Yes, you’re putting in what you thought was sufficient while the US was carrying the largest burden. That’s not going to continue much longer so you can either change your perspective and increase your contributions or you can let Ukraine fall.

Trump is going to cut funding to Ukraine, that much is certain. What happens after that depends on Europe’s response.

They’re not doing nothing but they’re not pulling their weight either. If they were then Zelensky’s statement here would not be necessary.

There’s so much oversupply in general, why would anyone else increase their output to 3/tanks?

I think the why should be pretty obvious at this point.

The collective West hasn’t been stopping Putin, that’s the point. Ukraine has been with primarily American support. It needs to be collective and it isn’t up to this point.

Absolutely. If I had my way we would be giving Ukraine everything they ask for and more. Unfortunately that’s not the world we live in. My point is that European apathy is just as much to blame for the situation we find ourselves in as the instability in the US. Europe has allowed, and continues to allow, the situation to become hopeless without US support and that can’t be blamed on the US.

There’s a legitimate discussion to be had about harm reduction here. You’re approaching this topic from an all-or-nothing mindset but there’s quite a bit of research indicating that’s not really how it works in practice. Specifically as it relates to child pornography the argument goes that not allowing artificial material to be created leads to an increase in production of actual child pornography which obviously means more real children are being harmed than would be if other forms were not controlled in the same fashion. The same sort of logic could be applied to revenge porn, stolen selfies, or whatever else we’re calling the kind of thing this article is referring to. It may not be an identical scenario but I still think it would be fair to say that an AI generated image is not as damaging as a real one.

That is not to say that nothing should be done in these situations. I haven’t decided what I think the right move is given the options in front of us but I think there’s quite a bit more nuance here than your comment would indicate.

More than anything your statement just makes me wonder why the phrase “the country who has been developing anti-Russian weapons for 50 years” does not refer to a European country. They seem to have been content to outsource defense spending for the last half century at least and now are acting surprised that they have to rely on someone else for defense.

This issue is a great example of the insane double think that most of Europe has about the US. We are too involved in world affairs until someone needs to take military action and then all of a sudden we’re the only ones who can address it. Ukraine is your neighbor, not ours. You should be the ones funding Ukraine’s defense because if you don’t Russia is on your doorstep. Ukraine should have so much money that it doesn’t matter what the US does but instead all of Europe is looking on like “it’s a shame a country on the other side of the world isn’t doing enough to stop this”.

Listen here you little shit…

That was actually a pretty good one.

You are familiar with the DNC, yes? You must be because you just described every decision they’ve made for the last 20 years.

You’re not wrong but what’s a realistic path to accomplishing such a thing? Capitalists want to extract as much money as possible so raising wages or improving working conditions without being forced is out of the question. The only party with even a pretend interest in forcing that discussion just got beat down all over the country. And no one cares enough about the issue to fix it by paying more for food, which would probably still be true if we doubled wages for all jobs.

Of course they aren’t but that’s what I’m saying. If people thought this was going to be quick, easy, and precise they need to learn that isn’t how it works. I say good luck to them but don’t ask for my help when the lesson turns out to be painful.

What part of people voting for this exact scenario makes you think they aren’t going to be “cool” with it happening? Hell, Hispanic people voted for this. Why is it my job to save them from what they asked for? If we keep bailing out idiots when they do dumb things they will never learn how dumb they are.

I’m not banking on that happening in large enough numbers to change anything but I am not batman either. We signed up for this and we all need to realize what that actually means if we want to have any hope of making better decisions in the future. Some of us won’t learn until well after that knock on the door and I don’t have anything to say about that other than I’m not the one knocking.

It would be a pretty on-brand ending to a saga involving two former TV personalities turned head of government. A real daytime soap opera plot line.

Yeah I would say so. I am pretty laid back by nature and there are some minor things that impact my mood in a negative fashion more than they used to. That could be getting older in general but I do think being away from those kinds of things for a while has made them harder to ignore.

I wouldn’t necessarily blame your niche interests or anything else like that. There’s lots of people this applies to who just forgot how to socialize. I would put myself in that category. I like sports and many other popular things, and I used to be reasonably easy to talk to but ever since covid I’m considerably more awkward in social situations.

Someone I haven’t seen in two years will ask what I’ve been up to and my mind just goes blank. It’s not that I’ve been sitting at home doing nothing the whole time but for some reason none of the things I could talk about come to me in the moment. It’s a strange thing to feel yourself being socially inept in a way that you didn’t used to be. I’ve gotten better but it’s still weird a lot of the time.

That’s fair. We seem to have largely given up on police reform in general. I guess they wore us down and we’ve accepted it.

I give a shit and I believe a lot of others do as well but what practical difference are you expecting that to make? There’s not exactly a feelings poll taken before a cop shoots a person, much less a dog.

One might argue that is the biggest problem we face

So did I but unfortunately we lost. That’s democracy in action. The country we live in (the collective we) asked for this.