pasabagi

60 ms·

631.
by pasabagi 5y ago
The basic goal of US foreign policy has been to maintain a network of US allies and partners around the world, who can be relied upon to protect US strategic interests, like access through the strait of Hormuz. Nations like Qatar or SA are
632.
by pasabagi 5y ago
This is the other thing: the US backed Israel because Israel was strong; Israel was not strong because the US backed them. At the end of the mandate period, Israel was the only country in the region with a real military, because the UK had
633.
by pasabagi 5y ago
I never said I agreed with US policy. I just think this is the main reason why US policy is how it is. If you don't understand why people do things, you can't convince them to do otherwise.
634.
by pasabagi 5y ago
I agree. I just think if I was working for the US state department, and I was sizing up various countries around the middle east to build a partnership with, I would choose Israel every time. The only country that comes close is Turkey, and
635.
by pasabagi 5y ago
Well, crime went down worldwide, whereas abortion and incarceration only went up in the US.
636.
by pasabagi 5y ago
> Do we need institutions to give us actionable information? We're at a point where scientific work is the sum of an enormous number of specialists, most of whom are only marginally able to judge the work of those outside their fiel
637.
by pasabagi 5y ago
That's true. I'm not American, didn't really think of the racial aspect of american social welfare. I think that's a bit more muted in europe, although it's still there.
638.
by pasabagi 5y ago
I'm not a scientist - I'm actually an ex-philosophy student. I guess part of my feeling is, sure, science has problems (every scientist will tell you that) but are there better institutions to give us actionable information in the
639.
by pasabagi 5y ago
I don't think you're right. Really good players will sometimes stop taking the game seriously after building a colossal economy, then they do stuff like build 1000 t1 bombers and try and win with that. It's usually horribly i
640.
by pasabagi 5y ago
Seems weird to me. My brother in law literally works with HIV every day in a biology lab. There are thousands of academics who do the same. Why would they bother if it was just some random virus? I can't really speak to the arguments y
641.
by pasabagi 5y ago
Do you seriously think there is a single health secretary or government in the last fifty years that wouldn't privatize the NHS if they thought they could? Sajid Javid literally reads The Fountainhead twice a year - and he's n
642.
by pasabagi 5y ago
I think this is a generational fault line that's pretty common even in good relationships. Older generations could get by making way less pragmatic choices. Many of the older generation graduated into an economy where the default state
643.
by pasabagi 5y ago
I don't think it's particularly out of the way. Iterators are a normal part of rust, and are lazy.
644.
by pasabagi 5y ago
The UK per-capita expenditure on medicine is very low. It's also hamstrung by the choice a few years back to balkanize the NHS (stopping financially successful hospitals from subsidizing unsuccessful ones). My feeling is the NHS is a g
645.
by pasabagi 5y ago
The thing is, georgian houses only look good if they are actually made with all the right materials and skills - and that stuff is expensive . If you look at all the neoclassical / retro stuff the nazis built, for example, it generall
646.
by pasabagi 5y ago
The barbican is super expensive, fwiw. They are also really nice inside. Personally, I like brutalist buildings. I feel like a lot of the fake georgian cutesy stuff is built to look good (for a certain taste) but almost always sucks to live
647.
by pasabagi 5y ago
It seems to me that real estate is the locus of a colossal regulatory failure that has already created one trainwreck (2008) and will just continue to spawn more until people start taking a look at the system and honestly evaluating how muc
648.
by pasabagi 5y ago
Did anybody find it weird that a series that ended with a rousing affirmation of the value of truth was full of so much gratuitous falsehood? I was just reading the article and a name popped up: "Mikhail Ivanovich Shchadov", who l
649.
by pasabagi 5y ago
Bit weird suggestion. He literally beat her (one time she had a miscarriage after).
650.
by pasabagi 5y ago
In England, everybody remembers it as a success. I was actually living in London at the time, and I remember it being pretty shambolic (the buildings weren't ever finished, for example), but if you have your national media on side, I t
651.
by pasabagi 5y ago
>what OP meant rather than the words on the screen Mmm, I was actually just pushing back against the words on the screen. I don't doubt the OP means it the way you read it. I guess I don't generally see a rejoinder as a way of
652.
by pasabagi 5y ago
Obviously, different countries participated in the Holocaust to varying degrees, ranging from turning a blind eye, to deportations, to active participation. That's even true amongst some of the allies (the UK, for instance, turned back
653.
by pasabagi 5y ago
You should probably re-read his post. Plus, it's not pedantic. Saying that the holocaust was a eastern-european thing (or that the polish were largely responsible) is a common way the far right in germany try to diffuse and deflect res
654.
by pasabagi 5y ago
Well, yeah, but if somebody said the Vietnamese had a history of using napalm, because it was mostly used there, people might look at them funny.
655.
by pasabagi 5y ago
Western europe too, and in the USA. Vichy france, for example, is a pretty standout example, or Franco's spain, or Mussolini's italy, or some people in the UK (the daily mail, perhaps their readership?)
656.
by pasabagi 5y ago
> en masse in Eastern Europe Is Germany in Eastern Europe now?
657.
by pasabagi 5y ago
Freedom is not a binary state. In the UK, new laws are being brought in to ban demonstrations that cause annoyance. Does that make the UK unfree? It makes some people less free , but is it sufficient? Again, in the UK, the first-past-the-p
658.
by pasabagi 5y ago
Acquaintances of mine had the personal data used to give a believable aura to automated blackmail attempts ('we know what porn you're watching', etc). Which didn't work, but still, it's quite threatening having some
659.
by pasabagi 5y ago
Really? I can see how, as somebody who has advanced the frontiers of human exploitation, people might have strong negative feelings towards J Bezos. (Personally, I don't feel that way, but I would be happy if some of the innovations am
660.
by pasabagi 5y ago
I guess for me it seems different to normal public health stuff because of the speed - but perhaps your second world war figure is exactly what I am getting at. COVID is on the same scale as the UK's losses in the second world war - it

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