Yea, it is definitely not for everyone. Which is maybe good or maybe just also consistent with the dystopian implications of such a business.

Heh, sanctimonious rage? The tone was intended as constructive and friendly.
Anyway accusing anyone of sanctimony is pretty rich coming from a guy who down below is speaking approvingly about the Pope just because of a single point you agree with, as if you actually care what the Holy See says about anything generally.

Also not sure what you mean by 'gain advantage.' Maybe you'll be more specific. But the reality is that women now outnumber men in college by about 10%, and are outpacing them on virtually every educational achievement metric. Plenty of high earning, high prestige professions like medicine and law (my profession) are close to female dominated and based on pipeline will be even moreso over the next generation or two. I don't have any problem with this in principle. So rest assured, all the opportunity is there for them, and there's no need for these official anf quasi official discrimination games.

I was going to make a joke about trying to fit a halberd in an SUV but according to Wikipedia sig sauer firearms would be a fully authentic representation.

I don't think any of is likely to turn out well. I've never voted for Trump or any Republican for president. If I have to cop to anything it's voting for Larry Hogan twice for governor in a context where Democrats would hold legislative super majorities.

Here is what I'd offer as food for thought from someone who still votes D but probably has some big disagreements on a handful of cultural issues.

1. I think the ability to do the kinds of really good things the government can do rests in large part on the government being, on balance, effective and responsible. Not perfect mind you, because nothing is perfect. But it does need to operate from an understanding that it's going to have to work really hard, and be really good, to get credit, and that a relatively small amount of idiocy is going to be weighed (at times grossly) disproportionately against it.

2. I think the Democratic party and the progressive permanent bureaucracy, and its auxillaries in education, corporate HR, and influential NGO spaces, desperately want to be able to discriminate against my sons based on race and sex. Your own comments here at times suggest you'd be comfortable with that too. I don't think any progeny of mine ought to be given unfair advantage (as if my glorious genes aren't enough- kidding) but I'm never going to be on board with a system like that. Neither are a lot of people, including, increasingly, the people who are nominally supposed to benefit from it.

Now at the end of the day I vote based on the fact that I think the greater evil is, for example, to (pretend to but not actually) balance the federal budget on the backs of health insurance that mainly helps poor women and children. And thats to say nothing of putting ignorant yahoos in charge. It's like trying to solve a problem by giving a monkey a hand grenade. However as long as the Democrats and progressive bureaucracies are steeped in this stuff it will be asking for many, many people ro swallow a bitter and bordering on poisonous pill.

Hungary is a unitary parliament system which makes it a lot easier to totally take over. I think Trump is going to leave a mess of smoking craters and ruins, kind of like a half-as*ed renovation job that never got passed or even completed the demolition stage.

Unlike you I wouldn't call myself an internationalist but I am a kind of realist that sees the upside to self interested noblesse oblige and non-zero sum thinking where the opportunities present themselves.

It seems to me that the core failure is that of America's outward looking organizations, from the aid agencies, to the spooks, to even the military itself to exercise some basic judgment and self auditing. It's clear to me that DOGE (to say nothing of Trump himself) is completely Twitter brained. The reason this stuff is on the radar is because it's become so easy to meme-ify the various idiotic-to-disastrous things these organizations do. Bottom line is if we want PEPFAR (and to be clear, I want PEPFAR) we need to be able to say no to DEI in Serbia or promoting gay or trans or whatever comic book characters for Peru's department of education, and wherever else.

Autocorrect fail. Obviously I meant NYP but know better than go edit a comment with a link.

All paths lead to someone in prison, just a question of how much excitement we have along the way.

NYT has more details.

https://nypost.com/2025/02/15/us-news/new-app-offers-personal-bodyguards-and-private-motorcades-on-demand-in-nyc/

Apparently you can specify your security details style of attire. Options include 'business tactical.'

The name for it is DEI.

I think this is all fair enough but a credible conversation is only possible when it excludes tax cuts.

DOGE is fairly criticized as unserious until such time as Trump/the GOP drop those from the budget proposal.

Cowabunga.

Yea I think the US press is way too cozy with power.

Not just that, but they operate from a space of seemingly studied incuriosity about the status quo. For example, as I understand it, Musk and his dorks have been given control of US Data Services which was set up by the Obama admin to conduct audits and similar stuff not that far removed from the steel-manned version of what Trump (and Musk) say they want to do.

I am sure Musk and co. are making a total hash of this, operating in a manner of total incompetence and corruption. But it all begs questions like 'what was US Data Services doing before January of 2025? Did they ever uncover waste or abuse? Is every penny the federal government is spending truly beyond reproach? What about the inspector generals? Do we know they were all doing a good job?'

The WaPo is fundamentally incapable of asking questions like that, everyone knows it, and the result isn't even the view from nowhere, it's the view from a presumption of authority no one actually recognizes.

I don't think it's whataboutism. I think that media outlets like WaPo have either decided not to, or their worldview simply precludes, the ability to interrogate the assertions of particular officials and institutions. This causes a lot of their criticism of Trump, much of which is warranted, to fall flat.

My understanding is that the launch codes were always in Moscow and that while the weapons were stationed in Ukraine the Ukrainian state never had the ability to use or maintain them.

I think what we're seeing now is the testing of those agreements that from Russia's perspective were made under duress. Some level of revanchism was probably inevitable even after nominal independence. Our own wasn't totally secure for decades and decades after we had it on paper.

This is the claim.

https://kyivindependent.com/ukraine-has-received-less-than-half-of-us-assistance-allocated-during-full-scale-war-zelensky-says/

I haven't seen anything with better context but I read it as being about shortcomings in either US logistics or procurement, not necessarily corruption.

I'm not quite sure that's right. I would say we had something like 50 years of nationalistic expansionism and consolidation followed by another 50 years of tense mostly peace underwritten by coherent mutual defense alliances and mutually assured destruction. We then had about 20 years of US unipolarity. Now we have to figure out what comes next.

I think the natural first order results of a sphere of influence approach is that a dozen or more countries immediately develop nuclear weapons as their only guarantee of continued sovereignty and a couple dozen more involved in some low intensity ethnic and/or territorial conflict or another rationally conclude this is their moment to strike so they'd better take it. If that's what we're nevertheless going to say is the best option then we need to be really, really confident we've thought through how all of that plays out. I am not convinced anyone has.

What is your position on what US strategy should be? Something other than indefinite support is understandable and hey I'd agree with that. But are you saying we just concede it as Russia's sphere of influence? Something similar?

Nah I wasn't accusing you personally of that, sorry it came off that way. Big picture I agree with you about the deterioration of the NATO deterrent due to untenable expansion.

Read my previous comment as frustration about the state of the debate. I don't think NATO membership was ever a plausible solution to Ukraine but I'm also pretty convinced that neither Vance nor Hegseth appreciate the perils of getting Ukraine wrong (ironically based on a kind of Greenwaldian/Gabbardian inability to understand that different situations call for different strategies) and I think there's a decent chance that's about to happen.

I think there's a good possibility that if European security wasn't 'NATO or bust' then maybe this doesn't happen. However now that it has I agree that the path to resolution needs to be something short of NATO that still creates a serious deterrent to future Russian incursions.

This is where I will be kind of mean to what IMHO is a serious deterioration in the realism of the Realist community. Just like it was always 1938 for the Neocons I think the Realists have entered a similarly current events agnostic cul-de-sac where it's perpetually 2002.

All I can think of is the baseline to the Megadeth song.

But bigger picture and beyond whatever happens with Ukraine, the US and the West generally may need to re-arm. We got a 30 year break which was nice even if we kind of squandered it. I'm not sure anyone is taking the situation seriously from a fiscal or strategic perspective. We've got all this bitching and moaning about giving away a bunch of old, obsolete kit gathering dust when the real problem is that projections suggest we'd run out of ammo for basic weapons systems in days or weeks in the event of a conflict with a real adversary.

I think the chances of people complaining about selling weapons is low, especially if a lot of them are made here. At the end of the day that's what this proposal would come down to.

But sure there are a lot of really naive people in America who think we can have all of the upside of Pax Americana and none of the costs. At best they're penny wise pound foolish.

I think the time between when they wanted to join to when they felt they actually could (or maybe had no choice but to make it official) was around 70 years.

The truth is that there is no baby, only bath water. It all must be banished. The only thing that's sad is that it took election of a totally unfit for office asshat to do it.

This has a distinctly nottheonion vibe.

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/national-security/trump-administration-wants-un-fire-nuclear-safety-workers-cant-figure-rcna192345