It is not at all certain that there was any sabotage. Supposedly it was sabotage because important wires were stolen, but wire has been stolen by criminals for decades to sell for the materials. And for the last few years there has been an increase of delays, breakdowns and failures in the whole railway network. It is far more likely that common theft on a decaying system caused the problems, but that would pin the blame on the government for this decay. As such they prefer to blame anyone else, including shadowy enemies sabotaging the country.
Letting your interests always go last, and letting people who depend on you and have worked against you(remember Zelenski campaigned against Trump), demand things and reproach you in public, is not tact.
The one who lacked tact was Zelenski, not Vance. As Trump said, "You're in no position to dictate what we're gonna feel."
As for aid, the arrogance in assuming the aid was mandatory and failing to give what you want the way you want is wrong and evil, does not endear people to aid you.
And besides, any delays in aid had a much lesser effect than the EU countries buying russian gas at exorbitant prices. The sanctions imposed were immediately sabotaged by buying russian gas.
As for aid, the arrogance in assuming the aid was mandatory and failing to give what you want the way you want is wrong and evil,
This is insane. He's been constantly begging and thanking the US for support for years. At no point has he even come close to "assuming the aid was mandatory".
To claim that Zelenski lacked tact while Vance did not is similarly nuts. Anyone who watched the video would understand that.
Some of the spending actually is mandatory, because it was passed and apportioned by Congress (but may not have been dispersed yet), and I think Zelensky can be forgiven for having some level of expectations on more aid given the bilateral security pact Biden signed last July and the overall glowing reception he gets in the press.
Hard disagree. The way he treated Zelenskyy who was their guest is unacceptable and completely tactless. He acted as if he was scolding Zelenskyy. The entire comment from Trump "look he dressed up!" was juvenile, showing zero respect. But then he called him a dictator not long ago so I don't know what I expected.
>>The sanctions imposed were immediately sabotaged by buying russian gas.
Because it wasn't possible for EU to stop buying it on a dime, not without letting its citizens freeze and go without electricity. You can argue that well, they should have gone cold if they care about it so much - I'd argue that the EU countries have stopped buying Russian gas and resources as soon as they possibly could.
>As for aid, the arrogance in assuming the aid was mandatory
That's not what I said - I said if the aid was provided when it was requested the war would have ended already.
Zelenskyy famously stopped wearing civilian suits, and is always wearing military-style clothes in public appearances to symbolise how he's defending his nation in a time of war. It's a reminder to other leaders that it's not just another trade deal, that this is a real shooting war and people are dying.
Trump hates this, and thinks it's disrespectful that Zelenskyy doesn't wear a suit when he comes to the US on official visits.
Trump generally can't stomach a real fight, and Zelenskyy can... visibly.
Hence the reaction from Trump. Zelenskyy made him feel shame through his mere dress, his shirt, so he had to do something or say something to feel in control again, to feel powerful.
>Zelenskyy famously stopped wearing civilian suits, and is always wearing military-style clothes in public appearances to symbolise how he's defending his nation in a time of war. It's a reminder to other leaders that it's not just another trade deal, that this is a real shooting war and people are dying.
>Trump hates this, and thinks it's disrespectful that Zelenskyy doesn't wear a suit when he comes to the US on official visits.
That's why they invited dress uniforms...the ones with the jackets and ties.
No, there's definitely no "dress code" in those circles.
A dress code is specifically something you impose to lower-ranking ones. That's why Trump did not like it, and why this journalist seemed upset: they couldn't bear that Zelenski was not submitting to their, very closed-minded WASP dress code for underlings.
When you're the head of state, or in power circles, there's something else, that's called a _dress standing_, which is different and opens a much wider area of possibilities.
And by that standard, boy, did Zelensky outfit outranked everyone else's in the office!
Yeah, no. Nothing in that discussion was tactful on America's side. This is oligarch's trying to gaslight, lie, and extort a country while getting cozy with an enemy they fought for decades. And their remarks were absolutely juvenile. THat's not how we treat allies (or at worst, ,enemy of an enemy).
The argument that mass deportations are some impossible ordeal is only defended by those that are deeply invested in that they don't happen.
Most illegal immigrants are only in the US for economic reasons. Don't give them any welfare, make hiring them actually illegal and punish the companies that hire them. When this happens, many of them will just go back to their country.
Then if somehow their countries refused to take in their own citizens, they can just be sanctioned, or stop being given foreign aid by the US.
The only reason you believe that mass deportations are impossible and would cause an apocalyse, is because you really want it to be true.
You are not the first to think that. That is called the Broken Window Fallacy, obviously by people who disagree. But it makes sense to me that if you spend resources on repairing damages, or weapons which don't generate more wealth, you are not investing and growing. What happened to the US in WW2 is an anomaly.
Crowley might have been a drug-addicted sophist and not a good source for seeking ultimate truths. But was he a good sophist? I am interested in occultism and symbology, but only as entertainment. I am certain of my materialistic beliefs. It might be that he is so popular here because he is clever and decadent, something shocking and thrilling if you don't take it as truth.
Also, was he actually a fun sophist? You seem to have read a lot so I would ask for your opinion. Is he worth reading for entertainment?
As a committed materialist, what do you make of the Kalaam cosmological argument and others which make similar points? How can something come from nothing?
I am not well-read enough to really have a reasoned answer, but mine is that we don't know. But just because there is something more, something we don't understand, doesn't mean that it's something greater. It's just something we don't understand.
Through the ages people tried to answer the great mysteries with great answers, but they didn't achieve anything. Truth should have predictive power, and understanding of great enigmas should help explain lesser ones, like the laws of gravity can calculate the fall of an object, but these answers haven't done something useful.
But lesser questions have been answered with lesser and less interesting answers, and they successfully predicted stuff. Through answering many small questions, we now know why rain happens, why the seasons change, or how eels and flies come into existence. And the domain of the great mysteries was reduced, bit by bit.
Trying to answer the great mysteries, like the origin of existence, is building a house from the roof. Religious experiences and the numinous can be better explained by psychiatry and medicine than by theology.
There might still be something not more, but greater, than our understanding. It is probable, since our intuition and our senses are limited. But if there is, it would be equal to a colour we don't see due to lacking color cones. We might be unable to intuitively explain how it's like to see color to a colorblind person, but it's not divine or magical, greater than the material world and what we can measure and calculate; it's just greater than our eyes or our vocabulary.
That is at least my belief. It was hard to write somewhat concisely my beliefs, but I think I did a good enough job. I must say I'm not opposed to trying to answer the great mysteries, it's very similar to when the ancient greek philosophers tried to find the origin of matter. But I do not believe real truth can be obtained that way.
Also, I must say that your comments in this post were great. A perspective very different to the common HN point of view, thought-provoking and in-depth. I also learned the word numinous, which makes me happy as I have now a word to describe something I couldn't before.
Being canceled isn't even a real thing. It's just a phrase people use because they have to have consequences when they show their true selves. Some group of people don't agree with you? Show me an example of being canceled then
You've already made up your mind, so if you're not interested in actually understanding why cancelling both exists and is a problem, you can probably sit this conversation out. You want an example, fine.
In many scenarios canceling is completely arbitrary, based on misquotes, lack of context, or total fabrication simply because someone, somewhere was offended and can get other people to act on their behalf.
In the best case scenario, the person being canceled is actually a shitty human being. I know such a person. He said some really stupid stuff online, was called out on it, doubled down on it, was doxxed and canceled. He's not the type of person who considers the consequences of his actions in any scenario. He's also actually stupid and not a friend of mine. I think he's as close to hot garbage as a human being can get without actually abusing or murdering other people.
However, this person still did not deserve death threats for the words he wrote. This person did not deserve people calling his employer threatening to burn down their building. The employer certainly didn't deserve that. His coworkers didn't deserve it. This person did not deserve his house to be vandalized; nor did the actual owner of the house. His roommates didn't deserve to live in fear and to have to deal with angry people maybe thinking they were him.
These behaviors are not justifiable. They are, in fact, less justifiable than someone saying awful things online. Writing them off as "consequences" is simply twisted.
If you really think it's not a thing, here's an early cancellation. Pretty much everyone involved lost their jobs, and it was all over social media for a cycle.
> Though the show’s ratings were still good in season four, ABC cancelled the series because of continued pressure from the so-called “moral majority.” By the end of the series, Vlasic pickles was the only advertiser interested in advertising on the series. In They’ll Never Put That on the Air, executive producer Paul Junger Witt said, “We weren’t killed by a fearful network. The network had been incredibly supportive. We had been doing this long enough to understand that they were in a business, and they sat down and showed us — dollar for dollar — why they couldn’t afford to do it anymore.”
The people who are part of cancel culture now are literally using the same scare tactics that were used to suppress and oppress homosexuals and other minority groups.
> The people who are part of cancel culture now are literally using the same scare tactics that were used to suppress and oppress homosexuals and other minority groups.
More like people who complain about being victim of the cancel culture are the ones who were oblivious to it until they became the victim. Currently the cancel culture is being associated as some kind of PC culture outcome but it originated way before. The push back or critisim against it seems to be only happening now.
I don’t think so. Abhorrent behavior has always been abhorrent. The people using these tactics even often acknowledge it’s ugly behavior but feel vindicated (and even righteous). Some people are hypocrites. This is all just quite a bit easier and more visible than in the past. If anything has changed beyond scale and politics, it’s that people arguing against it are more easily heard.
They will never be brought to justice, since they are another arm of the state. These groups are a way of doing what the powers that be want to be done while having some plausible deniability.
>8. The enemy is both weak and strong. “[…] the followers must be convinced that they can overwhelm the enemies. Thus, by a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak.”
Well, for fascists it's often true because they choose enemies that are actually simply weak (as having shadowy enemies that can be portrayed as both weak and strong is necessary for fascism). The state is not weak at all, and it is indeed often incompetent. I think your argument is simply overfitting.
