https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2018/04/26/trumps-unwieldy-fox-and-friends-interview-annotated/?utm_term=.e20df2e9d99a

I know basically everybody has forgotten about this guy's babbling, but holy ****, the free association going on is nuts. I find it incredibly challenging to follow anything he says.

I hope so. There've been moments in the past that touted as breakthroughs, and little changed. But this could definitely be different.

I think something to keep in mind is that a nuclear North Korea is, in some respects, in America's interests. A nuclear North Korea gives the United States a reason to have and other military assets at China's door. If North Korea denuclearizes, in return it's going to want America to pull back its presence in South Korea, which is something that the US may not be eager to do. It'd weaken the US-SK relations considerably, and also to some extent the US-Japan relations, which would be bad for the US, because the US is going to want to put more pressure on China rather than less in the future.

I dunno after living outside North America for a little bit one of the more striking double standards is how much America demands that other countries tolerate chaos and aggression on their borders but have absolutely no tolerance for it themselves. I don't think it's hypocrisy (or at least not just); I think it's a failure to imagine what it's like to have threats from neighboring countries, because thanks to the geography of the US we don't really have anything to worry about (except maybe for people who live in communities near the Mexican border but w/e we don't listen to them in the Northeast -- but even then, only maybe.)

https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/u-s-officials-israel-struck-iranian-anti-aircraft-missiles-in-syria-1.6049947

Anybody know what's going on here? I wasn't aware that Israel wanted to go to war with Iran at this time, but that's what NBC's headline for their version of this story implied.

Why else would SA be softening on Israel?

Israel has always wanted to go to war against Iran, this is just the first time in 50 years there’s been a US government negligent enough to let it happen.

Iran or Israel a smoking crater before EOY 2022

https://www.timesofisrael.com/pm-authorized-to-declare-war-in-extreme-situations-without-consulting-cabinet/

The NBC headline is very misleading. Everyone has just started talking about this "new shadow war" between Israel and Iran as if it happened out of the blue. That's really wrong: it's been going on for a long, long time. When developments in the Syrian Civil War look like they could potentially threaten Israel, has tried to steer the Syrian Civil War in a direction that it can tolerate (in that respect its no different from other countries that share a border with Syria. Nobody wants the civil war spilling over into their own country). I don't want to effortpost about it, but bottom line is what has happened recently is really nothing new. Shi'ite militias, who take direct orders from the IRGC, have been involved in the Syrian Civil War since about 2012 (they've fought to prop up the Assad regime), as has Hezbollah, which is another Iran proxy and Israel has consistently stopped them from doing things it perceives as a potential threat (don't forget -- this is happening on Israel's border. It's not an abstraction. You can hear fighting from the Golan Heights).

You can be sure: Israel doesn't want this war with Iran, and the fact that it's happening now has little do with it who the US president is, or with Netanyahu's political problems at home. It has to do with the shifting tides of the Syrian Civil War and the way that they affect Israel. The reason why this has been escalating is because Iran is more and more aggressively deployed against Israel, and more capable of striking Israel inside its own borders. Between Hezbollah (which has massive weapons stockpiles in Lebanon), the Shi'ite militias that have amassed near Israel's border with Syria, and various other Iranian military installations in Syria, if a more direct confrontation breaks out, which it probably will, Israel will be more vulnerable -- and will probably suffer greater casualties -- than in any war since the Yom Kippur war in 1973. It could very easily be worse.

This article from a few weeks does a slightly better job at describing the situation: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/syria-strikes-spotlight-israel-s-nightmare-iran-its-border-n863826

The Iron Dome won't be as effective against Hezbollah's rockets as its been against Hamas' rockets in the past, in part because of the sheer scale of them, but also because they're more sophisticated. Hamas' rockets are generally pretty dumb, which is part of why they don't kill many people. You point them, fire them, and they land where they land, usually in an open field far away form people. Hezbollah's rockets have sophisticated software that makes their targeting much more precise, and that allows them to evade air defense systems.

Syria (Assad), Iran, and Hezbollah are all either openly allied with or armed by Russia, and Israel’s only noteworthy ally in the region is the US military. So yes, I would expect a non-interventionist/ambiguously pro-Putin US government does change Israel’s military calculus a tad.

(The link you posted suggested as much.)

Yeah, the fact that Israel is concerned by Trump's non-interventionist tendencies is one of the things I think the article gets right and needs to be especially highlighted. Despite the NBC article that said Israel is lobbying for US support, there's a lot of evidence that Israel believes it won't get it, and that it'll be on its own in this upcoming war.

Things with Russia are a little more complicated, because Israel and Russia are also allies, despite Russia being aligned with all of Israel's enemies. Before Russia got into the war, Israel had air supremacy in the region, but that changed overnight when Russia got involved. Russia wants to be on good terms with Israel for a host of reasons, and so Russia lets Israel go into Syria and bomb targets and attack various targets, but it effectively needs Russian permission to do so. So Israel's lost a lot of its latitude to act freely, and there all sorts of dangers for Israel in the current situation.

I don't know, much of what Trump says about the Middle East seems like it makes sense. Aside from owing something to its allies (and Trump is famous for thinking of alliances in transactional terms, so we know that's not very important to him) it doesn't seem like there's a US interest to being in the Middle East now that the US is on its way to being an oil exporter.

US involvement in the Middle East isn’t because they need to buy ME oil, it’s because protecting OPEC is a lynchpin in the oil markets/USD forex/treasury securities/arms exports/US hegemony feedback loop. Trump is not an intelligent person and the benefit to the US here is neither obvious nor immediate, but it’s strategically important in the long term because Americans aren’t having nearly enough kids.

How does that work?

[quote=Fox News]
A group of 18 Republican lawmakers have signed their names to a letter formally nominating President Trump for a Nobel Peace Prize
[/quote]

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2018/05/02/house-lawmakers-formally-nominate-trump-for-2019-nobel-peace-prize.html

Because deficit spending either requires a large supply of cheap debt (meaning high international demand for US treasuries, generated in large part by OPEC and obligatorily USD denominated oil transactions) or massive population growth to afford future debt service from high cost debt borrowed from a smaller market.

Well... what had Obama done by the time he got his Nobel Peace Prize??

Not been Trump, basically.

What had Obama done by the time he got his Nobel Peace prize? To answer the question: nothing. He had given a bunch of inspiring speeches in which he promised to end wars and bring peace. I guess that's something. But as a president, hut he hadn't ended those wars by the time he was awarded the Nobel (or really, he hadn't achieved anything notable in foreign policy by that point), nor by the time his presidency ended. And if Obama hadn't been awarded a Nobel Peace prize based on the promise of his presidency at its very beginning, there would've been no reason to award him one as a result of any of his peacemaking achievements, because he didn't really have any. The only reason he won the Nobel Prize was because the exuberance that fueled his election hadn't quite yet been exhausted (but it was getting there).

At the time, even many liberals disagreed with giving Obama the Nobel: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/8299697.stm#sa-link_location=story-body&intlink_from_url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.bbc.com%2Fnews%2Fworld-europe-34277960&intlink_ts=1525511982404-sa . The Nobel Foundation gave him the award in order to encourage him to be a peacemaker and live up to the expectations he had set as a candidate. But in retrospect it's difficult to see how he actually ended up deserving it, given that the US became involved in more wars during his presidency, not fewer. Looking back, the skeptics turned out to be right. Which isn't to say that Trump deserves one. But even so, it's still possible he'll somehow stumble into a peacemaking achievement that makes all of Obama's pale in comparison. It would say more about Obama than it would about Trump.

Agreed, Obama didn't deserve one really

As a rule of thumb: this is more often than not the case, isn't it?

He didn’t deserve the prize, but this is intellectually dishonest. Obama’s military efforts were mostly a continuation of those foisted upon him by Bush. When he did expand the conflict it wasn’t to make war, it was Team America World Police stuff. You can object to the US assuming that role, but assassinating mass murderers and protecting people against a bloodthirsty despot is a far cry from making the world less peaceful.

He compares quite favourably to presidents past and since, on this metric.

Trump has yet to start a war, but he’s not apparently opposed to doing so, and he is toiling to dismantle the worldwide economic and diplomatic regime that underlies world peace.

W Bush started two unjustifiable wars, both of which functionally continue to this day. Clinton undermined UN peacekeepers in Yugoslavia and bombed civilians there on purpose, when he wasn’t antagonizing Iraq to distract from his political crises. HW Bush invaded Panama, also bombing civilians on purpose, and eventually defended two brutal Islamic dictatorships against a third more secular one. It gets darker from here.

Obama wasn’t perfect, and I’m not a fan of the (frankly very little) that he did. But he was actually a pretty big change, and his approach was a lot more peaceful than the US norm.



Well hey, Adolf Hitler stumbled into a peacemaking achievement that makes all other efforts pale in comparison, too. That doesn’t mean he deserves credit. I’m not sure that threatening and terrorizing people into acting more peacefully counts.

This is what I thought when they gave him the award! I just assumed they had given it to him to prod him into being a peaceful president. And then he gave that speech that attempted to justify reaching goals of peace as a 'wartime president'.

Yes, if you're conservative.

No, if you're one of the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They're not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can't do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.

I don't think it's it's intellectually dishonest. As far as his disposition goes, he was certainly reluctant to start more wars, so I'm sure that when he did it was because he was responding to circumstances over which he had no control. At the same time, he was also the presidential candidate of Yes We Can. He ran a campaign whose key idea was that committed idealism can overcome "politics as usual" and that we could actually have the things that we wouldn't dare hope for. That was just as true with his foreign policy vision as with universal healthcare. Given the gap between the expectations that were set and what he actually did, it's not unfair to point out that the US expanded its military footprint significantly during the Obama years.

I often use this tool: https://wordcounttools.com/

And it's very rare for me to write sentences that don't show up as having the readability level of a college graduate. But sometimes when I come across speeches of politicians or public figures, I put them in just for fun. They often come up as 9-10th or 7-8th grade reading level.

I was going to say "it probably looks that way to a cynic"

It’s not unfair, but it also doesn’t imply Obama was particularly warlike compared to other US presidents. He didn’t deserve his peace prize in an absolute sense, but relatively speaking he sure did.

:suicide::master:

Because the :suicide emoticon (emoji?) doesn't work now.

I put in an essay I wrote last year for a religious studies class and it said college graduate. Woo! I suppose that means my English skills are up to snuff.

But yeah, this seems a very self-conscious decision. 7-8 grade is the average American's reading level. If the president speaks at that level, he can sound on par, so as not to sound either dumb or pretentious from speaking in either way apart from that.

Yeah Eversor didn't you learn in college that you have to write at an 8th grade level to not sound like a pretentious douchebag?

I'm serious, that's like intro communications stuff lmao

what if traffic signs were written at a college level

Interesting choice

I ****post at a graduate reading level because it takes the least effort to write that way.

Sad!

Once you reach a certain point, you realize that the turgid prose of a professor is part subject mastery, part rapid thought, but foremost an utter contempt for the listener. It's the verbal component of absent-minded-professorism: selfishness by way of shifting all obligation onto others. Our society deems this behavior acceptable among intelligent men, but it probably shouldn't.

It's a lot of work to read an audience and communicate ideas at an appropriate level. I've personally spent too much time writing grade 8 executive summary powerpoints of formal proofs to waste any more of it trying to convert that audience to market socialism. I'm sure those people find it quite rude.

Interesting that Leslie Lamport has set up a course website teaching tools (TLA+) for formal methods specifying software, and (at least in the early slides) he appears to have spent the majority of his effort simply trying to phrase things in a way that people won't easily be able to reject as too complicated to bother with.