Bishyaler posted:

"We can't send people relief because it might be stolen from the mailbox." is the laziest justification for austerity I've ever heard. They're not even bothering to hide that they don't give a poo poo that they caused a gas panic and drove up the price of nearly every product. At this rate they'll be lucky if they only lose the midterms in a landslide instead of triggering an insurrection.

Srice posted:

It also ignores the fact that they *have* given people money several times over the past few years in a way that mostly worked fine (there were hiccups but overall it went fairly well and was an extremely popular action!), yet somehow that's too complicated this time around?

(Of course the obvious solution is to just send people cold hard cash into their accounts instead of making it more complicated with cards)

AmiYumi posted:

Best bet to see anyone else is if he dies or ends up in a coma, at which point we get to see Harris lose by record-breaking numbers.

Gumball Gumption posted:

Would the parts of the party currently supporting Biden want to fall behind any of these people? I mean, that's the answer to why Bernie lost in 2016 and 2020 so I don't think in 2024 the moderates will suddenly stomach the idea of backing someone like Bernie or half the names on that list.

Lib and let die posted:

Your inclusion of Raimondo on this list is...really something. Nobody gets anywhere in Rhode Island state level politics without the approving nod from the remnants of the Patriarca crime family.

Lib and let die posted:

poo poo, I didn't think it'd be that easy of a sell. You gotta try the cleah chowdah next time you're in town if you haven't already!

Lib and let die posted:

Don't get it somewhere bourgie like Providence, you gotta go down into Richmond or Narragansett (not the touristy parts) to get the real good clear chowder where they make it the same way the tribe did back before we did a genocide on them.

quote:

In destructive power, the behemoths of the Cold War dwarfed the American atomic bomb that destroyed Hiroshima. Washington’s biggest test blast was 1,000 times as large. Moscow’s was 3,000 times. On both sides, the idea was to deter strikes with threats of vast retaliation — with mutual assured destruction, or MAD. The psychological bar was so high that nuclear strikes came to be seen as unthinkable.

Today, both Russia and the United States have nuclear arms that are much less destructive — their power just fractions of the Hiroshima bomb’s force, their use perhaps less frightening and more thinkable.

Concern about these smaller arms has soared as Vladimir V. Putin, in the Ukraine war, has warned of his nuclear might, has put his atomic forces on alert and has had his military carry out risky attacks on nuclear power plants. The fear is that if Mr. Putin (ed: NOT Joe Biden or NATO) feels cornered in the conflict, he might choose to detonate one of his lesser nuclear arms — breaking the taboo set 76 years ago after Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Analysts note that Russian troops have long practiced the transition from conventional to nuclear war, especially as a way to gain the upper hand after battlefield losses. And the military, they add, wielding the world’s largest nuclear arsenal, has explored a variety of escalatory options that Mr. Putin might choose from.

“The chances are low but rising,” said Ulrich Kühn, a nuclear expert at the University of Hamburg and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “The war is not going well for the Russians,” he observed, “and the pressure from the West is increasing.”

Mr. Putin might fire a weapon at an uninhabited area instead of at troops, Dr. Kühn said. In a 2018 study, he laid out a crisis scenario in which Moscow (ed: not Washington or Brussels) detonated a bomb over a remote part of the North Sea as a way to signal deadlier strikes to come.

“It feels horrible to talk about these things,” Dr. Kühn said in an interview. “But we have to consider that this is becoming a possibility.”

Washington expects more atomic moves from Mr. Putin in the days ahead. Moscow is likely to “increasingly rely on its nuclear deterrent to signal the West and project strength” as the war and its consequences weaken Russia, Lt. Gen. Scott D. Berrier, director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, told the House Armed Services Committee on Thursday.

President Biden is traveling to a NATO summit in Brussels this week to discuss the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The agenda is expected to include how the alliance will respond if Russia employs chemical, biological, cyber or nuclear weapons.

James R. Clapper Jr., a retired Air Force general who served as President Barack Obama’s director of national intelligence, said Moscow had lowered its bar for atomic use after the Cold War when the Russian army fell into disarray. Today, he added, Russia regards nuclear arms as utilitarian rather than unthinkable.

“They didn’t care,” Mr. Clapper said of Russian troops’ risking a radiation release earlier this month when they attacked the Zaporizhzhia nuclear reactor site — the largest not only in Ukraine but in Europe. “They went ahead and fired on it. That’s indicative of the Russian laissez-faire attitude. They don’t make the distinctions that we do on nuclear weapons.”

Mr. Putin announced last month that he was putting Russian nuclear forces into “special combat readiness.” Pavel Podvig, a longtime researcher of Russia’s nuclear forces, said the alert had most likely primed the Russian command and control system for the possibility of receiving a nuclear order.

It’s unclear how Russia exerts control over its arsenal of less destructive arms. But some U.S. politicians and experts have denounced the smaller weapons on both sides as threatening to upend the global balance of nuclear terror.

For Russia, military analysts note, edgy displays of the less destructive arms have let Mr. Putin polish his reputation for deadly brinkmanship and expand the zone of intimidation he needs to fight a bloody conventional war.

“Putin is using nuclear deterrence to have his way in Ukraine,” said Nina Tannenwald, a political scientist at Brown University who recently profiled the less powerful armaments. “His nuclear weapons keep the West from intervening.”

A global race for the smaller arms is intensifying. Though such weapons are less destructive by Cold War standards, modern estimates show that the equivalent of half a Hiroshima bomb, if detonated in Midtown Manhattan, would kill or injure half a million people.

The case against these arms is that they undermine the nuclear taboo and make crisis situations even more dangerous. Their less destructive nature, critics say, can feed the illusion of atomic control when in fact their use can suddenly flare into a full-blown nuclear war. A simulation devised by experts at Princeton University starts with Moscow firing a nuclear warning shot; NATO responds with a small strike, and the ensuing war yields more than 90 million casualties in its first few hours.

No arms control treaties regulate the lesser warheads, known sometimes as tactical or nonstrategic nuclear weapons, so the nuclear superpowers make and deploy as many as they want. Russia has perhaps 2,000, according to Hans M. Kristensen, director of the Nuclear Information Project at the Federation of American Scientists, a private group in Washington. And the United States has roughly 100 in Europe, a number limited by domestic policy disputes and the political complexities of basing them among NATO allies, whose populations often resist and protest the weapons’ presence.

Russia’s atomic war doctrine came to be known as “escalate to de-escalate” — meaning routed troops would fire a nuclear weapon to stun an aggressor into retreat or submission. Moscow repeatedly practiced the tactic in field exercises. In 1999, for instance, a large drill simulated a NATO attack on Kaliningrad, the Russian enclave on the Baltic Sea. The exercise had Russian forces in disarray until Moscow fired nuclear arms at Poland and the United States.

Dr. Kühn of the University of Hamburg said the defensive training drills of the 1990s had turned toward offense in the 2000s as the Russian army regained some of its former strength.

Concurrent with its new offensive strategy, Russia embarked on a modernization of its nuclear forces, including its less destructive arms. As in the West, some of the warheads were given variable explosive yields that could be dialed up or down depending on the military situation.

A centerpiece of the new arsenal was the Iskander-M, first deployed in 2005. The mobile launcher can fire two missiles that travel roughly 300 miles. The missiles can carry conventional as well as nuclear warheads. Russian figures put the smallest nuclear blast from those missiles at roughly a third that of the Hiroshima bomb.

Before the Russian army invaded Ukraine, satellite images showed that Moscow had deployed Iskander missile batteries in Belarus and to its east in Russian territory. There’s no public data on whether Russia has armed any of the Iskanders with nuclear warheads.

Nikolai Sokov, a former Russian diplomat who negotiated arms control treaties in Soviet times, said that nuclear warheads could also be placed on cruise missiles. The low-flying weapons, launched from planes, ships or the ground, hug the local terrain to avoid detection by enemy radar.

From inside Russian territory, he said, “they can reach all of Europe,” including Britain.

Over the years, the United States and its NATO allies have sought to rival Russia’s arsenal of lesser nuclear arms. It started decades ago as the United States began sending bombs for fighter jets to military bases in Belgium, Germany, Italy, Turkey and the Netherlands. Dr. Kühn noted that the alliance, in contrast to Russia, does not conduct field drills practicing a transition from conventional to nuclear war.

In 2010, Mr. Obama, who had long advocated for a “nuclear-free world,” decided to refurbish and improve the NATO weapons, turning them into smart bombs with maneuverable fins that made their targeting highly precise. That, in turn, gave war planners the freedom to lower the weapons’ variable explosive force to as little as 2 percent of that of the Hiroshima bomb.

The reduced blast capability made breaking the nuclear taboo “more thinkable,” Gen. James E. Cartwright, a vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under Mr. Obama, warned at the time. He nonetheless backed the program because the high degree of precision lowered the risk of collateral damage and civilian casualties. But after years of funding and manufacturing delays, the refurbished bomb, known as the B61 Model 12, is not expected to be deployed in Europe until next year, Mr. Kristensen said.

The steady Russian buildups and the slow American responses prompted the Trump administration to propose a new missile warhead in 2018. Its destructive force was seen as roughly half that of the Hiroshima bomb, according to Mr. Kristensen. It was to be deployed on the nation’s fleet of 14 ballistic missile submarines.

While some experts warned that the bomb, known as the W76 Model 2, could make it more tempting for a president to order a nuclear strike, the Trump administration argued that the weapon would lower the risk of war by ensuring that Russia would face the threat of proportional counterstrikes. It was deployed in late 2019.

“It’s all about psychology — deadly psychology,” said Franklin C. Miller, a nuclear expert who backed the new warhead and, before leaving public office in 2005, held Pentagon and White House posts for three decades. “If your opponent thinks he has a battlefield edge, you try to convince him that he’s wrong.”

When he was a candidate for the presidency, Joseph R. Biden Jr. called the less powerful warhead a “bad idea” that would make presidents “more inclined” to use it. But Mr. Kristensen said the Biden administration seemed unlikely to remove the new warhead from the nation’s submarines.

It’s unclear how Mr. Biden would respond to the use of a nuclear weapon by Mr. Putin. Nuclear war plans are one of Washington’s most deeply held secrets. Experts say that the war-fighting plans in general go from warning shots to single strikes to multiple retaliations and that the hardest question is whether there are reliable ways to prevent a conflict from escalating.

Even Mr. Clapper, the former director of national intelligence, said he was unsure how he would advise Mr. Biden if Mr. Putin unleashed his nuclear arms.

“When do you stop?” he asked of nuclear retaliation. “You can’t just keep turning the other cheek. At some point we’d have to do something.”

A U.S. response to a small Russian blast, experts say, might be to fire one of the new submarine-launched warheads into the wilds of Siberia or at a military base inside Russia. Mr. Miller, the former government nuclear official and a former chairman of NATO’s nuclear policy committee, said such a blast would be a way of signaling to Moscow that “this is serious, that things are getting out of hand.”

Military strategists say a tit-for-tat rejoinder would throw the responsibility for further escalation back at Russia, making Moscow feel its ominous weight and ideally keeping the situation from spinning out of control despite the dangers in war of miscalculation and accident.

In a darker scenario, Mr. Putin might resort to using atomic arms if the war in Ukraine spilled into neighboring NATO states. All NATO members, including the United States, are obliged to defend one another — potentially with salvos of nuclear warheads.

Dr. Tannenwald, the political scientist at Brown University, wondered if the old protections of nuclear deterrence, now rooted in opposing lines of less destructive arms, would succeed in keeping the peace.

“It sure doesn’t feel that way in a crisis,” she said.

Harold Fjord posted:

There's something to be said about an issue everyone agrees on suddenly coming up as being under debate again, regardless of where you think the article ends up pointing as correct

Willa Rogers posted:

Alcohol-related deaths in the U.S. soared by 25 percent during the first year of the pandemic:

I wonder whether anyone's done the math on the extent to which "excess deaths" were caused by pandemic-adjacent numbers like these.

Heck Yes! Loam! posted:

Interracial marriage is now a GOP issue

https://twitter.com/nwi/status/1506366122806943756

It got me wondering if Clarence Thomas would become the swing vote.

Yeowch!!! My Balls!!! posted:

the Virginia Model turning out to be 'tell younger voters you'll do things for them, once in power tell them to eat poo poo and gently caress off, then be shocked when they don't vote for you' does put a neat little bow on that dumb chapter of our history

Leon Trotsky 2012 posted:

Our very rich don't skew per capita and median measures.

Mean/Average is not the same as Median.

selec posted:

I get being scared of change, or just saying “well it’s not actually a democracy but it’s as close as we’ll ever get” but I couldn’t bring myself to accept that level of humiliation. How much of the government do we have to accept as illegitimate before the whole enterprise can be thrown out? Why bother with laws when they obviously don’t apply to the rich and famous, Eric?

selec posted:

None of this goes to supporting the legitimacy of what we currently have though; if I’m reading this right you’re just addressing that change is hard (agree) and would be violent (agree; the rich won’t go quietly) and that maybe people want different things.

How does any of this affirm or undermine the legitimacy of the current situation?

Gumball Gumption posted:

What would be the threshold to hit abort?

Harold Fjord posted:

Actually if the Democrats started loving trying they wouldn't lose so many loving elections.

Willa Rogers posted:

Although the results definitely are influenced by partisanship, the fact that slightly less than a majority of Democrats trust Biden to "effectively handle a crisis" is pretty dang and shows the drawback of nominating & electing a barely sentient elder during the most-recent most important election ever.

punk rebel ecks posted:

punk rebel ecks posted:

I assume part of it is because people are leaving the Northeast and moving to the West and South.

Riptor posted:

Violence is okay if your feelings are really really hurt

Calibanibal posted:

Imagine. Can you imagine it? I can't stop imagining it. Complete humiliation. The undisguised disdain as she looks at me and I know, that in her eyes I am no longer a man.

(USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)

Jaxyon posted:

The catch is this is too late and it won't matter because the structural biases of the electoral college system will likely render Dems unable to win a presidency despite winning the popular vote.

Rich Lowry posted:

I'm sure I'm not the only male in America who, when Palin dropped her first wink, sat up a little straighter on the couch and said, "Hey, I think she just winked at me." And her smile. By the end, when she clearly knew she was doing well, it was so sparkling it was almost mesmerizing. It sent little starbursts through the screen and ricocheting around the living rooms of America. This is a quality that can't be learned; it's either something you have or you don't, and man, she's got it.

Leon Trotsky 2012 posted:

That's basically subjective and nobody can really quantify it for sure!

Historically, and the belief is that it would continue to be the case, that a national election strongly favors the person with the most money and name recognition.

Doing it in blocks takes away from that advantage, but also introduces different biases. They have just decided that the various other advantages and biases introduced that way are more fair than requiring an expensive and massive national political organization or pre-existing fame.

Willa Rogers posted:

I didn't report the post; only expressed the flashback effect to me. I don't care what Lowry has to say on anything, but I will note that you're ventriloquizing on behalf of GOP voters in your defense of the creepy post.

"Now me, I'm enlightened, and would never base my vote on a candidate's looks. However, those people over there certainly would" is how it comes off, in other words.

Leon Trotsky 2012 posted:

Do you think Mike Huckabee, Bernie Sanders, Ted Cruz, Tom Harkin, Rick Santorum, and Barack Obama would have won a national election the way they won Iowa? Rick Santorum would never be anywhere near a top candidate in a national election.

Leon Trotsky 2012 posted:

Assuming they weight each category equally, it seems like the states most likely to be on the shortlist for the first five (depending on how they end up defining "small state" and whether some of the states would hold primaries instead of caucuses) based on the draft criteria are:

...
New Jersey
...

Leon Trotsky 2012 posted:

CT has a 12% higher non-Hispanic white population, a larger Democratic margin in 2020, and lower union rates. So, it is basically New Jersey, but slightly worse (according to the draft criteria).

Willa Rogers posted:

Oh, I meant to post this, too: Biden's new budget calls for spending $34 million to hire more lawyers to prosecute 1/6 Never Forget :

So glad that he's resolved soaring costs for medical care, housing, food & energy and can move on to the things that matter to most a handful of voters.

Willa Rogers posted:

Where do you see a Biden-Nontrump match-up?

Willa Rogers posted:

I'm complaining about spending tens of millions more money on a show trial that polls say voters don't give a poo poo about instead of funding or expanding funding for stuff they do give a poo poo about.

Lib and let die posted:

And .06% of 4,000,000,000,000 is still more than I'm gonna see in medical debt relief from the federal government.

Gumball Gumption posted:

Honest question, do you really think it's the exact numbers people are upset with and these corrections will help or is it just an impulse to correct people when they're wrong?

FlamingLiberal posted:

Yes a lot of the moderate suburban voters who turned against Trump because he was so publicly disgusting would not have to worry about that with DeSantis

Killer robot posted:

For a little background on why there was a debate as to whether Hunter's dick pics came from a real live laptop via a really convoluted set of circumstances, or from a cloud hack: it wasn't anything to do with whether the evidence of Hunter doing 9/11 was on it. It wasn't even just about whether any of it had been altered. It was because having purchased a real live laptop abandoned according to a repair shop agreement would give media outlets legal cover for publishing all the salacious details of a private citizen's cocaine habit and dangling penis, while publishing files from a cloud hack could open them to the same sort of revenge porn lawsuits that took Gawker down.

Regardless of which it actually was, even news agencies eager for Hunter dirt and desperate for a Trump win smelled something fishy there and didn't leap on it until the story had cycled through a few more hands of plausible deniability.

All of this would have been different if the files had something clearly tying shameful photos of private citizen Hunter Biden to illegal actions by presidential candidate Joe Biden vs "Look, they're both named Biden!" At the time there was nothing that even Fox and the like was ready to stand beside, as much as a lot of people were crossing their fingers and praying about it.

plogo posted:

I think it's worth noting that ur-liberal outlets were talking about some of the issues people have raised in reaction to laptop story well before the laptop story.

This is from a year before the election.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/07/08/will-hunter-biden-jeopardize-his-fathers-campaign

Yeowch!!! My Balls!!! posted:

and right now, 'this whole thing is made up' has shown to be a far more egregious changing of the facts than the right wing tabloid's presentation.