Russia shouldn't have invaded Ukraine and should return all the invaded territories, but fuck Ukraine for blowing up Nord Stream and worsening climate change.
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Serious The Politics Thread
- Thread starter Oglemi
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“Ukraine blew up Nord Stream” is an oversimplification. Ukraine wanted to blow up Nord Stream, the CIA said to stop, the Ukrainian president relented and called off the operation, but the military commander disobeyed orders and did it anyway. The political power structure in Ukraine was clearly involved, but the expected legitimate authority tried to prevent it.
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Celtic's point was you can have these opinions and there's some relevance to them but in terms of Power on the global stage - military, political, economic - relative to any other contenders; if anything the US has only gotten relatively stronger and Gaza has little to no effect on that.
Its position as Hegemon ain't going anywhere anytime soon.
I'm not making a moral statement on that, just a factual one because I believe Celtic is right.
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Ukraine government is still responsible for being unable to stop it, they keep denying any responsibility blaming Russia and the people who ordered it didn't get punished, one of them even became the Ukraine’s ambassador to the UK after the fact by your source that indicates they aren't displeased that they ignored the president orders to stop the operation.
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I DM'd about this yesterday but I'll reply in thread too:
Yeah, my post sucked and was more emotional backed than me being logical, your arguments are mostly correct, and I was wrong. That being said, I still know and understand politics, thank you very much; one post I made that sucks I made on a whim doesn't mean your dunk = entirely correct, and if making a bad post here meant that then most people here including you would be in the negative index of "understanding politics".
On Ukraine: Ukraine has a right to defend itself from Russia, Russia should be punished for its invasion. If you read many academic arguments on the subject, you'll find that those in the know have found that Russia's "denazification" propaganda basically is "If a Ukrainian doesn't acknowledge they're Russian they are a Nazi", which is extremely explicitly genocidal rhetoric.
I believe some do not understand this from just viewing the conflict because most genocides in contemporary or past are usually read from when the defending side has lost, or from when the genocidal country/state/whatever has the power to do it freely. But Ukraine having the ability to defend itself with an army doesn't stop it from being an attempted genocide at minimum. I am not a big fan of NATO because I am not a big fan of world police politics, but Ukraine trying to defend itself by joining NATO is absolutely in its own volition and Russia having an objection to that would only make sense if both (1) Ukraine didn't want to join NATO because Russia wanted to invade it for decades and (2) A NATO border state there compromised Russian security, which doesn't make sense.
Personally, I do not talk about Ukraine much because my country's leaders are funding them appropriately (at least, from my knowledge), and I instead focus on Gaza because we are funding the genocidal party in that conflict.
On the Nord Stream: Blowing it up was cringe, but we can replace that, we can't replace the potentially millions of lives in a colonialist genocide, so that isn't anything close to a good reason to just go "fuck Ukraine" and stop supporting its endeavors.
This was exactly my point. I believe that everyone in this thread (I hope) believes that violence should be avoided whenever possible, the situation in Gaza is horrific, the situation in Sudan is horrific, the invasion of Ukraine is horrific, Taiwan deserves our support, and ideally we’d live in a world free from strife.
But that’s not the world we live in. Wishing the US’s support for Israel will reduce its standing as a global superpower is fanfiction. Wishing the Democratic party’s support for Israel will cost it the election, and the Democrats will suddenly ditch Israel in response, is a fantasy. 85% of voters stepping into a ballot booth to vote will not vote with the current Middle East situation at the top of their mind, and some of those that do vote with the Middle East in mind will be Zionists!
Remember how after 2020, the Dems became more pro-law enforcement, because “defund the police” was hemorrhaging votes in the House? Remember when pulling out of Afghanistan tanked Biden’s approval rating, and it never recovered? It turns out on military, police, and the border, people like “feeling safe” and “looking strong.” That’s just reality. And this goes for foreign countries too. Our allies aren’t abandoning us. Europe, Japan, Korea, Australia, Canada, none of those alliances are going anywhere.
Ukraine should continue fighting Russia to have its territory back, I never wrote otherwise, hopefully without causing another environmental catastrophe. I don't particularly care about replacing Nord Stream, I am worried more about this. The methane released on the explosion made life worse for everyone in the planet.
If everyone would like to join me in the driver's seat for a minute
I've updated the OP with a couple more guidelines on what is acceptable in this thread. Of particular note, in my opinion, is after meta-analyzing the thread up to this point and spending some time to find the cause of major points of contention, what I've concluded is that there's a pervasive issue of cherrypicking in the thread. And what I mean by this is users distilling or ignoring most of another user's post into a single line and responding only to it, rather than to their point overall. This tends to cause contention because that line tends to be taken out of context or is largely irrelevant to what the user was trying to say, and that results in multiple back and forth posts being made to resolve the misinterpretation/misunderstanding.
What to do about this is another story. As I said, it's pervasive, and not just here, on the forum (and internet) as whole. I could simply be more aggressive in deleting posts that are guilty of this, but then again, not every user that does this is being malicious and it doesn't always lead to a bad post/resulting discussion. I think generally it's just something that everyone needs to be mindful of, first and foremost. However, this post is everyone's warning that if you do find your posts being deleted, this may be the cause if we don't happen to send you an alert.
Another pervasive issue is simply the aggression. As I've said before in this thread, and we've sent out a few other reminders before, please be wary of posting flippantly and responding aggressively in this thread. You can find a user's post ridiculous without mocking them or insinuating they're stupid. We will be looking to remove users that have had an issue with this going forward more pressingly.
Finally, as a general note to everyone, please be aware that if you post a source, to please prefer posting journalistic sources. While I personally find direct sources more interesting, as I'm sure others do, it is not Smogon's place to be somewhere where this takes place, especially hard links to things such as propaganda. This also goes along with being cognizant that your post doesn't veer from "support" of a cause into propagandizing for that cause.
Thank you everyone for taking the time to read this post! Hopefully we can continue discussing these important topics in a constructive way
I've updated the OP with a couple more guidelines on what is acceptable in this thread. Of particular note, in my opinion, is after meta-analyzing the thread up to this point and spending some time to find the cause of major points of contention, what I've concluded is that there's a pervasive issue of cherrypicking in the thread. And what I mean by this is users distilling or ignoring most of another user's post into a single line and responding only to it, rather than to their point overall. This tends to cause contention because that line tends to be taken out of context or is largely irrelevant to what the user was trying to say, and that results in multiple back and forth posts being made to resolve the misinterpretation/misunderstanding.
What to do about this is another story. As I said, it's pervasive, and not just here, on the forum (and internet) as whole. I could simply be more aggressive in deleting posts that are guilty of this, but then again, not every user that does this is being malicious and it doesn't always lead to a bad post/resulting discussion. I think generally it's just something that everyone needs to be mindful of, first and foremost. However, this post is everyone's warning that if you do find your posts being deleted, this may be the cause if we don't happen to send you an alert.
Another pervasive issue is simply the aggression. As I've said before in this thread, and we've sent out a few other reminders before, please be wary of posting flippantly and responding aggressively in this thread. You can find a user's post ridiculous without mocking them or insinuating they're stupid. We will be looking to remove users that have had an issue with this going forward more pressingly.
Finally, as a general note to everyone, please be aware that if you post a source, to please prefer posting journalistic sources. While I personally find direct sources more interesting, as I'm sure others do, it is not Smogon's place to be somewhere where this takes place, especially hard links to things such as propaganda. This also goes along with being cognizant that your post doesn't veer from "support" of a cause into propagandizing for that cause.
Thank you everyone for taking the time to read this post! Hopefully we can continue discussing these important topics in a constructive way
I think pressure can work, and can get something done— but it won’t be because of US loss of power or anything really structural to the empire.
It’ll be because they feel embarrassed. There’s still a lot we can do by shaming individuals. There’s no such thing as too cool for school— looking like a dumb ass or a genocidal maniac in front of Europe, Japan, Korea, the American intellectual world WOULD affect a Kamala Harris administration.
Mostly from shame.
I mean I understand where you're coming from, but there's also a pervasive trend of people spewing a wall of text littered with platitudes, non-sequiturs, unsourced claims, and wild tangents. Cherrypicking in some form becomes a must, unless you seriously expect us to sit down and go through an essay-length post point by point and debunk each and every claim made within. This is a Pokemon forum at the end of the day, not a place for rigorous political debate that requires hours of research.
Similarly, sometimes I just don't care about engaging with or perhaps even disagree with each and every point a poster makes, but they do make one or two particular points that I want to discuss. Is that not allowed now? I would appreciate some clarification as the way this is worded seems to empower gishgalloping and sealioning.
No one here is an expert and I don't expect you to respond to a user's 30 paragraph post in full, this too is expressed in the OP. This is simply my community note that it's something to take stock of in how you respond to other users. As I said, it's pervasive and not something I realistically expect to change; it's my note to say that it's something I've identified as an issue and the worst offenders may find themselves being moderated for it. You don't need to respond to every point a user is making, but you can avoid taking 1 line out of context and tangenting off it. I don't think that's an unreasonable base expectation to levy on everyone.
Most of the rules of the thread are guidelines, rather than hardline rules unless you're the worst offenders, otherwise I'd be sat here all day deleting posts.
Maybe I'll make a nicer more cohesive post here about this later with links or whatever. But anyways I'm tired of Lula's stupid centrist little plays and his worthlessness. I didn't expect him to be a leftist and was waiting for a boring rather unproductive term and lots of holding the line but the complete inaction on the burnings in the amazon and pantanal is crazy. also his inaction on anything related to indigenous people but hes always been dogshit about that too. PCB save me. save me PCB. PCB please
This seems like it would be a difficult thing to enforce evenly — what constitutes cherry-picking egregious enough to moderate? What separates an acceptably tangential response from one that is unacceptably so? Personally, I would prefer cherry-picking not to be something that people can be moderated for — if someone feels that they have been cherry-picked, they can stand up for themselves — and for needless aggression to be moderated more severely instead. Isolating part of a post to make one's own well-articulated, measured point seems fine to me; isolating part of a post to berate the poster seems like it would break the aggression rule either way.
The cherry picking is fine for the most part. The bigger problem in this thread is the cherry picking in combination with long tangents, most of which are just a back and forth between specific users that clog things up, and a large portion of which is just "clarifying" posts. If it goes beyond two back and forths they should just take it to DMs. Also should disallow double posting.
This is more to which I'm referring and agree 100%
Predictions are starting to roll in. Allan Lichtman is expected to release his official prediction via the New York Times after Labor Day.
Election forecaster Chris Bouzy, who has been more accurate than the Nates (Cohn and Silver) just released his map:
Looks like a Dem best case scenario. He’s been contact with state party in Florida and is bullish that it will flip in November. We shall see. Thoughts?
Election forecaster Chris Bouzy, who has been more accurate than the Nates (Cohn and Silver) just released his map:
Looks like a Dem best case scenario. He’s been contact with state party in Florida and is bullish that it will flip in November. We shall see. Thoughts?
This is me just not knowing. Is Florida really more of a tossup than, say, Ohio? I assumed that post 2016 Florida would be safer red than Ohio, but for what its worth when I saw Ohio leaned red I was surprised in general.
As much joy as blue Florida would give me, I have my doubts. Not many thoughts about the rest of the map beyond not taking it for granted.
If we go by demographics, Florida should for sure be more purple than Ohio. Florida has a much higher non-white population and more residents have bachelor’s degrees than Ohio. The predictors of vote preference in America are unfortunately race and educational attainment.
It's the other way around, Florida keeps shipping us their boomers every summer to leave trash all over our beaches, clog up our roads, and jack up the cost of living.
Blue Florida and both blue Georgia and North Carolina seems overly optmistic. There was a poll asking people from Montana that if they would vote for Tester if this would give the dems control of the Senate and most answered they would vote for a Republican in this case.
Idk I live in New England and every time I hear of a destination place for our elderly it's always Florida
It's even happened in my family
There's def some people who come here but I've also seen more people come to visit from Europe than from other regions in the states tbh
They claim it’s abortion being on the ballot initiative, Harris / Walz coattails, and unpopularity of the state GOP which has dominated as of late. DeSantis has turned it into a hellhole.
Georgia I am extremely bullish of going blue. North Carolina is only 2 points behind Georgia, so it depends on Harris’ overall margin and is certainly not far fetched. Biden only lost NC by just over a point.
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