You have to be corrected on a few critical things. The US' power doesn't come from it making so many weapons. The structure of the government. The principles it stands for. The geographic perfection it lucked into. The allies it has (which, despite appearances, are still there.) The economic influence it has. The human talent it has soaked up from around the world as people moved to the US.
China can't replicate any of those things in the next 100 years. They are also handicapped by their ideology, which weakens their capacity to work the necessary logic for critical outcomes. They've tried and failed to achieve some kind of belt and road initiative to make up a bit of the difference in their supply chain dependencies. They've tried and failed to clone so many of our technologies, but what gets promoted are the ones they've succeeded at.
One of the admirals in the Pacific said something along the lines of (paraphrasing), "China is complaining that we're trying to contain them. My question to them would be, 'well, do you need to be contained?'"
China constantly contradicts itself about its ambitions. What you need to understand, from all this stuff you've been writing in this thread, is that China is no longer China. That great history, so much of its critical culture from the past. It's all trashed. China is now communist. It's now what communism wants, not what China wants or needs. Taiwan isn't about reunification with a brother, it's about communists crushing democracy.
If you look back at World War 2, it was in large part caused by communism. Comintern believed that communism could not co-exist with capitalism, so communism would have to be established globally. This threatened Japanese and German sovereignty. Granted, the Japanese and Germans had their own ideological problems, but just the threat of global communist expansion was enough to start a race for global resource control.
We downplay this about WW2, but if you want to understand anything about US national strategy, it is that we have been hedging our resource control against a potential flaring up of global communist ambitions again.
Now what is China doing? They're building the largest military in history that has no use other than expanding. Xi Jinping is purging his military like Stalin did before he invaded Poland and Finland.
The contradiction about communist ideology is that it is anti-western and anti-imperialism, but the success of communism is that it has to become western to suck less and it has to manufacture a psychological empire to succeed. Western "empires" have largely been a result of good fortune in water access. The US is the absolute pinnacle of that. Russia and China are worse off and since they are at a disadvantage there, the alternative is psychological expansion.
China is trying to make up the difference by using a massive population, but the entire logic around it is weak. China is easy to choke off and scale down. It would go the same way World War 1 and World War 2 went, except with more turmoil in each other's countries. It's easier now than ever to project power from inside enemy's countries than to need to send ships and missiles thousands of miles to reach them. The issue is that, China is more fragile in this regard than the US is in every regard despite all their social controls.
> The US' power doesn't come from it making so many weapons. The structure of the government. The principles it stands for.
This is high school propaganda. It's classic "they hate us because of our freedom" nonsense.
What principles? America was established on white supremacy, slavery, genocide, religious intolerance and exploitation. The government we formed was by and for wealthy white slaveowners.
Do you know when the last slave ship survivor died? It was 1940. Slavery survived in practice well beyond Emancipation. Forced servitude existed up until 1941 [1] and that only happened because of the propaganda threat from World War 2.
You're right about the geographical "luck" (other than, you know, the whole genocide part of it).
> [China is] also handicapped by their ideology
No, they're not. The reason the US goes after communist and socialist governments so vehemently is because any success threatens capitalism, not the other way around. If these systems were all doomed to fail, why can't we simply serve as a good example? Why do we need to militarily intervene, overthrow governments and starve countries that dare do anything different? Don't you find that odd?
China has transformed itself over recent decades and brought ~800 million people out of extreme poverty in the last century. All while living conditions and infrastructure crumbles in the West.
> One of the admirals in the Pacific said something along the lines of (paraphrasing), "China is complaining that we're trying to contain them. My question to them would be, 'well, do you need to be contained?'"
I don't know what point you think you're making with this. It can just as easily be used to justify imperialism because "we don't like anyone else succeeding". What kind of argument is that? If anyone needs to be contained, it's the US military, actually.
> China is now communist.
This isn't really true in practice. Sure it's the Chinese Communist Party and you may see labels like "socialist/communist transitional state" but what China really is is a command economy [2]. Chinese people have seen their standard of living change massively in their lifetimes. What do we do? Further concentrate wealth in the hands of the 10,000 richest people because it matters that Jeff Bezos has $210 billion instead of $200 billion.
> If you look back at World War 2, it was in large part caused by communism.
This is hitorically revisionist nonsense. Communism (if you define the USSR as such) saved Europe by defeating Nazi Germany at terrible cost. Stalin tried to warn Britain and France about Hitler and form an anti-Hitler alliance. Britain and France refused.. Japan was imperialist. Germany was imperialist. WW2 started at near the peak of the British Empire. Communism didn't cause the Rape of Nanking or the Holocaust or Japanese internment in the US.
For the rest of it, all I can say is "read a book".
You're making a lot of weak arguments that aren't based in real historical context.
Xi Jinping absolutely believes in Marxism-Leninism. You could argue there were reformers in past decades that held sway, but he doesn't want to see himself get replaced with a reformer.
There has never been a communist state, when we talk about communists we talk about movements that aspire to communism. Maybe the old CCP operated things more like a command economy, but today's China is more like planned mercantilism, which is a weaker regression from "capitalism" which is itself an inaccurate Marxist caricature of how regulated free markets actually work. The CCP leadership are very firmly Marxist-Leninist.
Industrialization amplified power potentials of trade and production, which did leave Japan and Germany operating below their potentials, but communism threatened them both. Look at the first actions Japan took and who made those decisions and what they were concerned about. Look at the first actions the nazis took in Germany, look at who they allied with Japan against, look at the book Hitler wrote about the threat he saw, look at who he labeled and what he did with them.
Russia is the largest country on Earth, by accident? No, because it expands its empire. China is huge, because it's never expanded its empire, it was just born that way? No, it has taken over adjacent regions and expanded its culture. It even tried to expand into Russia, but Russia threatened to nuke them.
Italian fascists and German nazis were a direct reaction to communists psychological imperialism. Marxist global expansion is itself a contradiction, because they hate imperialism, and yet aim to achieve the same goals. Communist International in the USSR was a prime enemy that Japan and Germany allied against. The US got Stalin to dissolve Comintern to try to deflate German and Japanese motivations, but also because the US was very anti-communist. We just saw Germany and Japan as the more immediate threats to the world.
Russia couldn't have beaten Germany without aid being shipped in from the US constantly.
What the US sees right now is the threat of another world war caused by communism.
Personally, looking at the kind of things you write, I think you should step way back, forget everything you've been taught and instead focus on the fundamentals. Go back into history and just understand the basic behaviors of countries, like they are organisms. How trade, industry, economy, military, geography, psychology, culture, communication, transportation, demographics, power imbalances, etc all contribute to the various behaviors and outcomes. Then you can say, ok, there are all of these details, but how many of the details are just....details and not the trend?
The threat that China poses is unmistakable. They have the warped ideology, societal repression, information control, massive state propaganda, most rapid military build-up in history, they have the largest global network of spies in history, they're threatening almost all of their neighbors (not just Taiwan) and so on. The list just keeps going.
If you think the US should simply sit back and watch it unfold without pushing back at all...yeah, we're not that naive.
> Xi Jinping absolutely believes in Marxism-Leninism.
Good. It also doesn't make China Communist, let alone establish that "Communism = bad" as you assert.
> ... which did leave Japan and Germany operating below their potentials, but communism threatened them bot
Are you really saying that Japan and Germany had to do Imperialism and the Holocaust because there was a Communist movement in their countries? Really? That's one of the silliest things I've ever read.
> Italian fascists and German nazis were a direct reaction to communists psychological imperialism.
Fascism is capitalism in crisis. Fascism and imperialism are the ultimate forms of capitalism. "The threat of a more equitable distribution of wealth made us kill millions" is the biggest pro-capitalist cope.
> What the US sees right now is the threat of another world war caused by communism.
Most (if not all) wars since 1945 were instigated by or materially supplied by the US. Saddam Hussein was our puppet until he wasn't. We even looked past him using chemical weapons on Kurds and feigned indignation only when he turned on us. Weird. We them fueled the Iran-Iraq war for 10 years killing more than a million. We then starved the Iraqis for a decade before killing millions more of them in the so-called "War on Terror" when Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11 all while ignoring Saudi Arabia who materially supported 9/11. We even covered for the Saudi involvement.
The world would be a demonstrably better place without the US.
> The list just keeps going.
I once heard a quote that the only thing Americans know about is WW2 and they don't know much about that. You're making that point. Repression? You mean like locking up and deporting them for saying "Free Palestine"? Oh wait, that's us.
History will judge the US as the Evil Empire, with or without your DARVO.
You're ignoring things I already stated, such as communism is an aspiration. So of course China is not realized communism, because communism has never been realized at the national scale. The people in charge however, are absolutely communists.
Do you know why Hitler blamed the Jewish people and had them separated out? He blamed the Jewish Bolshevik revolutions in Germany for causing Germany to lose World War 1. Hitler's actual belief was that Bolshevism was a Jewish mechanism to achieve global control. Bolshevism is born out of Marxism and is essentially communist. The "headquarters" of communism was Comintern in Russia. Many of the leaders of the Bolshevist movement in Russia and elsewhere were Jewish. Marxism also comes from Karl Marx, who was Jewish.
This is why he put Jewish people in concentration camps, because he believed with conviction that they were a threat to German sovereignty. This is also why he planned from the very beginning to attack Russia, even while temporarily allying with them. Japan also saw Marxist revolution inside China as a threat to its sovereignty, but it ended up fighting both the communists and the anti-communists.
Obviously many atrocities were committed in these wars. We are lucky that the US saved Russia and China, because they are much weaker adversaries than an expansive Germany or Japan had they conquered their respective regions.
We didn't start World War 1, but we helped finish it. We didn't start World War 2, but we helped finish it. We didn't start the Korean war, the communists did backed by Russia. We didn't start the Vietnam war, but it probably started similarly.
We didn't put Saddam Hussein in power and he was never our puppet, but Iran was a much greater threat than Iraq was and that's why we provided him weapons when he was fighting Iran. Saddam Hussein was afraid of the Islamic revolution and saw it as an existential threat. There were border fights even beforehand. Saudi Arabia also saw the Islamic revolution in Iran as essentially the next Hitler. The reason that war started, was because Iran was trying to export its Islamic Revolution into Iraq, which is the same thing it's been doing again in recent years. Yes, Saddam eventually became a problem for us, but it's more nuanced than you present it.
There are a lot of details around 9/11, Iraq and Afghanistan that maybe you aren't aware of, but I don't feel like going into them at present.
Both Marxist movements and Islamic movements have these kinds of extreme radical qualities about them that countries feel the need to defend against. When a country has any sort of power, it gains some capacity to export its way of thinking through investing people, funding and even hardware into that goal.
China is simultaneously threatening to export its ideology in psychological warfare and expand militarily.
I guess you'll never believe any of this, anything else I say or research any of this objectively to decide if it has merit. I can't fix that, that's up to you.
> Do you know why Hitler blamed the Jewish people and had them separated out?
Yes, Hitler did blood libel [1], a tradition continued by Donald Trump [2].
> He blamed the Jewish Bolshevik revolutions in Germany for causing Germany to lose World War 1
Are you arguing Hitler was right? Or that it was a useful tool and a lie? Because you've blamed the Communists for WW2. Multiple times. This makes me think you've been hiding your power level and I'm usually pretty good at spotting that. I should've recognized it from blaming the Communism. It's specifically "cultural Bolshevism" [3]. That too has been recycled today as "cultural Marxism" [4]
> Bolshevism is born out of Marxism and is essentially communist. The "headquarters" of communism was Comintern in Russia. Many of the leaders of the Bolshevist movement in Russia and elsewhere were Jewish. Marxism also comes from Karl Marx, who was Jewish.
I get it now [5].
> We didn't put Saddam Hussein in power and he was never our puppet,
He was our foil against Iran. We gave him weapons to fuel the death count of the Iraq-Iran war. We didn't care when he used nerve gas on the Kurds. All of that is established historical fact.
> I guess you'll never believe any of this
No, I don't buy into neo-Nazi conspiracy theories. You are correct.
Racism was clearly an important aspect of Hitler's motivations and there is an important reason why. The reason racism is important, is because of communism. It would be outrageous to simply discard communism as if it was irrelevant, when these revolutions necessarily inflame these qualities in a society.
Communist revolution was not simply some kind of economic restructuring demand from workers. It is about eradicating religion and revolutionizing culture which in old countries is often tied to the culture of a genetic line of people. That is how inflammatory these Marxist revolutions are, that they bring rise to voices who want to reinvigorate a race and defend religion.
Marxist movements tend to redefine multiple angles of a people's identity. That's why there were also many similarities in Japan's fight against communism and its racial attributes. That's why you also see racial and religious qualities in the US rejection of Marxist tampering in culture today, though they are vastly overstated. Basically information moves so fast now, it's easier for people to see how dumb Marxism is if they weren't indoctrinated young, so plenty of reasonable people reject it without needing religious or racial angles fueling it. Despite that, it still spreads.
I do blame communists for World War 2, in combination with the power imbalances and massive opportunities that industrialization surfaced. Germany and Japan both believed they had larger potential in that environment, but communism gave them the legitimate enemy they needed to justify expanding. Essentially, global communism is about controlling all the resources and leveraging them, so any country that wants to survive outside of communism has to race for resources.
This isn't a neo-Nazi conspiracy theory, it's just history. It's a matter of history that there was an intention to expand communism globally. Look up Comintern if you've never heard of it, which advocated for world communism.
So, you think China is building the largest military in history because of "communism". Do you recognize Chinese people as warriors? Can you remember any pro-war Chinese folklore? Communism is a relatively new flavor in their culture.
And what exactly do you think China can't reproduce in 100 years?
I'm not necessarily saying that, only that it's not an unreasonable concern given the history. Venezuela (a communist country) with Chinese ties, was going to invade Guyana before we captured Maduro. Cambodia, a country with communist remnants and Chinese ties was attacking Thailand. China has a long-standing threat to take Taiwan. It already took Tibet and helped try to take communist control of Korea.
Do you think if you were Japan, South Korea or any of those other countries, you would be sitting comfy on the belief that China has good intentions for them?
So, no, I am not _certain_ that is what China is doing with its military build up. Only that, I see it as a possibility that we can't sleep on.
Your argument about whether Chinese people are pro war isn't as relevant in a country like China as it might be in some democracy, but even in democracies war still occurs even if the population is anti-war. In China, it's just even less relevant, because they have strict social control. You could say the relevance has other angles, like more of the population has to be dedicated to enforcement and repression which takes some of that capacity away from military duties.
China can definitely reproduce a lot of technologies, but if they confirm again that they are a critical threat then there is a lot more we can do to slow their progress if necessary.
Religion and race are absolutely useless gobshite whose only physically observed function is making people kill each other, coming from this throughly capitalist person.
It's funny you say Marxism is something thats hard to imbibe unless indoctrinated from childhood, why did you leave out religion from this, marxism is merely a faulty economic system. Religion is a fundamentally wrong and violently wrong system thst encompasses the entire universe. Religion is precisely what is the first and most fundamental thing that comes to mind ehich absolutely requires brainwashing from childhood to consistently propagate.
Think of it in evolutionary terms. There is physical evolution, but there's also mental evolution, moral evolution, legal evolution and so on.
We also see education as being useful, yet education seems to not teach many critical things which we often leave up to parents. Yet, many parents do not fully teach essential morals or lessons. It wasn't that long ago that the only real kind of formal education was a sort of religious education.
Religion in a way, carries forward crystallized values that people felt were important enough. You can look at all the religions around the world and identify the various elements of how those people behave. Is the way they behave useful, logically?
Not everyone is a scientist or a computer programmer, many people do not invest heavily in their minds. We might think that religion only served a purpose 500+ years ago, because it was an inverted solution to a surveillance state, letting people police themselves from within their own minds when external surveillance apparatus was basically not sufficiently viable.
I would argue some, but not all religions, still offer value as they bring forward crystallized behaviors that serve an actual purpose.
We've all seen how easy it is for people to get manipulated, become violent, etc. That seems to happen even if they aren't religious. So, if the people who are most susceptible to manipulations are pre-manipulated into a positive format that encourages them away from violence, that doesn't sound useless.
It's true that religion has been involved in many wars, but not all of those wars were for religious ends, even if religion was used. If religion wasn't used, it might have been something else. Societal structures and law enforcement have advanced a lot since then.
No, stop trying to pull out of your bs. You said communism is something that can only exist if indoctrinated into in childhood, in a comment where you whined about religions feeling "threatened" while pointedly ignoring the elephant in the room. Just answer me a simple question in a Yes or a No. Does religion survive if it isn't indoctrinated into as a kid?
Why not, if religion wasn't available, we'd wrest one major weapon away from warmongers. They will have to search much harder to galvanize large groups of people to fight for nonsense reasons over. If they didn't have this strong identity ready made on a platter to tap into, things become much harder.
Religion is simply not worth the baggage, it posits and requires faith in the infinitely wrong. Values can be taught without religion, you don't need to be a scientist to have values. Everyone has values including atheists. I see no reason why we can't simply teach values minus religion. I don't see atheists who believe in the American constitution as a good system have by virtue of atheism any less support for it, as an example. For the tiny amount of good you may find religions have provided, on the scale of balance the bloodshed and negativity it has caused are simple far worse and not worth it. And even if you think in terms of some values religions might impart, its also again counterproductive. Almost all religions are very karen and nosy often violently so about lgbtq, so much for the values side of the equation. If a religion might be good for values, such a religion at least hasn't yet emerged.
Personally, I think you're lost in the very kind of generalizations and lack of precision that you seem to hate. You're becoming what you complain against. If you think people living that way is something to be eradicated, which you seem to, why have you become it in your own way? Is it because you're human and just as susceptible to these mistakes as anyone else?
Where did I say anything about eradication? I asked you an extremely simple question. Do you think religion survives without being indoctrinated into during childhood? Yes or No? You mentioned religion a lot and said communism doesn't survive if it hasn't been indoctrinated into, which may be correct but you ignored the elephant in the room right then and there in your own message: religion. I am not asking if you think religion is good or not. I asked a very simple question, does it survive without childhood indoctrination or does it not?
You are also making up crap about wanting "eradication" which I never wrote or said about. I simply stated facts about the vast ills religion has given us and very little to almost non-existent good. I showed you how religion is unrelated at best and an active hindrance to capitalism.
>Essentially, global communism is about controlling all the resources and leveraging them, so any country that wants to survive outside of communism has to race for resources.
I hate communism but why faslely single it out, global any group or system will want to control resources as much as possible. You seem extremely stupid to the point of believing nazism was about opposing communism fundamentally rather than antisemitism and racialism.
Again as an avowed capitalist, race is the opposite of good capitalism. I will gladly trade with anyone of any race.
Well, first you'd have to make a decent argument for why it shouldn't be singled out. You're having an immediate rejection of the idea, but why? Have you been configured to feel that?
I'm not arguing that racist motivations and beliefs didn't already exist, but the Bolsheviks were a very real cultural, economic and religious existential threat to German identity which massively amplified the validity and appeal of something like the Nazi party.
Are you arguing that's not true at all? I think that would be ahistorical.
Why would I be configured for anything, its common sense, any large powerful entity will be the same. If you think only communism attempts to control the world why is America playing oil games by invading venezuela?
It may have been a religious threat but that is not an existential threat. What do you think happens if suppose most Germans stopped believing in those fairy tales? Do they combust and die? Capitalism literally has no use for religion and nationalism. They are completely out of scope of capitalism, it is at best neutral about them, and in practice religion and nationalism are a hindrance to practicing free trade.
Of course nazis hated commies just as nazis hated any other alternative source of power, but that was hardly their main animating reason for the genocides. I don't need any "brainwashing" to know what nazis openly and proudly said about Jews and Slavs. Or what are you going to say, Poles were also "commies" which is why Germany attacked them? I think the nazi motivation part of your shtick is so beyond mentally ill it's not even worth bothering with.
I think you're a little too emotionally invested and it's preventing you from making a coherent argument.
Even if I explained the actual reasons for Venezuela, it doesn't seem like you legitimately want to know. You can be addicted to curiosity or you can be addicted to opinion, but it's hard to be both.
No you haven't explained shit for Venezuela. If you did you forgot to reply it to me, I see you have written it to someone else. There is nothing emotional about the simple fact that you are positing some utterly brain dead moronic crap out of your ass that basically goes against what nazis themselves proudly proclaimed and then whining and claiming "incoherence" instead of responding to any point.
Again its completely fucking irrelevant if you think its for a good cause or bad cause, you simply said communism wants to hoard and control everything for itself starving others.
We all know the real reason Venezuela was attacked for. Capitalism, communism it does not matter what system, anything powerful enough will want to control all resources for itself. I hate communism, I hate nazism but you give the stupidest non-reasons against it factors which are shared in any powerful system and not unique to it.
I'm not the person you're responding to, but there are some counterpoints to your arguments.
China's stockpile of oil is only enough for a few months and that is only assuming that nothing happens to the stockpiles or the ability to access them. China does have a lot of renewable energy infrastructure, but these numbers don't convert directly into oil not being important. Oil is still very important. Their military runs on oil and for many kinds of products oil has no alternative. A lot of their population still uses ICE cars. You can put a percentage on it, like they are 60% less reliant on oil, but these numbers are useless if they still fundamentally rely on it in critically important ways. Which, they do.
Russian oil infrastructure has been under attack, which shows China that their oil imports from Russia are not guaranteed and their own infrastructure can be reached. Being at Venezuela and Iran's doorstep also shows that oil imports from them are not guaranteed.
As far as Iran goes, they can harass, but they can also lose all of their income and imports. While Iran and Russia are being scaled down, more western energy infrastructure can be coming online to replace it over the coming years even if this current situation gets resolved soon. Iran is being boxed in militarily, politically, economically, and more. They can troll, but even their trolling options are being slowly reduced. Their long range missiles can only achieve those ranges by removing the warhead and adding extra fuel. They are incapable of defending the island that most of their income flows through.
Speaking of islands. Xi Jinping absolutely wants to take Taiwan and he's been purging his military just like Stalin did before he invaded Poland and Finland. They've been building out manmade islands and military bases in the sea to increase their claim and threaten anyone who would intervene.
There is also a very big difference between political or token recognition of Taiwan as part of China as a cost of doing business vs real belief. The CCP sees Taiwan as a threat to harmony, because it serves as an example of democracy which China will always be a poor example of. If the CCP falls, Taiwan might be able to serve as a new center of gravity, which was also a credible threat from Hong Kong. That is the flip side of the "One China" policy, where it's only good for them so long as the CCP survives. Even without that, travel and communications between them increases interest in a true democracy that gets compared every time the CCP fails at something. COVID, property investment, unemployment, you name it. Ukraine was a similar issue with Russia, partly because they see Russian language and culture as an encapsulation that their mechanisms of control need to dominate within.
Taiwan is in very close proximity, so even if there is a lot of leverage against China from all angles, if they put everything into it they would probably be able to do it at great cost. They don't have the capability matrix to sufficiently achieve a Venezuela. If they tried that right now, it would just start a new 100 years of humiliation if the clock didn't already start the day Xi Jinping got in.
> China's stockpile of oil is only enough for a few months
China is still getting oil from Iran. Maybe that'll change but there's still (IIRC) >100M barrels of oil in transit to China.
Aside from that, the point isn't to have indefinite supplies. It's to have supplies the last longer than other countries. This is going to create huge problems for the US beofre it creates huge problems for China.
> Russian oil infrastructure has been under attack
This is a delicate balance. Ukraine can only do so much against Russian energy infrastructure before the US and Europe, who supplies the military, reins it in because of the damage done to the global energy market. This included restricting the supply and use of long-range weapons that could be used to strike energy infrastructure deep in Russia.
Like, did you know that some countries (eg Hungary) are still buying oil and gas from Russia [1]?
> As far as Iran goes, they can harass, but they can also lose all of their income and imports
Iran can do more than harass. They're winning. There is no military path to victory for the US and Israel short of the wide-scale use of nuclear weapons.
> ... more western energy infrastructure can be coming online to replace it over the coming years even if this current situation gets resolved soon
This is just wrong. No Western infrastructure can replace 20Mbpd of crude oil production and losing 20-25% of the world's LNG supply. None. You're talking about investment in the trillions of dollars over a decade or two, assuming you can even find raw resources to extract, whihc is far from certain.
> Speaking of islands. Xi Jinping absolutely wants to take Taiwan
Sorry but no. China considers this its territorial waters. And yes I know some of these "islands" (some are just reefs, basically, that they build artificial islands on) are closer to Taiwan or the Phillipines. China considers Taiwan part of its territory so that's no issue for them. Most of the world agrees (ie only ~10 nations recognize Taiwan).
China doesn't want the US or its allies to militarize "islands" right off its coast. Can you blame them?
> The CCP sees Taiwan as a threat to harmony, because it serves as an example of democracy
This is just "they hate us for our freedom" type Ameribrainned propaganda. China does more for its people than the US does. China pulled ~800 million people out of extreme poverty. The truth is that the Chinese government is quite popular with Chinese people. How do Chinese people talk about the US? One good recent example is the "kill line" [2].
Westoids project Western imperialism on China when China has no modern history of doing imperialism. "But Tibet" is the usual rejoinder. That was 1950. Other than that? There was a dispute with Vietnam over like 50 square miles in the late 1970s. And that's it. You want to compare that to the US history with regime change [3]?
Taiwan just isn't the threat to China Westerners make it out to be. We make it out as a threat because it justifies American imperialism. It's the result of propaganda. China believes that the Taiwan question will ultimately be resolved peacefully and there's absolutely no reason to resolve it militarily.
This is a difference of time frames. Every problem we have is immediate requiring a kneejerk reaction. China operates on five year plans but more than that, China plans far mor ein the future than that.
China is only still getting oil from Iran, because we allow it. China knows that. Venezuela and Iran partially tells China, the US does have influence over your oil shipments and you can't sanction proof your oil supply chain. Stopping China's oil shipments right now would just make oil prices go even higher, but we definitely could stop them.
As for Russia, yes there is still some European reliance on Russian oil/gas, but that isn't the only issue as there can also be concern over civilian casualties inside Russia with a complete collapse of oil infrastructure which could hurt some aspects of public support for Ukraine inside Russia and in the rest of the world.
Iran doesn't produce anywhere near 20 million barrels of oil per day, and only a tiny fraction of the 30% of LNG supply is disrupted, which will be coming back online within 3 years. You could argue that Iran might expand its attacks on all the infrastructure in the region to try to take more production offline, but their capacity to do that is shrinking every single day. Even if they did manage it, that would basically greenlight a multi-national ground invasion to end their regime for all time. So just like your arguments about the limitations Ukraine faces in taking out Russian infrastructure, even though Iran is a terrorist state and demonstrating how their terrorism operates, they are still fundamentally limited in what they can do without destroying themselves.
When it comes to China and Taiwan, you need to better appreciate that China has had a standing policy to take Taiwan by force if Taiwan sees itself as independent. Increasingly the Taiwanese population do see themselves as independent and they are arming themselves for defense.
China did not magically bring its population out of poverty, the US did that, by opening up to them and allowing them into the WTC (which they then abused). We thought it might liberalize their economy, which might liberalize their politics, which would pave the way for democratic reform. It didn't happen, but that was part of the plan. The other part of the plan was to increase the dependency of China on western supply chains, because this was part of the logic to stop world wars by making everyone interdependent on each other.
Communism is freaking awful, because it is never achieved and always seems to stagnate into a permanent state of dictatorship. It then sucks enough that it cannot maintain itself naturally, so it has to repress its population and heavily control information to simply prevent crumbling. The logic is not self-reinforcing. Therefore, it absolutely, critically is a threat to freedom around the world.
Technology advancement and resource access accelerates with global trade, so if one country goes rogue, that supply chain can be cut off reducing their incentive for war. China now sees that it continues to have many critical dependencies and its current potential is only achieved as part of a global trade network. Their sanction proofing will never be complete. The concern is that they may not care that they're at a disadvantage and do what they want anyway.
USD dominance isn't going anywhere, because all of the critical metrics are still basically uncontested by any alternative. China and Russia are losing allies left and right. They're demonstrating that they support terrorism. Nobody is going to decide that their currencies are the new hot thing.
China poses a huge threat, but some of their worst advantages aren't viable. We know things they have, so we tell them things we have. If you do X, we do Y. Thus some of their big advantages are nullified, unless they get reckless. Same as the nuclear issue, weapons you've invested in yet cannot even use, because they become part of new rules.
Some of that has been clarified in the trade tug of war, showing each other's dependencies. Some is being shown by also showing how easy it is for Russian infrastructure to be hit, or how easy it is to put a choke hold on critical energy, or to simply capture a dictator for that matter. It isn't even just those things, it's also the cadence and timeframe. Venezuela, Cuba, Iran and Russia all under severe pressure within just a few months at the start of 2026.
At most we've maybe seen some limited sabotage of infrastructure inside the US and perhaps aboard a carrier, some sharing of targeting information, etc.
If Russia and China are leveraging any of their real potential for pressure, it sure is hard to tell.
I mean, Gold is an asset. Bitcoin is an asset. Those aren't currencies, even if people like to think of them that way.
As far as the Euro, Europe is not America. The European Union is also not the United States. America has geographic advantages that Europe lacks. The US has structural stability advantages that the EU lacks. People sometimes argue things like, the EU is more of a framework or general agreement, while the US is an actual country.
The amount of USD in circulation dwarfs all other currencies and makes it more cushioned against shocks. It's much more liquid than gold or bitcoin. If you need to get actual things done in the real world and you need to get them done quickly, USD is the currency you want to generally have.
It's also the least likely to simply poof or disappear. China is the only real threat the US has faced since World War 2 and we're handling it pre-emptively. You could argue we were pre-empting the CCP even before World War 2, since we were supporting the anti-communist forces inside China before Japan attacked it and unified them against it.
The outcome of a lot of wars comes down to physics. The physics are on the side of the US. USD isn't going anywhere. Iranian and Venezuelan oil will be traded in USD now as well.
the reason your encouraged approach tends to produce poor results, is that you increase the distance between the decisions that need to be made and the people who understand how to make the decision or whether a decision is even valuable to make.
it is basically an unsustainable structure. there's not much value to replacing one structure which you might think is unsustainable with something equally or less sustainable that also produces worse results anyway.
another issue is that it can dilute responsibility and someone will take more assertive control anyway which further reduces the quality of decision making. someone still has to enact and enforce the decisions, so whoever does the enacting has to obey and whoever does the enforcing has to enforce the right thing. it's easy to end up with a bunch of people influencing things for their own reasons which have nothing to do with maximizing the production of good results.
This feels like the 2026 version of "blog". A thing that didn't need a name and the name it now has contains "out of touch" qualities to it, but it spread easier under a name that got popularized so it wins out in evolutionary terms?
Unlike blog though, claw is camping on an existing word and it won't surprise me if people settle on some other word once a more popular, professional and security conscious variant exists.
I don't think operating through messaging services will be considered anything unique, since we've been doing that for over 30 years. The mobile dimension doesn't change this much, except for the difference between always connected and push notifications along with voice convenience being a given. Not using MCP was expected, because even in my personal experiments it was very natural to never adopt MCP. It's true that there are some qualities MCP has that can be useful, but it's extra work and friction that doesn't always pay off.
Total access + mobile messaging + real productivity is naturally addictive, and maybe it's logical that the lazy path to this is the first to become popularized, because the harder problems around it are simply ignored.
I do consider it unique to interface with your home lab server or personal vps through a messaging. The first time I did a version of that, I was completely blown away by that concept. I guess I just never thought about being able to talk to my computer in English via chat.
If we're talking strictly a messaging app, like ICQ, AIM, etc you could argue it's mildly different, but people have communicated with and orchestrated machines over IRC for a very long time which is where I'm coming from with it.
It is fun and feels new the first time you do it, but that aspect of it is not particularly new to computing. Back then of course, you'd interface with some flat text file database, directories, run commands or use raw sockets to scrape some website to get a result. APIs weren't a thing as much as you'd just try to replicate the queries to submit webpage forms.
You could have a music server in another room and send a message to pick the next song or open the CD drive on some machine halfway around the world. You could write new scripts that operate on a daily schedule and have them running on machines around the world. Many home computers were totally compromised back then too, so almost anything that was connected to IRC was a potential orchestration node.
Having an LLM make decisions about what to do with the machine is a natural evolution of that and not a hard thing to hack on if you have the right model, although it makes totally compromised the new default again.
1. Find out what Co-pilot's reputation is among power users.
2. Realize that Co-pilot is bad and needs to improve up to Microsoft's highest gold standards of trustworthiness.
3. Ditch Co-pilot branding inside the OS.
4. Make AI features private and offline by default unless the local hardware cannot run the specialized tiny model for that task, at which point it goes online for it. It might be slower, but if it does the thing, it's ok.
5. Allow companies and power users to provide their own local models that hook into these tasks, so they can host AI servers within the company and these AI tasks never reach outside of the company.
6. Make AI features more specific, targeted and useful instead of simply integrating it into the various functions and throwing it at users like "here, you figure out what to do with this thing, we don't know."
7. Don't expect people to want to chat with it in every app, just find a task that you know it succeeds at and expose that task rather than letting users figure out what it sucks at.
8. Don't make the AI integration APIs a case of increased surface area privacy and security risk that 3rd party system apps can hook into, to mass extract information out of every app on your system easily. Put limitations on it.
9. Add features to specify where AI can go and cannot go, just like the microphone. Folders, apps, online services. Even if it does use Co-pilot online, let users sculpt it.
10. Make it explicit and obvious when AI features are operating offline or online. If users have decades of understanding that Notepad is a private offline app, preserve that expectation as much as possible. Just because Outlook and OneNote are very online-oriented apps, it doesn't mean they want their local experience to be online in every way. If you force AI to go over all my cloud files, notes and e-mail without my permission, that is sociopathic behavior and I will ditch you, Microsoft.
Some day Co-pilot will probably be good. That isn't today. It's probably not this year or next year, but eventually. Until then, it needs to stay in a lane with freshly painted lines surrounded with sand barrels in case it wrecks.
It's not that I'm entirely opposed to some Microsoft AI feature existing in Windows, but manufacturing a user assumption that it is everywhere all the time is bad not just for Windows, but for society as a whole.
We've already seen how political and activist the public sphere became over the last decade, which reduces trust in the people who make software and services too. What do we do when Microsoft gets ideologically taken over and abuses its information access to people for political ends?
Show you can be trusted. When I put a little food bowl down for you, don't scratch me and we'll go from there.
It's not illegal to track law enforcement, but if any of their still visible chats show intent it will hurt them. They'll also want to find out how many people in the group chat are outside of the US, if any money was being exchanged, etc.
Hopefully they can unwind these groups, because it's just pitting people against law enforcement who have no idea what they're up against. They don't seem to have a sense for when they have gone beyond protesting and have broken the law. There's this culture about them, like protesting means they are immune to law.
If this all ties back to funded groups who are then misinforming these people about how they should behave to increase the chance of escalatory events with the knowledge that it will increase the chance of these inflammatory political highlights to maximize rage, it won't surprise me.
If they want to follow ICE around and protest them, fine, but that's not what they're doing. These people are standing or parking their cars in front of their vehicles and blocking them. They'll also stand in front of the street exits to prevents their vehicles from leaving parking lots and so on. They refuse to move, so they have to be removed by force, because they are breaking the law. Some people are just trying to get arrested to waste ICE's time, and it's particularly bad because Minneapolis police won't help ICE.
A lot of video recordings don't even start until AFTER they've already broken the law, so all you end up seeing is ICE reacting.
Any time someone dies, there'll have to be an investigation to sort out what happened. Maybe the ICE officer made a mistake, but let the evidence be presented. Being that this is Minneapolis, hopefully they do a better job than the George Floyd case. I absolutely recommend you watch the entire Fall of Minneapolis documentary to get a better sense for what the country may be increasingly up against in multiple states: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eFPi3EigjFA
> because it's just pitting people against law enforcement who have no idea what they're up against.
i think people know exactly what theyre up against: a lawless executive, many members of which have never had to work in places where they are held accountable to the constitution before.
its more important for the government to follow the constitution than for citizens to follow the law. if the government isnt following the law, there is no law
If you're talking about the Trump administration, they're surrounded by lawyers and constantly battling things up to supreme court decisions, which is not what lawless looks like. ICE is also enforcing existing laws that simply haven't been enforced in recent years. Whatever you think about those laws, they are the laws. Many people agree those laws need to be reformed, but elect people who are willing to change the laws. Unfortunately congress has trouble passing laws around some of these more controversial issues, so it'll probably stay this way for many more decades.
And you have it completely upside down. The federal government serves the people, the people do not serve the feds. If, while attempting to enforce federal law through ICE, the feds break the Bill of Rights, they are doing more harm than good. We can live with a few illegals. We cannot leave the house if we expect to be murdered in cold blood on the street by the federal government. The instigating event of the American Revolution was the Boston Massacre, where protesters were shot and killed by British soldiers. Sound familiar?
The people voted for mass deportation of the tens of millions of illegals that were let into the country and lawlessly given "sanctuary." The federal government is attempting to enforce the laws on the books, laws that were voted into statute by the democratically elected representatives of the people. No one is going to be murdered in cold blood on the street simply for leaving the house, but they could be if they brandish a weapon while seeking out officers and attempting to prevent them from enforcing the law.
So 2nd amendment yeah? I have a license to concealed carry in PA. You are saying I should be murdered in cold blood on the street? Again, this is PRECISELY what the bill of rights and our constitution is all about. Have you read Common Sense? Please try to get through it. It explains many things but chief among them is that the government exists only to ensure the maximum freedom of the people from fear. "Everyone shall sit under their own vine and fig tree and no one shall make them afraid". That is what America is all about. If someone comes into my city to evict violent illegals, yes, I voted for that, and would again. If someone comes in to my city to a) Evict legal immigrants of color, b) Take children away from parents c) Murder good citizens in cold blood, e) Punish political enemies, or f) attack, beat, and tear gas nonviolent protesters? Well as an actual American who believes in and understands the US Constitution, I will be right there, next to those protesters, and looking to abolish and defund whatever godless and ethic-free agency is purporting to carry out the will of the People.
An American VA Hospital ICU Nurse was disarmed and executed. Which crime is it OK to be chemically and physically assaulted before being disarmed and shot dead?
As far as I understand it, he laid hands on the officer, then struggled against arrest. He had a gun on him, which is not in itself a problem, but he had already broken the law 3 times by this point and the fact he had a gun on him instantly escalates the potential threat. They don't know if he has multiple guns on him or just the one. Supposedly one of the videos shows him reaching for some black object. I don't know.
He wasn't killed for owning a gun or carrying a gun.
He wasn't killed for laying hands on the officer.
He wasn't killed for resisting arrest.
It was likely the entire combination of things that caused him to demonstrate he was a credible threat to their lives and reaching for an object. No matter what you think, Alex made a whole string of mistakes. The officer may have also made mistakes. With any luck investigation will reveal more details.
I'm not predisposed to assuming that Alex is innocent and the officer is guilty, because there is a lot of activist pressure to push exactly that perspective. I prefer to preserve the capacity to make up my own mind.
I have seen the videos. He was already on the ground, fixated by several ICE agents, when he was shot 10(!) times. That was after he had been peppersprayed and beaten to the head. At no point did he actually draw or reach for his gun. There was absolutely no reason to shoot him.
> With any luck investigation will reveal more details.
Kristi Noem said: "This looks like a situation where an individual arrived at the scene to inflict maximum damage on individuals and kill law enforcement." She even went so far as calling this an act of "domestic terrorism". At this point, do you seriously believe there will be a neutral investigation?
Being on the ground doesn't remove any potential that he could be dangerous.
I don't know why he was being beaten on the ground, that seemed a little excessive. Not sure how many times he was shot, but generally if law enforcement ever makes the determination to shoot they do it to shoot to kill.
They knew he had 1 gun, so he could have 2 guns. The officers don't see the angle most of the camera angles see. They see the perspective they see, from themselves. That is the perspective that will matter by law. What situation were they in and what did they see when they made their decision?
You have the luxury of seeing a perspective the officer did not see, and the officer has the luxury of seeing a perspective you did not see.
People who are in favor of throwing the officer's life away without knowing all of the details are doing basically doing exactly what they're accusing the officer of in suggesting that he threw away this person's life without knowing all the information.
I don't know what Kristi Noem is on about, but she's a political appointee and not an investigator.
> Being on the ground doesn't remove any potential that he could be dangerous.
When the shots were fired, he was restrained by several agents and did not pose any immediate threat.
> Not sure how many times he was shot
It was ten shots, fired by two agents. That is a lot of shots.
Yes, the shooting itself was very likely an accident by grossly incompetent agents. (You can hear an agent shout the word "gun", which probably triggered the other agents to immediately start firing.)
However, it was the ICE agents who started the very situation that led to this tragedy: One agent violently pushed a women from behind. Why? Alex tried to help her and he immediately got peppersprayed in the face. Why? Then he was wrestled to the ground. Why? Then he was beaten to the head. Why?
All these actions are already outrageous in themselves. It is worrying how police brutality has been normalized in the US.
It is pretty rich to blame Alex when it was really the ICE agents who started this whole mess!
In fact, the videos are so damning that even Stephen Miller had to backpedal and admit that these agents "may not have been following proper protocol".
> I don't know what Kristi Noem is on about, but she's a political appointee and not an investigator.
What confidence do you have in DHS to lead an independent investigation of their own people?
It's not clear from any of the videos that he did not pose any immediate threat, even though people keep saying that. Saying it doesn't make it true. Even if your honest perspective is that this is the case from the camera angles you've seen, that isn't necessarily what the officers see. What the officers see matters in cases like this. They can only make decisions based on the information they have.
It may very well be an accident, miscommunication, or people even misinterpreting some of the things shown in the video. We'll find out eventually.
It could be argued that both the activists and the officers contributed to the situation getting to where it was. The activists shouldn't be following them around and harassing them, even if it is legal to do so up to a limit. The officers should have kept their cool, even with the whistles. The activists shouldn't have broken the law, whether the officers broke their protocol first or not.
Do not harass anyone who has a gun if you aren't willing to accept the risk that it could escalate into you losing your life. If he went in knowing that risk and accepted it, then he went out doing what he believed in. If he was misinformed that he was entering a safe situation where his life wasn't at risk, then he was lied to.
It's not rich to blame Alex at all. That doesn't mean it's entirely his fault or that his own mistakes justify his death, only that if you're going to make a string of mistakes don't choose that moment to be when you are harassing people who have guns. If anything good comes from this being so public, it'll be that if people do choose to harass law enforcement at least they can learn to be safer about it.
These officers know that the second they kill someone they will be unmasked. They don't get to kill people and remain anonymous. Each officer has a gun assigned to them and they know which bullets came from what gun. Generally, if an officer kills someone, it's because they felt justified in making the decision. They'll have to sort out what that justification was, even if it involved a chain of mistakes by the officer or other officers that created a cascade.
> What confidence do you have in DHS to lead an independent investigation of their own people?
I do not have any particular positive or negative opinion about DHS or their capacity to investigate. It has to be better than the local justice system there.
What I do know based on past performance is that Minneapolis courts have severely underserved justice. I think JD Vance referred to them as kangaroo courts. Not sure if that's precise or accurate by whatever definition, but I would never trust their court system.
> It's not clear from any of the videos that he did not pose any immediate threat, even though people keep saying that.
So where do you see the potential threatening behavior? When the agent shoots Alex in the back, he is kneeling on the ground and being restrained by several agents. He has not acted in a threatening manner before the shooting nor did he physically attack the agents. The DHS report does not mention any threat either and they have already reviewed bodycam footage.
> Do not harass anyone who has a gun if you aren't willing to accept the risk that it could escalate into you losing your life.
As long as you're not attacking an officer/agent with a weapon, that risk should be very close to zero. Otherwise you're sending a very chill message to the general public.
> I do not have any particular positive or negative opinion about DHS
So you have no issues with the initial statements by Kristi Noem, Greg Bovino and Stephen Miller?
> So where do you see the potential threatening behavior?
If you are laying hands on officers, leaning your weight against them, not obeying their commands, asking them to assault you (verbally, potentially), resisting arrest and struggling on the ground, that string of behavior should concern anyone. Imagine you AREN'T a police officer and someone is behaving that way to you. Of course you'll be on guard more than if it was just someone walking down the sidewalk with their bag of groceries.
Being on the ground does not mean you can't be a threat. As far as an officer might know, he could have a second gun holstered under his jacket that he could reach for. When someone is that uncooperative, it is very reasonable to throw away assumptions that they aren't a threat to you.
Whether what the officers experienced justifies escalating to lethal force I don't know, but that is what they'll have to find out.
> As long as you're not attacking an officer/agent with a weapon, that risk should be very close to zero. Otherwise you're sending a very chill message to the general public.
So, if an officer hasn't been shot in the head first, they shouldn't react? Guns can come out quick and kill a person almost instantly. There's very little time to react. That is why officers request people to listen to what they say and respond reasonably so you don't put them in a situation where they miscalculate your threat level. This is true even if you're not dealing with an officer. Someone doesn't have to be a threat and they don't even have to have a weapon, but if you have sufficiently justifiable reason to believe based on their behavior and actions that they are posing an imminent threat to you or others, you can often justify shooting them. You don't have to like that, but if you ever do need to defend yourself, you would be glad the laws are like that. Otherwise people who defend themselves end up becoming a victim twice where they survive an attack and then end up in prison just for legitimately defending themselves.
> So you have no issues with the initial statements by Kristi Noem, Greg Bovino and Stephen Miller?
I don't really know what any of those people were saying, but whether they are right or wrong doesn't justify everyone else being wrong by making false claims. If you want to be better, then don't try to be better by becoming the very people you disagree with.
> Being on the ground does not mean you can't be a threat.
If someone is fixated on the ground, they are not a threat. Alex was fixated by three agents, with four more agents watching from close distance.
> As far as an officer might know, he could have a second gun holstered under his jacket that he could reach for.
He wouldn't even have been able to reach for a gun as his hands were fixated at this point. That's the very point of fixating someone!
> Someone doesn't have to be a threat and they don't even have to have a weapon, but if you have sufficiently justifiable reason to believe based on their behavior and actions that they are posing an imminent threat to you or others, you can often justify shooting them.
How can you be a posing an imminent threat if you're not behaving in a threating way? At no point did Alex actually try to attack an agent or make any verbal threats against their life.
> I don't really know what any of those people were saying
Sorry, I don't believe you. There's no way you could have followed this case without knowing about their statements. You are acting in very bad faith here.
> but whether they are right or wrong doesn't justify everyone else being wrong by making false claims.
If several high officials of an agency are spreading obvious lies, it very much hurts the credibility of that agency.
> If someone is fixated on the ground, they are not a threat. Alex was fixated by three agents, with four more agents watching from close distance.
It's not clear from the videos that they have full control of all of his limbs and it seems more like he's keeping his arms tightly tucked in to resist which leaves some range of motion. The moment that he first gets shot, he's not laying flat against the ground under full control of the agents.
You have way more confidence about the amount of control they have of him than the officers seemed to. There are videos of him being highly uncooperative and violent. In the video of the killing, he's also clearly being uncooperative. It would logically follow based on his past behavior and also the way the officers feel they need to react that he's continuing to be uncooperative on the ground.
> He wouldn't even have been able to reach for a gun as his hands were fixated at this point. That's the very point of fixating someone!
You're assuming 2 things here which an officer should know they cannot assume.
1. That he's fixated. You have high confidence of this, but even watching the video frame by frame this is not fully clear. You are leaping to a conclusion that it does not seem like the video evidence can guarantee.
2. That's the only gun or weapon he has on him. He could have a gun holstered under his jacket too, which would be within reach. After all, supposedly he reached for his phone, so that is a non-fixated range of motion and they could have believed it to be a gun, reasonably.
> Sorry, I don't believe you. There's no way you could have followed this case without knowing about their statements. You are acting in very bad faith here.
I mean, I don't follow this case. I don't even know who Stephen Miller is. What I do know is there are videos and I have seen the videos along with the things people are claiming are obvious based on the videos alone. I also know that even if public statements are made, those are not law and are generally not guaranteed facts of any sort. That's what court cases try to sort out. If public officials are saying things which turn out to be false, why would that surprise anyone? It doesn't mean they lied, but they are suffering from the same kinds of nonsense that a lot of people in these comments are, where they make assumptions that are not always supported by the evidence. When society gets stupid, courts are even more essential.
> If several high officials of an agency are spreading obvious lies, it very much hurts the credibility of that agency.
This is true. You are correct. I do not support spreading lies or disinformation or just jumping to statements which have a decent chance of being inaccurate or misinterpreted. They might have said something which has some support, but which is more political language than accurate legal language just like people are invoking the word murder oblivious to its meaning.
So yes if you become a public official, ideally you don't lie unless it's for some kind of essential national strategy, because public trust has value. Not sure what else you want to know about it.
At the very same time, just because you are not a public official does not mean you should say anything you want and make any claims you want about videos. It doesn't matter what everyone else is saying. A lot of people are talking with their hearts, which is nice and we need heart, but hearts are dumb. That's not controversial.
Most of us are contributing to public trust or deteriorating public trust by some measure in daily life and in every comment we write. Do you think your statements within the past week would make people have trust in their society, or would you say in reflection that your statements erode trust in society?
There are forces at work both from outside our country and within our country that are absolutely encouraging the reduction in trust. They will amplify any opportunity they can find to do so. There's a non-zero chance that Alex was an unwitting participant in that. You don't have to make the mistake by taking the same bait.
Officers aren't perfect and mistakes were probably made. You don't have to be a Harvard professor to know the video looks bad. That's not the point. Even if it looks bad, a lot of the claims people make about what happened and about what the video shows are not supported by what the video shows. Simple.
> The moment that he first gets shot, he's not laying flat against the ground under full control of the agents.
Well, they certainly felt they were under control, otherwise the four other agents wouldn't just stand around and watch.
The problem is that they send badly trained agents with guns to patrol cities where they meet people who are (rightfully) angry at what ICE is doing. That's a recipe for desaster.
It's no secret that ICE has significantly lowered the barrier to entry and shortened the training duration. In fact, there are reports of agents being deployed before they completed their training. Apparently, they don't do proper background checks either since some agents have been found to have a criminal record. Finally, ICE is intentionally recruiting in rightwing circles, using white nationalist language.
> I don't even know who Stephen Miller is.
I have a hard time believing this. How is this even possible for anyone with even a passing interest in US politics? If that is really true, that's quite an embarrassing admission.
> that's what court cases try to sort out.
Who says the case will go to court? What if they just close the investigation?
> They might have said something which has some support, but which is more political language than accurate legal language
Why speak in the subjunctive? Why don't you look up what they said? How can you assess the credibility of an agency when you don't seem to know much about it?
> or would you say in reflection that your statements erode trust in society?
I see no reason for saying that. But if there's someone who is eroding trust then it's the Trump administration with their egregrious lies, their contempt for the rule of law and their staggering corruption.
> The problem is that they send badly trained agents with guns to patrol cities where they meet people who are (rightfully) angry at what ICE is doing. That's a recipe for desaster.
I think ICE is trained to do the job that they're trained to do, but I don't expect riot control and protest management is part of that standard job training. That is part of why it is so dangerous and stupid for local government to prevent the local law enforcement that does have that training from helping keep these environments safe.
The local policies are getting people killed. The local posture of hostility and delegitimization of ICE creates a dangerous environment and it is divorced from reality.
> I have a hard time believing this. How is this even possible for anyone with even a passing interest in US politics? If that is really true, that's quite an embarrassing admission.
I don't know that I'd say it's embarrassing. Don't really know who he is and I expect most people don't know who he is, because I consume far more information than most people. It's also not as critical, because people are making claims about what the videos show that are not supported by the videos themselves. As far as I know, Stephen Miller was not present during any of these events. He wasn't shot. He wasn't shooting. He wasn't protesting. He wasn't in these videos. Forcing some kind of arbitrary need to know other people to delegitimize thoughts seems very much like an emotional argument especially since no strong reasoning has been provided for why knowing him is critically relevant for making an observation within the videos.
> Who says the case will go to court? What if they just close the investigation?
It's complicated, because there has been evidence of Minneapolis court corruption. In the Renee Good case I think the FBI and the state of Minnesota were going to work together in that situation and that's how it would have worked, but the local corruption was too hard to swallow and they backed out. You cannot have an impartial investigation in the place that handled the disastrously corrupt case around George Floyd.
It looks like they're going to do something similar here even though I think people said this was CBP rather than ICE. Here again the FBI was already involved, but they're now taking the lead on it in cooperation with the DOJ: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/alex-pretti-shooting-fbi-invest...
> Why speak in the subjunctive? Why don't you look up what they said? How can you assess the credibility of an agency when you don't seem to know much about it?
I have no idea what a subjunctive is. It doesn't help when you try to misdirecting attention to some random guy who wasn't there and various public statements. None of it matters. If people make a claim about a video that isn't supported by the video, they have to provide other evidence that does support their claim. People here were just making absolute statements about what the video definitely shows as if the video by itself is the entire proof of their claim. All I'm saying is that they're incorrect. It will be true 100 years from now, because information has limits.
> I see no reason for saying that. But if there's someone who is eroding trust then it's the Trump administration with their egregrious lies, their contempt for the rule of law and their staggering corruption.
You could make a fair argument that he is employing a strategy that makes it easy for activists and politicians to attack him which stokes anger. A lot of what he does is rhetorical devices and monument building to achieve deals. It wouldn't be so messy if he limited dealmaking to regular deals, but he makes everything a deal. Even Trump himself is a deal, so he builds himself up as a monument the same way he does every other thing.
He believes monumental deals are easier to get people to pay attention to and get investment in, so they are in many ways easier to do than small deals. He inflates everything to get things done, whether that's walls or greenland deals. The problem is, it actually works. He's not always right and his strategy doesn't always pay off, but it pays off often enough that there's no reason for him to stop.
Some people go into a maniacal moral panic over it and emotion oriented news and comedy media abuses it, which ends up actually looking way more dishonest than they even paint Trump. These terrible late night shows and opinion news networks are so lost in their bubbles that they are far worse for the country than Trump could ever be. You could argue that it's Trump's fault that these shows got so bad, but in a way I've always gotten used to politicians being wrong or flexible with their words, but I still had the expectation that the news would be straight with me about what events were occurring on a day. That illusion was destroyed.
I don't have to like Trump or align with his morals to appreciate that many of the things this administration is getting done are basic fundamental national interests that a lot of the normal establishment politicians have been trying to achieve for decades without luck. He's unconventional, but the threats we face have gotten so large that we no longer have the luxury of doing things slowly.
> I think ICE is trained to do the job that they're trained to do
The number of ICE agents has more than doubled in one year (from 10,000 to 22,000). These new agents have not received proper training and many have been recruited from problematic backgrounds.
> but I don't expect riot control and protest management is part of that standard job training.
Well, because they are not meant to be patrolling US cities in the first place. Currently, there are 3000 ICE agents in Minneapolis alone. That is 5 times more people than Minneapolis own police roce! 13% of all ICE agents are currently deployed in a city that makes up 0.15% of the US population. The purpose is very clearly to terrorize a democratic city that resists ICE unlawful and inhumane practices.
> In the Renee Good case I think the FBI and the state of Minnesota were going to work together in that situation and that's how it would have worked, but the local corruption was too hard to swallow and they backed out.
That's certainly not what happened. Stop kidding yourself.
> Don't really know who he is and I expect most people don't know who he is, because I consume far more information than most people.
If that is true, you're willfully uninformed. How can you even make any qualified statements about the Trump administration without knowing one of its most influential people? How can you assess the credibility of the DHS without knowing the (very prominent) people who are in charge?
> which ends up actually looking way more dishonest than they even paint Trump.
Don't worry, the Trump administration is doing all the heavy lifting here. We've reached a point where reality has surpassed the wildest satire. We can listen to Trumps speeches over here in Europe. We see what the administration is doing. There are no excuses!
Your seemingly levelheaded words are just thinly veiled complicity with the MAGA movement. In your last paragraph you really let the mask slip.
> The number of ICE agents has more than doubled in one year (from 10,000 to 22,000). These new agents have not received proper training and many have been recruited from problematic backgrounds.
I don't know if their training is sufficient or not for the job they're actually tasked with, but it seems to not be resulting in dead people in every other city.
> Currently, there are 3000 ICE agents in Minneapolis alone. That is 5 times more people than Minneapolis own police roce! 13% of all ICE agents are currently deployed in a city that makes up 0.15% of the US population. The purpose is very clearly to terrorize a democratic city that resists ICE unlawful and inhumane practices.
Well, if the local police don't assist, you're going to end up with more ICE than other cities since some of them have to try to do the job of the police too. Sanctuary cities may also have a higher proportion of the people ICE is going after, so it would logically follow that more ICE resources may be needed there which could inflate the numbers twice.
> That's certainly not what happened. Stop kidding yourself.
Well, I did look into the George Floyd case. It was not a fair trial. If you care about fair trials, and you do like the word embarrassment, that trial was an embarrassment to all US courts. These Minneapolis protester deaths are the closest things we've seen since then as far as I know in terms of them being promoted in the public for manufacturing outrage for political gain. It's like activist organizations know Minneapolis is a particularly good place to farm this so they push harder there. It was so easy for them to incite riots and city burning, that's the kind of imagery you like to get pushed national if you're a resistance movement.
> If that is true, you're willfully uninformed. How can you even make any qualified statements about the Trump administration without knowing one of its most influential people?
I probably know of them, but not by name then if they're that influential. You're still missing the point that they aren't relevant here. Whoever they are and whatever DHS does, there are laws that exist that apply. There are officers and protesters in a video. An event took place. You don't need to know the current temperature on Mars in order to estimate whether a claim about the event is supported solely by the video evidence. You know this, because you're pushing back against people making claims about what's in the videos too. You're getting lost in the weeds here.
It's like saying, "look at Stephen Miller, that's how you know the video is proof it was murder!" or "look at Stephen Miller, that's how you can tell the officers had him fully and confidently restrained!". It is not logically supportable.
> How can you assess the credibility of the DHS without knowing the (very prominent) people who are in charge?
The George Floyd case was so bad, that what I'm saying is no matter what you think of DHS, they can surely do a better job than that. It's one of the worst cases of the execution of justice I can recall in my lifetime. Courts do sometimes get things wrong, but that was another level.
At the same time, I can understand the concern that if these protesters are fervently and emotionally anti-Trump then get killed by DHS, serious activists may feel uncomfortable that DHS is part of the executive branch which Trump has legal authority over. There have also been lies spread about complete legal immunity of Trump and him being a king which aren't reality, but if it contributes to distrust in the executive branch handling the case that's probably a legitimate issue of public trust. That element existed somewhat in the George Floyd case, because the local police department was part of the executive branch and people didn't trust the police, so the judicial branch took it. That is fine, except for how the courts handled it.
Either way, DOJ is involved with the case now.
> Don't worry, the Trump administration is doing all the heavy lifting here. We've reached a point where reality has surpassed the wildest satire. We can listen to Trumps speeches over here in Europe. We see what the administration is doing. There are no excuses!
Being European doesn't mean you can't have an opinion and it's not unique to you alone that you don't understand Trump, because most people don't understand Trump. I highly doubt you see what the administration is doing, because it's very rare.
There's the law, there's what they say, there's the action, there's the goal, there's what was achieved and then there's what achieving that actually produces as an effect. Most of what is occurring aligns with vanilla strategic national interests of the US that goes back many administrations. Maybe the surface level optics and culture are different, but make no mistake that this is just the US being the US.
In short, if you think it's not about China, its probably about China. If you think it's about Greenland, it's about China. If you think it's about ending NATO, it's about China. If you think it's about immigration, it's about China.
If you don't know what China has been doing and why they've been doing it. If you don't know the things Xi Jinping has been saying. If you don't know what China has been doing in the South China Sea, or in propping up dictatorships, etc. I highly recommend, whatever your political feelings are, you dig deep and spend a couple thousand hours just consuming information about China and the history of communism.
Almost everything we're doing in the US and around the world right now can be explained from that concern as an organizing principle. Trump is just an instrument of that.
You're one of the rare people who understands Trump? (Yet you don't know who Stephen Miller his?) Give me a break! Your whitewashing of the Trump administration is mindboggling.
Stop pretending ICE and the whole administration is acting lawfully. Their disregard and contempt for the law is all too obvious. ICE is patrolling cities, breaking into homes without warrants, kidnapping people without due process and throwing them into internment camps with horrible inhumane conditions. People are rightfully angry for being terrorized.
I did not mention Stephen Miller because he is relevant for the shooting, but for the assessment of the DHS as a whole. If you have actual confidence in the DHS to lead an independent investigation of its own agents, considering the people in charge, you must be very naive.
Your country has taken a sudden and deep authoritarian turn and is right on its way into fascism. We've seen this in our own countries 90-100 years ago, it looks and sounds all too familiar. The past few months have already shown that the democratic system is in fact very fragile and can fall apart faster than people would have thought. Better wake up until it's too late!
Set a reminder for yourself in 20 years to think back on these times. Not all of your thoughts about these times will be correct, because almost nobody is 100% correct about all of the things all of the time. Recall how sure the media was about this and that, but it never panned out. It will be illuminating.
Thanks, but luckily I can recognize authoritarianism and facism when they're happening. No need to wait 20 years. We're seeing similar tendencies all over Europe and your fucking government is supporting them.
Fascism isn't possible here without stealing control of education and other institutions in a bunch of states, but what Trump has been doing is increasing education freedom. A similar argument is made with socialism and communism. "Socialism is not communism!", but you can get to communism through socialism. It's just that, in the US to do that you have to control education and other institutions in numerous states simultaneously. Marxists did try that and it's why we've had the culture war here, but we've been pushing back.
Fascists and communists also like to control language. It was Marxist movements trying to control language here and cancelling people, with widespread pressure campaigns to divide communities. Trump's unfiltered rhetoric drove them crazy and created space in the public sphere for people to speak their mind even if it wasn't politically correct. So Trump has also helped freedom of speech.
There are several other issues like that which are being addressed. It's not that everyone thinks Trump is a beacon of morality and sanity, it's just that he's getting things done that are legitimately helping address the country's challenges at the moment in time we're in.
Putting pressure on Venezuela and Iran with CIA, Mossad and the military has probably significantly delayed China's move on Taiwan. It may have even contributed to Xi Jinping's timing in arresting the last of his military high command which is unprecedented.
We'll be ok here in the US and our behavior today is in line with some pretty traditional national strategy. We were in luxury mode for too long, so part of what is happening is we're playing catch-up, which tends to involve some rudeness and chaos.
The Sig P320 that an agent took off of him went off while it was in a federal cop's hand. This is the same Sig P320 that the US Army rejected and was mass recalled for going off on its own.
Unfortunately, when the shot went off he was still fighting with them, actively resisting and not complying. Fighting with federal cops like that is a good way to get killed. He played a stupid game and won a stupid prize.
BS! You can clearly see/hear on the videos that the agent fires the first shot. You've claimed that Alex' weapon went off as if this was a fact. There is no evidence for this whatsoever. Otherwise the DHS would have included it in their report.
The very start of the incident is an officer chasing a woman, she slips and falls, the officer chasing her catches up and then Pretti pushes the officer away.
That's almost certainly not the start. It's very common to not show what you did to agitate the officers and to only record after they come after you. If there are longer videos I haven't seen them, but its a very common tactic to cut out critical context to maximize emotional reaction on social media.
So I checked it out, but it's not really relevant. These activists appear to have followed the federal law enforcement. That highly suggests they knew exactly who they were. The officers didn't show up unannounced to the front door of someone who happened to be an activist. No reasonable court is likely to determine that they were unaware who they were dealing with.
It's relevant because you said you didn't know. The review provides information that helps you to know.
> These activists appear to have followed the federal law enforcement.
Nothing illegal about that at all.
> That highly suggests they knew exactly who they were. ... No reasonable court is likely to determine that they were unaware who they were dealing with.
That's not relevant.
What's your point? No reasonable court would find that the activists did anything wrong, while they certainly would find two federal employees ("officers") are culpable in the murder of one of those activists.
> The officers didn't show up unannounced to the front door of someone who happened to be an activist.
You probably linked the wrong video, because the video you linked is not relevant.
> Nothing illegal about that at all.
The first thing I said is that it's not illegal.
> No reasonable court would find that the activists did anything wrong, while they certainly would find two federal employees ("officers") are culpable in the murder of one of those activists.
The videos don't show all the events leading up to the moment he was shot, but multiple federal laws were broken just in the videos we do have. Murder has a specific definition and nothing here suggests murder.
Thanks for grabbing the correct link. So I checked it and here are my thoughts.
- One of the first things he states is that this is irrefutably cold blooded murder. That is absolutely legally and logically false. It could be murder, but that would require information that is not present in any of these videos, because murder has a very specific definition. Look up the definition. If this guy was law enforcement he should know the difference.
- He then claims that Alex is being pushed back to the curb and that Alex is complying, when you can see in the video that Alex seems to lean his weight into the officer in resistance.
- Alex physically lays hands on the officer which is a bad idea, but this guy never mentions that. If he was LEO, it is very careless to overlook this observation.
- Alex is wearing glasses and yet this guy never mentions this when claiming Alex is blinded by this spray. The activists look prepared to get sprayed and are wearing glasses and goggles. You can see this more clearly in better footage here: https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/minute-minute-timeline-fatal...
- He's talking about how the weapon is removed, but not talking about how that doesn't mean there is no longer a weapon in the situation. If you have 1 gun, you can have 2 guns. He claims he is completely unarmed, but the officers cannot know if that is true in that moment. They don't have the benefit of hindsight.
- He claims he points the gun at the back of his head and shoots, but that is not what the video shows. Whether that is what later evidence shows is another matter, but that is not what is clear in this video.
- He complains that Youtube is going to demonetize this. Maybe it's just me, but I wouldn't want to enable monetization on a video about someone dying like this, because it just stinks of profiting from someone's death. If he left monetization on, that lowers my opinion of him, but that's just an aside and not relevant.
If you want my honest opinion of this guy's analysis, it is that he either does not have the military and law enforcement qualifications that he says he does, or he is intentionally misrepresenting the facts, or he is simply being very loose with language and biased towards an interpretation. Either way, this is not an objective analysis. I can't speak for the rest of the videos on his channel and nobody is perfect, but at least on this topic in this specific video the number of logical errors he makes is staggering.
This is just lunatic speech. The one place he didn't have a gun was in his hands. You're out here acting like if he'd had a gun strapped to his ankle it would have been proof beyond any doubt he was intending to shoot and kill ICE officers.
He was pepper sprayed and on the ground surrounded by 6 agents when he was killed. At the time when an agent said that he had a gun (this was after his gun was removed), he was physically pinned with his arms restrained. He wasn't 'reaching for an object'. He was carrying his phone in his hand before he was restrained and shot a dozen times.
They don't necessarily know that's the only gun he had and the officers aren't Neo, seeing every camera angle at once. What you see from your outside perspective is not what they see. They have to act based on the information they have, which is why it's important you listen to law enforcement for your own safety. All the whistles make that harder, which might be part of the point.
Again: he was on the ground, with his eyes sprayed with mace, and he was, at least until seconds before he was shot, physically restrained. It doesn't matter if he could potentially have had another gun. They aren't Neo but there were six of them surrounding him, and the one who shot him only took eyes off to mace another protestor.
There are multiple videos from multiple angles and a multitude of witnesses.
The only investigation being done is by the DHS, who is blocking all other state level investigations. The same DHS who lied about easy disproven things that were recorded and destroy evidences.
What are you waiting or expecting from a investigation to make up your mind?
In the case of George Floyd, that was local police. In this scenario, these are federal law enforcement officers so it probably is correct for this case to be handled federally as far as I know.
I don't know what you're referring to about DHS lying about disproven things and destroying evidence. If you can give me links I'll look into it.
> What are you waiting or expecting from a investigation to make up your mind?
I've seen enough video to know that it's not impossible the officer reacted within the spirit of the law. To get a sense for that requires testimony from the officer that fired the shot. Please watch court cases some time and you'll get a sense for how the application of these kinds of laws work. I'm not a lawyer, but if you ever have to defend yourself against someone you'll be thankful the laws work the way that they do.
We have a justice system for a reason. It doesn't always work, but it lays out a process for evaluating evidence. Why do we do it that way? We do it that way, because it is not that uncommon that perceptions, witnesses, videos and many other things can be deceptive. They can make you believe things which are not true. So you try to establish all of the relevant facts as they apply to the law. Not based on how you feel, but based on the law.
It actually hurts some of the witnesses that are obviously activists, because it means they aren't unbiased objective observers, but are predisposed to a perspective and have a possible agenda in mind which risks reducing the quality of their testimony. A law enforcement officer that thinks he might be found guilty also risks their testimony being weak. The video quality is also often bad and there are people obstructing important details at times. All of those things have to be considered.
Of course when you are emotionally invested, you might want them to just rush to what you obviously see. Again, you will be very thankful that the justice system generally doesn't rush to those conclusions so readily if you ever have to defend yourself in court when you know you're innocent.
Good lord. There's no helping you if you cannot see with your eyes, my friend. I'd have to be blind to not see this poor man trying to defend a woman, then tackled, beaten, disarmed, shot dead in the back and head with 10 bullets.
I've seen enough of these kinds of situations to know it's easy to trick people into seeing what you guide them to see. It's like lying with statistical charts, but more insidious.
Why is it so important to you that other people see what you see before any investigation is complete? Look at how courts handle video evidence to gain some perspective on why your thinking which seems to rely so heavily on video evidence alone is simply flawed.
Your eyes matter. Videos matter. It's just, they aren't the only things you should factor in. Why have ears, if sight alone is enough? Why have touch, if sight alone is enough?
What you are saying is, trust your eyes alone! Pay no attention to what you can touch or what people involved might have to say. That is the final and most essential command.
It goes both ways. With your eyes that you trust so much, hopefully you can see at least that.
Dude. My dude. Seven different angles. There's no mistaking what happened. You would trust the judgment of someone else when there's that much contrary evidence to what they are claiming? Do you not make your own judgments in your life?
7 different video angles or 7000 different video angles doesn't really change this. What will matter is the testimony of the people combined with the evidence that exists. They'll have to go over the full timeline of events with radio chatter, officer testimony, testimony of activists, make assessments of who are being the most credible and objective observers, look into these claims about a gun misfiring and so on.
There is no version of this where nobody made mistakes and mistakes don't mean someone should have to die, but laws exist for a reason and you don't know what each person was experiencing simply after watching a video.
Video evidence does not generally have infinite credibility in court, because it is often a limited perspective on the reality of what happened. The cameras can only catch sound waves and photons, but almost the majority of everything important that occurred is invisible. If the audio had much value, all the whistles ruined some of that. It may even turn out that the whistles contributed to this death, because it weakened officer communication. Maybe there could be a justification for involuntary manslaughter by people blowing whistles if they were blowing them precisely with intentions like that. I don't know.
We just don't know and claiming these videos show everything you will ever need to know is simply logically false.
Your response strains credulity and suggests complicity. If you tell me an investigation is necessary to prove he is a criminal, perhaps that makes sense. But here you are saying an investigation is needed to prove he should not have been murdered in cold blood. That's bloody nuts. Investigations matter, but there's a point where the burden of proof switches sides. In this case, there would need to be incontrovertible evidence that this man was secretly building a bomb, and even that does not justify execution on the street. Do you understand how this country works, or are you a foreigner? Perhaps where you live, one is not innocent until proven guilty. That might explain your inability to come to judgments, you believe the man murdered must prove he was not a terrorist.
I think you're confused. Someone died. They contributed to their own death with their actions as did many other factors. It was an unnecessary death that could have been avoided. The officers might have made mistakes as well.
You weren't in Alex's head. You weren't in the officer's head. All you know is what you think you know, but aren't even sure you can know it. That is what investigation is for.
You keep using words like murder despite there not being sufficient evidence for that.
Alex broke many federal laws, spit at officers, laid hands on them, attacked their vehicles and broke their tail lights while they were in the vehicles and so on.
I do not know what kind of person Alex was when he was being civil in his own life, but in his most public representation he has shown himself to be an unhinged criminal. Maybe he thought his criminal behavior was justified, but that is a separate matter. It also doesn't mean he deserved to die.
Acting that way though, makes it a lot easier to make the case that officers believed he was a credible threat to their lives in a court case. It doesn't even only have to be valid in court, it could have legitimately been true in that recorded moment that in all of the chaos and with this guy's crazy behavior, they really believed he might have had another weapon and would have used it.
Don't get manipulated into using words like complicit to try to divide the country.
Ahh, now it's clear. He was a boy scout and a choir boy and an ER nurse. A truly good person. But somehow he was an "unhinged criminal" trying to protect a woman. According to who? ICE? Kristi Noem? Liars and fascists, my friend. Take a look in the mirror and then read "Common Sense" to educate yourself about why this country was founded, and what it means to be an American, because you seem lost.
Civil disobedience exists and does not deserve a death sentence.
At least, while decrying civil disobedience, you differ from the administration in one important aspect: You think there should be accountability for police shootings. That's different than the ICE leader, the DHS leader, the FBI director and the Vice President.
From a sort of naive perspective it doesn't matter whether it's police or not. If you kill someone illegally, you should be held accountable for it. In many cases, whether it's illegal depends on how reasonable it was to do so. This is where it being law enforcement starts to matter even more.
Law enforcement face a lot of violent resistance, so it can be very reasonable for them to see an uncooperative person as a serious threat to their life. If they kill someone, because they believe them to be a lethal threat even if that was not the reality, their perspective absolutely matters to the outcome.
Civil disobedience is basically understood to be breaking the law in a civil manner. What I'm seeing in a lot of videos is not civil disobedience. One expected attribute of civil disobedience is non-evasion, but resisting arrest is essentially attempted evasion.
Again, I don't think anyone should have died, but to my eye I can tell the people who are unreasonable and lacking in critical thinking, because they have already prejudged and sentenced people as if they've already sat through the entire court case and had their own hands on the gavel as it went down.
Social media, videos, news, activists and more are incentivized to rile people up. Let it be investigated.
That's not how the law works. In a case like this, all the events that led up to the moment he was killed are relevant as per the supreme court. They'll have to investigate both the officer and the activist and see how the law applies to it.
This wasn't civil disobedience. It was stalking law enforcement and then aggressively interfering. Not a capital crime, but still a recipe fir suicide by cop.
It's telling on yourself that you think compassion for other people, the core idea that other peoples needs might be more important that your own, is objectively a weapon. You're not wrong that there's a lot of disinformation about, but from a purely historical view, the one position that has never been right is fence-sitting.
What you are basically saying is that justice is unjust and vigilantes are the solution, because the legal system operates under the principle that you are innocent until proven guilty.
You don't want to live in a world where you are guilty until proven innocent, because you might like it when you're the one wagging the finger, but you'll be crying for the old ways once it's turned on you.
You're not arguing in good faith, which is clear from your other replies, but I'm not saying vigilantes are the solution, just that compassion is not a weapon.
But also, just within your moral framework, I think it's really important to understand that the systems of justice have been compromised and we are, right now, seeing people treated as guilty until proven innocent. It's just not happening to you. It *is* happening to people like me.
Let me say that again: I'm not saying that vigilante justice is better, only that the legal system has become vigilante justice. People who share my moral values are being gunned down right now. And people like you are spreading excuses about how its shades of grey.
Well, if he's innocent until proven guilty and you agree with that, why do you need someone to prejudge their guilt and tell them they are on the wrong side of history by not prejudging? That really does come across as promoting vigilantism.
You've clarified that you don't support vigilantism...so, what benefit do you get from someone deciding guilt beforehand?
Why is it your position that people should not wait until investigations are done and it has been combed through in court? What purpose does that serve if not for vigilantism?
It sounds like you are aiming primarily for a political benefit or a sort of emotional moral validation through cultural acceptance of your view. This is why we have courts, because people can become very emotional and invested in an outcome. It can become a critical part of your identity and world view that someone be guilty. Those are generally presented as cautionary tales in history books, not the example to live by.
> Congress has been in a state of relative gridlock for many years, across multiple administrations whether republican or democrat.
Let me stop you right there. It's not a both sides issue, is it? It's one side forcing gridlock? A party of obstruction, even.
> People thinking that Trump is a king or dictator are delusional, because the US doesn't work that way. If Trump rounded up thousands of US citizens and simply burned them alive, he would be arrested by the military and impeached by congress, because there are red lines that basically everyone agrees on.
No, and it's very important to you that you think that's true, because then people who disagree aren't just wrong, they're mentally ill. The only Trump Derangement Syndrome is the people thinking he's fit to be in any kind of leadership position.
The problem is that we're seeing people treat Trump like a king to a worrying degree, and he has gotten several of the traditional rights of kings that made people depose kings, like immunity to prosecution. And we're seeing things that were formerly thought to be absolute red lines like rounding up citizens and deporting them to Venezuelan prisons will absolutely be tolerated by his base. People like you constantly assure us that there are red lines he won't be allowed to cross, and then defend him when he does cross them and deny ever saying that thing would be wrong.
> Let me stop you right there. It's not a both sides issue, is it? It's one side forcing gridlock? A party of obstruction, even.
There are still things they agree on and pass legislation for, but on many other issues they both obstruct each other. The actual details of that aren't as relevant as the fact that they have trouble passing legislation and can't be relied on for many important issues at present.
> No, and it's very important to you that you think that's true, because then people who disagree aren't just wrong, they're mentally ill.
If he was an authoritarian dictator king tyrant master emperor, I would care, but he's not, so I don't care. The evidence does not support that position. There's a lot of rhetoric, propaganda, sound bites, teases and more, but those do not produce reality. They produce perspective.
> The problem is that we're seeing people treat Trump like a king to a worrying degree, and he has gotten several of the traditional rights of kings that made people depose kings, like immunity to prosecution.
This is false. The supreme court decision did not fundamentally say that he was immune to prosecution. That is what was spread about it to foment anger, but I read the actual language of the decision and it's just a lie.
> And we're seeing things that were formerly thought to be absolute red lines like rounding up citizens and deporting them to Venezuelan prisons will absolutely be tolerated by his base.
Unless you're talking about something I haven't heard about yet, they were not legal US citizens and they were not sent to Venezuelan prisons. There was someone who had some kind of temporary legal status and so there were complexities around it, but they weren't a US citizen.
> People like you constantly assure us that there are red lines he won't be allowed to cross, and then defend him when he does cross them and deny ever saying that thing would be wrong.
I don't know anyone like me. It's common for people to be unable to navigate the gray area. It's either black or white. You are either "with us or against us". That's just purely juvenile. Does Trump have some moral failings? Sure. Is he some kind of arrogant character? Sure. I think on one side, some people will get so stirred up into such a moral panic that they'll believe any false thing about him. On the other, some people get so caught up in his reality distortion field that they'll believe anything he says. If you fully give up and end up settling into one of those grooves, you lose all sense.
"Congress has been in a state of relative gridlock for many years, across multiple administrations whether republican or democrat. As a result, presidents have increasingly been leading by executive order rather than legislation. That is not Trump's fault, that is just the state of the country."
"People thinking that Trump is a king or dictator are delusional, because the US doesn't work that way. If Trump rounded up thousands of US citizens and simply burned them alive, he would be arrested by the military and impeached by congress, because there are red lines that basically everyone agrees on."
So presidents are acting more like kings, but Trump... isn't?
Does pardoning people who commit acts of violence in your name not sound like a king?
Or what about pardoning people who donate do your campaigns?
"Talk about taking over Canada or Greenland is just rhetoric to get better deals and improve ally strength, because this is what Donald Trump has been doing since the 1980s. Doing something with Venezuela is part of basic US national strategy, not simply a spontaneous whim of Donald Trump."
You think Donald Trump has been _strengthening_ our relationships with allies? In what manner has he done that in your mind? Is it the tariffs, the denigration, or the threats that are helping? And how does Canada talking about moving away from the US at Davos, then confirming it again later play into that? Is our allies cutting off signal intelligence actually a sign that our bonds with them is getting stronger?
Just trying to understand.
"Doing something with Venezuela is part of basic US national strategy, not simply a spontaneous whim of Donald Trump."
Which part of US national strategy is that exactly? Sure Maduro is pretty universally condemned by anyone paying attention, but so are plenty of other authoritarian regimes? Is part of the national strategy leaving the ruling class exactly the same as the one the apparently corrupt dictator we deposed had and then extorting it for millions of barrels of oil? Does the richest country in the world, which also is the largest oil producer and has plenty of access to a very stable world oil market need to resort to extorting barrels of oil from foreign dictators as part of national strategy?
If it's just part of our national strategy, why'd the rational change so frequently and why does no one seem to have heard that before Trump decided to start focusing on it and amassing weapons off their coast?
"This doesn't mean you have to like a current president personally or morally, or even agree with everything they are doing, but at least you can gain more perspective around what is real and what is not."
> So presidents are acting more like kings, but Trump... isn't?
No US president is a king, because the US doesn't have kings. The country isn't structured that way. Most countries legitimately do not understand this, because almost no countries are structured the way the US is.
> Does pardoning people who commit acts of violence in your name not sound like a king? Or what about pardoning people who donate do your campaigns?
A king is a very specific thing and you don't need to be a king to have a power which has been delegated to you.
> You think Donald Trump has been _strengthening_ our relationships with allies? In what manner has he done that in your mind? Is it the tariffs, the denigration, or the threats that are helping? And how does Canada talking about moving away from the US at Davos, then confirming it again later play into that? Is our allies cutting off signal intelligence actually a sign that our bonds with them is getting stronger?
When people watch news or listen to world leaders talk, it comes with a sense of authority. Many people are predisposed to automatically think that is the end of it, that they've found the truth. Like clockwork, Trump says some big bold thing that gets people talking and he does this to produce the kinds of results he's after that other people have trouble getting. It gets him a lot of criticism and hate, but he's been doing this since the 80s or even earlier.
He creates a "monument", because he says that nobody cares about deals that aren't monumental. The small uninteresting deals don't get much attention. People don't invest in it. As a result, he thinks small deals are actually harder to do than big deals. So he makes everything a big deal. He's a big deal. Ukraine is a big deal. Gaza is a big deal. Canada is a big deal. Greenland is a big deal.
Now, in order to be credible, he has to be known as a person who does get some big things done. So what you do is you see what can you actually do, and you do the biggest thing you can get done. Now you have credibility. You use that credibility as leverage to make larger claims and people will take your larger claims seriously, even if people who are anchored in reality may have the sense to know that larger claim is a bluff. He bluffs so much. If you remember that old youtube video of trading up from a paperclip to trade all the way until you get a car, it's like that.
So much talk about threatening to leave NATO, or destroying NATO by invading Greenland or any of that nonsense only makes NATO stronger. It makes them say, "hey, we need to be more independent. maybe we can't fully rely on the US if they're talking like this. let's invest more." When they invest more in their military, now the whole alliance is a little stronger. This is important, because World War 3 may be coming and we either need our allies to join us in some way in South East Asia, or we'll need them to be able to hold their own in Europe.
It amazes me the stuff he gets away with, but he's not any kind of threat to democracy.
> Which part of US national strategy is that exactly? Sure Maduro is pretty universally condemned by anyone paying attention, but so are plenty of other authoritarian regimes? Is part of the national strategy leaving the ruling class exactly the same as the one the apparently corrupt dictator we deposed had and then extorting it for millions of barrels of oil? Does the richest country in the world, which also is the largest oil producer and has plenty of access to a very stable world oil market need to resort to extorting barrels of oil from foreign dictators as part of national strategy?
We were already in Venezuela in the 1900s. It is estimated to have upwards of 300 billion to over a trillion barrels of oil. That dwarfs basically every other country. Oil is important for global stability and we still haven't discovered any energy solutions that fully erase dependence on oil. So long as it is needed, it has to come from somewhere. If Russia and China control it, that risks oil being traded primarily in some currency other than USD, even propping up some reserve currency. Venezuela also had Russian and Chinese military hardware, with Russia recently agreeing to send them missiles. That allows for comparisons with the Cuban Missile Crisis. They were also a stopping point for the shadow fleets which were breaking international law and helping fund Russia's war in Ukraine. Iranian terrorist groups were also operating in Venezuela. It was also at risk of becoming the next North Korea, but with both nukes and oil. It would've been a nightmare for freedom, democracy and global security.
The CIA is definitely operating in Iran. Nobody reasonable will deny that. Mossad is too, guaranteed. How inflated their numbers are, I don't know, but even just the confirmed numbers of dead both officially and unofficially are too high.
At this point they need to split the country so people who want to live differently can do so. Maybe that would prevent needing to bomb the Iranian government into oblivion.
Splitting the country in two? Okay, but then you show them how to do it with YOUR country as example. I'm sure your freedom loving soul won't mind leading the way.
Our country is already split into a bunch of pieces, so that's easy. In the US, many people do move when they don't like the local policies and there are many different states to choose from that handle issues differently.
I don't trust any language that fundamentally becomes reliant on package managers. Once package managers become normalized and pervasively used, people become less thoughtful and investigative into what libraries they use. Instead of learning about who created it, who manages it, what its philosophy is, people increasingly just let'er rip and install it then use a few snippets to try it. If it works, great. Maybe it's a little bloated and that causes them to give it a side-eye, but they can replace it later....which never comes.
That would be fine if it only effected that first layer, of a basic library and a basic app, but it becomes multiple layers of this kind of habit that then ends up in multiple layers of software used by many people.
Not sure that I would go so far as to suggest these kinds of languages with runaway dependency cultures shouldn't exist, but I will go so far as to say any languages that don't already have that culture need to be preserved with respect like uncontacted tribes in the Amazon. You aren't just managing a language, you are also managing process and mind. Some seemingly inefficient and seemingly less powerful processes and ways of thinking have value that isn't always immediately obvious to people.
China can't replicate any of those things in the next 100 years. They are also handicapped by their ideology, which weakens their capacity to work the necessary logic for critical outcomes. They've tried and failed to achieve some kind of belt and road initiative to make up a bit of the difference in their supply chain dependencies. They've tried and failed to clone so many of our technologies, but what gets promoted are the ones they've succeeded at.
One of the admirals in the Pacific said something along the lines of (paraphrasing), "China is complaining that we're trying to contain them. My question to them would be, 'well, do you need to be contained?'"
China constantly contradicts itself about its ambitions. What you need to understand, from all this stuff you've been writing in this thread, is that China is no longer China. That great history, so much of its critical culture from the past. It's all trashed. China is now communist. It's now what communism wants, not what China wants or needs. Taiwan isn't about reunification with a brother, it's about communists crushing democracy.
If you look back at World War 2, it was in large part caused by communism. Comintern believed that communism could not co-exist with capitalism, so communism would have to be established globally. This threatened Japanese and German sovereignty. Granted, the Japanese and Germans had their own ideological problems, but just the threat of global communist expansion was enough to start a race for global resource control.
We downplay this about WW2, but if you want to understand anything about US national strategy, it is that we have been hedging our resource control against a potential flaring up of global communist ambitions again.
Now what is China doing? They're building the largest military in history that has no use other than expanding. Xi Jinping is purging his military like Stalin did before he invaded Poland and Finland.
The contradiction about communist ideology is that it is anti-western and anti-imperialism, but the success of communism is that it has to become western to suck less and it has to manufacture a psychological empire to succeed. Western "empires" have largely been a result of good fortune in water access. The US is the absolute pinnacle of that. Russia and China are worse off and since they are at a disadvantage there, the alternative is psychological expansion.
China is trying to make up the difference by using a massive population, but the entire logic around it is weak. China is easy to choke off and scale down. It would go the same way World War 1 and World War 2 went, except with more turmoil in each other's countries. It's easier now than ever to project power from inside enemy's countries than to need to send ships and missiles thousands of miles to reach them. The issue is that, China is more fragile in this regard than the US is in every regard despite all their social controls.
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