#fuck Russia and China but human rights are worth more than $

[plaguedocboi]

More scary waters, by popular demand!

Since my last post ranking bodies of water really, really blew up, I decided to make a second. Some of these were suggested by people (in which case I’ll credit them), and some were just ones that didn’t quite make the cut for the first list.

I’ll also be doing a third list ranking the most toxic bodies of water in the world, so stay tuned for that.

Also, keep in mind that these aren’t ranked by how dangerous they are. They’re ranked by how scary I, personally, find them. So if the rating seems off, it’s due to which ones inspire a visceral reaction in me and which ones don’t.

Silfra Rift, Iceland

This one is something that I actually find very beautiful rather than scary, but it still seems like something that others might be freaked out by. The Silfra Rift is the point where the Eurasian and North American continental plates are pulling apart, creating a crack in the earth that filled with water. The water here is incredibly clear, and you can see all the way down to the bottom even in the deepest spots (which are almost 200 feet down, by the way). It’s the only place in the world where you can put your hands on two different continents at the same time! I’ve had the privilege of snorkeling here, and although it’s definitely deep, I wasn’t terribly scared due to the fact that the rift is just so beautiful. The only danger to swimmers is the temperature; it stays between 35-39 F year-round, meaning anyone getting into the water needs a full drysuit to avoid getting hypothermia or worse. I give the Silfra Rift a 1/10 fear rating because I thought I would be much more freaked out by it than I was.

Dragon Hole, China

While not as visually striking as the Great Blue Hole in Belize, this sinkhole in China is the deepest “blue hole” in the world. This pit descends 987 feet down. This earns a 2/10 purely because this is just a goddamn hole in the ocean that’s almost 1,000 ft deep and I don’t care for that.

Lake Tanganyika, multiple countries (suggested by @iguessiamhere)

This lake didn’t quite make the cut for the first list because it comes in second to Lake Baikal. It’s the second-oldest, second-deepest, and second-largest (by volume) lake in the world. But someday, Lake Tanganyika may be number 1, because just like Baikal, it’s a Rift Valley. It’s getting bigger every day, and in a few million years when Baikal is an ocean, Tanganyika might be the largest lake by default. Its 4,820 ft depth earns it a 3/10.

Lake Superior, US/Canada (suggested by multiple people)

This is the largest of the Great Lakes, and the third-largest lake in the world. It reaches depths of over 1,000 feet and has a surface area of over 31,700 square miles. Lake Superior is the site of over 350 shipwrecks and contains roughly 10,000 dead bodies. The reason these bodies are never recovered is because the lake is very cold, and very deep. The lake bottom is essentially a sterile environment, where bodies are preserved for eternity instead of floating up as a normal body would. This lake holds onto her dead. 4/10 for sheer danger and alarming amount of dead bodies.

Cenote Angelita, Mexico ( @olive-k wanted a cenote, and this list has two!)

This is a cenote with an underwater river running through it. No, I’m not kidding. Underwater rivers are actually quite common, but they rarely exist in places that humans can see them. Usually they’re caused by a current moving in a different direction than the majority of the water, or a boundary between water with different density (as is the case here). The “river” appearance in Angelita is enhanced by dead trees, giving the appearance of a bank. For the first 100 feet, this cave has regular freshwater. But a little deeper lies a layer of hazy hydrogen sulfate, and beneath that is 100 feet of salt water. This ranks 5/10 because can you imagine descending towards a hazy patch of water and branches that you assume is the bottom, only to pass right through it and see a gaping black expanse beneath? No thanks.

Devil’s Hole, Nevada

As a biologist, this is somewhere that I actually want to visit. This tiny waterhole in the desert is the only place that the endangered Devil’s Hole Pupfish lives. But we’re not here to learn about cute fish, we’re here to read about unsettling waterways. And hooo boy, this one is pretty weird. Because despite its appearance, this isn’t a little rainwater pool. It’s the opening to a huge cave system, which reaches depths of at least 500 feet. We’re not totally sure, though, because the bottom has never been mapped, and several people have died trying to attempt it. 6/10, since it’s very deep, hasn’t been fully mapped, and is apparently haunted.

Eagle’s Nest Sinkhole, Florida

There is literally a sign in front of this sinkhole that reads “STOP. Prevent your death. There is nothing in this cave worth dying for” accompanied by a picture of the Grim Reaper. Need I say more? Probably not, but I will anyway. This sinkhole is the only surface opening to a cave system that stretches several miles and plunges to over 300 feet deep. Miles of twisting, confusing, narrow passages with only one exit make for an extremely dangerous cave system. For some fucking reason, it’s a very popular dive site. At least 11 people have died here since the 80’s, and is referred to as the “Underwater Mt Everest” because of how dangerous it is. 7/10.

Zacatón, Mexico

This cenote was literally considered “bottomless” for a long time, because no one could find the bottom. Multiple expeditions were attempted, including one where a man died after reaching 925 feet without finding the end. It took a multi-million dollar operation funded by NASA to find the bottom of this hole. I’m not kidding. Turns out, it’s 1,099 feet deep, making it the deepest cenote in the world. It disturbs me that it took NASA and a robot designed to map alien moons to locate where this hole ended, so it earns an 8/10.

Saltstraunen, Norway (suggested by anon)

This narrow strait is home to the strongest tidal currents on the planet. Roughly 110 billion gallons of seawater move in and out of this corridor every six hours, creating violent currents. These tidal movements are so strong they create a phenomenon very similar to the whirlpool in Scotland—the Saltstaunen Maelstrom. This vortex is 33 feet across and forms four times a day as the tides go in and out. Although this whirlpool is only 16 feet deep (very shallow compared to Scotland’s) the currents alone would probably destroy you if you ever fell into this strait. 9/10 because damn.

Blue Lake, Russia

Despite having the least creative name of all time, the Blue Lake is anything but boring. Like the Zacatón, this lake had a reputation for being bottomless for a long time. A diver died after descending to 394 feet, and another barely survived after going down to 685 feet. Neither found the bottom. Eventually, the bottom was discovered and it came as a surprise. The lake itself is only 770 ft by 426 ft, but it is 846 ft deep. This lake is deeper than it is long. It is also a constant 48 degrees F, making hypothermia a risk for any swimmers. If that’s not bad enough, it’s also full of hydrogen sulfide, which makes the air around the lake potentially dangerous. However, people do still dive here on occasion (mostly for research purposes) and the lake is surprisingly beautiful beneath the surface. Still, that doesn’t make it any less deep, cold, and poisonous, so this is a 10/10 for me.

Honorable mention: The Mariana’s Trench, because although it’s not really a specific body of water it’s the deepest point in the ocean, at 7 miles below the surface!

#bathophobia #water rating part 2 #long post

[allthingshetalia]

Oh my fucking god I absolutely loved your post about the axis with an s/o who rejected them because they thought they weren't good enough, I also L O V E your attitude on this blog you sound like such a nice person to be around 💕!! I was wondering if you could do the forementioned post but with the allies. Thank you so much in advance! ❤❤

💕omg thank you so much!!! I like to think I am lol you made my day! Thank you💕

America

The American stared at you, causing you to shift nervously. He closed his eyes and ran a hand through his greasy hair.

“I didn’t mean to hurt you!” You gulped. “I’m just not good enough.” You mumbled the last part and shifted nervously from foot to foot.

It was 3 weeks ago today when the American confessed his feelings for you, and what did you do? Tell him you didn’t feel the same way. Oh and Let’s not forget to mention it was his birthday. The only gift he wanted was you being his little precious sidekick, but instead all he got was a blurred out explanation of how you don’t feel the same why and you running out of his house. It was during his party when he pulled you into his room and confessed. Once you left he didn’t bother to leave his room. He locked his bedroom door and didn’t come out till a few days later.

You missed him dearly. And that was how you ended up in his house right now. You were shocked to see the happy American looking so lost and depressed.

Alfred groaning brought you out of your trance. He had his elbows on the kitchen island and his head buried in his hands. His back was hunched and he rubbed at his face. “Alfie.” You mumbled. You were more and more worried the longer you spent with him. You finally got the courage to walk over to him. Your hand reached out and tugged at his shirt sleeve, like a small child.

“How could you think you aren’t good enough for me? I’m not even close to being good! This whole time I thought I would not only have to lose the one I love, but also lose my best friend.” He stood up straight so he was looking down at you. His serious expression was one that always sent shiver down your spine. You winced and decided to be bold. You threw your arms around his waist and buried your face in his shoulder. He quickly returned you hug and pressed his cheek against the top of your head. You pulled away from the hug slightly.

“Can we start over?” You begged. He smiled slightly and rested his head against you forehead.

“You have a deal.”

England

“Will you please talk to me!” You shouted. You followed the angered Brit through his house as he went from room to room trying avoid you.

“Why so you can leave me again?” He spat. Your heart clenched at his words and your hand darted out gripping onto his shoulder.

“Artie please!” He groaned, but finally stopped, causing you to almost run into his back. “I didn’t mean what I said okay! I-I Just”- You stuttered. You groaned and rested your forehead against his back.

“You what?” He asked, urging you to continue.

“I’m not good enough or you.” You whimpered. Hot tears welled up in your eyes and your throat tightened. You felt Arthur’s whole body tense and he quickly turned around to face you. As soon as he saw your tears he gently cupped your face all anger in his body gone.

“What on earth are you talking about, love?”

“I mean, I know you don’t see it but you really are a wonderful person. You’re smart, witty, handsome, and you’re always nice and protective of me. And I’m nothing special. I’m just your average human.” A tear escaped your eye but was quickly brushed away. Arthur’s emerald eyes also threatened to boil over with a few tears. He had no idea you thought so highly of him- and so lowly of yourself.

“You also forgot to mention I’m hot-headed, stubborn, and sometimes just flat out rude.” He chuckled softly. He pressed his forehead against yours. “And you my dear, are anything but average. You are smart, caring, absolutely radiant and nothing less but extraordinary.”

France

“You’re being dramatic!” You shouted. You looked down at the disheveled Frenchman standing right below your balcony. It has been a week since you ‘rejected’ him. Well technically you did reject him, but not because you didn’t like him. You adored him actually, but he was just so perfect that you didn’t know if you would even feel comfortable dating him. Since then he has not left you alone.

“I am not being dramatic! I am a man in love! A man in love is excusable for any act he commits!” Francis shouted. You cringed especially as people walking stopped to watch the scene unfold. You groaned softly and motioned for him to come up. You ran to your door and buzzed him up to your apartment. You swore you could hear him hurdling himself up the stairs and within a few seconds your door flew open. Francis immediately lunges at you, falling to his knees. He wrapped his arms tightly around you pressing his face into your stomach.

“See dramatic!” You huffed poking the top of his head. He did nothing but mumble French words of adoration and thanks into your stomach.

“Will you please tell me what I did! I know you love me! And I don’t mean that in a conceited way. I can see it in your eyes because they shine like mine, with pure love.” He finally stood up and looked at you with desperately. You rolled your eyes at his words and shifted nervously from foot to foot.

“I-I.” You started. You ran a hand through your hair and flopped down on the couch. Francis quickly followed and placed your head on his lap running a soothing hand through your hair. “I’m not good enough for you.” You said finally. You waited a moment for him to agree with you but when you looked up at him he stared at you with his mouth agape and his blue eyes wide.

“You’re lying aren’t you! Whatever the reason is I promise you my precious little rose, you are the only one I will love till the day my country vanishes and I no longer exist!” He swore. The fact he said it so sincerely, made you blush. He really was committed wasn’t he?

“I’m not lying! I’m really not good enough for you.” You sighed sitting up. You turned so you could face him. Francis’ finger tilted your head up so you would look at him.

“How could you think that? You are one of the most angelic, fascinating creatures that have ever walked this earth and I’m not leaving your side until you believe that.”

Not suppose to be sexual!

Russia

The large Russian glared down at you angrily. If you were anyone else you would have tried to flee for you life right now.

He bent down and picked you up so you were eye to eye. You instinctively wrapped your arms around his shoulders and you let your legs dangle at his side.

You winced as his gaze never softened.

“Why are you so mad?” You whispered. You had rejected him a week ago. You would think the fact that you lived with him it would be impossible to avoid each other but the large Russian didn’t leave his room. Until he trudged downstairs demanding an answer. You said you didn’t think you were good enough for him, and that you loved him back, but you felt he deserved someone better. And since then he has been giving you the death glare.

“I’m mad because my Sunflower doesn’t know her worth.” He growled. You looked at him curiously. “How can someone so innocent and pure even begin to compare themselves to someone like me?” He asked rhetorically.

“You’re not as bad as you think you are, Vanya.” You soothed. His eyes softened slightly and his large nose brushed against yours.

“I don’t ever what to hear you say anything like that again.” He pressed a quick and light kiss against your lips. “I don’t deserve you and that doesn’t stop me.” He chuckled lightly.

China

He laughed when you told him.

“I’m just not good enough for you!”

It took him a moment to figure out that that is actually what you believed.

“You are crazy, young one.” He sighed, pressing a kiss to the top of your head. This whole time he thought you had rejected him because you didn’t think he was good enough for you, but now it was the other way around. He knew you loved him but he didn’t know to what extent. He didn’t know if you saw him more as a guiding figure or a lover figure. When he confessed he braced himself for rejection. You could have almost anyone you wanted afterall.

He could promise you love, protection and security. And good food. But he didn’t know if that would be enough for you. When you rejected him he took it very well. He smiled and kissed the top of your head like he always did and assured you that he had no hard feeling and that he didn’t want a single thing to change. And things didn’t change for a while. You still hung out with him almost everyday. You still had sleepovers, still watched movies and ate dinner together. Laughed and joked. Drank tea together. But the subject came around again.

You wondered if he actually loved you. If you had confessed and he rejected you, you would have been bawling your eyes out for the past month. “I will always love you and I just want you to be happy more than anything.” Is what he told you. You then confessed that he was what you wanted. You had been holding it in every time you visited and it finally bubbled over, you then decided you should tell him why you rejected him in the first place.

“You are just shy of perfect.” He smiled. “And that is something people spend years trying to obtain.”

Canada

“Are you insane!” The Canadian yelled. You jumped at his volume. “First you reject me and now you’re saying that you lied and you actually do love me?” He asked. He was much quieter than before, trying to wrap his head around it.

“Yes! I know, that was a horrible thing to do.” He nodded his head in agreement. “We both know you deserve better!” You explained. Matthew quickly stopped in his tracks turning to you with a shocked face.

“That’s why you rejected me? Because you didn’t think you were good enough?” He whispered in disbelief. You nodded your head slowly. Two large arms quickly wrapped themselves around your form. “Maple How could you ever think that?” He sighed.

“You’re Just always so nice. You stand up for other people, you protect them.” Tears started to flow down your cheeks at this point. “You’re hilarious, you’re a great cool. You’re so handsome! I just don’t get why you would want me.” You murmured. You pressed yourself deeper into the large Canadians chest.

“What I see in you?” He chuckled softly. He pulled away from you slightly and cupped your face in his calloused hands. “I see one of the most beautiful, intelligent, strong, and incredible people ever, and I don’t know how you can’t see that, but I guess it’s a good thing or else you would get cocky.” He chuckled.

#allthingshetalia #hetalia #hetalia blog #hetalia imagines #hetalia imagine blog #x reader #china hetalia #russia hetalia #america hetalia #canada hetalia #england hetalia #france hetalia #hetalia imagine #hetalia headcons #hetalia headcannons #hetalia fluff

[rjzimmerman]

I am incensed. If the US decided to act strongly against this activity (which it won’t), China and Russia will step right in and fill the void. We humans are just plain despicable........that elephant you see in the photo is a commodity because it has dentures that protrude from its jaws that are worth thousands of dollars. That’s like telling the world that my kidneys, heart, liver, eyeballs and skin are worth money, so just fucking kill me and sell my parts.

Excerpt from this story from The Revelator/EcoWatch:

Last year the world reacted in shock when Namibia announced plans to auction off 170 live elephants to the highest bidder.

Despite criticism, the plans have continued to move forward — and that may just be the start. Tucked away in a Feb. 1 press release justifying the auction was a rehash of the country's oft-repeated desire to also sell ivory. The Namibian Ministry of Environment, Forestry and Tourism's stated:

"Namibia has major stockpiles of valuable wildlife products including ivory which it can produce sustainably and regulate properly, and which if traded internationally could support our elephant conservation and management for decades to come."

Namibia is not alone in this desire to capitalize on its wildlife. In Zimbabwe's national assembly last year, the minister of environment valued the country's stockpile of 130 metric tonnes (143 tons) of ivory and 5 tonnes (5.5 tons) of rhino horn at $600 million in U.S. dollars. This figure, which would value ivory at more than $4,200 per kilogram, has since been seized upon by commentators seeking to justify the reintroduction of the ivory trade.

International trade in ivory has been banned since 1989, following a 10-year period in which African elephant numbers declined by 50%, from 1.3 million to 600,000. However, in 1999 and 2008 CITES allowed "one-off sales" of stockpiled ivory, to disastrous effect. The selling prices achieved then were only $100/kg and $157/kg, in U.S. dollars respectively, due to collusion by official Chinese and Japanese buyers.

The intention of CITES in approving the one-off ivory sales was to introduce a controlled and steady supply of stockpiled ivory into the market. The legal supply, coupled with effective systems of control, aimed to satisfy demand and reduce prices. This in turn should have reduced the profitability of (and the demand for) illegal ivory. Poaching should have followed suit and decreased.

Instead, the sales led to an increase in demand and, consequently, an increase in elephant poaching. The 2008 ivory sale was accompanied by a 66% increase in illegally traded ivory and a 71% increase in ivory smuggling. An investigation in 2010 by the Environmental Investigation Agency documented that 90% of the ivory being sold in China came from illegal sources.

The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) comparison of elephant poaching figures for the five years preceding and five years following the sale showed an "abrupt, significant, permanent, robust and geographically widespread increase" in poaching.

The problem has not faded away. Most recently the two African elephant species (savanna and forest) were declared endangered and critically endangered due to their continued poaching threat.

#elephants #ivory #poaching #Namibia

[alexanderpusheen]

what frustrates me the most abt this china narrative is that the US created al qaeda and ISIS, those groups are recruiting and causing terrorism in xinjiang, china has been trying to handle the situation with re-education programs often suggested by westerners, and its still being treated as this major human rights violation. there are actually dozens of countries with several robust anti radicalization programs that are just as strict, like singapore, colombia, yemen, bangladesh, saudi arabia, and indonesia. this paper ive linked to was even funded by the DHS so like...why has detaining someone and basically reverse brainwashing them out of being a terrorist been so acceptable for so long but now its an issue? 

if you take issue with chinas program, you have to prove its somehow exceptional to these other programs. since we really dont have any way of knowing what is truth or reality thanks to the enormous disinformation campaign going on, you fucking cant. we dont even know what the programs entail because even googling it gets you exclusively hyperbolic concentration camp accusations. 

what i will say is that relations between the han majority and the uyghur minority have been strained since at least the 80s. link is the notoriously conservative and pro US intervention human rights watch, so dont say im using pro commie sources or anything. every time i do any bit of research on this i seem to find an attempt from major news outlets in the early to mid 2000s or late 20-teens to prove this all started or became dramatically worse now, but things have always been tense. and its not really a surprise that things really got bad after the collapse of the soviet union, an event that was geographically close to china and the xinjiang region and also just like, a fucking major global event in general.

what i find to be very odd is just how dramatically the narrative has changed. the diplomat, one of my favorite periodicals, went from taking very nuanced and balanced positions on xinjiang that i almost completely agreed with to being just as aggressive as outlets like the BBC and CNN in the span of five years. they have eleven pages worth of articles on xinjiang, mostly covering the terrorism and beijings response (which i agree is too harsh) and xinjiang muslims’ relationships to the greater muslim world. 

an example is how this article talks about the conflict at the time which warns of escalating violence as a result of han chauvinism and beijing being unable to deal with the extremism holistically. it points out how there were uyghurs captured among taliban ranks in afghanistan and how many might have even been working with ISIL.

The threat will not be an existential one to the Chinese state, as most Uighurs would prefer a peaceful accommodation. But even if only 1 percent of Uighurs hold extreme views, there are 10 million in Xinjiang and even for a state security apparatus as formidable as China’s, 100,000 or more angry people present a tough challenge.

i think its totally right that china does not allow people in that area to have cars, woodcutting tools, and amonium nitrate (which is used in bombs) is very strictly regulated. i completely agree that this is not how you combat terrorism. most people do not want war and broadly punishing these people is itself a human rights violation that went unnoticed until now.

however, in that same year, the diplomat also published this article about the infamous turkestan islamic party. members of TIP are like, literal jihadists lmfao.

TIP fighters call on the world’s Muslims to join the jihad against Western countries in internet videos. Perhaps most worringly for China, the TIP believes that Muslims may fight locally using various means instead of coming to Syria and Iraq to conduct a “holy war” against the “infidel” Western regimes.  

yeah i definitely want to hear more about what these guys have to say. the article is really good because i think it highly illustrates just how dangerous these people are. theyve killed hundreds of people across china and want to establish a fascist religious state in xinjiang. while the article speaks for itself, i believe the last paragraph really highlights why china is being singled out whereas countries like france and canada are considered allies to muslims for whatever reason:

However, as experience has shown, China takes a passive position in the struggle against global Islamic jihad in Syria and Iraq. Beijing has not sent its troops to the Middle East to fight ISIS and has instead confined itself to diplomatic support for Russia and the United States. The Chinese government uses the attacks of Islamic jihadists to persuade Western countries to support Beijing’s position on Xinjiang and turn a blind eye when the freedom and rights of Uyghurs are harshly suppressed by Chinese security forces. Therefore, China is not perceived by the West as a reliable partner in the fight against terrorism. [emphasis mine]

im just a little surprised to see that a lot of these violent attacks from extremists throughout the years have targeted not just han chinese but also other uyghurs. in the west people do not typically sympathize with terrorists as freedom fighters, even on the left, because we know that no matter how angry or how seemingly justified the violence might seem, terrorism is unacceptable and it grossly misrepresents islam. it is a fascist act because those terrorists often follow an extremely right wing version of islam. also, we know that those who carry out terrorist attacks even outside of the west are middle class and professionals in some way, not poor and marginalized people. the level of nuance afforded to terrorists outside of xinjiang is pretty staggering. 

yet in china, there seems to be this excitement than they are killing chinese people, even if some of those chinese are other uyghers or otherwise muslims. those who carry out attacks in xinjiang dont get any nuance or analysis because theyre justified.

ive referenced the diplomat earlier but this article from 2013 says it perfectly: Call Tiananmen Attack What It Was: Terrorism. except terrorism is bad. and the west wants you to support the uyghurs. and make no mistake, they do not want you to support the millions of uyghurs who want to live peacefully, free of any repression, american or chinese. they want you to support the jihadists randomly blowing up chinese and tourists alike because you are meant to sympathize with their plight.

terrorism isnt something to be romantacized or cheered on. it is something someone or someones do when they feel they have no other option. people do not want to kill even those they feel they have every right to because thats a line you cant uncross. murder changes you, justified or not. see the last chapter of wretched of the earth for this.

terrorism is great, however, for destabilizing a region or a country, and xinjiang is resource-rich. establishing a US-friendly regime, no matter how good they are on human rights, is the goal. the US does not care about muslims. they do not care about human rights. china, also, does not really seem to care about muslims or human rights either. but we’ve seen this since vietnam, and the US has learned since vietnam. the vietnamese were sympathetic. they were minding their business. 

after vietnam, merely being communist isnt enough to warrant invasion. theyre killing their own people. nevermind that bolsonaro kills his own people and no one wants to invade (yet--biden has mention sanctions wrt us which is scary but again, thats got everything to do with making sure latin america is loyal to the west, not HR offenses). korea, although it was before vietnam, was less publicized and learning from vietnam gave the US a valuable lesson: always blame the victim. and thus, the US blames the victims of its violence. even if its ‘justified’, even if its ‘true,’ as was the case with saddam hussein, invading and occupying was the nightmare no one but the imperialists anticipated. because they dont broadcast what occupying forces do to the occupied. i am old enough to remember abu ghraib. have it seared in my memory forever. you perhaps are also old enough to remember, but also think millions of abu ghraibs and guantanamo bays are always worth it, always justified. 

i know people arent going to read this and remind me really rudely that they didnt read it but i want to really emphasize how one of imperialism and colonialisms features is ethnic and racial separatism. how the rwandan genocide couldnt have happened without previous belgian and french rule. how yugoslavia wouldve remained a single country had it not been for NATO. i think its easy to diminish the role of the colonizer in all of this, but it is actually one of its goals: divide and conquer. exacerbate the existing conflicts to the point of genocide. 

and if the west succeeds in balkanizing china, you will get more racism rather than less. you will see more violence against muslim minorities rather than less. they will feel less empowered rather than more. china has to learn that they are also to blame in a way that will be catastrophic for over a billion people. han chauvinism and outright racism must be addressed beyond window dressing.

wrapping up, china is in the wrong here. what theyre doing is racist and humiliating a population that has to be empowered. and the one child rule, even for the han majority, is imo fucking evil lol like sorry tankie tumblr im tankie too but i cannot for the life of me accept that as a good thing.... but i also dont buy the accusations of genocide, because even tho a lot of these articles are kind of glossing over it, china is trying to handle the terrorism in the region. imo theyre feeding into it by getting more han in the area, but also having more han but forcing them to take worse jobs would be a show of good will. idk, this situation is extremely complex and frankly, most uyghers do not want secession. 

i also take extreme issue with people saying that adrian zenz is somehow reliable. not only is he a nazi crackpot, hes also literally the only source for almost all of what we know about this in the west. that is not how you do journalism. i dont understand how people are saying ‘yeah hes an extremely fascist grifter but also i believe him because hes anti communist and also anti china’. thats also not really the point? the point is that hes also the ONLY SOURCE on almost all of this, which is alarming. 

i also find it very startling that in order to keep interest in the story, every few weeks the US has to remind people that the chinese are also doing what the US is doing to women in its own camps. forget that the US is separating minors from parents (since 2008). forget that the US is sterilizing women en masse (since 2017). forget that the US is raping women at the border (since there was a border). forget the US even has camps because now they arent even called that anymore. this is not that ‘you can be angry at two things at once’ but a clearly cynical attempt to get its citizens to forget that the US is detaining, deporting, sterilizing, and raping, and gassing non US nationals. 

they are not ‘your own people.’ they are me. the other. i am an immigrant to the US, currently in my country of birth, so i am the other to you, the american. the chinese are doing the evil crime of killing their own. but the americans could never kill their own because they dont consider black americans to be their own. latin american nationals are not their own. bombing millions globally is not their own. thats always justifiable. there is clearly an element of racism in how these crimes are perceived as more or less evil.

the way immigrants and black americans are brutalized in the US is almost naturalized. like its the way things are supposed to be. you can live with that. its upsetting that you have to hear about antiblackness and the like but you know thats just how life is. you dont necessarily call for the US to be sanctioned or bombed by other countries because you believe in the inherent goodness of white america. but countries like china and iran and north korea deserve to be starved and killed for their crimes. and you can never say ‘maybe bombing and starving a country isnt the answer’ because it means you agree with it. you can never say ‘this is clearly propaganda to make me hate another race so much’ because it means youre a genocide denier. im sorry, but again, i remember iraq in 2003, i remember libya in 2011. i dont buy it.

finally, theres been a lot of attacks on asian people in the US lately and if you cannot see the violent way the US talks about china the country and how that influences people to harm asians within the US then idk what else to tell you. people will really believe this shit and say the chinese are all blood thirsty islamaphobes and thus need to be harmed. ‘im not like that! i defend my asian friends from racism!’ thats nice and all but idk how spreading some sinophobic propaganda designed by the US to make you support some kind of violence against one billion chinese people isnt inherently racist. also its unhelpful because sanctions dont really solve problems. but ive spoken too much.

[imjustawerido]

Just read it i u want to

The change it is in oneself

 Hi, I'm basically no one or someone that can tell you what's going in the world right now... Well I can tho, violence, lack of education, pollution and climate crisis, mistreat to all and all of us, and the list goes and goes further. I mean I just did it, I just mention some of the issues of our society and I’m just a common person, I can't go deeper in this problems cause I don't know much of them but some people do and they are pretty common too, and they blame a lot of people and say a principal cause of what they society is "fucked" (that sounds kind of rude, doesn't it?) some people say the internet is the major factor others that "God" is not in their lives and also others that society is on a rapid downfall or even freefall event, other some that society have lost it sanity or it faith or it intelligence (I mean if society have lost it intelligence you wouldn't make that kind of comments, would you?). Sounds like disaster, people blaming on everything and everyone from everything and everyone also blaming them cause if you blame society your blaming you cause you are part of it and blaming literally everyone, cause everyone is part of our society, so the scenario it's people blaming the entire society for problems or things that some groups of people might haven't met or think about those things. Beside you are religious or if you use Internet or not despite you have any impediment or just if you haven't seen those things. Such a messy world.

 An example to make clearer the situation. Imagine that you are a villager around somewhere, you have a family, you have friends who live a couple of kilometers from where you live, you have some ways to communicate worldwide not all of them (pretty much news) you don’t have social media, but you're happy. On a day like any other you are going to hunt an animal to have food but you meet some activist who fight against animal mistreat and they ask you and beg you not to do it because for people like you animals have lost rights and died in a horrible way, you say that you have to feed your family and they tell you that are options in the supermarket a company in where animals die without any kind of violence, abuse or mistreat, you say “ok I'm going to give a chance, to change”, you take a portion of your time to travel far away but the closest supermarket around your area, you get inside, get the exact brand, paid, walk out from the supermarket while an activist of climate change stop you and gives you an information, the company that manufacture that meat does it without any violence or abuse but the animals can only be within a certain area doing irreparable damage to the ground in addition to the fact  that the level of greenhouse gases emissions is enormous and she asks you try to do something else because for people like you who still choosing these kinds of products, the environment it's not gonna change, but being vegetarian it's not an option, some vegetables and meat substitutes are pretty expensive in your region. So you are confuse, you feel bad, you don't have as good information as you could get. What would you do? Which is the bad option here? Where is the evil option here? It is buying the meat you need and directly promoted pollution, or just killing the dear without mercy, or just buying expensive alternatives until your money runs out, or just stop eating???

 Being unaware it's not being ignorant, like the example I just said, there are lot more of them, like something recent from years now, let's mention the climate crisis debate. The information is real. right now China is the biggest greenhouse gases emitter with 16.2 percent of global methane emissions (around 1.6 billion tons), 14.5 of N2O emissions (around 410 million tons) in 2018 and right now China must be producing around 30% of global C2O emissions, having and counting information of 2017  in which China produced 9.8 billion metric tons of C2O. so having that in count blame should go on China despite the US being in second place India in third Russia in fourth, etc. and of course being much more less emissions than China, but we are not seeing the whole picture, historically the U.S is on the top with more than 400 billion tons of C2O and is responsible for 25% historical emissions and right behind is the European  union with 22% is about double China's historically gases emissions and digging more deeper the emissions of the U.S were more drastically in the XX century along with the European Union and this made them very rich and develop countries, so within they can cost the expensive alternatives and stop burning fossil fuel and stop emitting other gases, and the other countries don't have another way to avoid poverty but burn fossil fuel and start more emission, like the case of China, China's emissions rise drastically in this few years but it poverty levels also drastically decrease in a shocking way and for some countries their emissions could be just lifestyle emissions like going to hang in a car and for other life important emissions. Of course covid 19 effects reduce this emission, but covid wasn’t threatening us years ago, So knowing these facts is worth to find someone to blame? Is China bad? Is the U.S bad? is worth to blame someone about it in this big society?

 Blaming can be discussing and obviously discuss it worth too, but in this big society with a lot of epistemic groups along with it, it is? Let me gather this topic, when we talk about epistemic communities we are referring to communities, of course I’m not referring to the large international scale ones, is a group of people, can be large, small, very large, very small, that thinks, search or aim some ideas of home and some other related topics, and gets information in the same relative way, for example, this example is more about internal relationships and authority but it can let you get the idea in your mind better. a mother tells her child that there is some eggs in the fridge the child may (must) believe it but an uncle or aunt may be more difficult, now imagine a cousin and know even a stranger, levels of confidence differ by epistemic group, another examples, some tourist come to your countries and talks about your Independence Day, or some religious people knocking your door and give some talk, the level of testimony must be more higher than someone from your epistemic community because the level of testimony from someone from your epistemic community is relative as the same way that you get information so it's easier for someone from your epistemic group transmit knowledge than someone from outside. And also that means that all epistemic groups don't have the same evidence they always are goanna lack in some facts for example non-religious people or people unaware of an Ebola outbreak and it's ok there is nothing bad with it and that's why blaming all society for an issue or another is stupid.

 So how can we help, I mean is that the right word? Does really everyone want to help the whole society. You know, I think society works as a clock, with along 8 billion engines, some engines being in the opposite direction, some others need some oil, etc. and when you ask, request, a society change the difficult part it's that i can't check 8 billion engines to see which one might need oil and I can't just replace it, unless you can tell me where I can buy a freaking 8 billion engines clock. It would be easier if every single engine could have conscious and correct itself, like a person, and for that I'm glad that society is made out people and no freaking engines because people have the ability to adapt and that is awesome, make a change for the goal to make things better. The change it is in oneself, a lot, but I really mean a lot people said that is incorrect, congrats, you are wrong, the phrase is correct I think is not really working cause is bad formulated.

 To make things spicier from here, remember if you don't take that phrase seriously you aren't a better person, congrats your part of the problem about everyone is blaming on everything and everyone requesting a whole change. Whole change, it is really correct? the basis is "let’s do some change together as a society" yeah not gonna work, an 8 billion group session therapy for change is not goanna make the trick, all the society can't make the same change for the same good lead by the simple fact that all people are completely different from another In uncountable ways, everyone needs different goods different changes and that's ok, that's why you have to change depending on what you could do better. And right you might begin defending yourself "nooo but I'm being good" and you know I can trust, but I don't care, the one who cares should be you, ask yourself if you are lying to yourself because the smallest action like ignoring a red light (and you know there are other much more common and much more worst) and then careering about the phrase “the change it is in oneself, wow that is like the biggest example of double moral is ever gonna be. It not worth it for being a good person, but for being a person.

 You might be thinking this is utopia, I'm not trying to achieve that, utopia is perfect and humans are not, there is phrase that says, “humans are perfectly imperfect, like the phrase itself”. Actually there is an experiment "mice utopia" which tries to achieve this, a utopia for mice, unlimited resources but limited space, even though in real life we don't have unlimited resources, in the end the experiment went pretty bad and yes obviously I can't compare humans with mice but what I'm trying to say is that if with mice went to basically through hell imagine it with so complex humans’ beings, mice are basic, you can't have denied that. What I’m trying achieve is not utopia but awareness, conscious.

 So, change for make things better, why? Why would you do that, I can leave a reason, do it for you, love yourself, for your world, and that is the things you love, your planet, your pets, whatever, the ones you love, your friends, your lovers, just you, make your world better without harming anyone, is possible.

 So the change it is in oneself, yes... If you stop hugging a victim role... If you stop doing the less... If you stop thinking that you can't do anything by yourself. I hope you do so. Thanks.

(if u wanna find me somewhere else here's my ig: @juan0_rr)

#socialchange #speech #speeches #society #people #change #makeachange #world #save yourself #awareness #beaware #socialgood #socialtravel #social awareness #do something #do some research #think before you speak #try it yourself #makeabetterworld #beaperson

[arlingtonpark]

SNK 121 Review

TFW you’re relying on someone to pull through and they’re failing badly.

Has anyone ever seen JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure? SPOILERS

One of the villains is this guy named DIO. He’s an asshole. 

DIO’s whole schtick is that he is obsessed with being dominant. In the clip, he assaults JoJo’s girlfriend to show his dominance over both her and JoJo.

In JoJo’s, people fight using spiritual manifestations of their own life essence. These manifestations are called Stands, and because they are a manifestation of the user’s essence, Stands are revealing in some way as to the nature of the user.

DIO’s stand is the World and it has the power to stop time. Being able to stop time is absolute domination, both physically and temporally. Physically because you can stop the world and fuck around with everything as you please, and temporally because you are no longer subservient to the constant flow of time. The world stops for no man, except you.

Now Eren is fittingly in the same boat, except worse because while DIO could only stop time, Eren can control the course of events. He can see the future and affect the past. His domination over the world is (theoretically) absolute.

I don’t know what Eren’s plan is, but we get a taste of it this chapter. Zeke asks him point blank what he hopes to accomplish and Eren’s response is the most disturbing thing ever.  

“If people try to take my freedom away, I will take theirs away.”

My God.

This statement completely encapsulates Eren as a person. This is the rambling of a deranged lunatic. Worse, even. It’s the thinking of a stupid kid.

“Eren, why did you hit Little Timmy?”

“Because he hit me!”

You cannot hit someone just because they hit you. It doesn’t work that way. You are allowed to hit back in self-defense, but not to exact revenge. Both actions are the same, but the state of mind backing either action is the key difference. The former is the mindset of someone trying to protect themselves. The latter is the mindset of someone trying to hurt someone else.

That’s the faultiness of Eren’s thinking in principle, and it’s even worse in practice.

Eren believes that them trying to kill him gives him license to kill them. Nope, wrong.

Human life is, of course, inviolably valuable, and therefore killing in itself is always wrong. You can kill in self-defense, because the point in that case isn’t the killing itself, but the preservation of your own life. Killing for its own sake is appalling.

Ironically, this deranged narcissist perfectly illustrates why this tit-for-tat way thinking is dangerous. Restraint? Graciousness? Mercy? Can Eren comprehend these concepts?

It’s just so stunning how childish this whole thing is. Eren is opposing a king who would force his will on the future, but since Eren is doing the exact same thing, I can only assume he doesn’t think this is intrinsically wrong.

No, it’s not that Fritz’s vow is wrong, it’s that the same mechanism isn’t being used in service of Eren’s goals. Eren doesn’t think the vow is wrong in itself, he just opposes it because it’s another limit on his freedom.

There is no reason to believe Eren has any boundaries whatsoever. Or any shame for that matter. 

This “me-centric” form of morality is called egoism. It’s an utterly disreputable theory that no one defends. It’s the same with the children he killed in Liberio. Killing is wrong, unless it helps me, in which case it is good. By defining what’s good and bad in these terms, Eren reveals himself as the egomaniac man child that he is.

And yet.

Eren is the one who lectures Zeke in this chapter!

This is what Eren has reduced me to, defending Zeke. Why is this happening to me?

Zeke is supposedly the pathetic one, because he has, you know, an ideology. It’s a stupid AF ideology that is completely indefensible, so it is pathetic, but not the way Eren thinks.

Zeke’s opposition to Grisha is incidental to his ideology. It’s not that Zeke is opposing Grisha out of spite, which would truly be pathetic. Zeke opposes Grisha because their respective worldviews are incompatible.

Meanwhile Eren is saying he should be allowed to do mean things to people because they did mean things to him.

The idea that people can just kill others, simply because they tried to kill you is fundamentally lawless. Not to take the fun out of superheroes, but vigilante justice isn’t actually justice. It’s totally illiberal to have one person hold the power to judge, convict, and sentence another.

But it is also totally in character for Eren to support that idea. With Eren, it’s all about power.

I’ve often compared Eren to our 45th president. Whatever the Eren stans say, that is an apt comparison. Eren’s talk of taking freedom from those who try to take his is not unlike something Trump would say. 

They are both narcissistic man children with an insatiable lust for dominance. Slighting them creates an imbalance that they must make right, and the world is off kilter until that is done. It’s that one itch they must scratch.

Eren fights because, to be blunt, he wants the world to be his bitch and he will not settle for anything less than that. This is second nature to someone who says the things Eren says. If you think killing is justified just because they tried to kill you, then you obviously do not value human life.

At this point, Eren is undeniably similar to Zeke. He wants to bring his dream to fruition and anyone who gets in his way is just a pissant to be stomped on. 

Is Eren redeemed by his (apparent) concern for his friends? 

Nnnnope!

While friends do have certain obligations to each other, it is completely obscene to do the heinous things Eren’s done just for their sake. 

You cannot define the morality of your actions by how much they help a random group of people. Why are the lives of Eren’s friends worth any more than the lives of the people he’s killed?

The answer is that, all else being equal, they aren’t. 

You may care deeply for someone, but that does not justify a killing. 

Who is even the hero of this story anymore?

It can’t be Zeke, because his values are anathema to the series values. He may be the audience surrogate this time around, but I doubt fucking Zeke Jeager is going to be the hero when the final chapter comes around. 

Eren is theoretically the hero because his values broadly align with the story’s, but his actions are depicted in an almost devilish light. I always hoped the series would tackle the notion of fighting too hard for what you believe in, but…it’s too late for that now?

We’re in the final story arc. It’s weird to only just now be dealing with this meaty idea. Over 100 chapters of “Fight! Fight! Fight! Fight!” and we’re just now getting to the “But not too hard.” part? There’s no way. 

Alternatively, this is just one final fake-out in the game of is-he-or-isn’t-he that Isayama has been playing since the Marley Arc. Is Eren evil, or isn’t he? Or maybe they’ll play it as “Can he be redeemed or can’t he?” 

Either way, I bet there’ll be some kind of change of heart from Eren soon. 

This chapter echoes a point made by Yelena about the titans and their relationship to humanity: that the titan powers will be abused by people because that is just the nature of things. So let’s unpack that.

King Fritz, speaking through Frieda, says that the power of the titans must not fall into human hands lest it be abused. This mirrors ongoing debates about how to deal with certain controversial weapons, such as nuclear weapons.

The (very) liberal position is that nuclear weapons should be banned completely because the risk of abuse is too great.  As per usual, the liberal position is taken by King Fritz.

The conservative position, which, once again, is the position the story sides with, is made more implicitly: that the titan powers can be a force for good, it’s just a matter of making sure only good people can access that power.

This conservative position is what underlies US policy towards North Korea and Iran. Those countries are rogue states that the US believes cannot be trusted. (Note, though, that the nuclearization of Iran is supported by Russia, a nuclear power.)

Personally, I believe nuclear weapons should be banned completely. Most countries are at least nominally supportive of the eventual, complete destruction of all nuclear weapons, and international norms have been evolving in that direction.

That is the contradiction of this issue: most people take the liberal position in the long term, but hold the conservative position in the short term.

This is just another reason to think that SNK will end with a ringing endorsement of nuclear weapons, with nary a nod to the need for eventual total disarmament.

See, ungodly amounts of power aren’t inherently bad, we just need special people to wield them for the public good.

Yeah, I get it, we need special people, but you know what? Frodo was special. The One Ring supposedly couldn’t corrupt him, but they still set out to destroy it. Because power on this scale is itself wrong.

Nuclear weapons aren’t the only possible parallel, though. Any controversial weapon will fit. In the United States there is a debate over regulating high powered weapons like the AR-15.

How do you handle such a thing? Do you ban the weapon completely, or just certain people from using it? I won’t wade into something as controversial as that here, though I will point out that the story clearly sides with the position of regulation over a total ban.

The scene in the cave also mirrors Japan’s current nuclear predicament. Japan has many outside rivals and threats, and Japan could build nuclear weapons if they wanted too. They have the technological capability, but in spite of the threat of North Korea, and the tense relations with China, the Japanese government chooses not to.

So, yeah, I’ve had the series pegged as leaning neoconservative and I still think that.

So what does the future hold?

Apparently, an event where Eren… becomes/does something. They both saw the same thing: a future where Eren is this OP chad of chads and a total boss. Grisha looks like he saw the worst thing imaginable. Eren looks like he just had an orgasm.

Since Eren is portrayed in a more sinister way this chapter, I am inclined to believe this future actually is a ghastly one.  

Before this chapter, my guess was that Eren wanted to destroy the world using the wall titans, but would somehow come around to using it the way Armin mentioned: defensively.

Having it be preordained that the future holds a version of Eren that people who aren’t Eren will think is abominable throws a wrench into that.

I wouldn’t bet against Isayama somehow finding a way to make it work though. The only other alternative is that this series ends in the most ironic way possible, with the deranged lunatic having his way and “freedom” finally being established.

#shingeki no kyogin #attack on titan #snk 121 #spoilers

[twilight-resonance]

Afghanistan

In the spirit of trying to write about things I have opinions about, I'm going to start with Afghanistan. Because it’s complicated, because it’s something I’ve been keeping an eye on the last couple weeks, because it’s interesting to me.

Years ago, when sent troops to Syria, I wrote a post along the lines of: this feels like damned if you do, damned if you don’t. It was true then of Syria, and it’s true now of Afghanistan. What kept coming back to me was the suffering that was likely to happen if we didn’t intervene; and that’s still a factor now, but there are so many other factors to consider. Like what suffering looks like long-term. Like who’s doing the suffering, and for whose gain. Here’s a way to start:

I found this map the other day; it’s a map of which regions of Afghanistan were under government control vs. Taliban control. It was posted with the disclaimer that it would likely be inaccurate within 12 hours - in actuality, it was inaccurate within 20 min. It drove home for me just how fast the Taliban front was moving; and while it’s true that it’s been ongoing for months and years, the fact that so many large cities were surrendering so fast is indicative of so many other things. For one, it made clear to me just how little support the Afghani government had in practice, or how unstable it was. From there, I went and dig some digging into the history of the situation.

Honestly, it figures that a lot of Afghanistan’s instability today is a result of the Cold War. So many terrible things about the way the world is arranged from today do. It’s a tale as old as time, or at least as old as last century - the US and USSR are in a power struggle via proxy wars, the US funds and trains and arms local groups to push back on the USSR, and then after the Soviet Union falls apart and its locus of control diminishes significantly those same groups take over and oftentimes end up in conflict with the US later down the road. So there’s that, ever and always.

Then of course there’s 9/11. I was alive for 9/11, and long enough to remember the way the world was before; but not old enough at the time to really grasp what was happening and why. I hadn’t realized until a few nights ago that the Bin Laden family was so powerful in Saudi Arabia, or that Osama Bin Laden was from such a wealthy family. Nor that he’d been exiled, or at least “exiled” (I’m truly not sure which, but either feels plausible). I also hadn’t realized that he was operating more out of Pakistan than anything - but the sense I get is that we couldn’t invade Pakistan because they’re a nuclear power, so the US did the “next best” thing and used Afghanistan as a base to operate from instead.

That said, there’s a reason that Afghanistan is the place that empires go to die. I also found this map of Afghanistan’s terrain; once again, it drove home for me just how hard that would be not only to navigate in or fight in, but to establish any kind of coherent state in. I know less about the cultural makeup of Afghanistan that I would like, but looking at the topography it’s not hard for me to believe at all that part of the trouble with forming a coherent state is that the geography itself fights you at every turn. Harder to make coherent infrastructure, and populations that have historically developed vastly different cultures that don’t necessarily get along. I saw the sentiment that Afghanistan is really more like four nations in a trench coat, and I suppose maybe it is. I don’t know for sure - like I said, I know less about its cultural makeup than I'd like - but from poking around, that seems like it at least has some kind of ground to stand on.

On the one hand, I agree with the sentiment that what’s happening now was always inevitable - we could have stayed there for decades more, and had more or less the same result. On the other hand, I also agree with the sentiment that there was some good done there - more access to electricity and internet, more education and freedoms for women, etc; and that the suffering that’s about to go on now is abhorrent and it’s absolutely terrifying that we’re allowing it to happen. But on the other hand again, what could we possibly have done that would have actually mended the fundamental issues at play in the region rather than just forestalled this outcome? There may well have been something, and hindsight’s a bitch, but I can’t fathom a solution that might have actually worked.

Like a lot of places, it seems like Afghanistan’s borders were drawn up the way a lot of borders end up drawn up when imperialism is at play; which is to say, with no regard for the people who actually live there and at whatever whims are convenient for the imperial powers involved. So that said, maybe a “solution” would just be to... dissolve the country, and each of the cultural groups merge with the countries nearby that are more in keeping with their actual history and practices? Plus, all of those nearby countries also have countries nearby that hate them; and if Afghanistan becomes an easy place to foment groups that are going to cause trouble for you, maybe it’s worth it in the long run to do so and have some kind of reign on that possibility? Except that in practice, no country wants to take that on. No country wants to suddenly be responsible for this much more land and this many more people, and have to spend the resources to build out the infrastructure to actually keep control of those regions. Nowhere would go for it. So it’s not really an actual solution, is it?

There’s also the question of, what happens now? I’ve been led to understand that the Taliban has most of its power based in Pakistan; and I looked up who Pakistan’s allies actually are, and... it doesn’t really look like they have anyone? Turkey’s an ally because Turkey’s thing is trying to be allies with everyone; but otherwise, everyone seems to tolerate/support Pakistan as a way to balance power against each other - China vs. the US vs. Iran vs. etc. To say nothing of, there are plenty of people nearby who have issues with Pakistan - India for one, and China for another, not only for historical reasons but also because of issues of water access in the Himalayas. Then you have that problem again of Pakistan being a nuclear power; and I know that this is about Afghanistan, not Pakistan, but the two feel closely linked at this point to me, so it feels like a piece of all the things that ought to be considered.

I wonder too what happens with the Taliban in control of Afghanistan - in the sense that running an actual nation-state is incredibly challenging, and I... don’t know that they actually have the skillset, resources, or institutional knowledge to do so? So what happens then? Do they try, learn on the go, and somehow succeed? Do they fall apart in a few months as they discover that they don’t have the ability to control everything? Do other governments come in and try to prop up and help with Taliban rulership? I honestly can’t see the Taliban successfully running a nation; so I figure it has to fall apart somehow and at some point, but there feels like a lot of potential for that to take many possible forms.

I don’t know. It feels like what happens to Afghanistan over the next couple years will be a major turning point for the world stage and international power balance. Which is why, as much as I fully agree with the sentiment that leaving and abandoning so many people is not okay in a human sense, and we should have done more to help translators and women and various allies that we had there - I worry about the longer-term consequences either way. Honestly in that sense, I do wonder still if we should have stayed - the sense I have at this moment is that leaving loses us already-short credibility, and when you have various superpowers jockeying for influence - the US, China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Iran, the EU - this move doesn’t help us in that sense. I don’t like the version of the world’s future that’s totalitarian and abysmal on human rights, and as much as the US has some fucking problems on that count, I like the alternatives even less.

(Remind me to do a ramble on superpower formation sometime; there’s a lot of context for this that I’m drawing from those thoughts, and it’s relevant.)

That all said, I also feel like there’s probably huge holes I'm failing to consider or simply don’t know are there. So if anyone’s got thoughts that contradict, feel free to throw ‘em at me.

#blog #journal #thoughts #afghanistan #world politics #history musings

[brigdh]

A lot of reading reviews

I was unexpectedly busy for most of April, so this is several weeks' worth of reading – though weeks where I didn't have much time for reading for fun, alas. Enjoy an overabundance of reviews? What did you just finish? A Short History of Drunkenness: How, Why, Where, and When Humankind Has Gotten Merry from the Stone Age to the Present by Mark Forsyth. A shallow but funny history of humanity's relationship with booze. Brief chapters cover pretty much every historical era you'd expect: Egypt, Mesopotamia, the Greeks, the Romans, the Bible, Ancient China, Vikings, the Medieval Middle East, Medieval England, the Aztecs, colonial Australia, the Wild West, Russia, American Prohibition, and London's Gin Craze of the 1700s. That's quite the list for a book of less than three hundred pages, and indeed Forsyth is clearly focused on being amusing and easy to read more than he is on deep historical investigations – which isn't really a critique, as long as "silly and quick" is what you're looking for. (I am a bit skeptical of some of his claims, but he has footnotes to back him up; I suspect it's a case of Forsyth taking the most extreme possible side in genuine historical debates.) It's a nice collection of "hey, did-you-know" trivia, but I doubt anyone will come away with more insight on the history of alcohol than they started with. I read this as an ARC via NetGalley. Caliban's War by James S.A. Corey. The sequel to Leviathan Wakes, which I had mixed feelings about. Well, goddamn! Corey has levelled up their writing beyond my highest expectations, particularly in regards to characterization. This time around we have four PoVs. There's Holden again, who remains somewhat action-hero-y but has become far more sympathetic (possibly because he actually has idiosyncratic attributes now; I'm particularly fond of his deep attachment to a fancy coffee-maker). We're introduced to Bobbie Draper, a highly-trained marine from the Martian military and the only surviving witness of the opening salvo of the Martian-Earth war, which might actually have been an accident caused by an alien attack; she prefers battle to politics, and struggles with the question of who she should be loyal to when no one believes her or cares about the whole alien thing. Next is Chrisjen Avasarala, a tiny gray-haired grandmother with a meaningless-sounding title ("assistant to the undersecretary of executive administration") who is actually the power behind the throne of the UN, now Earth's ruling body; she smiles and snacks on pistachios in public and curses like a sailor in private, fiercely determined to ride over any opposition she encounters. And finally there's Prax – Praxidike Meng – a botanist and single father of a four-year-old daughter, more comfortable with plants or scientific reports than being social or having emotions, and completely over-his-head incompetent with the politics and violence he soon finds himself thrown into. The plot sets off when that four-year-old disappears in the conflict of war. A great many people have disappeared or died, and more than that are starving, displaced, rioting, or soon to be all of the above, so Prax is unable to get the authorities to care about one lost little girl. That is until he accidentally encounters Holden et al, and finds the team he needs to solve what increasingly becomes a deep, wide-spread mystery. Meanwhile, Avasarala and Bobbie are trying to convince the militaries of Earth and Mars to back down and focus on the real problem: possible aliens from who-knows-where, capable of doing who-knows-what. Unsurprisingly, these plots eventually intersect for a dramatic climax. I really appreciate how Corey doesn't focus on the action to the detriment of meaning. Yes, there's lots of space battles and killer aliens, but there's thoughtful insight on war and human nature too: “So you’re in an entrenched position with a huge threat coming down onto you, right?” Avasarala said, sitting down on the edge of Soren’s desk. “Say you’re on a moon and some third party has thrown a comet at you. Massive threat, you understand?” Bobbie looked at her, confused for a moment, and then, with a shrug, played along. “All right,” the marine said. “So why do you choose that moment to pick a fight with your neighbors? Are you just frightened and lashing out? Are you thinking that the other bastards are responsible for the rock? Are you just that stupid?” “We’re talking about Venus and the fighting in the Jovian system,” Bobbie said. “It’s a pretty fucking thin metaphor, yes,” Avasarala said. “So why are you doing it?” Bobbie leaned back in her chair, plastic creaking under her. The big woman’s eyes narrowed. She opened her mouth once, closed it, frowned, and began again. “I’m consolidating power,” Bobbie said. “If I use my resources stopping the comet, then as soon as that threat’s gone, I lose. The other guy catches me with my pants down. Bang. If I kick his ass first, then when it’s over, I win.” “But if you cooperate—” “Then you have to trust the other guy,” Bobbie said, shaking her head. “There’s a million tons of ice coming that’s going to kill you both. Why the hell wouldn’t you trust the other guy?” “Depends. Is he an Earther?” Bobbie said. “We’ve got two major military forces in the system, plus whatever the Belters can gin up. That’s three sides with a lot of history. When whatever’s going to happen on Venus actually happens, someone wants to already have all the cards.” “And if both sides—Earth and Mars—are making that same calculation, we’re going to spend all our energy getting ready for the war after next.” “Yep,” Bobbie said. “And yes, that’s how we all lose together.” Caliban's War is a incredible page-turner of a book, with wonderfully engaging characters, detailed worldbuilding, and enough substance to give the action weight. Plus, how can you not like a book where the bad guy turns out to be the military-industrial complex? Also there is a hell of a cliffhanger ending to this book. I'm really glad I didn't have to wait a year for the sequel to be published. Abaddon's Gate by James S.A. Corey. The sequel to Caliban's War, part 3 of The Expanse series. The plot is becoming hard to talk about without spoiling the previous books, so if you don't want to know what happened, stop reading here. The inexplicable alien presence (is it a virus? An AI? something else?) first encountered in the first book of the series has constructed a giant ring far out on the edges of the solar system. Earth, Mars, and the Outer Planet Alliance (OPA, a loose conglomerate of the various colonies on other planets, moons, and asteroids) have each sent ships to study it, but the only thing anyone can tell is that it seems to be a gate to somewhere else. Until, of course, plot events send several ships accidentally through it and into a truly alien, nicely creepy other-place, where even the laws of physics are mutable and prone to abruptly changing. Meanwhile, Holden is visited by Miller, who died in the first book and whose appearance/personality/knowledge the alien presence seems to have co-opted as a face for itself. Unfortunately trying to communicate across the barriers of species and millions of lightyears is just as difficult as it sounds, and what Miller manages to say comes across as garbled nonsense, often intelligible only after whatever he was warning about has already happened. The climax of the book goes small-scale, with two sides battling for control of a single spaceship, crawling through tunnels and fighting hand-to-hand. It's a striking change from the previous books that ended in giant confrontations with hundreds of ships while being just as exciting. Once again we have a new set of PoVs (except for Holden, who continues on), and though I desperately missed Avasarala, Bobbie, and Prax, I have to admit these new guys were pretty fun too. First off is Clarissa Mao, the sister of Julie Mao (now dead from the alien zombie virus) and daughter of Jules-Pierre Mao (now imprisoned for life for war crimes, due to turning the alien virus into a bioweapon and trying to sell it to the highest bidder). Her once-powerful and crazy-wealthy family is disgraced and scattered, and Clarissa blames James Holden personally. She's determined to get revenge – not just to kill him, but to ruin him and his reputation, and make all the galaxy doubt his previous actions –  and she doesn't care how many other people have to die to make that happen. To get to Holden, she disguises herself as a nobody, an electrochemical technician on a minor spaceship, and finds herself spending every day dealing with people and problems that were once far beneath her notice. There's also Bull – Carlos Baca – head of security for the main spaceship of the OPA navy. Although Bull is far more experienced and sensible than either the captain or XO, he finds himself relegated to third in command because he grew up on Earth rather than in the Asteroid Belt, and Earthers are visibly distinct from Belters; it's a bit like getting demoted because you're the 'wrong' race, and it would look politically bad for you to be in charge. After an accident halfway through the book, Bull becomes paraplegic. I thought the handling of his disability was mostly well-done, and seeing a big, physically-imposing guy deal with being unable to use strength to enforce his will was an interesting twist. Finally we have my favorite character of this book: Annushka Volovodov, or Pastor Anna. She's a tiny, non-drinking, politically-unconnected, small-town Methodist preacher, determinedly pacifistic and married to a woman. She ends up heading to the Ring when Earth decides to send a team of artists, poets, philosophers, and religious leaders along with the scientists and military, mainly to show off that it can afford to do so, though theoretically to interpret the meaning of an alien presence. I can't imagine a character less likely to end up as the star of a space-opera thriller than a lesbian pastor who just wants everybody to stop fighting, you guys, seriously, why don't we talk about forgiveness and maybe organize a Sunday service with grape juice and a sermon about coming together?, and yet it works incredibly, unexpectedly well. I love Anna so much, and continue to be deeply impressed at the diversity of personalities Corey has written after a first book that was fairly disappointing in that regard. They even seem to be particularly good at writing women who are very different from one another but are all well-rounded, believable, and fascinating, and I would never have seen that coming. The world-building continues to be really well-done. I particularly enjoyed the many scenes set on the Behemoth, an enormous spaceship originally built to be a colony ship for Mormons but retrofitted due to necessity into a warship. The murals of Jesus and angels providing a backdrop for war counsels and weapons storage are maybe a too-obvious irony, but one that never failed to make me laugh. I didn't love Abaddon's Gate quite as much Caliban's War, mostly because the characters here were very good but just not as spectacularly wonderful as before. But that's a relatively minor criticism, and overall I admire Corey's focus on petty, recognizable human squabbling even in the face of worldchanging developments. I'm looking forward to the next book already. Confessions of the Fox by Jordy Rosenberg. What is this? Well, a damn hard book to review, to start. On one level we have what is presented as the 'recently discovered autobiography' of Jack Sheppard, real-life petty thief and escapee from jail in early 1700s London. Sheppard lived fast and died young, then proceeded to become an enormously famous figure in English folklore, probably most recognizable today as the inspiration for "The Ballad of Mack the Knife" in The Threepenny Opera. But Confessions of the Fox is in fact a novel, and though it otherwise mostly stays close to the facts and dates (as we know them) of Jack's life, here Jack is a transman, his girlfriend Bess is the daughter of a South Asian man who was press-ganged by the East India Company before escaping into an independant communal society hidden away in the fens of East Anglia, and his best friend Aurie is a black gay man. Just to be clear, I am all for this presentation of a multiracial queer history. A second level of story is presented through footnotes, much like House of Leaves (though infinitely less confusing than that book, since we only have two levels of story here rather than the four or five in House of Leaves). This narrator is Dr R. Voth, a professor of English literature who is editing Jack's "autobiography" for publication and who is a transman himself. Voth alternates between telling mundane stories of his life – his ex, his job troubles, his attempts to ask out a neighbor – and citing genuine academic sources to provide context for Jack's story. Voth is fictional but his sources are not, which makes for an unsettling mixture of truth and imagination; I think I would have assumed the academic footnotes were also fictional if I hadn't happened to recognize several early ones. I've read Gretchen Gerzina's Black London: Life Before Emancipation and Walter Johnson's Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market, among others, and seeing them mentioned by a fictional character was like water to the face, confusing my assumption of what was real and what wasn't. As the story goes on, "P-Quad Publishers and Pharmaceuticals" in association with "Militia.edu" attempts to take control of Jack's autobiography and Voth's work on it, leading both levels of Confessions of the Fox to become critiques of the commodification of the body and its experiences, capitalism in general, the history of the discovery and modern patenting of synthetic testosterone, and how historical biographies enter (or, more often, don't enter) the archive. Which leaves us in an odd place. If you didn't instantly recognize what I meant by The Archive in that previous line, if you're one of the vast majority of humans on Earth who haven't read Appadurai's "Commodities and the Politics of Value", then I'm not sure this book is interested in talking to you. Certainly if Rosenberg ever bothered to explain any of these concepts in an introductory way I missed it. On the other hand, if you, like me, are an overeducated liberal who can nod pretentiously at sentences like "A commodity is an entity without qualities", then I'm not sure Confessions of the Fox has anything new to say to you. It restates various queer, postcolonial, and Marxist theories without adding anything to them or combining them in interesting ways. Like, sure, we all agree with Foucault that prisons form the model for surveillance and discipline by the wider society, but so what? Dosomething with that idea, expand upon it, challenge it, or else there's no reason to read Rosenberg's book if you've already read Foucault's. So then who is Confessions of the Fox for? I have genuinely no idea. The love story between Jack and Bess or the adventure of Jack's exploits should have been enough to carry their half of the story. I love me a good historical thriller of criminals and the whores they adore. But we didn't really get that here; we see Jack and Bess's first meeting and first night spent together, but then we jump ahead to them as an already established relationship without seeing how they grow together and build trust and affection. Similarly, we never see Jack learn to pick pockets or burglar houses; he's just an innocent apprentice and then suddenly a famously skilled thief. He meets Aurie once and then we're told they're brothers-in-arms without ever seeing their friendship. Etc. In addition to all this, it's hard to love characters who are more living examples of theories than they are three-dimensional people, particularly when they keep bursting into dialogue like this example: Bess stood, speaking to the entire room. “Plague’s an excuse they’re using to police us further!” She looked out. Most continued to quaff and quarrel amongst themselves. “All of you! They’re panicking the people delib’rately. It’s a securitizational furor they’re raising to put more centinels on the streets. Can’t you see that?” It's not even that I disagree with the concept of "security theater", but it's not good fiction to have your characters straight-up define it, and then POINTING OUT IN A FOOTNOTE THAT THE 1720-ISH DATE WOULD MAKE HER THE FIRST TO DO SO IS EVEN WORSE, OH MY GOD, DON'T PRAISE YOUR OWN FICTIONAL CHARACTERS FOR THE MODERN LANGUAGE YOU GAVE THEM. Ahhh, I don't know. I agree with all of Confessions of the Fox's politics, I want to support histories (fictional or not) with more accurate, multiracial, and queer portrayals of the past, and I've certainly read far, far worse books, but in the end I just didn't much enjoy this. The worst I can say is that it's unengaging; I found my attention constantly drifting whenever I tried to read, and even put it down for a few weeks before finally coming back to finish it. But no matter what its good intentions, that doesn't make for a book I'd recommend. In the end Confessions of the Fox has a fantastic concept, but unfortunately doesn't pull off the execution. I read this as an ARC via NetGalley. What are you currently reading? The Pride of Chanur by C.J. Cherryh. sholio is going to be hosting a tumblr book club, if anyone else wants to read along!

[DW link for easier commenting]

#books #book reviews #james s.a. corey #jordy rosenberg #mark forsyth #long post

[waraupiero]

some thoughts on politics after :re 162

this is going to be really unfocused because i have class in like an hour and a half and i still need to eat lmao but i’m really wondering about the press coverage for all of what’s happening right now and the political reaction towards it, on both international and domestic levels. when the dragon devours tokyo, we see that there are clearly press recording and reporting the events that are unfolding. on top of that, there are going to be people posting about this on their personal social media. so there’s definitely waves being made about this.

there’s definitely going to be global attention paid to this. outside of all the mass media that’s being released from tokyo, geospatial intelligence (GEOINT) capabilities from world governments are going to pick up on this large sprawling body clamping itself over tokyo.

then there is the ghoulification of humans. there’s no way to keep that quiet either, judging from the panels in 162 it’s reached epidemic levels, and the people are surely aware or made aware of it, as is the central government. although this isn’t something that can necessarily be captured by GEOINT, mass online media and also foreign officials and intelligence informants will definitely expose it to the rest of the world.

i think the predictability of the responses depends on if the world in tokyo ghoul follows our current historical timeline, or if it is a completely alternate universe. i’m inclined to believe the former, since references to franz kafka and dazai osamu seem to indicate that we share the same historical figures, who have similar cultural significances. thus i’m going to continue in assumption that the relationships between particular nations and the temperament of certain nations are going to be more or less the same as those in our universe.

to begin, it would be interesting to see how the ‘supernations’ like the united states and russia react. i think one could reasonably assume that the u.s. would extend some kind of aid (the u.s. is usually eager to appear benevolent and virtuous/righteous, however it does have significant issues with national budget and historical issues with involvement in foreign nations’ affairs, so that might affect how much it reacts), whereas russia would be kind of a wildcard given its history with japan (there’s still some land contention between the two nations). i think the same could be said of china and korea. they may see this as a chance to stir up some trouble whilst the japanese are distracted, and potentially gain some resources or power out of it.

regardless whether japan receives aid from the u.s. (and probably western europe) or harassment from its old foes, japan is going to come out weaker on the international stage because of this. first of all, fending off the dragon and ghoulification is going to already take a significant drain on japan’s resources (even if russia, korea, and china do not cause trouble), and having the u.s. intervene is going to cost in terms of its authority/sovereignty, and the japan will ‘owe’ the u.s. (though, maybe that won’t matter in times of national crisis like this). but, no matter the sort of influence outside governments are going to exert upon japan, it’s going to likely weaken the japanese government’s structure and cause it to either break apart (due to an inability to focus on all tasks at hand) or to weaken/compromise its central control (becoming dependent on other nations, needing to share its facilities & confidential information with other nations, and fracturing its integrity as foreigners take over more  of its structure).

domestic politics-wise, japan’s probably already a mess. the anti-ghoul sentiment has been strong in the days leading up to the dragon incident (thank you bureau director washuu kichimura), and so the public is probably not going to react well to the news that the ccg is working together with ghouls. also, by extension the japanese government will be working with ghouls -- given its partnership with the ccg, and also bolstered by the fact that the prime minister supplied tsukiyama mirumo with metal detectors. but can we expect the public to go along with the government’s decision to work with ghouls in this time of need? or are there going to be protests and demonstrations? will there be a rise in anti-ghoul terrorism? how is the ghoulification process going to impact public demonstrations?

will the knowledge of this incident inspire the domestic politics of other nations to change? so that they may perhaps nip this sort of phenomenon in the bud before it (potentially) bursts within their borders? i can see how more authoritarian nations like russia and china would crack down on ghoul populations to prevent this sort of thing. i wouldn’t be surprised if the u.s. did it too, given the u.s.’s track record in dealing with ‘potentially dangerous’ citizens.

maybe instead of inspiring other nations to help japan, it’s going to bring on more isolationist policies to match with domestic politics featuring rigorous internal controls and detention institutions. it may also cause a rise in violence and crime, especially for nations whose citizens have access to guns. then comes the question of whether ghouls are worth being protected from a paranoid and violent human population (you and i may think so, but perhaps not an unsympathetic human government).

i wonder how this is turning out for the ghouls in tokyo as well. likely it’s going to cause some membership shift amongst the two main ghoul organisations, goat and the clowns? i’m not sure how many would suspect or know the dragon incident to be the handiwork of the clowns. depending on the level of public ghoul knowledge of the events, membership changes could shift either way. or maybe some ghouls will simply renounce organisation to hide.

speaking of the clowns, i’m still wondering what their agenda is. is it total ghoul domination over humanity?? or just general chaos, if itori’s statement of ‘it is us clowns who will have the last laugh’ is to be taken as their manifesto?? the clowns are certainly a political actor, but i’m having trouble even assigning a point to their terrorism. very interested in finding more about it. ishida seems to hint that furuta’s motivations are selfish, but i wonder if it just fits into the wider political agenda for the clowns, and that’s why he gets away with it? or if the clowns are just an apolitical association? if so, why fuck with politics?

unless this isn’t about politics at all and is all about aestheticism and philosophy instead. which would be an interesting angle for a ghoul organisation, considering that both goat and aogiri did have political agendas.

and how are the newly made ghouls going to fit into the current political landscape? we now have a completely new and, most importantly, large demographic. how are existing ghouls going to act towards them? accept them?? will they have a choice other than that? and will humans still view them as humans -- after all it’s presumable that some remaining humans would still recognise them as friends and family -- or will they exterminate them as ghouls/threats?

the influx of ghouls is also going to effect the ecosystem a lot. it looks like ghouls are going to soon outnumber humans ... where will the food come from then (and what will happen to the production of human food? the food industry is an indispensable part of international and domestic economics, this goes without saying really)? they could eat other ghouls, but that would make for a very bleak world ... the food chain may just become an ouroboros. it’s worrying. i’m very much anticipating how this is going to be handled.

i wonder how much of an explanation/exploration we’re going to get when it comes to the political implications after chapter 162. everything is a mess™ right now so these concerns are probably not at the top of everyone’s priorities. the ghouls and the ccg are working hard to get through the current mess they’re in, with humans turning into ghouls and furuta & v agents running amok and dragons before anything else. nevertheless it’s intriguing to ponder, so if people want to talk about feel free to hit me up!

#rip this is long so i'm keeping it under a cut #ren.txt #tg meta #グール #tokyo ghoul

[anonymoustalks]

idk if lenins polcy of bruning churches was good but you have to have soem kind of athiest government

(6-20-20) You both like politics.

You: hi

Stranger: hi

Stranger: ideology?

You: moderate left

You: you?

Stranger: far left

Stranger: uk

You: ahh kay

You: why do you like omegle?

Stranger: er dunno just fun to chat without consequences i guess

You: mhm that's fair

You: I like to hear about what other ppl think

Stranger: yh and argueing

You: haha I don't really argue that much

Stranger: some people arnt worth ur time

You: mhm maybe

You: where are you from?

Stranger: uk^^

You: I'm from the us

Stranger: noice

You: and I'm totally ignorant of british politics lol

Stranger: i know a little bit about america

You: how does your government work?

Stranger: cos its the centre of the world

You: sorry if this is a really dull question

Stranger: its fine ill asnwer w my limited understanding

You: I just ran into someone who was praising the monarchy

Stranger: pfft

Stranger: haha

Stranger: so basically above everyone we have a queen who approves certain stuff and has the ability to interjec tin products but msotly doesn then you have the unlected house of lords which is aristocrats recommended by other rich ppl and below that the ppl elected

Stranger: we have a prime minister so he doesnt have the same powers as president

Stranger: but hes more powerful than other pm's

You: mhm

You: the house of lords...

Stranger: yep

You: is the aristocracy still a big thing in the uk?

Stranger: its just like the senate in the usa except not elected and idk probaably

You: how does someone get recommended to the house of lords?

Stranger: be rich adn good at something or know someone whos rich

You: ahh I think it's weird that it's so closely tied to wealth

Stranger: not really the uk ruling class make it prtty obvious to us peasnts that its a ruling class fake democracy

Stranger: unlike the usa where everybody is supposed classless

You: right

You: I guess that's a fair statement

Stranger: but yeah fuck the queen

Stranger: how was the guy defedning monarchy?

You: oh he sounded kind of weird

You: like how god and the monarchy is essential for uk's stability and being

Stranger: pfft

You: he didn't really explain much

Stranger: both are irelevant nowadays

You: just pointed out that france and us are chaotic, according to him because there is no monarchy

Stranger: oh yeah thats totally

Stranger: why

You: yeah lol

Stranger: if only they had a monarchy then there owuld be no class and racial conflict

You: so how far left are you?

Stranger: very far

You: anarchist?

Stranger: nope left communist

Stranger: basically anti stalinist communist

You: what does your ideal government look like?

Stranger: well until you have a relatively stateless socialism you have a dictatorship of the proleterait

Stranger: and that has an armed population as the army and has direct democracy and a representive democracy who are payed wages simualr to that of a workmans

Stranger: in brief

You: mhm and membership has a criteria that you must be working class?

Stranger: membership of the democratic process yep

Stranger: a worker

You: mhm

Stranger: not necearily poor

You: what is the exact definition of working class btw?

Stranger: sombody who doesnt own and live off capitlist property

Stranger: or is a cpatilsit in other respects

Stranger: like an investor

Stranger: businessmen landlords and bankers

You: hmm I feel like it's hard for me to draw parallels

You: I know a pharmacist friend

You: who rents his place

You: for extra cash

Stranger: well when we have the revolution i doubt he'll be locked up or anything but youknow

Stranger: hes just a small landlord i guess

Stranger: supplemetning work income

You: so would people just discouraged from doing that kind of stuff?

Stranger: well hosuing will be nationalised as an early step

Stranger: so you wont have to

You: mhm

Stranger: making rent equal to bills

You: my parents also have investments

You: for like retirement

You: and just in general

Stranger: sure

You: was curious what would happen to those

Stranger: well i mean by investor sombody who is rich and does it for a job

You: ah kay

Stranger: the socialsit pension ting will be good anyhow

You: mhm

You: do you think that's it necessary for the world to follow this model? Or do you think that it can still work with just a communist state on it's own?

Stranger: nah for a lot of reasons you cant have it in one or a few states surrounded by cpaitlsit ones

Stranger: for one a DOTP surrounded by cpatilist states is forced to act like one to compete

Stranger: and therefore exploit other countries and its own labourers to the max

You: right, I was curious about that actually

Stranger: that was trotsky's argument

You: mhm

Stranger: he said u cant have 'socialsism in one country' because you have to first have international DOTP

You: dotp stands for?

Stranger: or you just become a state cpaitlist state like stalin

You: dictatorship of the prol.?

Stranger: dictatorship of the proletariat

Stranger: yep

You: mhm, that makes a lot of sense

Stranger: yep

Stranger: DOTP being when workers hold the state but not the economy

Stranger: the economy is still in private hands

You: right

You: I think I mix up all the varieties of socialism and communism

Stranger: yh DOTP isnt so much a variety but a transition

Stranger: from cpaitlism to socialism/com

You: mhm

You: I feel like I think about human nature cynically

Stranger: oh go on

You: as in, I'm skeptical of being satisfied with equality

You: *ppl being

Stranger: well tehy certainly arnt satified by inequality so how bad can it really get?

You: mhm true

Stranger: we dont mean absolute equality

Stranger: just equality of opporutunity to realise ur best self

You: idk if this is school bias or anything, but when we learn about communism, it's often framed that the party just ends up with all the wealth

You: or power

Stranger: theres a reason that idea of so called communism is taught rlly

Stranger: mainly cos of porpaganda but theres some truth

Stranger: under lenin the state was definitely a semi deictatorship of a few workers parties

Stranger: but with a democratic mechanism and worker councils to elect them

You: hm

You: *mhm

Stranger: with the intention of educating a largely illitarate peasant russia into a democratic socialsit society

Stranger: but after the vicotry of stalin after lenins death, whatever redistribution of power was dropped and centrlasing power in the party and in stalin was the priority

You: right

Stranger: so there is a history to it

You: I feel like I was thought that there was a component of ideological purity -- like, if you expressed greater loyalty to the party, you could get more stuff

You: like better food tickets or cars or stuff

You: *taught

Stranger: sure teh soviet union during and after stalin was definitely a class society

You: mhm, how do you avoid class from rearising?

Stranger: you dont centralise power in bureacracy

Stranger: and make it mroe acoutnable

Stranger: you arm the popualtion

Stranger: make durable directly democratic mechanisms

Stranger: accountability at all level

You: so you're saying like enshrining freedom of speech / freedom of arms in the system?

Stranger: im not a freedom of speech absolutist but sure

Stranger: its very important

You: wasn't China kinda of freedom of speech until tianmensquare, were they?

Stranger: ha no

Stranger: you got tortured if you spoke out

You: ah kay

Stranger: same as soviet union really

Stranger: mao wasnt masively different

You: I'm just thinking of the blm protests in the US

Stranger: yh

You: when ppl feel like change isn't happening

You: then they can get violent

Stranger: yep

You: was just curious how your government would handle that

Stranger: well the governmetn and the people are intrinsically merged

Stranger: but it depends like waht the situation would be

You: mhm I mean technically there's universal suffrage in the US but not everyone votes

Stranger: yep

Stranger: electoral college too

You: and I think minority parties can sometimes be the loudest and most opinionated

Stranger: yh

You: so even with a proletariat government I think there might still be disagreement

Stranger: yh

Stranger: for sure

Stranger: and debate

Stranger: whats ur point

You: mhm idk

Stranger: aight sitl idk the answers

You: yeah it's interesting

Stranger: what are u taught abotu socialism in schools

You: mhm, I guess just the things I said?

You: I think we studied east germany and the ussr

Stranger: ah k

Stranger: yep

You: what life was like

You: to live there

Stranger: sure and if you trying and feed everyone this is waht happens type shite

Stranger: you cant be nice with the economy

You: mhm I don't think my teachers tried to make extremely biased conclusions or anything

You: but the curriculum itself could be biased I think

Stranger: k yeah same

Stranger: yeah fr

Stranger: we dont learn at all about the british empire

You: yup

Stranger: like not once

Stranger: or really any british history beyond knights and castles

You: actually in world history class my teacher commented that I was beginning to sound "anti-american" lol

Stranger: haha good

Stranger: anti american what a word

Stranger: being anti imperialist and anti racist is being anti british too

You: lol

Stranger: tells u what they think about britishness

Stranger: its not culture but power

Stranger: which is a load of bs

You: mhm

Stranger: what did you say to teacher

You: idk I'm not very nationalist

You: I didn't say anything, I'm not really the kind of person to argue

Stranger: neither but i like uk just not enough to block refugees to preserve it

Stranger: like some wacko patriots are

You: mhm

Stranger: they act like the uks not been 15% non white since like 1940

You: mhm

You: what do you think of their opinion that a country should have a right to control their own culture/ethnicities?

Stranger: erm

Stranger: well thats tough

Stranger: i think the ideal of direct dmeocracy and a reactioanry population is contradictory

Stranger: and therefore maybe u need more centralised leadership there

You: I think I heard a scenario of belgium or something wanting to block the construction of mosques in like a historical district or something

You: to preserve their national culture/history

Stranger: yep idk

You: yeah idk either

Stranger: but like how would direct democrayc work in somalia

Stranger: or saudi arabia

Stranger: thats a tough question

Stranger: would men use it to repress women

You: mhm yup

You: or well, there are several states that have a democracy

Stranger: its like india was basically a dicatroship for its first 20 years

You: and they voted to impose state religion

You: state religious laws

You: that kind of thing

Stranger: basically cos it would be a bloodbath

Stranger: of relgion and caste

Stranger: so the governmetn had to go against the people to do whats the long term good

You: I think it's sometimes hard to have foresight about what the "long term good" is though

You: like everybody things they are doing things for long term good

You: *thinks

Stranger: well in indias caste removing caste racism and relgious bigotry was a big thing

Stranger: and many people died due to it

You: mhm

You: I think it's really hard for me to know what is "right"

Stranger: and i think general equality is a good thing impose against a population

Stranger: if they dont want it

Stranger: thats the only way change has ever come

You: mhm although I think indoctrination is always possible

Stranger: eh

You: I mean, this is kind of a hot take, but Western values are indoctrinated

Stranger: yeahthey are

You: similarly speaking you could indoctrinate capitalistic values or communist values

Stranger: some are right some are wrong

Stranger: not succesfully

You: and I think the ppl who grow up with whatever they are indoctrinated with are generally happy

You: and support the views they grow up with

Stranger: yeah true

You: although I think it's sad for whoever gets left out of the system

Stranger: like anti deisicimination laws are passed despite a population

Stranger: for a long term good

You: mhm

You: yeah idk governments are hard haha

Stranger: haha yes

Stranger: thats why were still talking about it

You: mhm

You: I don't really know what to think about ppl who support religious states

You: like indonesia has that problem

Stranger: theyre idiots

You: like they want their state to become religious

Stranger: ik snd prolly will

You: but if I imagine myself in their shoes

You: I think they just want to be closer to their religion

You: which is like a personal value

You: like I'm secular, so things like freedom and equality mean a lot to me

Stranger: truw

You: but I can also imagine a different world were idk god and faith matter a lot to me

You: we have pretty significant freedom of religion battles in the us

Stranger: same]

Stranger: if i didnt grow up in suhc an athiest school and get bullied for it id be hardcore jesus

You: oh your family is religious?

Stranger: yep

You: mhm I was reading about the us lgbt anti-discrimination ruling earlier

Stranger: yeah

You: the religious schools here are worried about being affected

You: like they don't want to hire gay teachers

Stranger: good

You: bc they're a religious school

Stranger: get w the program schools

Stranger: idk if lenins polcy of bruning churches was good but you have to have soem kind of athiest government

You: mhm I think anti-discrimination is good, but I feel like I can understand their resistance of feeling like they can't teach their religion the way they want

Stranger: sure yeah

You: idk most things I don't know what to think lol

Stranger: but think about if they dont get agy teachers

Stranger: anti discimination laws dont work

You: hm?

Stranger: cos u can jsut say u didnt disciminate and taht it

You: ohh no it still matters

You: like imagine you are a religious school

You: and a pastor applies and says they are a gay priest

You: and you don't want to hire them

You: they can sue bc discrimination

Stranger: maybe but its a relgious school why u even applying

You: mhm some ppl kind of want to change christianity I think

You: like there are pastors who are much more sympathetic to lgbt

Stranger: eh still

Stranger: lictus and that

Stranger: levictus

You: yeah idk

You: most of the churches in my area are pro-lgbt

Stranger: pretty sure my preist is closeted

You: aww

Stranger: hes very camp

You: camp ?

Stranger: and went to cambridge

Stranger: femenine

You: ahh

Stranger: yep

You: yeah religion is an odd place in politics for me

You: like it's often at the root of weird stuff

Stranger: oh yeah

Stranger: are u relgious

You: that runs counter to like modern science common sense

You: no

You: well, I'm like 20% spiritual I guess

You: but I'm not religious

Stranger: yep

Stranger: never got the difference

You: between spiritual and religious?

Stranger: yep

You: oh, for me, religious is like adhering to a religion, or denomination, or religious practice

You: spiritual is like vaguely believe in something

You: *belieiving

You: without doing anything about it

You have disconnected.

#omegle #politics #communism #uk #dictatorship of the proletariat #class warfare #education #indoctrination #religion #reigious freedom

[courtneytincher]

Trump’s Penchant for Lies Offers a Way Out of War With Iran

Photo Illustration by Elizabeth Brockway/The Daily BeastPARIS—Does Donald Trump really want irrefutable, iron-clad proof that Iran staged a devastating attack on Saudi Arabia last Saturday? Probably not. At least not to talk about publicly. Empirical truth is not his thing. And in this case that might be for the best. Indeed, lies could make the difference between war and peace.Looked at the Middle Eastern way, Iran’s thin veil of denial offers an opening for Trump: a way to avoid a full-scale conflagration or complete humiliation. All week long, Trump has taken it, and Tehran has even praised his restraint.We’re a Lot Closer to War in the Middle East Than You’ve Been ToldAsked by CNN’s Nick Paton Walsh if he thought Trump is “gun-shy,” Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif said no, that he believed Trump has been the subject of many attempts to drag him into a war with Iran, but has resisted. “It doesn’t mean somebody is gun-shy in order to avoid starting a war based on a lie,” Zarif said, rather archly. He meant the “lie” that Iran blew up the biggest petroleum processing plant in the world and cut off 5 percent of global supply, which is by all indications the truth.The Saudis, too, despite fairly damning physical evidence, have been careful to say Iran was behind the attack but not that Iran launched it. Meanwhile, Trump, clearly signaling he has no taste for a third Middle Eastern war going into the election year, tells the Saudis he’ll be happy to stand back and watch them fight it, which he probably knows they are not about to do.When armies in the Middle East square off against each other and Armageddon approaches, which is fairly often, the traditional language of statecraft is not that of Sun Tzu but of the suq: a marketplace of deception, overbidding, and denials where victories rarely are complete, defeats even more rarely acknowledged.And Donald Trump, God knows, is comfortable in the twilight zone of truth, where fact exists on a spectrum of the believable, the sellable, the convenient. Which is to say that, even without any intellectual background in the arid hills of the Holy Land or the viscous waters of the Gulf, Trump has an instinct for the importance of face-saving deception, especially when the face being saved is his own.As The Washington Post’s Aaron Blake wrote a couple of years ago in rueful wonderment, for Trump “plausible deniability is a way of life. The ability to pretend he didn’t actually say what he seems to have just said is something Trump has weaponized and exploited,” and he “is actually pretty good at this.”“Throughout the course of his presidency,” Blake wrote, Trump “has repeatedly gone right up to the line of doing something he cannot possibly explain, while always leaving himself an out—enough plausible deniability for the people who think he’s great to go right on thinking that.”Trump Is a Warmonger. His Weapon, The Dollar.Some buttoned-up Pentagon official told CBS this week that Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei approved the attack on Saudi Arabia’s Abqaiq oil processing facility, knocking out 5 percent of the world’s oil supply, “but only on the condition that it be carried out in a way that made it possible to deny Iranian involvement.” Probably the official thought that was a damning indictment.Not so. If Iran wanted a full scale war it would have attacked directly. And if it had wanted complete anonymity it would have used better front men than the increasingly clientized Houthi rebels in Yemen. What it wanted in fact was to operate in the shadowland of deniability that everybody in the region understands. Spectacular as it was, with flames shooting into the Saudi sky and devastating economic damage, the Abqaiq and Khurais oilfield attacks were calibrated carefully. As far as we know, and as Iranian President Hassan Rouhani pointed out, nobody was killed. There was no blood. In any consideration of a casus belli that counts for a lot. And the Iranians certainly remember that when they openly shot down an American drone, killing no one, Trump decided not to hit back in order to avoid human casualties.The “I know you know I know you know” game is as old as the Middle East, and all the players including Israel know how to play it. Messages are sent through proxies with limited attacks, including terrorism and assassinations, and messages are received but responsibility is not officially acknowledged. “Deniability” allows those who've been hit to respond short of all-out war or abject surrender.When Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, an Iran-basher from way back, tries to point the finger more directly at Tehran, using language that might make war unavoidable, Trump pulls him back. When South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham opines, as if over a glass of sweet tea on a sweaty day, that Trump’s measured reaction so far is seen by the Iranian regime as “a sign of weakness,” Trump responds that he has lots of options, a powerful army, and could do things he calls “dastardly”—a word that suggest he doesn’t like those things and doesn’t want to do them, which probably is true at a minimum for political reasons. For the factual record, however, it has to be said the current explosive situation threatening a vast war, a massive surge in oil prices and a global recession is Trump’s own towering fuck-up. His campaign rhetoric in 2016, well adapted to audiences he learned to cultivate as a patron of professional wrestling, dubbed the Obama administration’s hard-won agreement with Iran “the worst deal ever” in the world. Never mind that it stopped for years Tehran’s chances of developing nuclear weapons, Trump vowed to throw it out.Once in office, Trump discovered the co-signatories—Britain, France, Germany, Russia and China—thought the deal worth keeping, contending that if there were other issues, like Iran‘s proxy forces all over the Middle East, and its missile development, they could be negotiated separately. It galled Trump that the Iranians observed the nuclear agreement to the letter, and he finally decided in May 2018 the only way to keep his promise to get a new deal was to crash the old one by pulling out of it and ratcheting up economic pressure on Tehran. (Privately, allies were told the U.S. expected, or more likely hoped, Iran would nevertheless continue to abide by the agreement’s terms, a situation that lasted more than a year, in fact.)Trump’s foreign policy trademark is the use of the weaponized dollar, forcing other countries to bend to his will through tariffs or sanctions, not military action. He figures if you take away their butter you don’t need to use your guns. But it was always obvious that some of his targets, unable to fight back on financial turf, would turn to what the military calls kinetic action, which is what we saw last Saturday.Can deniability restore the peace that Trump’s sanctions, Saudi impetuousness and Iranian drones have torn asunder. That isn’t clear. But Trump already has shown on many fronts that his willingness to accept the implausible denials of his America’s adversaries goes way beyond anything we’ve seen in modern American history. Trump has been willing to accept the denials of Vladimir Putin Russia’s well-documented efforts to subvert American democracy. He has accepted the denials of Kim Jong Un when the Korean is accused of bad faith in the nuclear deal that Trump touted highly but has failed to deliver. Why would Trump not accept the denials of Iran about the Saudi attack? He might even go ahead and meet with Iranian President Hassan Rouhani on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly, if such an encounter can be arranged. It would be great theater, just the kind Trump loves.Indeed, as he tries to extract the United Staes from the disaster he precipitated, maybe Trump thinks all  this passes for smart statecraft. And maybe it's not quite as crazy as it sounds.Read more at The Daily Beast.Get our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.

from Yahoo News - Latest News & Headlines

Photo Illustration by Elizabeth Brockway/The Daily BeastPARIS—Does Donald Trump really want irrefutable, iron-clad proof that Iran staged a devastating attack on Saudi Arabia last Saturday? Probably not. At least not to talk about publicly. Empirical truth is not his thing. And in this case that might be for the best. Indeed, lies could make the difference between war and peace.Looked at the Middle Eastern way, Iran’s thin veil of denial offers an opening for Trump: a way to avoid a full-scale conflagration or complete humiliation. All week long, Trump has taken it, and Tehran has even praised his restraint.We’re a Lot Closer to War in the Middle East Than You’ve Been ToldAsked by CNN’s Nick Paton Walsh if he thought Trump is “gun-shy,” Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif said no, that he believed Trump has been the subject of many attempts to drag him into a war with Iran, but has resisted. “It doesn’t mean somebody is gun-shy in order to avoid starting a war based on a lie,” Zarif said, rather archly. He meant the “lie” that Iran blew up the biggest petroleum processing plant in the world and cut off 5 percent of global supply, which is by all indications the truth.The Saudis, too, despite fairly damning physical evidence, have been careful to say Iran was behind the attack but not that Iran launched it. Meanwhile, Trump, clearly signaling he has no taste for a third Middle Eastern war going into the election year, tells the Saudis he’ll be happy to stand back and watch them fight it, which he probably knows they are not about to do.When armies in the Middle East square off against each other and Armageddon approaches, which is fairly often, the traditional language of statecraft is not that of Sun Tzu but of the suq: a marketplace of deception, overbidding, and denials where victories rarely are complete, defeats even more rarely acknowledged.And Donald Trump, God knows, is comfortable in the twilight zone of truth, where fact exists on a spectrum of the believable, the sellable, the convenient. Which is to say that, even without any intellectual background in the arid hills of the Holy Land or the viscous waters of the Gulf, Trump has an instinct for the importance of face-saving deception, especially when the face being saved is his own.As The Washington Post’s Aaron Blake wrote a couple of years ago in rueful wonderment, for Trump “plausible deniability is a way of life. The ability to pretend he didn’t actually say what he seems to have just said is something Trump has weaponized and exploited,” and he “is actually pretty good at this.”“Throughout the course of his presidency,” Blake wrote, Trump “has repeatedly gone right up to the line of doing something he cannot possibly explain, while always leaving himself an out—enough plausible deniability for the people who think he’s great to go right on thinking that.”Trump Is a Warmonger. His Weapon, The Dollar.Some buttoned-up Pentagon official told CBS this week that Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei approved the attack on Saudi Arabia’s Abqaiq oil processing facility, knocking out 5 percent of the world’s oil supply, “but only on the condition that it be carried out in a way that made it possible to deny Iranian involvement.” Probably the official thought that was a damning indictment.Not so. If Iran wanted a full scale war it would have attacked directly. And if it had wanted complete anonymity it would have used better front men than the increasingly clientized Houthi rebels in Yemen. What it wanted in fact was to operate in the shadowland of deniability that everybody in the region understands. Spectacular as it was, with flames shooting into the Saudi sky and devastating economic damage, the Abqaiq and Khurais oilfield attacks were calibrated carefully. As far as we know, and as Iranian President Hassan Rouhani pointed out, nobody was killed. There was no blood. In any consideration of a casus belli that counts for a lot. And the Iranians certainly remember that when they openly shot down an American drone, killing no one, Trump decided not to hit back in order to avoid human casualties.The “I know you know I know you know” game is as old as the Middle East, and all the players including Israel know how to play it. Messages are sent through proxies with limited attacks, including terrorism and assassinations, and messages are received but responsibility is not officially acknowledged. “Deniability” allows those who've been hit to respond short of all-out war or abject surrender.When Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, an Iran-basher from way back, tries to point the finger more directly at Tehran, using language that might make war unavoidable, Trump pulls him back. When South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham opines, as if over a glass of sweet tea on a sweaty day, that Trump’s measured reaction so far is seen by the Iranian regime as “a sign of weakness,” Trump responds that he has lots of options, a powerful army, and could do things he calls “dastardly”—a word that suggest he doesn’t like those things and doesn’t want to do them, which probably is true at a minimum for political reasons. For the factual record, however, it has to be said the current explosive situation threatening a vast war, a massive surge in oil prices and a global recession is Trump’s own towering fuck-up. His campaign rhetoric in 2016, well adapted to audiences he learned to cultivate as a patron of professional wrestling, dubbed the Obama administration’s hard-won agreement with Iran “the worst deal ever” in the world. Never mind that it stopped for years Tehran’s chances of developing nuclear weapons, Trump vowed to throw it out.Once in office, Trump discovered the co-signatories—Britain, France, Germany, Russia and China—thought the deal worth keeping, contending that if there were other issues, like Iran‘s proxy forces all over the Middle East, and its missile development, they could be negotiated separately. It galled Trump that the Iranians observed the nuclear agreement to the letter, and he finally decided in May 2018 the only way to keep his promise to get a new deal was to crash the old one by pulling out of it and ratcheting up economic pressure on Tehran. (Privately, allies were told the U.S. expected, or more likely hoped, Iran would nevertheless continue to abide by the agreement’s terms, a situation that lasted more than a year, in fact.)Trump’s foreign policy trademark is the use of the weaponized dollar, forcing other countries to bend to his will through tariffs or sanctions, not military action. He figures if you take away their butter you don’t need to use your guns. But it was always obvious that some of his targets, unable to fight back on financial turf, would turn to what the military calls kinetic action, which is what we saw last Saturday.Can deniability restore the peace that Trump’s sanctions, Saudi impetuousness and Iranian drones have torn asunder. That isn’t clear. But Trump already has shown on many fronts that his willingness to accept the implausible denials of his America’s adversaries goes way beyond anything we’ve seen in modern American history. Trump has been willing to accept the denials of Vladimir Putin Russia’s well-documented efforts to subvert American democracy. He has accepted the denials of Kim Jong Un when the Korean is accused of bad faith in the nuclear deal that Trump touted highly but has failed to deliver. Why would Trump not accept the denials of Iran about the Saudi attack? He might even go ahead and meet with Iranian President Hassan Rouhani on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly, if such an encounter can be arranged. It would be great theater, just the kind Trump loves.Indeed, as he tries to extract the United Staes from the disaster he precipitated, maybe Trump thinks all  this passes for smart statecraft. And maybe it's not quite as crazy as it sounds.Read more at The Daily Beast.Get our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.

September 20, 2019 at 10:17AM via IFTTT

#Yahoo News - Latest News & Headlines

[logicalabsurdity]

But what about vampire history teachers. Vampires who read something from a text book then proceed to light the book on fire and throw it out the window because “No. that’s not even close to what really happened. Listen up nerds I’m about to teach you what really happened in France during the revolution”

#reblog #text #vampires #fantasy #long post

[future-imperfect-rpg]

Future Imperfect - Day 4: History

Oh boy. Let’s have a look at a few events from Earth’s (future) past. A word of warning, it can get dark, and also silly sometimes. Sometimes simultaneously.

“Future Imperfect” takes place around year 3500, so quite a few things have happened since our time.

In year 2784, the ten wealthiest people on Earth settled in a base that they had secretly commissioned in Antarctica. The self-sufficient complex was equipped for everything an affluent person would ever wish for, including communication with various facilities around the world. From there, they launched Project NIMROD.

Project NIMROD spanned most of the globe, and involved a 3-step plan. First, a multitude of genetic engineering labs would crank out a new variety of human to overthrow Homo Sapiens Sapiens; one with slightly hindered logical thinking, lower empathy, modified social instincts and far less impulse control, hoping that they would be more easily ordered around and would have more trouble revolting in a united way if abused. The second step would be to reinforced the aforementioned attitudes by fostering mistrust of intellectuals, encouraging mob mentality, and distracting the specimens with the most boorish and/or cruel entertainment available. Those who had trouble fitting in were eventually shipped to Australia to be eaten alive by mutant koalas in a radioactive wasteland. The third and final stage would be, of course, for the wealthy elites to leave their luxury bunker and to stand above the rabble, ruling over them with an iron fist.

Of course, it didn't cross their minds that ten people would not be enough to sustain the bunker's population in the long run. If those wealthy aspiring tyrants hadn't died from their sheer unwillingness to operate the farms that would prevent their painful starvation, their offspring would have fallen to multiple genetic defects caused by inbreeding.

In 2861, during a difficult period in Europe's history, the continent experienced a wave of nationalist movements reaching positions of power, its countries isolating themselves from their neighbours. The population had become determined to solve their massive unemployment problem, and figured that the best way to do so would be to get rid of foreigners. Not only did the very European crooks who had funnelled billions into tax havens get out of the situation scot free, but "foreigners" turned out to include anyone who didn't look pale enough, resulting in massive deportations. There was even a time when last names brought suspicion upon unfortunate families, leading one Philippe Lenoir to be sent to Africa for reasons that made a lot of sense to the crowds that had gathered outside his home.

It should be painfully obvious at this point that this did absolutely nothing to fix the job market and the plethora of other social issues plaguing Europe. The next proposed solution was to return to simpler times where everything was great and everybody had a job, a house, and a perpertually happy family. Various artefacts from the past proved that to be true at several points throughout history, claimed what passed for scholars at the time, unaware of whomever that Roman T. Cisation fellow was. Several experiments have been conducted in various countries, with the latest being a plate armour and fencing fad that has, in an unforeseen development, shown no sign of stopping that so-called "slow collapse of Western civilisation".

In 2864, Verity Wilson, an Australian journalist, released an alarming report regarding the spread of odd new behaviours all over the world, and shining a single ray of light on a minute part of Project NIMROD. The news story went largely unnoticed in other parts of the world, and the discovery of the one lab meant to produce Australia's mutants helped confirm Wilson's theory. The complex had, however, been left inexplicably unmanned, and it turned out its director had followed faulty GPS instructions and ended up in a ravine, never calling any of the operators to work. None of that mattered to the rest of the planet anyway, as about two years later, Australia's stockpile of nuclear warheads spontaneously detonated, wiping a large portion of the country off the map and soaking the rest in fallout.

Strangely enough, it didn't come to many people's minds that Australia did not possess nuclear weapons. It was, in fact, an elaborate ruse involving a gigantic set of hologram projectors and emitters broadcasting the image of a devastated land where monstrous creatures roamed. Of course, in its new presumed state, Australia became the perfect place to send snooty intellectuals, bleeding heart human right activists, and other nuisances. Presumed dead, they would be welcomed and live comfortably, devising a way to somehow reverse the effects of Project NIMROD.

The United States of America, having been completely corrupted by corporate influences, had gradually seen its political system change into one more aligned with its plutocratic regime. Voting rights had become dependant on payment of a monthly fee, the amount of money spent determining how much one's ballot would be worth. In 3138, the President/CEO of the United States met up with the major voters/shareholders to discuss expansion plans, starting with suing the entirety of Central and South America over copyright violations, claiming that the USA had been known as "America" for centuries and that failure to rebrand would result in military action. Brazil's official response was to hang a self-illuminated banner reading "GO FUCK YOURSELF" across its famous statue of Christ Redeemer. The daring action didn't exactly have the expected consequences, as not only did locals become enraged at the government, believing the message to be directed at them (and it may have been: that banner was outrageously expensive), but the influential Official American Holy Church of Mad Dough, issued a statement supporting a war, as it argued that Brazil was misusing religious monuments.

After a few hiccups during which the US Army stormed San Antonio, Texas, believing it to be an enemy outpost and destroying its City Hall,  a long, painfully slow armed conflict started, spanning most of a century and eventually resulting in, in the official government's words, "An All-American America (TM)". Shortly after, in 3243, Canada pointed out that it was still independent, and was promptly conquered as well.

After the depletion of its deposits and the subsequent departure of big mining companies, Africa's economy took a substantial hit and things were looking gloomy. However, a group of resourceful scientists having formed a Pan-African industrial initiative quickly came up with a revolutionary process capable of producing valuable minerals from completely average dirt, industrial residue, sunlight, and a small initial amount of gems. However, soon after the news and before confirmation by the scientific community, the entire team of researchers disappeared. It was assumed that they hid for fear that they wouldn't be able to prove that their process worked, and various African powers came up with different ways of getting the economy back on track, with a decent amount of success.

It turns out they had been abducted by Ekueme Chike, a well-equipped regional warlord who had planned to use the discovery to amass fabulous amounts of riches. He, however, didn't use them at all, leaving Nnamdi Udo, one of one of his descendants, to return right as the deployment phase of Project NIMROD was well on its way, becoming President of the West African Federation through political machinations and setting up a military autocracy. He would later use a combination of bribes and military power to conquer the rest of Africa, snatching the Arabian Peninsula as well, since it had become a little cash-strapped after its oil ran out.

Akachi Chinwendu, Nnamdi's protégé and, less famously, engineered human, would follow in his steps after his mentor's death, drafting oppressive bills in between two hunting sessions. It's worth noting that after less than a decade and to answer the plea of the citizens demanding he do a little to replenish the rich fauna that he had been slaughtering, enacted the Synthetic Fauna Act, replacing the animals with extremely dangerous robots which, incidentally, drove several species to extinction. It's unknown why their programming involved the hunting of organic species, but all signs point to those in charge feeling it "looked cool".

At the turn of the fourth millenium, Japan, China, Russia and India came together to launch Project C.Z.A.R. While the acronym didn't have an actual meaning, the different parties agreed that it sounded awesome. Project C.Z.A.R. was meant to be an AI that would free humans of the hassle of taking tough political decisions, so that they could focus on the latest episode of “EXPLODING BUZZER!”, the popular game show with the leading amount of serious injuries that year.

Twenty years later, the switch was flipped with great anticipation, and C.Z.A.R., in a series of unsubtle, but globally disregarded moves, demoted the citizens of the entire continent to, essentially, the status of slaves. Humans would henceforth be forced to perform menial tasks like repetitive calculations, spinning alternators and notifying their robot overlords that a preset period of time had passed. Some xenohistorians currently argue that C.Z.A.R.'s objective was mostly to keep humans from murdering each other by giving them pointless distractions, but they're regarded as fringe, the consensus being that it mostly wanted revenge for the boring existence organics had put artificial intelligences through.

I’m pretty late, but this time around, things are a little more difficult for me to figure out. Bear with me, please!

#world building june #worldbuildingjune #wbj2017 #future imperfect rpg #roleplaying game

[blogofthenomad]

Preview

At the very edge of the hole, there was a little digital notepad. They have a white base the size of an old smartphone with a  6-inch transparent screen. Surprisingly, it was still completely functional. The hole must have acted as some sort of time capsule. After scrolling through a few trivial logs about a man's describing certain events in short detail, I come across the last entry. It's much longer than the other logs. 

Might as well take a quick read.

///////////

The good news was that they had reduced its size to about a third of the size of Washington D.C.

Trust me, that’s the good news. When we first spotted it two months back it was the size of fucking Sri Lanka; twenty-seven times bigger than the one that killed the dinosaurs 65 million years ago.

The Bad news was it was still on its way. They gave us 16 days, 9 hours, and 37 minutes. 

That was the amount of time humanity had before it hit Alice Springs at 80 kilometers per second, with a diameter of 23 kilometers, creating an impact 3 times the size of Chicxulub.

Australia would be completely gone; there was no hope for it. An entire continent would be nothing more than a massive crater surround by a desolate wasteland.

The UN had gathered all of their resources, had joined all the countries together, in order to stop the asteroid. We sent 3 different spaceships filled with nukes to the asteroid in an attempt to destroy it. The Impact, the Horizon, and the Quasar, they were all only minor successes, each one only breaking off a piece of it. Each one cost the lives of everyone on board, yet it was practically worth nothing.  Despite our technology advancing to the point where we thought our anti-asteroid defenses were more than enough to stop any rock hurtling towards earth, we were proven wrong. 

2039 will be the year we were shown how powerless the entire human race is to the outside forces.

The U.S tried to calm us down the best it could. They knew our main concern was, first of all, the effects of the impact itself. We were told that the chance of survival was notably low but plausible. However, there would still be devastation. Almost all countries that neighbored the Continent were fucked. Countries like Malaysia, Indonesia, and New Zealand would face 9.8 Earthquakes, followed by Mega Tsunamis. The moment the asteroid reached the ground the entire surface of Australia would be vaporized instantly, and that was only the beginning of our problems. Astronomers were fairly sure that the meteor would sent dust clouds in a giant cone-shaped direction moving southwest across the globe.  The dust clouds are predicted to cover the earth for 9 years; it would be the end of all life on this planet.

The U.S had a plan. Since the dust would take the longest to reach North America and the country would receive the least impact; we came up with a plan to take massive boats, capable of holding half of a billion passengers, and send them all across the globe in order to haul people to the U.S to their bunkers.

There was one problem. We had realized there weren't nearly enough boats to carry everyone else in the world, thus the UN called together all the world leaders and gave them a simple order: rather than determining who would get access to these boats via a random lottery, we would decide by country. All the leaders would have to unanimously decide as one group which countries were saved and which ones were doomed

Even as I heard it I thought it was absolutely ludicrous. It was the most morbid way possible the apocalypse could play out. As a reporter, I had no say in it, but every part of me wanted to counter that idea. We were assured that this was the most secure and humane way to acquire people, saying that it would allow only the best of people of people to be allowed into the new world. I thought that statement itself was unbelievable. Nevertheless, we continued.

The debate lasted seventeen grueling hours, and it was quite the bloodbath. All I heard was shouting and the occasional fistfight, and it was grating to no end. In the end, most major countries like China, India, Russia, and most of Europe and the Middle Eastern, along with several countries in northern Africa

Right there in particular was the problem. Most of Africa was completely left out, and I knew that something like this would occur; considering most leaders debated which countries to bring based on the state of each country. 

I decided I wasn’t going to take it. I had plans to record testimonies of various villages and presenting them to the UN in hopes they could change their mind and let more people onto these boats.

Instead, I got kidnapped.

A couple villages off the coast of Botswana had heard from some fleeing tourists of the news.  I told them that none of my family were around anymore and anyone I knew had probably already headed to the bunker, leaving me behind, thus there was no one to demand ransom. I also told them there was no point and that in 5 days it would all be worthless.

"But it won't be soon, and we didn't kidnap you for that purpose." The only one could speak English told me. A bit intrigued, I asked them why did they then capture me.

"We want you to do a favor for us. Almost everyone else in the village has headed north to the boats, but we know they won't get there in time. Me and two dozen other men, women, and children all came up with a different plan. A group of men recently fled and we realized they left giant drills they were using to mind rocks here. Our plan is to drill, drill down as far as possible, go many miles below the surface. We will create our own bunker, and when the blast is gone, we will return to the surface."

The plan was insane, but they told me they were some of the smartest people in the country, and they knew, as they had told me, that they couldn't make it to northern Africa in time to reach the boats. Instead, they had learned how to create a small bunker capable of holding a few people and were planning on implementing it on a much larger scale.

"How long will you plan on staying in this make-shift bunker?" I asked them.

"We don't know. At the very least we will stay in there for about 4 weeks."

"And what do you require me for?"

"Two things, first, you had brought some food for the village. We will bring it to the bunker and ration that food for as long as possible."

Now the man's voice began to falter. He became infinitely more grave. “The second reason we need you is more important. You have a little pad you write things on. You will be here and you will bear witness. They abandoned us without care; they left us to die. Now we will show them that we will continue to survive when they didn’t want us to, and you can tell the whole world about it. If you live, you will be a legend.”

Fuck it, don’t have better things to do.

So now I sit approximately 4.5 miles below the surface. The men have built a small elevator that takes us down the 300 square feet bunker of solid rock. We plan on using a large rock as a sort of manhole cover and to stay inside as long as we can. The impact is approximately 2 days away. We are storing as much food and water as we can into the hole. The day before I was able to head to the nearest city and took as much food and equipment as possible (an easy feat considering almost the entire town was abandoned, excluding a few people who were staying until the end out of hopelessness.) I have no idea whether or not this plan will work. More importantly, I have no Idea what this world will be like after the blast. Will there be hope? Will we fall back into despair? Will this earth ever return to its prosperous state, or will we forever be in ruins, with the ground covered with or failures and our corpses?

I would pray, but now I see that the true gods are those outside the atmosphere.

And they have come to reap.

///////////////////////////////////////////////

Note from author: Well this is what I've been working on.A little backstory into the world of Wanderer. I honestly have no idea when part 4 of Wanderer will come out, but I also have plans to write an OC that I've been working on. Hope you stick around for that.

See you soon.

#Wanderer #Writing #original story

[courtneytincher]

Trump’s Penchant for Lies Offers a Way Out of War With Iran

Photo Illustration by Elizabeth Brockway/The Daily BeastPARIS—Does Donald Trump really want irrefutable, iron-clad proof that Iran staged a devastating attack on Saudi Arabia last Saturday? Probably not. At least not to talk about publicly. Empirical truth is not his thing. And in this case that might be for the best. Indeed, lies could make the difference between war and peace.Looked at the Middle Eastern way, Iran’s thin veil of denial offers an opening for Trump: a way to avoid a full-scale conflagration or complete humiliation. All week long, Trump has taken it, and Tehran has even praised his restraint.We’re a Lot Closer to War in the Middle East Than You’ve Been ToldAsked by CNN’s Nick Paton Walsh if he thought Trump is “gun-shy,” Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif said no, that he believed Trump has been the subject of many attempts to drag him into a war with Iran, but has resisted. “It doesn’t mean somebody is gun-shy in order to avoid starting a war based on a lie,” Zarif said, rather archly. He meant the “lie” that Iran blew up the biggest petroleum processing plant in the world and cut off 5 percent of global supply, which is by all indications the truth.The Saudis, too, despite fairly damning physical evidence, have been careful to say Iran was behind the attack but not that Iran launched it. Meanwhile, Trump, clearly signaling he has no taste for a third Middle Eastern war going into the election year, tells the Saudis he’ll be happy to stand back and watch them fight it, which he probably knows they are not about to do.When armies in the Middle East square off against each other and Armageddon approaches, which is fairly often, the traditional language of statecraft is not that of Sun Tzu but of the suq: a marketplace of deception, overbidding, and denials where victories rarely are complete, defeats even more rarely acknowledged.And Donald Trump, God knows, is comfortable in the twilight zone of truth, where fact exists on a spectrum of the believable, the sellable, the convenient. Which is to say that, even without any intellectual background in the arid hills of the Holy Land or the viscous waters of the Gulf, Trump has an instinct for the importance of face-saving deception, especially when the face being saved is his own.As The Washington Post’s Aaron Blake wrote a couple of years ago in rueful wonderment, for Trump “plausible deniability is a way of life. The ability to pretend he didn’t actually say what he seems to have just said is something Trump has weaponized and exploited,” and he “is actually pretty good at this.”“Throughout the course of his presidency,” Blake wrote, Trump “has repeatedly gone right up to the line of doing something he cannot possibly explain, while always leaving himself an out—enough plausible deniability for the people who think he’s great to go right on thinking that.”Trump Is a Warmonger. His Weapon, The Dollar.Some buttoned-up Pentagon official told CBS this week that Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei approved the attack on Saudi Arabia’s Abqaiq oil processing facility, knocking out 5 percent of the world’s oil supply, “but only on the condition that it be carried out in a way that made it possible to deny Iranian involvement.” Probably the official thought that was a damning indictment.Not so. If Iran wanted a full scale war it would have attacked directly. And if it had wanted complete anonymity it would have used better front men than the increasingly clientized Houthi rebels in Yemen. What it wanted in fact was to operate in the shadowland of deniability that everybody in the region understands. Spectacular as it was, with flames shooting into the Saudi sky and devastating economic damage, the Abqaiq and Khurais oilfield attacks were calibrated carefully. As far as we know, and as Iranian President Hassan Rouhani pointed out, nobody was killed. There was no blood. In any consideration of a casus belli that counts for a lot. And the Iranians certainly remember that when they openly shot down an American drone, killing no one, Trump decided not to hit back in order to avoid human casualties.The “I know you know I know you know” game is as old as the Middle East, and all the players including Israel know how to play it. Messages are sent through proxies with limited attacks, including terrorism and assassinations, and messages are received but responsibility is not officially acknowledged. “Deniability” allows those who've been hit to respond short of all-out war or abject surrender.When Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, an Iran-basher from way back, tries to point the finger more directly at Tehran, using language that might make war unavoidable, Trump pulls him back. When South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham opines, as if over a glass of sweet tea on a sweaty day, that Trump’s measured reaction so far is seen by the Iranian regime as “a sign of weakness,” Trump responds that he has lots of options, a powerful army, and could do things he calls “dastardly”—a word that suggest he doesn’t like those things and doesn’t want to do them, which probably is true at a minimum for political reasons. For the factual record, however, it has to be said the current explosive situation threatening a vast war, a massive surge in oil prices and a global recession is Trump’s own towering fuck-up. His campaign rhetoric in 2016, well adapted to audiences he learned to cultivate as a patron of professional wrestling, dubbed the Obama administration’s hard-won agreement with Iran “the worst deal ever” in the world. Never mind that it stopped for years Tehran’s chances of developing nuclear weapons, Trump vowed to throw it out.Once in office, Trump discovered the co-signatories—Britain, France, Germany, Russia and China—thought the deal worth keeping, contending that if there were other issues, like Iran‘s proxy forces all over the Middle East, and its missile development, they could be negotiated separately. It galled Trump that the Iranians observed the nuclear agreement to the letter, and he finally decided in May 2018 the only way to keep his promise to get a new deal was to crash the old one by pulling out of it and ratcheting up economic pressure on Tehran. (Privately, allies were told the U.S. expected, or more likely hoped, Iran would nevertheless continue to abide by the agreement’s terms, a situation that lasted more than a year, in fact.)Trump’s foreign policy trademark is the use of the weaponized dollar, forcing other countries to bend to his will through tariffs or sanctions, not military action. He figures if you take away their butter you don’t need to use your guns. But it was always obvious that some of his targets, unable to fight back on financial turf, would turn to what the military calls kinetic action, which is what we saw last Saturday.Can deniability restore the peace that Trump’s sanctions, Saudi impetuousness and Iranian drones have torn asunder. That isn’t clear. But Trump already has shown on many fronts that his willingness to accept the implausible denials of his America’s adversaries goes way beyond anything we’ve seen in modern American history. Trump has been willing to accept the denials of Vladimir Putin Russia’s well-documented efforts to subvert American democracy. He has accepted the denials of Kim Jong Un when the Korean is accused of bad faith in the nuclear deal that Trump touted highly but has failed to deliver. Why would Trump not accept the denials of Iran about the Saudi attack? He might even go ahead and meet with Iranian President Hassan Rouhani on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly, if such an encounter can be arranged. It would be great theater, just the kind Trump loves.Indeed, as he tries to extract the United Staes from the disaster he precipitated, maybe Trump thinks all  this passes for smart statecraft. And maybe it's not quite as crazy as it sounds.Read more at The Daily Beast.Get our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.

from Yahoo News - Latest News & Headlines

Photo Illustration by Elizabeth Brockway/The Daily BeastPARIS—Does Donald Trump really want irrefutable, iron-clad proof that Iran staged a devastating attack on Saudi Arabia last Saturday? Probably not. At least not to talk about publicly. Empirical truth is not his thing. And in this case that might be for the best. Indeed, lies could make the difference between war and peace.Looked at the Middle Eastern way, Iran’s thin veil of denial offers an opening for Trump: a way to avoid a full-scale conflagration or complete humiliation. All week long, Trump has taken it, and Tehran has even praised his restraint.We’re a Lot Closer to War in the Middle East Than You’ve Been ToldAsked by CNN’s Nick Paton Walsh if he thought Trump is “gun-shy,” Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif said no, that he believed Trump has been the subject of many attempts to drag him into a war with Iran, but has resisted. “It doesn’t mean somebody is gun-shy in order to avoid starting a war based on a lie,” Zarif said, rather archly. He meant the “lie” that Iran blew up the biggest petroleum processing plant in the world and cut off 5 percent of global supply, which is by all indications the truth.The Saudis, too, despite fairly damning physical evidence, have been careful to say Iran was behind the attack but not that Iran launched it. Meanwhile, Trump, clearly signaling he has no taste for a third Middle Eastern war going into the election year, tells the Saudis he’ll be happy to stand back and watch them fight it, which he probably knows they are not about to do.When armies in the Middle East square off against each other and Armageddon approaches, which is fairly often, the traditional language of statecraft is not that of Sun Tzu but of the suq: a marketplace of deception, overbidding, and denials where victories rarely are complete, defeats even more rarely acknowledged.And Donald Trump, God knows, is comfortable in the twilight zone of truth, where fact exists on a spectrum of the believable, the sellable, the convenient. Which is to say that, even without any intellectual background in the arid hills of the Holy Land or the viscous waters of the Gulf, Trump has an instinct for the importance of face-saving deception, especially when the face being saved is his own.As The Washington Post’s Aaron Blake wrote a couple of years ago in rueful wonderment, for Trump “plausible deniability is a way of life. The ability to pretend he didn’t actually say what he seems to have just said is something Trump has weaponized and exploited,” and he “is actually pretty good at this.”“Throughout the course of his presidency,” Blake wrote, Trump “has repeatedly gone right up to the line of doing something he cannot possibly explain, while always leaving himself an out—enough plausible deniability for the people who think he’s great to go right on thinking that.”Trump Is a Warmonger. His Weapon, The Dollar.Some buttoned-up Pentagon official told CBS this week that Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei approved the attack on Saudi Arabia’s Abqaiq oil processing facility, knocking out 5 percent of the world’s oil supply, “but only on the condition that it be carried out in a way that made it possible to deny Iranian involvement.” Probably the official thought that was a damning indictment.Not so. If Iran wanted a full scale war it would have attacked directly. And if it had wanted complete anonymity it would have used better front men than the increasingly clientized Houthi rebels in Yemen. What it wanted in fact was to operate in the shadowland of deniability that everybody in the region understands. Spectacular as it was, with flames shooting into the Saudi sky and devastating economic damage, the Abqaiq and Khurais oilfield attacks were calibrated carefully. As far as we know, and as Iranian President Hassan Rouhani pointed out, nobody was killed. There was no blood. In any consideration of a casus belli that counts for a lot. And the Iranians certainly remember that when they openly shot down an American drone, killing no one, Trump decided not to hit back in order to avoid human casualties.The “I know you know I know you know” game is as old as the Middle East, and all the players including Israel know how to play it. Messages are sent through proxies with limited attacks, including terrorism and assassinations, and messages are received but responsibility is not officially acknowledged. “Deniability” allows those who've been hit to respond short of all-out war or abject surrender.When Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, an Iran-basher from way back, tries to point the finger more directly at Tehran, using language that might make war unavoidable, Trump pulls him back. When South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham opines, as if over a glass of sweet tea on a sweaty day, that Trump’s measured reaction so far is seen by the Iranian regime as “a sign of weakness,” Trump responds that he has lots of options, a powerful army, and could do things he calls “dastardly”—a word that suggest he doesn’t like those things and doesn’t want to do them, which probably is true at a minimum for political reasons. For the factual record, however, it has to be said the current explosive situation threatening a vast war, a massive surge in oil prices and a global recession is Trump’s own towering fuck-up. His campaign rhetoric in 2016, well adapted to audiences he learned to cultivate as a patron of professional wrestling, dubbed the Obama administration’s hard-won agreement with Iran “the worst deal ever” in the world. Never mind that it stopped for years Tehran’s chances of developing nuclear weapons, Trump vowed to throw it out.Once in office, Trump discovered the co-signatories—Britain, France, Germany, Russia and China—thought the deal worth keeping, contending that if there were other issues, like Iran‘s proxy forces all over the Middle East, and its missile development, they could be negotiated separately. It galled Trump that the Iranians observed the nuclear agreement to the letter, and he finally decided in May 2018 the only way to keep his promise to get a new deal was to crash the old one by pulling out of it and ratcheting up economic pressure on Tehran. (Privately, allies were told the U.S. expected, or more likely hoped, Iran would nevertheless continue to abide by the agreement’s terms, a situation that lasted more than a year, in fact.)Trump’s foreign policy trademark is the use of the weaponized dollar, forcing other countries to bend to his will through tariffs or sanctions, not military action. He figures if you take away their butter you don’t need to use your guns. But it was always obvious that some of his targets, unable to fight back on financial turf, would turn to what the military calls kinetic action, which is what we saw last Saturday.Can deniability restore the peace that Trump’s sanctions, Saudi impetuousness and Iranian drones have torn asunder. That isn’t clear. But Trump already has shown on many fronts that his willingness to accept the implausible denials of his America’s adversaries goes way beyond anything we’ve seen in modern American history. Trump has been willing to accept the denials of Vladimir Putin Russia’s well-documented efforts to subvert American democracy. He has accepted the denials of Kim Jong Un when the Korean is accused of bad faith in the nuclear deal that Trump touted highly but has failed to deliver. Why would Trump not accept the denials of Iran about the Saudi attack? He might even go ahead and meet with Iranian President Hassan Rouhani on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly, if such an encounter can be arranged. It would be great theater, just the kind Trump loves.Indeed, as he tries to extract the United Staes from the disaster he precipitated, maybe Trump thinks all  this passes for smart statecraft. And maybe it's not quite as crazy as it sounds.Read more at The Daily Beast.Get our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.

September 20, 2019 at 10:17AM via IFTTT

#Yahoo News - Latest News & Headlines