The US has never really sacrificed in a war.

Idk about that…

Pretty much a joke that the American public sector is a trainwreck thanks to how much we’ve squandered invading overseas.

Plenty of Americans have suffered and died to poverty, neglect, and the hideous environmental impact of the MIC, because so much of our economy is routed into immiserating others.

Accelerationists have never been more bullish.

He’s one of the richest men in the world and you’re harshing his vibes. Isn’t that enough?

The US cannot win a protracted war with the rest of the world.

Since Its Birth the USA has only had 17 years of peace. None of those years have occurred since 1941. I don’t know how else you describe “a protracted war with the rest of the world”, but given the enormous economic growth over the last 85 years and the near-endless multi-theater conflicts the US has been engaged in over that period, I would say it can and it has.

Unless they’re planning to destroy everything and kill everyone.

The great thing about war is that it churns the economy. And Americans care more about economic growth than any other domestic policy. Would be a shame if everything was destroyed and everyone killed, because then we’d have nothing to enact war on in the following fiscal quarter.

Much easier to just keep the wars at a low simmer and “lose” them endlessly, while contractors and arms dealers grow fatter and happier ad infinitum.

I don’t think there is anything in the French arsenal shy of a nuclear weapon that could deter a US advance.

I also haven’t seen anything to suggest the UK would oppose a US occupation of Greenland. If anything, they’d more likely offer a deal to facilitate it - especially if Parliament falls to Reform UK in the next few years

NATO is outward facing. It can’t handle internal conflict.

We already tested this when Turkiye and Greece began militarizing in the Aegan Sea back in the 1970s. They’ve grown progressively more hostile for decades, with a number of barely averted military engagements.

The agreement would continue to have meaning with respect to external entities - African, Middle Eastern, Russian, and Chinese conflicts. But all the member states can do is roll over (or actively facilitate territory seizure) when they’re threatened by their largest member

The alliance would just kick the US out.

The alliance was created to guarantee US hegemony over Europe. It’s predicated on dozens of US bases, US administered logistics routes, US contractors, US arms dealers, US surveillance.

You can’t remove the US any more than you can tear out your own heart.

Europe will need to completely retrofit how it handles internal security. And - especially after Brexit - I just don’t see the necessary level of cohesion between the members, absent a totalitarian hegemon like the Americans forcing Europeans together.

I don’t consider conservatives to be Americans anymore

You should. They’ve got the dark rot of Americanism running through their veins worse than any of us.

The second panel hit me hard, knowing how USAID operates in practice relative to how it is portrayed in media.

After taking power in April 1978, the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) instituted an array of socialist policies, including “land reform, growth in public services, price controls, separation of church and state, full equality for women, legalization of trade unions and a sweeping literacy campaign.” This might seem like a positive development, but not in the eyes of the U.S. empire and its capitalist agenda. In addition to the CIA’s covert support for the mujahideen’s holy war against the secular evils of increased living standards and women’s rights, USAID also played an interesting role in this conflict.

The agency reportedly spent $50 million on a “jihad literacy” program in Afghanistan, primarily during the 1980s. This effort included the publication and distribution of ultra-conservative textbooks that “tried to solidify the links between violence and religious obligation,” according to author Dana Burde. Lessons on basic math and language were accompanied by depictions of Kalashnikov rifles, grenades, ammunition, and a commitment to militancy and retribution against the Russians (who were depicted as “invaders” despite having been invited to lend military assistance by the PDPA). After consolidating power in the ‘90s, the Taliban government revised and reprinted these textbooks, and copies have even been found in Pakistan as recently as 2013.

Assisting the Taliban’s precursor with reactionary, jihadist propaganda to viciously sabotage a progressive, feminist government and its allies is a strange form of “humanitarianism.” You might even say it’s the opposite of humanitarianism. Was this just a mistake that USAID made in the distant past and has since learned from, or is there a continued pattern of this behavior?

Fortunately, Afghanistan was half a world away. We liberated a foreign country from Soviet aggression. We struck a blow against Radical Leftist Socialism. And, as a consequence, we restored liberty and democracy to Eastern Europe. There wasn’t any risk of a radicalized movement of ultra-conservative religious fundamentalists ever doing anything that might blow back on American civilians.

reading books is impossible and too time consuming

Nobody said it was impossible. But you’re crazy if you think reading a long book isn’t time consuming. You’re not absorbing the material if you aren’t taking your time with it.

Might as well sprint through the Louvre as speed read Anna Karenina.

Can’t not read that in his voice

Anyone who has read a Free Press article or Ross Douthat column or subscribed to The Economist knows this isn’t true.

Conservative Intellectuals are a dime a dozen. The Ivy League is full of them. The courts are packed with them. Legions of Ben Shapiro wanna-bes goose step across Twitter and Facebook daily.

Reading skills won’t make you progressive if all you’re reading is Rand and Heinlein. Intellectuals wrote The Bell Curve and justified the invasion of Iraq. Education is not ideologically neutral and being “smart” does to turn your vote Blue.

The Causation on this is backwards. Progressives venerate academia. Academics don’t venerate progressivism.

I mean, graded take home essays are a waste. It’s like assigning weight training. Good for exercising, and we can talk about your form when you’re done.

But as soon as you start stack ranking the results, the incentive to cheat outpaces the goal of practicing ingesting and outputing ideas.

So what are you mad about?

Just said kids in college read cliffs notes twenty years ago. I’m not sure why this bothered you.

You weren’t taking English classes

Wasn’t I? Could have sworn my transcript says otherwise.

Guaranteed a bunch of ex-girlfriends are getting extra double stalked.

I probably read 500 pages a week on average.

Pride and Prejudice alone is 400 pages. Crime and Punishment is another 600 pages. If you have two Lit classes in the same semester, you’re going to have to double that rate or fall behind schedule. Nevermind retention.

I remember sitting in a library surrounded by books, struggling to solve the 15 problems a class Engineering Physics assigned. Just a fist full of brain-teasers day in and day out. Three of us working together managed to clear the load in a couple of hours. Then on to the next assignment, which was another two or three hours. Five classes a day, you’re lucky when you have enough time to sleep.

I’ll admit, I did a few summers at a community college and that workload was much smaller, the tests were far easier, and the graders significantly more forgiving. Crazy how little work it takes to ace an exam in High School Plus relative to a University weed-out program.

Gotta begin to question the utility of a device that exists to antagonize you, even after I’ve explicitly gone through the options menu and disabled all the “Would you like us to continue antagonizing you?” toggles.

Teachers are using AI to grade essays. But some experts are raising ethical concerns

We pretend to study and they pretend to grade us.