whatever is going to be imposed on them by Trump & Putin.

This is really sad.

Yet again, I can't help but look back towards Biden, who overall seems to have employed a practice of making no plans to safeguard any of his work against an election loss.

I wish he would've negotiated an end to this while Ukraine still had some leverage. I feel like that's been treated as a shocking proposal for the last three years. But it always seemed obvious to me: if Trump wins, you could lose any and everything. He could simply withhold weapons and invite Russia to complete full conquest. He could issue Zelinsky an ultimatum to surrender and live in exile or face a firing squad in St. Petersburg.

Ukraine will be lucky to simply survive these peace talks. Why they didn't negotiate this before the election seems to be another in an endless catalog of hubristic decisions.

Dude...

As the expression goes, even a stopped clock is right twice a day.

Sure, he's a morally bankrupt wildly corrupt autocrat. But sometimes his enemies happen to be people I hate too.

Why is he doing this? I can't say for certain, but my guess is that the military-industrial complex is on the wrong side of his kleptocracy. If they'd given the right bribes and flattery I'm sure he'd be saying that we gotta build more nukes, but apparently the CEOs of Raytheon et. al. didn't back the right horse. Plus, Trump likes the dictator club. He'd rather he, Putin, and Xi spent those dollars on presidential yaughts and focused on locking up dissidents than having an arms race among buddies.

Even still... fundamentally he's fuckin right. It makes no sense for us to give billions and billions and billions to these companies so that we have the capacity to exterminate the human race a fifth time or something. Killing our whole species once is fuckin stupid to begin with, but planning on doing it multiple times is just advanced levels of stupid, and it's dangerous as hell to incentivize other countries to get into this red-queen race.

Sure, his reasons are almost certainly evil as hell. But wherever they are... he's right that we should cut our military budget in half and negotiate disarmament.

Holy shit... I did not have that on my bingo card.

Fine. Who knows if it'll happen, but when he's right, he's right. I don't think he'll ever be able to make me like his fascist ass, but if he cuts the military budget and sets up a new arms control treaty I'll give him the credit for it.

We'll see.

Yep. Not to gloat, but I never touched Amazon's ebook marketplace.

My current e-reader is a second-hand Kindle that has a permanent message asking if I would just please connect to a WiFi network just one time just for a moment PLEEEEEASE.

I get my books from libgen, Gutenberg, or Kobo, and keep them on my computer. They're organized in Calibre, and I transfer them over on a USB cable.

I think maybe I was unclear. I believe that much of the shift rightward is because migrants are an ideal boogyman. They're a natural target for nationalists, and liberals are largely apathetic.

As late stage capitalism, automation, and outsourcing create greater and greater economic precarity, the far right has a perfect opportunity to enter the mainstream by giving voice to two of the biggest unspoken concerns that many politically disengaged voters relate to but often feel pressured not to talk about.

The fascists say, 'your life is worse! And your neighborhood has changed ethnically! And we have a whole explanation for all your problems that the people in charge are trying to suppress! Lol at how aggressively they try and prevent us from saying these things!'

And the dominant liberal order can't say 'It's not what it looks like! The rich are actually just taking advantage of you, and those migrants are just the earliest victims of climate change and greed!'

The truth is that migrants don't drive down wages: criminalizing migrants does. And given enough time, you could be a migrant too. That's the thing I'd like more folks to know.

Whew. I'm glad to hear this.

I have to say that I'm highly, highly incredulous that this deal won't break down eventually. I don't currently see anyone who is interested in actually completing the deal who has sufficient leverage on Netanyahu to compel that outcome. But I hope they get as far through the deal as possible. I'd like as many hostages on both sides returned, and as much of a respite as possible.

Still, it's so hard to find hope in this moment. They turned a genocide down from rolling boil to a simmer, but the military is still actively shooting people in both Gaza and the West Bank, and people in both are facing shortages of food and shelter.

Under the best possible circumstances, if all Israeli hostages are released, I don't see any reason why Netanyahu wouldn't just resume the extermination campaign in Gaza.

First, I find it kind of irritating when someone attributes opinions to an undefined "they". Was this a thing Bernie Sanders said? Was this something started in a press release by the DSA? If you're talking about Twitter, might as well say 'I heard from the propaganda machine...'

I'm left as heck, and I'm very aware that countries are moving right all over the world. It seems to be especially driven by migration. And I think folks need an affirmative message besides either 'we're ignoring your concerns and letting folks in' or 'fine, we'll lock the gates and kill the migrants. Please like us.'

I don't mean to come at you in particular, but when I hear a phrase like "a tiny bit of democracy left", I can't help but think about the fact that there is so much unexercised democratic power available to citizens in the US, and the primary tool for disenfranchisement is just demoralizing and inactivating people.

Let's just set aside all the people who just do not pay attention to politics and focus on folks in this thread. Within a thread of people who follow and react to international news, how many know who their county representative is? How many people vote in the primaries that determine who gets to run for their city council?

I'm not blaming anyone. It's a ton of work. Until recently I didn't know these things. But if we're looking for a revival of democracy, we should all be working together to solidify power among the people who control our local cops and school boards and have authority over our state national guards and our state-level medical records, and regulate labor rights in our states and counties, and so on. This is really a key point at which we can either push fascism back to the fringes or let it actually end democracy.

I feel like that term is ambiguous.

Are you saying that gender ideology is crazy as in 'It's crazy that all these gender abolitionists are trying to force a complex ideology of new gender norms' or that it's crazy as in 'it's nuts that all these people think that any change in gender norms is part of a New World Order conspiracy to indoctrinate their kids and dissolve male authority in order to collapse civlization and turn everyone into livestock for the J*ws' ?

It's not clear where in that fog you're pointing.

I'm sorry, but I chafe at the notion that America was a democracy within the recent past and has ceased to be particularly in the last month.

America was a weak democracy throughout its entire history; it has become weaker in the last generation, but still affords more democratic power -- even under a fascist leader in the process of attempting to further dismantle it -- than most citizens in the world enjoy today. A lot of people literally risk their lives for the political power that we often take for granted.

We should absolutely be disturbed and angry about the loss of civic power. We should also avoid defeatism or doomerism, as there is still a lot of room for this to get better or worse depending on what each of us do. And, we should absolutely reject any framing that suggests that the oligarchy we had last year and every year of our lifetimes before that was some sacred ideal.

America neither was a true democracy previously, nor has it ceased to be one at all. Ergo: democracy has not died.