In other news
In the current news climate we see that some figures and events tend to dominate the front-pages heavily. Still, there a
I don't really care that we drone striked a likely drug mule boatIts interesting that the administration is just kind of releasing war crime snuff films. I feel like a year ago we were being told that Donnie tha Dove was going to solve all the wars and recluse ourselves from global affairs and that Obama was the drone striker in chief and etc etcIts really just indicative of t
To near repeat a post from another thread:
If I am in the food chain of a drug cartel who deals with smugglers to ship drugs, I'd be delighted at them getting blown up as opposed to arrested.
And while the faux strong-man stance can be superficially impressive to peaceful people leading peaceful lives, I doubt it does much to impress cartels. These people blow each-other up as a career move, they blow others up for business and if they didn't accept death as a job risk, they wouldn't be in the game.
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And all that said, I doubt operations like these will do much to deter or lower drug trade. It is simply to cumbersome, too expensive and likely not competent enough to leave much of a mark. It's like using an 18-wheeler to do Doordash deliveries; it is an impressive vehicle, it makes a lot of noise, has a lot of lights and it is probably cool to the right crowd, but ultimately it is not a good fit for purpose.
ISAF was in the region of 100 000 soldiers at its height and operated under a reality of occupation and did not have to deal with independent countries. And it still took years to start making small dents in the Afghan drug trade. And those small dents simply saw production relocate to other regions.
The drug trade is also extremely profitable per "dollar" invested. If you think operations like this introduce a lot of new risk (which I personally doubt) into the operations, that still doesn't mean it will become unprofitable.
https://youtu.be/RIYthfPZDKw?si=qDeP4auu...
It strongly appears as if Rubio and the Trump administration are gearing up towards a potential regime change in Venezuela. Rubio, Hegseth, and Trump are all sounding rather hawkish, and there are boats surging in the Caribbean. On top of that they are saying Maduro is a fugitive of American justice, which means they are essentially saying that if they could arrest him they would.
I’m honestly not even sure what the goal of this military excursion is supposed to be, or that there even is some ultimate goal other than to make their administration feel powerful.
For my money I’m guessing there will be some insane whiplash with how fast MAGA will ditch the “no new wars” rhetoric.
You realize that historically this describes most people from most cultures, including "The West" before it was "The West", where people getting tortured and disembowled was considered entertainment. We probably wont be alive to see it, but I suspect Western Civilization will at some point fall, and behavioral norms that you and I (and much of the modern world) consider abhore
Sure but most people are ****ed up.
I’m honestly not even sure what the goal of this military excursion is supposed to be, or that there even is some ultimate goal other than to make their administration feel powerful.
For my money I’m guessing there will be some insane whiplash with how fast MAGA will ditch the “no new wars” rhetoric.
lower oil prices, fighting communism
To near repeat a post from another thread: If I am in the food chain of a drug cartel who deals with smugglers to ship drugs, I'd be delighted at them getting blown up as opposed to arrested. And while the faux strong-man stance can be superficially impressive to peaceful people leading peaceful lives, I doubt it does much to impress cartels. These people blow each-other up as
the people blown up don't deliver to the USA directly. they supply the Mexicans.
there was never an alternative scenario where those people could be arrested.
this isn't about "deterring the drug trade", this is about starving Maduro of cash an obviously telling the venezuelans trade dealer that if they help oust Maduro then they can go back to business as usual, maybe that part was less obvious
https://youtu.be/RIYthfPZDKw?si=qDeP4auu...It strongly appears as if Rubio and the Trump administration are gearing up towards a potential regime change in Venezuela. Rubio, Hegseth, and Trump are all sounding rather hawkish, and there are boats surging in the Caribbean. On top of that they are saying Maduro is a fugitive of American justice, which means they are essen
Considering this administration struggles with object permanence and the trio you mentioned puts far more thought into their makeup than their policies, they're probably not planning anything as much as they are just doing whatever gets engagement on TikTok and Twitter.
Considering this administration struggles with object permanence and the trio you mentioned puts far more thought into their makeup than their policies, they're probably not planning anything as much as they are just doing whatever gets engagement on TikTok and Twitter.
trump put a 50m bounty on Maduro head, then they moved a ton of boats there mid August, then the drone strike
Considering this administration struggles with object permanence and the trio you mentioned puts far more thought into their makeup than their policies, they're probably not planning anything as much as they are just doing whatever gets engagement on TikTok and Twitter.
Marco Rubio and Hegseth seem quite ideologically driven to me, even though they both obviously act obsequious to Trump because that’s what he demands. Rubio in particular has been attacking Venezuela since at least 2019 if not earlier.
WASHINGTON — His hand chopping in the air, his voice stern and stalwart, he declared that it was time for the regional despot to go and warned of the consequences if he did not. With a commander in chief’s resolve, he vowed that the United States would do whatever it took to protect its own diplomats on the ground.
It was not the commander in chief but Senator Marco Rubio, the Florida Republican who nearly three years after losing his own bid for the presidency has become a lead policy architect and de facto spokesman in a daring and risky campaign involving the United States in the unrest that is now gripping Venezuela.
What’s the plan to achieve that? Short of s full scale invasion or drone strike directly into the country, it seems unlikely to happen.
I suspect there will be a Gulf of Tonkin or USS Maine incident that will precipitate a “need” for war.
Internal coup by militaries/drug dealers (same things actually) who can get convinced to make more money in a post-Maduro society than currently. With american assistance.
I don't think trump&C have an appetite for a lot of american boots in the ground at all,but there is a lot of other stuff they can do to collapse the regime which is already very fragile resource-wise.
If you forget the idea of "rebuilding a healthy democracy" as a goal, it's far easier to intervene.
Marco Rubio and Hegseth seem quite ideologically driven to me, even though they both obviously act obsequious to Trump because that’s what he demands. Rubio in particular has been attacking Venezuela since at least 2019 if not earlier.
For Hegseth, I suspect a man who makes half his office into a makeup-studio and makes Signal chats to boast to his friends friends and family about how important and awesome he is isn't driven much by ideology. He's just a representation of the worst aspects of influencers. As for Rubio, he's a weather-wane without principle, and will point in whichever direction floats his political boat the best.
I'm sure these people are brave enough to fight tooth and nail to preserve their image, but they're blessed with neither moral nor political spines.
"low fertility isn't caused by lack of money, exhibit #5507
ofc ca va sans dire that india dramatic drop in fertility also disproves it's about modern day "feminism", or housing problems, or tinder or whatever other made up cause people think cause the drop in fertility
I know you love really, really, love the US gov't killing people, but this is not how the law works at any level.
international law simply doesn't "work". Especially for the USA. You always did the **** you wanted outside your borders and that's basically it.
Everything you participated in creating was to the exclusive benefit of the USA (and rightly so, as you are the most powerful), international law doesn't exist to limit you in any way, but to limit others when you want to limit them.
That said though, in this specific case there actually is a very old international law concept that predates the USA and clearly applies to drug dealers these days.
Hostis humani generis
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hostis_hum...
Hostis humani generis (Latin for 'an enemy of mankind') is a legal term of art that originates in admiralty law. Before the adoption of public international law, pirates and slavers were generally held to be beyond legal protection and so could be dealt with by any nation, even one that had not been directly attacked.
Originally Posted by tame_deuces
Considering this administration struggles with object permanence and the trio you mentioned puts far more thought into their makeup than their policies, they're probably not planning anything as much as they are just doing whatever gets engagement on TikTok and Twitter.
trump put a 50m bounty on Maduro head, then they moved a ton of boats there mid August, then the drone strike
trump put a 50m bounty on Maduro head, then they moved a ton of boats there mid August, then the drone strike
Yeah. There are a lot of things Trump doesn't actually care about (that he probably should) where he lets his minions set day to day policy and you can never guess what his position on it will be tomorrow (eg. immigration)
But for whatever reason the IRGC and Venezuela are 2 foreign 'enemies' (who are aligned and collaborate against US interests) that Trump seems to have a personal interest in; where I would not expect him to get distracted and move on.
ofc ca va sans dire that india dramatic drop in fertility also disproves it's about modern day "feminism", or housing problems, or tinder or whatever other made up cause people think cause the drop in fertility
So what causes it
well, yeah
In other news.........
https://thehill.com/blogs/pundits-blog/m...
Gotta love this. The corrupt trump bootlicking judge has to make a decision between the two trump bootlicking "news" outlets.
A judge in Florida has dismissed a lawsuit brought by conservative cable channel Newsmax against Fox News, for now.
Judge Aileen Cannon wrote in an opinion filed Friday that Newsmax’s suit, made earlier this week, was not filed properly, calling it a “shotgun pleading,” saying she has an “obligation to dismiss such pleadings.”
Internal coup by militaries/drug dealers (same things actually) who can get convinced to make more money in a post-Maduro society than currently. With american assistance.I don't think trump&C have an appetite for a lot of american boots in the ground at all,but there is a lot of other stuff they can do to collapse the regime which is already very fragile resource-wise.If you f
I’m sure that it’s very easy to intervene in another country by assassinating the president or getting someone else to.
Doesn’t mean that there’s a good plan, the objectives make sense, or that there won’t be a disaster for the country and our international image. Obama thought it would be easy with Libya too.
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The timeline for invasion/intervention might be accelerated
Definitely - increases in wealth and income, improvements in healthcare leading to lower infant mortality rates.
Likely - increase in knowledge of birth control.
Possibly - increase in availability of activities and entertainment which can substitute for sex when one has nothing else to do.
Hopefully - increase in morality and wisdom about the consequences of voluntarily bringing another person into existence.
Hopefully just the threat of an invasion is enough to provoke a coup or something.
I haven't met a Venezuelan who supports the government there since 2009 and that was before things started really going downhill.
I spent too much time in the last 10 years to try to understand this. I was on it well well before it became a ravenous topic on the right. I also spent too much time trying to tell people preoccupied by it that no, their pet thesis isn't the reason.
Fertility is cratering everywhere basically with the exception of subsaharian africa (where it's getting lower anyway, but much slower) and ultra-religious place (Israel, Philippines and a few others) where it goes down but not so much.
So whatever is happening has to be happening *everywhere* with those few exceptions (but even there, something is happening).
And the only thing that is happening everywhere except a few places is women education is increasing. And i don't mean phds, i mean going to high school. And teen age pregnancies are dropping everywhere to close to 0.
So basically until not so much ago, TFR was artificially propped up by some women having VERY early children (and then it's easier to have more down the road), and dramatically undereducated women having no other option for a normal life other than having children.
Everything else is noise, or could work at the margin for a 0.1 effect or whatever, but is irrelevant in the big picture.
Except religiosity that when extreme, still motivates women who otherwise would have fewer children later to have some quickly enough.
This is extremely sad because no one sane of mind could think of teen pregnancies being a good thing, or barring women from high school being a good thing (hello afghanistan), or being religious nuts being a good thing (hello religious wars).
It's like we had decent fertility because of wired genetical impulses but rationality makes it far harder for women with options. And that applies whether or not they have anticonceptionals, whether or not housing is cheap, whether or not men have porn available, whether or not real salaries grow, and so on.
For every other element that people think fertility is going down we have counterfactuals. For women education we don't. There are insane numbers in bangladesh where the moment girls start to go to high school a lot (ie at 14 they think about something other than having a husband as the only option not to starve) you see dramatic differentials in fertility.
Anticonceptionals aren't it : japan legalized the pill only in the mid 90s, fertility was already 1.5 back then
Feminism isn't it: aside from india and other countries where feminism in the western sense never existed, in Italy you have almost the same (tad higher) fertility in more modern, more leftist areas
Housing isn't it: balkans, moldova, eastern europe in general had dirty cheap housing (and almost everyone already having owner occupied housing, lilke 80%+ of the population) while fertility cratered to the bottom
Women labor participation isn't it: Italy southern regions have 30% lower women labor participaton rate with the same TFR or lower
And so on and on
