Sonori

Perhaps, but to people who have spent the last few decades in the halls of power surrounded by members of a western style military who take it as given that they are a western nation just as formidable as their close allies in Europe and Asia, the idea that the nation itself could falter in such a way is certianly far from many of their minds. Doubly so for a party that is used to bulldozing its way through critical media outlets, courts, and public protests.

They’ve had general success in previous wars with most if not all of their neighbors, and something tells me the focus in their telling is not on the massive amounts of foreign aid they received in the lead up or duration.

They may often talk about how any given threat may be an apocalyptic end of the nation, but I don’t think they actually believe it, at least when it comes to the court of public opinion in some far off foreign lands.

Could a senior politician be so disconnected from the basic reality of their situation by yes men, loyalists, and wishful thinking? Well by all accounts Putin did honestly believe the FSB’s reports that Ukrainians would welcome any Russian forces in droves as liberators, and that any conflict would be over before well before the west could respond, so I’d say yes.

The path they are seeing is the path for Benjamin Netanyahu and his far right party to hold on to power for a few more years, all else be dammed.

His far right campaign and political messaging pre October 7th focused hard on how he was the only one strong enough to control Hamas, and on how he could ensure the fires of conflict would burn just hot enough that they would never find common ground and unite with the West Bank (the pretense that Isreal and the US demands they do before the West Bank authority can be recognized as a nation by the UN) but never got enough to possibly harm Isreal itself.

Between constant legal battles and scandals with Isreal’s supreme court, he was just bearly able to hold onto power when Hamas demonstrated that they clearly weren’t actually under his perfect control, and so now he needs a win a war to play the strongman and distract everyone from what he had been saying up until that point. He needs a reason to shut down media outlets criticizing him, and war powers to run over the opposition.

He also needs the votes of the farthest right of his far right party, and thusly needs to appear amenable to their position of complete Israeli annexation of the West Bank and Gaza.

All of this means that the IDF must be seen fighting a great war for the very survival of the nation, not a series of hostage rescue or series of commando raids to capture high value targets and more importantly intel. It’s also why he cannot let this end in a ceasefire or give into Hamas original terms of a hostage exchange for the Palestinians being held without charges for years in Israel, but must fight on until whatever passes to the far right as a total victory.

Little things like burning though most of Isreal’s foreign support and international reputation are at best problems for the future, and maybe even opportunities for campaigning, because when the world turned its back on Isreal only he and his party of strong men are going to be able to keep things going for the average citizen.

Really? Doesn’t seem that wild to me that a place where cartels have openly claimed responsibility for assassinating politicians that threaten the status quo might see a large pushback against a change to the status quo.

Opinion pieces on the Internet and political saber rattling by low level politicians does not a nuclear policy make.

States actually have quite a few different ways of signaling they are serious about potentially ending the world as we know it, and Russia is currently using none of them.

As an example, the Russian state’s own published nuclear policy has remained unchanged for over a decade and still explicitly prohibits nuclear first use in cases like this. Currently high level Russian politicians including Putin continue to reference said defense policy in response to questions about the use of nuclear weapons in Ukraine. If they were seriously considering using said nuclear weapons in Ukraine, they would be unambiguously signaling through changing these documents and other such methods that other governments actually take seriously.

More to the point, breaking the nuclear taboo would be massively harmful to both Russia and Putins own interests. It would at best result in a NATO backed no fly zone over Ukraine while China and Iran completely abandon them, and quite possibly result in a direct conventional or nuclear war with Nato. I simply don’t buy that they would do that with no warning or previous signaling simply because an artillery rocket was manufactured in a different country.

But Amarica bad, hypercapitalist dictator good.

Because as we all know, Natrual Gas has an extremely steady and nonvolatile price, especially now that we’ve spent hundreds of billions tying North America’s previously independent pricing to the gobal price.

Or we could, and this is a very crazy idea, go back to not attaching a tradable minute to minute commodities market and instead give control back to reliable contracts and the operators who actually manage the grid.

No I don’t think Israel sprang into existence on Oct 7. I’m not sure how you could even get that from my comment. The entire theory we are talking about is however predicated on the idea that the public sentiment on Tiktok about Isreal’s response to Oct 7 is what primarily drove the current law, so one would expect the cause the theory blames to have occurred before the effect, not after.

Not to cast dispersions on the everything starts with the jews in Israel narrative, but didn’t most of the political movement to force the sale of US TikTok to a US owner and the current law to do so long predate Oct 7 and the more even distribution of support shown on TikTok months afterword. Like I hate to break it to you but congress, especially this congress and the maze of think tanks that draft their laws, just arn’t that fast and efficient at implementing new policy.

I take issue with the word now in the headline. From what I remember polling showed majority US disapproval with Israel’s actions for nearly the entirety of the war since october 7th.

Probably not, after all this was all done on social media locally owned by the target country, so if anything this would push the US to foucus more on large platforms full of voters like Facebook.

Fusion also produces most of the nuclear waste that a fission plant does thanks to undergoing the same nutron activation process, and while it lacks spent fuel rods, thouse are already infinitely recyclable, so the only real waste saveings would be in low grade waste like dust covered clean suits and such.

This also doesn’t help the case for Fusion very much given that even with these disposal costs ITER has costs four to six times any average fission plant for a donor reactor that has no generating capacity and which is mearly to prove that the physics work, something we did for fission with the Chicago pile in 1942 at an estimated inflation adjusted cost of 53 million dollars.

If it’s this expensive for a proof of concept, it is very unlikely that any full plant would be much cheaper. Compare it to things we can actually deploy at scale today like onshore wind or battery backed solar, and it is pretty clear that Fusion is an expensive but important science project, not a serious proposal to power the electrical grid.

For all the talk about a slowdown, US EV sales are still rising, just not as exponentially as hoped. That being said, China and the EU have been doing better in no small part because of a foucus on affordable and budget cars over the US’s high margin luxury focus.

Well no restrictions on what they can buy beyond the fact Russia has halted and redirected all major military equipment exports to Ukraine for the last three years beyond licensed production and even if the war ended tomorrow it would need to spend years restoring its own military before it could export anything of value.

Tieing the country’s ability to defend itself to a hypercapitalist far right government instead of a less ideologically driven nation like India or China is probably also an indication that the government isn’t very serious about going in a socialist direction so much as an indication that it is trying to whitewash its image with hollow rhetoric.

I mean i’d like to see a challenge to a capitalist dominated world, but this sure doesn’t seem to be one.

Ya, it definitely has nothing to do with overly ambitious requirements for nodes, poor siteing of plants by companies, said sites requiring highly skilled workers move to small town Arazona for peanuts, or even the fact that in many cases training worked on these cutting edge nodes ment they needed to learn a second language and spend years in a foreign country for work, and Amaricans arn’t used to being the ones who have to do that.

It definitely wasn’t any of that, it was that they tried to hire a similar percentage of qualified women and black people as apllied to work on these projects. Definitely.

There is also the whole Transphobia thing where they do things like consistently interview people who run organizations classified as hate groups as “concerned parents” and who’s front page stories have been cited in Texas courts as evidence that allowing trans kids gender affirming care is seen by medical professionals as child abuse.

It’s also pretty silly because there are two NATO member nations closer to Moscow than Ukraine.

But hey, I can’t imagine why the people of all these democratic nations keep voting to join a mutual defense pact. It can’t be because of anything to do with fear of being invaded by the unstable dictator next door, after all, we know the world only exists of the US and Russia and no other people could possibly have a voice in their local government or matter in any way.

Um, ever heard of the Kyoto Protocol, Paris Agreement, and UNFCCC? All treaties that Trump either attempted to or successfully backed out of and which Biden rejoined. Slow and too little yes, but all of which do create a legally binding commitment to make at least some progress. Maybe the IPCC, which is heavily reliant on Amarican government agencies like NASA and NOAA to gather the data they make thier reports on, as well as funding for studies?

How about building and distributing green technologies to fight climate change, most of which require economic cooperation with foreign countries to both build and distribute.

How about the 50 to 60 Billion a year in humanitarian aid and free food that the US provides to the poorest parts of Central Africa and South America that were most heavily damaged by colonialism? You know, programs that save millions of families from dying of starvation and which Trump either attempted to or successfully stopped, and which Biden has re-entered and expanded. You know, the sorts of programs isolationists like Trump primary fight as reparations.

I’m certain to know the Gazan kids will be thrilled to know that the person who is actively ordering Amarican drone strikes on them to posture to his base is really a cool dude because he also cut off food to Guatemala and Ethiopia.

How is fuck you, got mine, i’ll take what I want and if you start to say anything anything about it i’ll blow you up posibly the lesser evil over diplomatic negotiations?

Isolationism, national policy of avoiding political or economic entanglements with other countries… Isolationism was a common charge leveled at paleoconservatives who rose in response to the statism and internationalism of the neoconservative movement, which dominated the political scene during the presidencies of Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and George W. Bush. - Encyclopedia Brittannica

One can withdraw from foreign diplomatic and economic agreements, such as Trump’s first day executive order that withdrew the US from and made China the leader in the the Trans Pasific Parthership, while also favoring assignations. Indeed, using assignation and small, frequent unilateral military action to presue foreign policy Instead of multinational, diplomatic, or economic means is foundational to isolationist foreign power.

Given that from my understanding the Ukrainian constitution requires any change in the nation’s borders to win a public referendum, and that the current polls show 3-5 support for such in a mock referendum, something tells me this isn’t going to do much more than buy time for Ukraine to integrate more modern weapons into its arsenal.