CarmineCatboy2

Did you know that 1 out of every 10 irish wives are deleted by the Computer.

It does feel like it's more a culture war nonce thing, given that the ban is happening in Florida - a state that doesn't even produce oranges any more.

When I say fold I mean a total military collapse from the getgo. That at least didn't happen. The Ukrainian political class was seemingly ready to sign a deal then, but the State as a whole did not fold as hard as it did in 2014. On the contrary, it managed to overwhelm part of the small russian invasion with a lot of mobilized bodies. I don't think it would have managed that in 2014, pre military build up.

So all in all when Boris Johnson and the other western leaders told Ukrainians to send bodies to the front and fight at all costs, the Ukrainian government had something to work with.

If they were copying the NASA model they'd hand 1960s tech to an oligarch and defund their space programme.

And if you build a sofa made of sawdust and charge 3,500 dollars for it you'll be the talk of bourgeois avenue.

well yeah, because that was arguably their plan a. do a thunder run across ukraine, expect the state to fold (like it did in 2014), and intimidate the ukrainians to return to the negotiation table. but that was a pre-war, pre-sanctions plan. the west told the ukrainians they wouldn't offer security guarantees if they negotiated, and the ukrainians didn't fold as they did in 2014. now we've had 2 years of war on our hands and, frankly, a ceasefire would be the greatest threat not to putin but to everyone who's a part of the permanent russian state.

it's not like a) was even on the table really but now that Belgorod was attacked? russia won't stop any time soon, probably.

Well, this guy isn't academia. He's something much worse for the future of the US: a public communicator that forms opinion.

I think Macron is making the comments he's making because France at one point was considered the 'defeatist, mediator' of Europe. When the whole of Europe, the Germans most of all, were more loyal than the King, Macron 'tarnished' himself as weak. Since Macron's form of politics is just being a hollowed out neoliberal that panders to everyone at once, pretending to be more militarist than his own soldiers is likely something that Elysée aides have convinced themselves plays well to the public.

Sure, people like to bring up rational geopolitical reasons why Macron is making these foreign policy statements. Like losing influence in the Francophonie, or the french mercs who got merc'd, or, as you say, the souring in Europe and a need to keep the aid going. But Macron is primarily concerned with his political survival and nothing, not even one million ukrainian lives matter more than that.

I agree with your statements. I'd only add that Europe gets soured on America's fuck ups for years, but they never let it go. Europe thinks that Obama and France destroying Syria and Libya put their union on the way to fascism and disintegration. Europe thought bigly about Trump badmouthing NATO or Bush threatening them into complying with the Iraq War. None of this mattered and I think the self-sanctions against German industry still won't because these are financialized economies and the elites can just shuffle their portfolios around.

Europe and America already pre-empting the slogan of 'so, do you want to be the next Ukraine?'

I do think there's something else. European elites are just loyal to the american world order. They'll say so both in open and in private. Of course they are, they'd be fools not to be loyal to it as it was good for them. And as much as we talk about, say, German industrial decline, nothing has stopped German elites from investing in American LNG exporters and European LNG importers which are fleecing the masses of Europe. Likewise for the rest of the European populations, though they are now being squeezed dry by US policy they still believe, by inertia, that the 'rules based international order' is a good thing because they live in the imperial core and their labour is just better rewarded than that of the average person in the Global South.

With the Elites in tow you have the entirety of media. With inertial belief still strong in the middle and lower classes of Europe, that media has fertile ground to work on. The problem isn't today, it's years from now. If Europe continues to stagnate then the european elites become akin to compradors in impoverished countries. That is the fertile ground where the populist form of politics (in strict sense, an alliance between a member of the elites such as, say, a junior officer or a lower landlord, with the masses) leaves the fringes more and more. And in Europe, populism hasn't just been a big tent with some forms of conservativism and some forms of economic socialism like in LatAm. In Europe it will be straight up fascism.

He was a huge baseball fan and then in his first tng script he established in canon that it was a dead sport.

You know, that I don't mind. I'm not american, so I get to watch star trek in a way as an artifact of american cultural sensibilities over time. And it's a great source since it started in the 60s. Sisko being into baseball, a dead sport, is an echo of baseball's decline in popularity over time. I don't mind that Riker is really into Jazz either. But God Tom Paris sometimes felt like a character written to sell Boomer merchandise. Tom Paris figurines! He likes Cadillacs!