📌

yeah. Trump negotiated a deal (with no force of US law), the Pentagon did not intend to follow through (some speculate sabotaged the withdrawal as political retribution when Biden forced it), Biden had a hard choice to make as abandoning the deal likely would have led to a resurgence of violence.

making the bigtime here.

i mean, you don’t get the pomp and glory of a military victory in California… except, well, it *is* a blue state.

drill baby drill will take care of that, by two very distinct mechanisms!

bluesky really has graduated from a kind of Canada where everyone was polite to a place where people can be pretty effing mean!

watch them put minutes on the metric system because their favorite time would be 2:88pm.

📌

are there no rare earths in Antarctica?

Musk seems excited! x.com/elonmusk/sta...

the question is whether Trump will ratify Russia’s gambit to undo a Westphalian norm in favor of a “great power” spheres-of-interest norm, under which local toughs do what they will and small countries accept what they must.

“I cannot escape the sense that those pundits who really believed that Donald Trump was going to embrace restraint in foreign policy have been played for fools.” @dandrezner.bsky.social danieldrezner.substack.com/p/donald-tru...

so the internet is an echo-chamber echo chamber.

absolutely. but we have put a few decades between us and our invasions. and the stakes are very different, and much higher, than in the 1980s, when two hegemons took military liberties within their own blocs. it is our interest now to prevent that kind of liberty-taking.

a panama thing, let alone some greenland / canada / mexico thing, would instantly justify in retrospect russia’s ukraine thing and in prospect china’s taiwan thing. kind of what a russian-asset american president might attempt.

“We become one of the most dangerous kinds of people — a cruel person with a clean conscience.” @davidfrenchjag.bsky.social www.nytimes.com/2024/12/22/o...

oh, i voted for, publicly endorsed, kamala. drafts.interfluidity.com/2024/11/04/t...

the most deluded people in the world, who surround themselves with one another and then their sycophants, know what's "obviously true" when they see it.