Because battles won don't mean anything if they do not occur towards a clear, achievable, strategic objective. Most of our wars from Vietnam onward have had either vague strategic goals or fantastical ones.
Remember that the general history of the United States and its military efforts from Vietnam onward is tactical and operational dominance combined with strategic incompetence.
We win every "battle" and always hold or occupy the country we seek to hold or occupy. But then lose the war.
Another fantasy that leaders engage in is the fantasy that their opponents lack agency: we can just do stuff to them and they will not respond. That one *always* goes badly.
The people who talk about expanding the tent are never, ever actually expanding the tent. They want to pick up the tent and move it rightwards. If the tent were getting bigger, letting in new people would not require pushing other people out, which the metaphorical expansion somehow always does.
Even if we grant that: those who insist we should remain Over There refuse to engage with the fact that we will not be heard. The app has been designed, on purpose, to silence some voices and raise others. It is not even close to a neutral space. You are asking people to go scream in a void.
Unfortunately, in US journalism it is considered neutral to spread a lie, but it is considered "biased" to call out a lie. So, there is a structural asymmetry that rewards colorful lies with virality.
It's really on brand that Trump and his cronies love to extol the *idea* of the Greatest Generation while spitting on the world that generation struggled to create. It sure is...something.
On further thought, it really worth pointing out that the *entire* post WW2 international order as regards trade, economic policy, social policy, the always of war, you name it, was built by the greatest generation and it is this order which is being destroyed as we speak by Trump and Hegseth.
People’s ideas about the world are formed mostly from their social environment.
Their social environment includes their parasocial environment: media and social media.
The parasocial share of our social environment has been growing for many decades.
Pete Hegseth Chapter 10 More Lethality, Less Lawyers
A chapter in Hegseth’s book is literally titled “More Lethality, Less Lawyers.”
It’s almost as if there were signs!
It's worse. In a fundamental sense the Greatest Generation created, expanded and enforced the laws of warfare as a *result* of WW2.
look, I’ve been operating on the assumption that we cannot reach Bush 2 numbers because the media environment makes the floor much higher than it was back then (and Fox won’t throw him overboard the same way)
but, uh, we aren’t through year one and…
Many of us weren't well supervised in the 80s. Our parents gave us house keys, dropped us at school, and hoped for the best.
Fundamentally, its been clear what we've faced since at least the "Mass Deportation Now" signs at the RNC, but over time it becomes ever more explicit: this is a political movement that seeks to use the power of the state to ethnically cleanse this country until only whites remain.
Fundamentally, the Trump/Miller definition of citizenship requires not just mass deportation of immigrants but mass de naturalization of those judged as "un-American" (Black, Latino, Asian) followed by their subsequent deportation. And we already know they want to redefine birthright citizenship.
I think more than anything else AI feels like a miracle to people with questionable literacy because it can read and write for you, and a lot of us who are highly literate underestimate how many of our society's leaders, esp in business, struggle with literacy.
Good morning to Brazilian reporter Manuela Borges, who’s been waiting eleven years for this petty moment. ❤️ 🇧🇷
oh this is absolutely what i think. i think they feed him fake polls and outright AI slop
This is an insightful but deeply upsetting article about why everyone in the US feels poor, and why the current political situation emerges as a direct result.
www.yesigiveafig.com/p/part-1-my-...
kids on an ice rink playing hockey in a park
Kids don't always want to be on screens, they just need spaces and places to live, grow and play independently.
I love pretty much all pie and don't understand why we have to make all these bad bitches fight each other.
My personal fav is strawberry rhubarb, but if you don't like a certain kind of pie, I think it's likely you have only had poor examples of that pie.
A large (maybe 3 feet wide by 5 feet tall) sign on the end of a row of bookshelves that tells the “address” of books that have sensitive content.
Sometimes I think it’s going to be the librarians who will save us all.
I think the fact that we're basically looking at Bush 08 bubbling up before year one is even wrapped is what makes this period fundamentally different to the cycle we've seen with Bush and Trump I
The thing about laws is that they are nothing more & nothing less than agreements we decide to abide by. As Locke observed people in general will stick by laws even under fairly bad circumstances. But past a certain point, if the law is perceived as being broken beyond repair, we can just change it.
The problem with this article is they asked too many lawyers and not enough historians.
As a historian, I'd say the legality of Trump's immunity and pardons depends on how he leaves office.
At 40 over 55 approval? He's immune.
At 25 over 65? He's probably not immune & self-pardons aren't legal.
So we are currently at multiple threatened military operations, attorneys being rejected for improper appointments, suburbanites chasing the armed agents of the state cursing their names, a two vote margin in the house, and consumer sentiment worse than 2008/2009. It’s been less than a year.
One of my favorite things is getting to tell friends who are new to NYC that the subway "stand clear of the closing doors please" voice is a trans woman named Bernie Wagenblast and she's amazing.
I am being personally attacked.
Yeah, with some artists and some art, the art is so clearly and inextricably linked to them and who they are that one *can't* take one w/o the other. Certain kind of creator (usually white men) who get hailed as geniuses feel permission to let be "themselves" more openly over time. Whedon is such.
Donald Trump looking the happiest I’ve ever seen him talking to Mamdani, with a Reagan portrait hanging in the wall behind them
The classic distracted boyfriend meme
help
