mozz

Yeah. The frustrating thing is that the blanket "defund the police" attitude actually makes the problem of department-hopping bad cops, or tolerance for bad behavior by cops, worse a lot of the time, by starving departments of resources which makes it harder to hire as many cops as they need which makes them more desperate for employees and makes it harder to be selective about who they employ.

Ursula von der Leyen

Blinken

Surely "Anthony Blinken is full of shit sometimes" is something we can find some common ground on. I've never heard of this other person and her saying something dumb will not impact my assessment of whether Ukraine (or, for that matter, Palestine) should be allowed to defend themselves.

I think mostly we are talking in circles at this point. Ultimately it doesn't really matter what you or I say about it; what plays out on the ground will play out on the ground whatever anyone's typed assessment of the conflict on the internet says.

I can agree with a certain amount of the framing that Western governments as a whole sadly don't really give much of a shit about Ukrainian casualties and the overall outcome for the country. But I've spoken with and read from a large enough handful of Ukrainians that I am confident that your assessment of their feelings about the conflict is very wrong.

Corporation: Yo can you add a button so I can see all my employees’ screenshots? And maybe get like a little report of what % of the day they’re spending on doing exactly what they’re told? And then like an automated email to HR and their manager if it drops below a threshold…

100% agree with this

I should make clear I am not an ACAB person by any means. The whole mentality that the police are automatically the enemy makes just as little sense to me as that the police are never the enemy.

But no one in the world should simply have unaccountable power. Body cams, judicial oversight, warrants, charges when they abuse their power, get rid of police unions or anything else that makes it difficult for a department to fire an officer who they feel is causing problems. Just like some percentage of non police people do bad stuff and we need a system to watch them and try to protect everyone else from them, we need it 10 times more for police people.

Just to clear up, he’s still fine to sell them; he just can’t trademark the phrase or stop other people from selling the exact same thing. The whole thing about RBG was that she also had a bunch of merch sold about her but none of it was entitled to trademark protection either while she was alive.

Eh

Russia is depleting the Ukrainian forces

Yeah just like the US depleted those Vietnamese forces so effectively for so long and that was the key to their victory

hard to get a good idea what’s happening on the frontlines

But surely it is possible to see which direction they are moving, or not moving, on a scale of hundreds of km over years, no? I mean you're not obligated to actually follow through on the answer, but I think you can see what I'm getting at .

loudest voices in support of Israel are also oft the loudest voices in support of further escalations with Russia

...

Dude now you're just saying talking points.

People on Lemmy like both Palestine and Ukraine because both of them got attacked by oppressive neighbors for basically no reason. The US State Department's position on the two is wildly inconsistent, but the position of most human people (or most people I interact with online at least) is not.

"Further escalations with Russia." One, the State Dept is actually being very careful about laying down rules for use of US arms to try to avoid escalation. I suspect that most of what you mean about escalation is "no fair fighting back!" Two, if Russia doesn't want to get escalated against they can get the fuck out of the country and stop killing people. This crying about how everyone is being mean to them and it's really dangerous and everyone better stop it, right now, because it's escalation, while they are still doing their side of the fighting uninterrupted on someone else's sovereign territory, is a bunch of shit.

Upset about the results of the peace talks? Pack your shit, get back across the border. Go home. There you go, peace.

Want no escalation? Pack your shit, get back across the border. I suspect all your oil refineries and airbases and radar stations will suddenly stop blowing up without warning which you think is so improper. Etc, etc, and so on.

Sorry to be rude about it again. But hey! At least I didn't come to your country and blow up your apartment building and kill a bunch of your friends and family.

And there's also a contingent of people on the trolley who are trying to get it to slow down, working their asses off to improve long term actual outcomes in the real world, whether related or not to the little lever, and the guy standing next to the empty disconnected track is claiming to be one of them and saying you must be against them and how dare you, you person-running-over-enabling monster, if you say anything against his strategy.

war nerd radio

Holy shit holy shit

Is that Gary Brechner? I had no idea he was even still around, if it is; I liked him quite a lot, like a million years ago

You are citing people I generally agree with, but I do not agree with what Mearsheimer is saying here. You're also pointedly ignoring my question about how the front line is moving.

Just to take what I think of Mearsheimer's points in lightning round:

• He talked about striking the homeland and escalation -- the US's approval for strikes inside Russia is very limited, for exactly this reason
• He talks about S-400s mooting any strikes anyway, when Ukraine has been blowing up S-400s. They don't seem to be this dominating force for defending even themselves let alone the area where they're placed
• Concerns about manpower are real, but also, they've been that way since the jump and the fucking front line hasn't gone anywhere. It's possible that Ukraine will get ground down over time but it hasn't happened yet and during the ammunition shortage would have been the most likely time for it to happen.
• He talks about the motivation for strikes inside Russia to be "to up the ante" because Ukraine isn't winning -- it's just a weird framing. I don't think that is the motivation; I think Ukraine just needs to strike at forces that are attacking them instead of suddenly going hands-off as soon as something's 5 km across the border from them.

IDK man. I'm not convinced. Want to answer the question about movement of the front line? And is this stuff in answer to my question about where you get your information? These people are generally pretty highly qualified people in my view, yes.

For example they were rightfully quite skeptical about the great summer offensive of 2023 whereas other sources were promising the conquest of Crimea.

Yeah that sounds pretty accurate from what I remember of Brechner. Just like Mearsheimer he has a record of having been accurate about the future, in retrospect, which is a pretty fuckin difficult thing to do.

I wonder if I will find “blue MAGA” in your comment history

I wonder if I will find support for any type of direct action on behalf of Palestine there, or if it begins and ends with not voting for Biden in November

Brb. I will check a few pages, I’m not planning on going through the whole thing

Edit: Wait, what the heck man, I was wrong; you seem for-real. No "blue MAGA" and there is this kind of stuff which seems pretty real and productive on behalf of Palestinian people. Now I'm just confused about your intent.

Okay, so to take the conversation in a serious direction, then:

Lmao no. You can try to walk it back but we've all been here. We're not dumb and we weren't born yesterday.

This is, more than anything, what made me think you were a troll. You sound like a campaign commercial. Just say what you want to say, and leave the "We're not dumb, Joe Biden" while looking straight into the camera, out of it.

Nobody is refusing to vote for Biden because he supports a country. It's because he supports and covers for them committing a genocide.

I think the idea that Biden is happy about Israel committing genocide, and wants them to continue, is immediately obviously not true. It seems clear that he supports Israel the country (which, he shouldn't) but not the genocide that they are currently doing. He's still not shipping them any more weapons since mid-May, as far as I know, and he's clearly pushing for a cease fire and humanitarian aid. Is that enough? Fuck no. He should have done all that in mid October, and he should be taking Netanyahu to the Hague. But it's also different from choosing to hit the gas on the genocide.

I think giving him shit for it in the present to try to make him stop the support he's still giving them (which is, it looks to me, what most of your comments on the issue are advocating for) sounds great. Up to and including threatening not to vote for him in November if he doesn't do X, Y, and Z.

I'm not sure if I would say this to him directly as like a "commitment" -- for exactly the reasons that you're saying -- but I plan to vote for him in November regardless, because of not wanting 10 Gazas all over the world with full-throated support from a second Trump administration. But I don't actually have any issue with what it looks like you're mostly saying, and I wouldn't really apply this meme to you even as pertains to you saying to give Biden resistance about Gaza. I think most of what the meme is targeted at is people who are saying they will never vote for Biden, and (various made up flaws unrelated to Gaza), and Trump's not that bad anyway, and who even cares about putting pressure on him in the present. That kind of thing seems bad. What you're saying as far as I can tell makes perfect sense to me.

Parasocial is better than no social at all

The plot thickens

Ukrainians I know do not agree with your assessment of blame, to put it mildly

Which direction is the front line moving over the course of the last year? I am curious what your picture is of the reality on the ground. Before the US aid package came through, it was 100% fair to say Ukraine was losing or on the verge of starting to lose, but now is very different on any time scale you could select. In my reality at least. Why do you say they are losing?

Follow up question, where do you get your information? From media (which?), from Lemmy, where?

working class action even election reform is kind of meaningless

I mean without working class action, election reform is kind of impossible, as is a lot of other kinds of reform. It’s not something the politician class will ever come up with on their own and put up for a vote for “us” to then vote on, without prompting, for quite obvious reasons.

That’s why I quite like the meme. You can vote until your voting finger falls off and there are certain problems that won’t get fixed without something else coming in. But still, yes, even in a totally dire dire situation, that attitude of “imma vote against this thing that’s going to win, for as long as I have bullets, because fuck you that’s why” is 100% the right action to take in my view. (Coupled with calling for air support)