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Posted
24 minutes ago, 956 Worldwide said:

Lithuania’s former foreign minister has similar thoughts.  There will be a lot of lurching and spasmodic outbursts because that’s just the way this administration is. But there’s also a growing acceptance that the rest of the world can’t be cowed and browbeaten into submission when a primary isn’t at stake. 
 

The bad news, of course, is that cracking down at home to offset concessions you have to make abroad is the well-trodden autocrat path. 

image.thumb.jpeg.629770965027a031ba05060c8c0f221d.jpegimage.thumb.jpeg.db216e089e5055c14d4846743e6ca4ac.jpegimage.thumb.jpeg.2fe896e84bff38b211aa2e5b6849ea51.jpegimage.thumb.jpeg.10a3cbf08d0a682a4dc441c2b2d98646.jpeg

 

Interesting, but when the lurching and spasmodic outbursts come in the form of global economic crises, backstabbing our allies, and allowing our enemies to attack other sovereign nations, I think this may be a little bit of an optimistic take.  

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Posted
1 minute ago, Biff Tannen said:

Interesting, but when the lurching and spasmodic outbursts come in the form of global economic crises, backstabbing our allies, and allowing our enemies to attack other sovereign nations, I think this may be a little bit of an optimistic take.  

True and they also use spouse batterer psychology all the time. “At least he didn’t hit me today.”  

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Posted
3 hours ago, Brisketexan said:

Easy peasy.  Stop maintaining the street in front of the embassy, stop delivering water, stop taking sewage...because all of those municipal entities follow local DEI-type rules, and we KNOW the embassy doesn't want to receive any DEI services.  Malicious compliance and all that.

 

3 hours ago, Brisketexan said:

Yep.  You win by playing your opponent, not by strutting around the chess board.  Sacrifice a pawn, rope him into giving you the checkmate you're aiming for as he's gloating over the pawn he "totally destroyed, the likes of which no one has ever seen before!" -- that's a win.

 

 

Which is it young feller? 

 

 

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Posted
16 hours ago, 956 Worldwide said:

Vance gave some unusually measured and in some places even conciliatory remarks in an interview for the Munich Security Conference leaders’. Really a contrast in tone to basically everything coming from his office.

- Acknowledged that Russia is asking too much in negotiations and taking fewer swipes at Ukrainians

- Almost statesman-esque in the comments on NATO spending, framing it as a goal we all agree to and that the real question is how to get there quickly 

- Even some soft-pedaling of his hostile and antagonistic February speech where he raged out over alleged censorship; instead talking about the need to balance security and values with rights.

My sense is that someone told him that this administration is racking up Ls and they need to get positive movement from Europeans on trade and at the NATO summit since there’s basically no domestic appetite to have pointless food fights with Europe. 
 

 

Don't worry, he balanced it out by displaying his complete lack of knowledge of nuclear energy and how it relates to nuclear weapons.

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Posted
16 hours ago, 956 Worldwide said:

Lithuania’s former foreign minister has similar thoughts.  There will be a lot of lurching and spasmodic outbursts because that’s just the way this administration is. But there’s also a growing acceptance that the rest of the world can’t be cowed and browbeaten into submission when a primary isn’t at stake. 
 

The bad news, of course, is that cracking down at home to offset concessions you have to make abroad is the well-trodden autocrat path. 

image.thumb.jpeg.629770965027a031ba05060c8c0f221d.jpegimage.thumb.jpeg.db216e089e5055c14d4846743e6ca4ac.jpegimage.thumb.jpeg.2fe896e84bff38b211aa2e5b6849ea51.jpegimage.thumb.jpeg.10a3cbf08d0a682a4dc441c2b2d98646.jpeg

 

There are some really good and key observations in there, though.  Not praise for the situation, or Vance, just observations of the current reality.

- We thought we could shove the Silicon Valley ethos of "move fast and break lots of things" down literally everyone else's throat.  And that is "simply not acceptable to them."  

- We have utterly fucked ourselves on defense sales.  We are not a reliable partner, in any respect.  Would you entrust an unreliable, even backstabbing, partner with things essential to your security and survival?  You'd be an idiot if you did any more than you absolutely had to.  We can't really unfuck ourselves here.

- you can broligarch (perfect word for our current government) your way to the highest echelons of power in the US, but apparently that doesn't help you change things in Europe.  Not that the system in Europe is perfect - far from it - but it IS at least still somewhat designed to reflect some will of the people and an interest in a common good.  That is utterly incompatible with the US approach.

- but really, most of the above comes down to this: "the first victim of Trump's disruption was trust.  It was a very expensive commodity that was built up through decades of hard work and it will be very tough to regain."  That's really it.

Every choice is "what do I lose, and what will I gain."  Strategic entities make trade-offs.  Truly, I don't see much of anything of value that we will gain by Trump's approach.  But let's imagine that we marginally improve our trade deficit in the immediate term, and we call that a gain.  What will we have lost?  We will have lost the currency that allowed us to make favorable deals - trade, military, strategic, intelligence, everything - for 80 years: TRUST.  We are erratic, untrustworthy, and frankly, openly hostile (walking back the tone by JD doesn't change what everyone already knows because of the many words they've already said: this admin is openly hostile to and dripping with contempt for Europe).  We are not trusted.  We will not be trusted again in my lifetime.  And that's the absolutely correct decision by Europe.  We have lost so much.....for fucking what?

To keep with the chess metaphor, we aggressively brought out capital pieces to knock over a couple of pawns, and now we're strutting around the room bragging about the brutality we wrought, we captured two pieces, they captured none!  When long-term, we just set up the board in a way that our capital pieces are now fucked in future moves.  They are going to spend the next decades either neutered because they will be on the defensive, or they're going to get outright taken out because we stupidly put them in a vulnerable, indefensible position.  We just traded our get of two pawns today for our loss of our bishops, knights, and queen in the next 15 moves.  Stupid.

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Posted

Seems that this could be a big deal, but I honestly don't know enough beyond: peace = good; Erdogan benefiting = bad.

Kurdish Insurgent Group Says It Is Ending Conflict With Turkish State
The Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or P.K.K., said that it would lay down its arms and disband, a decision that could reverberate in neighboring countries.

A Kurdish militia group that has waged a bloody insurgency against the Turkish state for four decades said on Monday that it would lay down its arms and disband, a decision that could reshape Turkish politics and reverberate in neighboring countries.

The announcement by the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, known by its Kurdish acronym, P.K.K., came a few months after its imprisoned leader, Abdullah Ocalan, urged the group to disarm and disband. In his February message, he said the group’s armed struggle had outlived its initial purpose and that further progress in the struggle for Kurdish rights could be achieved through politics.

The P.K.K. began as a secessionist group that sought to create an independent state for Turkey’s Kurdish minority. More recently, it has said that it sought greater rights for Kurds inside Turkey. It is classified as a terrorist organization by Turkey, the United States and other countries.

In a statement on Monday, the group echoed Mr. Ocalan’s call, saying that it had “carried the Kurdish issue to a level where it can be solved by democratic politics, and the P.K.K. has completed its mission in that sense.”

A recent congress by the group’s leaders in northern Iraq had decided to end “the work under the name of P.K.K.’’

The group said Mr. Ocalan should lead the process of disarming, and it called on Turkey’s Parliament to take part. The move could end a conflict that has claimed more than 40,000 lives.

It was unclear what would happen next. Mr. Ocalan has been held in near isolation in a prison on an island in the Sea of Marmara after his capture by Turkish intelligence in 1999. The P.K.K. and pro-Kurdish politicians have called for his release, or at least for a loosening of the restrictions on him to allow him to oversee the disarmament process.

Many Kurds in Turkey have also expressed hopes that the end of the conflict would lead the government to formally expand Kurdish cultural and educational rights, but no new legislation on such issues appears imminent.

The long conflict, in which P.K.K. militants bombed civilian areas and the Turkish military responded with great force, has led to pitched battles in Kurdish-majority cities.

Monday’s announcement is a boon for President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. He can claim to have done what his predecessors failed to do, and the P.K.K.’s dissolution could expand his support among Kurds, which many analysts suspect that he covets to change the Constitution and seek a third presidential term.

In a social media post, Omar Celik, a spokesman for Mr. Erdogan’s governing Justice and Development Party, said the P.K.K.’s announcement was an important step in Mr. Erdogan’s work to ensure a “terror-free Turkey.”

The P.K.K.’s declaration could also influence other Kurdish militias, particularly in Syria, and shift regional dynamics beyond Turkey’s borders.

The Kurds — an ethnic group of roughly 40 million people — are spread across Turkey, Syria, Iran and Iraq. They were promised but never granted their own nation by world powers after World War I and have since launched various rebellions against governments that have sought to suppress their cultural identity.

In nearly every country where they live, Kurds have faced state-sponsored suppression of their language and culture.

It was not immediately clear how the decision would affect the P.K.K. bases hidden in the mountainous areas of Iraq’s northern Kurdish region. Turkey has repeatedly bombarded P.K.K. strongholds in northern Iraq, as well as the group’s offshoot controlling the northeastern regions of Syria, branding them a terrorist threat near its borders.

Turkish officials have said publicly that the government offered no concessions to the P.K.K. to persuade it to disarm. But officials from Turkey’s main pro-Kurdish party have expressed hope that the government would expand cultural and educational rights for Kurds.

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Posted

They are canceling Nobel-prize winning economists because woke.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/13/opinion/stiglitz-trump-dei.html?unlocked_article_code=1.G08.On8J.4hSuhXSYq--k&smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare&sgrp=g
 

Quote

The email arrived in early February from the U.S. Embassy in Copenhagen, carrying a blunt message. It informed the organizers of a Danish lecture series — one I was soon scheduled to speak at — that the final portion of American funding would be released only after they signed a statement essentially saying they were in compliance with a U.S. executive order banning diversity, equity and inclusion.

It was a head-spinning turn of events; under President Biden, attention to D.E.I. issues had been a requirement for receiving the grant. Unwittingly, Denmark seemed to have been swept into America’s culture wars.

Before the organizers at the University of Southern Denmark could respond, the U.S. State Department sent an even blunter message: The grant was “being terminated for the convenience of the U.S. Government.” It concluded by thanking the Danes “for your partnering with the Department of State and God Bless America.”

Some partnership!

The stakes here were relatively small. The lecture series was respected, but not overly prominent, and the savings amounted to a minuscule $10,000. Sometimes, though, a small story reveals a great deal — in this case about the priorities and obsessions of the Trump administration.


 

 

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Posted

Here’s something of value given in exchange for all the crypto and development deals - and we’ve only just started the official bribery tour. We haven’t even gotten to the new weapons deals for Qatar, yet.
 

Surely Republicans who spent 30 years decrying improper foreign influence of the Clintons will be furious, but no more so than the anti-terrorist hawks who can’t abide favorable treatment for state sponsors of terrorist organizations or Hamas. I’m sure the media will also be following up with relentless reporting and multiple days of front page coverage that was devoted to just as serious national security concerns about email servers for the Secretary of State 

*bangs head into desk*

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Posted
32 minutes ago, Pig Bellmont said:

Here’s something of value given in exchange for all the crypto and development deals - and we’ve only just started the official bribery tour. We haven’t even gotten to the new weapons deals for Qatar, yet.
 

Surely Republicans who spent 30 years decrying improper foreign influence of the Clintons will be furious, but no more so than the anti-terrorist hawks who can’t abide favorable treatment for state sponsors of terrorist organizations or Hamas. I’m sure the media will also be following up with relentless reporting and multiple days of front page coverage that was devoted to just as serious national security concerns about email servers for the Secretary of State 

*bangs head into desk*

Actually.....broken clock can be right twice a day.  There are some very good arguments for dropping sanctions against Syria once the Assad regime fell.  If the world wants to give the new regime a chance to succeed, and to offer it a carrot and incentive to be a good actor, dropping sanctions is a good way to do it.  In fact, keeping sanctions on Syria now that they've shaken off the shitty regime that was the reason Syria was sanctioned, would be unfair and arguably counter-productive.

Now, did Trump reach that conclusion for that reason?  Fucking OF COURSE NOT.  But it's still what plenty of decent, objective international strategists would have advised and proposed.

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Posted

As a follow up....last year, the US did $12.7 million in trade with Syria.  That is functionally.....zero.

Any increase in trade with the US would help stabilize Syria. I mean, we won't DO that, because in idiot world, trade is only good if they are buying things from us, not vice-versa.

Posted
1 minute ago, Brisketexan said:

As a follow up....last year, the US did $12.7 million in trade with Syria.  That is functionally.....zero.

Any increase in trade with the US would help stabilize Syria. I mean, we won't DO that, because in idiot world, trade is only good if they are buying things from us, not vice-versa.

In case you were wondering, Syrian goods are subject to a 41% tariff.

Posted
2 minutes ago, royiv said:

In case you were wondering, Syrian goods are subject to a 41% tariff.

I mean....a full 1/3 of what the US imported from Syria was antiquities...likely looted.  So, fuck it.



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