My sister has just moved to North Carolina, so when I get a chance to see her next, I may just pay y'all a visit too.
Cook up those grits, Hanny! — Baden
Or liars. There's a fucking paper ballot given for every electronic one recorded, for a start, and they match. You might as well claim Biden is hiding in the machine changing the votes by hand. — Baden
I assume this is a reference to an all out war, where basically the country itself is the battlefield. In the case of the US kept secure by those two mighty oceans and an own continent without any rivals, this seems a bit odd. As it is now those "colonial wars" fought by the professional army (still made of US citizens though) are a splendid way to cash in for the elites.Thomas Piketty demonstrates how war, and the need to mobilize the populace, had also acted powerfully to redistribute wealth and political power. Absent war, the returns on capital slowly allow a small elite to pull away and dominate the economy and politics. — Count Timothy von Icarus
I wouldn't say these particular people are stupid, but they sure as heck are personally invested. — jorndoe
If you have fought a long war where a large part if not all of the males of the younger generations have learned only warfighting and not have been sitting at school or learning their professions, it is simply a political suicide to forget these people afterward. Things like the G.I. Bill are an obvious policy, if you have the resources to do it. The dumb mistake of leaving a huge number of soldiers just to their own was last done by the American occupiers in Iraq. The inept American leadership just left the defeated Iraqi army alone to disband chaotically without any program for the now unemployed officers and soldiers. And what do you know, in an instant you had a Sunni insurgency in the country.Yes, he's referring to mass mobilizations. It doesn't necessarily have to be a war on a country's own land. WWII greatly reduced inequality and allowed workers to gain concessions in the US. — Count Timothy von Icarus
Do notice the obvious changes in warfare that have taken place: the Napoleonic or World Wars types of mass armies have gone. A conventional infantry battalion is quite vulnerable today, hence manpower isn't so important.Wars also force elites to accept a more centralized states. This is pretty obvious in the massive growth of the US security apparatus after WWII. Theoriticians like Fukayama and historians like William Durrant both tie the growth of competent states to the need to field larger and more complex armies. This is a trend that starts with the European Wars of Religion and then truly gets under way with the Napoleonic era and the levee en mass. — Count Timothy von Icarus
David Adler found that across Europe and North America, centrists are the least supportive of democracy, the least committed to its institutions, and the most supportive of authoritarianism. Furthermore, Adler found that centrists are the least supportive of free and fair elections as well as civil rights — in the United States, only 25 percent of centrists agree that civil rights are an essential feature of democracy.... Our findings show that concerns about political moderates — and specifically politically moderate men — are not unfounded. As America battles a global pandemic and an economic collapse and reckons with systemic racism, IDEALS suggests that moderate men may be the least likely to make a positive difference.
Well, some times you need a carrot and stick approach to handle potential insurgents. Or to get an insurgent force back to normal life. And it's a difficult balancing act that such inept people like Brennan simply could not fathom (when you hear him talk about it, you can see that he doesn't get it).what he probably needed was some sort of carrot and stick for the enlisted men and a reform strategy that would get me back in the organization. — Count Timothy von Icarus
That ethnic strife was something that was quite apparent for the Saudis and others, that pleaded for Bush the older not to continue to Baghdad during the Gulf War. But afterwards, it didn't matter anymore.The problem is that soldiers went home and didn't want to come back out when it was unclear how things would progress vis-a-vis ethnic divisions of power. — Count Timothy von Icarus
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