Absurdity aside, in thie specifc example Wikipedia doesn’t cite any sources.
The article (in English, anyway) is a summary of the plot of the book and there is not a footnote nor any external reference - and why would there be? It’s a summary of the plot, not a commentary or a critique of it. In this case, there’s no need to cite a source. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Game_of_Thrones
Yeah, that's a decent point. The example is a terrible example of a well written Wikipedia article. The problem with the plot summary is that it is technically original research, and whilst this is not banned from Wikipedia, it is at least frowned upon.
Polling suggests that independents don’t “overwhelmingly" blame the GOP. It’s split 48/32/14 GOP/Dem/Equal
"Democrats and Republicans hold each other's party more responsible for the government shutdown. Among independents, 48 percent think Republicans in Congress are more responsible, while 32 percent think Democrats in Congress are more responsible and 14 percent volunteered that they think both parties are equally responsible.”
A 16 point difference is quite substantial in American politics. It's a matter of taste whether you consider it "overwhelming," but it's objectively not split down the middle.
This is true, but it's also changing every week to where people increasingly blame the Republicans. A lot of people are still completely insulated from the consequences of the current shutdown, but as food benefits lapse and air travel shuts down people are going to blame the very public president and party that's allowing this to happen.
The author proposes three solutions: the GOP could change Senate rules to fund SNAP, the Republicans draw on the $5B fund that can sustain SNAP at least temporarily, or they can pass legislation in the House to fund SNAP.
Of course, a handful of Democrat Senators could also vote to end the shutdown and that would fund SNAP, and everything else, too, at least for a few more weeks.
Both sides seem dug in right now. It's still not clear who I'll blink first.
Actually, there is $500 billion that is REQUIRED to be used to fund SNAP. But Republicans are not activating it, because if they do, they need to bring congress back in session, and then they will be forced to vote on releasing the Epstein files. Get it?
I'm not from the US but as I understand it, if the Democrats voted to reopen the government, wouldn't that also release the funds for SNAP and bring Congress back in session so that the Epstein files vote in the House could take place?
The point is they should not have to. The funds were already appropriated by congress. This is a political maneuver by the Republicans to avoid bringing congress back into session, because they want to give the justice department time to redact the Epstein files and remove all evidence of Trump. We all know he's a pedophile and a rapist already, but the Trump base doesn't want to believe it. You simply cannot make this stuff up, it reads like a ridiculous Hollywood script. This article lays it all out plainly in black and white, for all the good that it will do.
This seems like a bad decision to me. Not only does it seem not to be in the spirit of the law (you can still report but not as easily now) but it's not clear why they shut it down at all. Cost? Inefficiency? Just wasn't getting used much? They have a better solution?
On the other hand, the US seems so partisan now that had the current administration told the world they were taking huma' rights abuse reporting seriously by creating a web form, some people would probably be criticized for that, too.
Hegseth is publicly just a huge fan of war crimes and this is probably the main reason he got the job he has now. The big thing he's been signaling, and not really even in a sly or dogwhistly way, is that war crimes are ok to do now.
If your goal is to do war crimes and enable others to do war crimes then removing the war crime reporting tool may not directly benefit you much but it certainly doesn't hurt you. And there is a certain idealogical alignment.
The most polite thing i can say about Pete is that he's the dimmest bulb among them, trying to imitate much more capable people. And everyone can see it.
He's broken the Peter Principle by shooting far above the level of his incompetence.
> allow me a few words to talk about toxic leaders.
> The definition of toxic has been turned upside down, and we're correcting that. That's why today, at my direction we're undertaking a full review of the department's definitions of so-called toxic leadership, bullying and hazing, to empower leaders to enforce standards without fear of retribution or second guessing.
> We're talking about words like bullying and hazing and toxic. They've been weaponized and bastardized inside our formations, undercutting commanders and NCOs. No more.
> Third, we are attacking and ending the walking on eggshells and zero defect command culture.
> A blemish free record is what peacetime leaders covet the most, which is the worst of all incentives. You, we as senior leaders, need to end the poisonous culture of risk aversion and empower our NCOs at all levels to enforce standards.
> I call it the no more walking on eggshells policy. We are liberating commanders and NCOs. We are liberating you. We are overhauling an inspector general process, the IG, that has been weaponized, putting complainers, ideologues and poor performers in the driver's seat.
> No more frivolous complaints. No more anonymous complaints. No more repeat complainants. No more smearing reputations. No more endless waiting. No more legal limbo. No more sidetracking careers. No more walking on eggshells.
> we know mistakes will be made. It's the nature of leadership. But you should not pay for earnest mistakes for your entire career. And that's why today, at my direction, we're making changes to the retention of adverse information on personnel records that will allow leaders with forgivable earnest or minor infractions to not be encumbered by those infractions in perpetuity.
> People make honest mistakes, and our mistakes should not define an entire career. Otherwise, we only try not to make mistakes, and that's not the business we're in. We need risk takers and aggressive leaders and a culture that supports you.
That makes his view of complaints, and his preference that people "take risks" and don't worry about "not being perfect", pretty clear. He thinks those things are "debris" that have been "weaponized" and that he's "liberating" people from. Maybe that seems great if you're in the military. Not so great if you're on the receiving end of those "risks", or if you or your family becomes the broken "eggshells".
To be fair (ignoring whether Hegseth really deserves that), what he describes is a very common view of military leadership during war time.
"War time" is the key there though. The US is not a nation at war. We have allies at war and the executive branch has taken it upon itself to take warlike actions without Congress, but we aren't st war - especially not a war the scale of which is seen as existential and leads to these kind of views on conduct and policy.
Hegseth seems to be playing out what Eisenhower tried to warn us about decades ago. When a wartime general turned President leaves office with a final warning of the dangers of the new military industrial complex, everyone should listen.
Any large standing military will typically oscillate between a wartime footing where aggression and risk-taking are rewarded versus a peacetime (garrison) footing where avoiding politically embarrassing mistakes is rewarded. The problem is that when the next war starts the careerist officers who were promoted during peacetime produce disastrous results. It then takes several lost battles until they are replaced with competent warfighters.
For better or worse, US leadership is now attempting to place the military on a permanent wartime footing, largely on the theory that a major regional conflict with China is coming at some unpredictable time in the next couple decades. They think they're going to have to fight WWII again with China now playing the role of Japan. Some level of occasional human rights abuses are seen as an acceptable "cost of doing business" to maintain a higher level of readiness and combat effectiveness. (I am not claiming that this is a good policy, just trying to explain the current thinking within the military-industrial complex.)
I agree with you here, that maps to my understanding of what they're intending to do as well.
I'm of the opinion that standing militaries are almost never justifiable at scale. A country may need a skeleton crew keeping some semblance of military infrastructure functional, but we should never need a military scaled up for a fight during peacetime.
We need a populace that is healthy and skilled enough to enlist with basic training should a war break out. We don't need to fully arm up and constantly be on the lookout for war.
That's a quaint idea but the notion of having a small cadre of experienced professional personnel who could rapidly train up new recruits in wartime stopped being relevant in the 1980s. The complexity of equipment and doctrine has increased so much that it now takes years to train people. Too long to wait in a crisis.
Its into quaint, there have been plenty of times in history where countries either (a) didn't exist as they do today or (b) didn't have standing militaries.
The standing military the US maintains today only dates back to WWII, and is exactly what Eisenhower was warning us against.
Equipment complexity is theoretical at best. I'm not aware of a war between comparable militaries since WWII. My expectation is that if or when that happens, equipment ceases being the determining factor pretty quickly in favor of boots on the ground and logistics. History, at least, supports those being the deciding factors.
If the war is prolonged, you can't go around treating people like eggshells to be crushed, or morale will suffer.
Unless your target image is how Russia conducts war. Beats (their own) soldiers, puts them in cages, ties them to trees for days, and so on. In Ukraine we see the difference in practice. If the cause is just, you don't have push your soldiers at gunpoint into the fray, like Russia does.
And if the war is not prolonged, what's even the excuse to do that in the first place?
I'm not arguing that it is a "good" or "right" way to approach war, only that the mindset is common among the military when fighting a war they believe to be an existential fight.
You're technically correct, though arguably the situation is much worse than "war time". Due to the US having ushered in a "time" of lawlessness such legal discrepancies as war and peace have very little meaning.
At least as a thought exercise, consider the possibility that the US administration was _always not great_ on its own merits, not as the fault of whatever foreign boogeyman-of-the-day.
You're right to be skeptical of "boogeyman" narratives. The baseline should be that US administrations can be flawed on their own merits.
The problem is that the "flawed" hypothesis fails to explain the specific vector of these anomalies. This isn't random incompetence; it's a persistent, multi-year pattern of actions that consistently align with the strategic goals of a single US adversary.
This pattern required him to systematically fire or purge officials who represented traditional US security policy (Mattis, McMaster, Bolton, Tillerson) and replace them with those who would enact this new vector (Vance, Kellogg).
The "ordinary incompetence" model must be able to explain the following data points, not as isolated gaffes, but as a cohesive pattern where his actions were in direct opposition to bipartisan congressional consensus and the US national security establishment:
Publicly inviting Russian interference ("Russia, if you're listening...").
Campaign chair (Manafort) providing internal polling data and strategy to a known Russian intelligence agent (Kilimnik).
Actively pursuing a Trump Tower Moscow deal during the campaign while lying to the public about it.
Softening the 2016 GOP platform to remove "lethal defensive weapons" for Ukraine.
Publicly siding with Putin in Helsinki over the entire US intelligence community.
Disclosing highly-classified, "code-word" intelligence from a key ally to the Russian FM and Ambassador in the Oval Office.
Illegally withholding $391M in congressionally-mandated military aid from Ukraine to extort a political investigation.
Waging a tariff war against allies (EU, Canada), creating a transatlantic rift that primarily benefited Moscow.
Unilaterally withdrawing from the INF and Open Skies Treaties, key arms-control pacts that constrained Russia, against the advice of allies and security officials.
Publicly stating he would "encourage" Russia "to do whatever the hell they want" to any NATO ally he deems "delinquent."
Dangling the prospect of critical Tomahawk missiles to Ukraine, only to publicly snatch the offer away immediately after a phone call with Putin.
Pausing vital US intelligence sharing with Ukraine, a move that directly aided Russia's successful offensive in the Kursk region and retaking it.
Publicly demanding that Ukraine "cut up" its territory and "stop at the battle lines," an act that validates Russia's invasion.
Consistently laundering Kremlin disinformation from the White House itself (e.g., CrowdStrike, "biolabs," "Nazis" in Kyiv).
One or two of these is a blunder. A list this long (and incomplete), spanning campaign, business, diplomacy, intelligence, and military policy, where every single item provides a direct, tangible benefit to the Kremlin, is a data cluster that requires a better explanation.
The choice isn't "great vs. not great." It's "random incompetence" vs. a coherent, multi-year vector of pro-Moscow actions that required a complete hostile takeover of his own party and the executive branch.
First off even if it was 99% unfounded Israel complaints, that's not a reason to axe it, that's just a reason to add a filter in an excel spreadsheet. But more importantly, we are absolutely responsible for making sure that our military aid is used in a way that supports our interests and values.
Here in France the presidential candidates who make it to the second round are limited to spending €22.5 million over the course of the entire campaign (first and second rounds). About half gets reimbursed from public funds, so you 'only' need to raise about €10-12 million. Hard limits on campaign donations (about €4K) mean big money impacts the race less, and limits on advertising means you don't have to spend it on TV ads or direct mail.
Spending $1.5 billion on a campaign (and still losing) is near unfathomable.
Please go have a look -- this is really well done with a clear message, good documentation and the call to action implemented very nicely (which is the background for TFA).
€10K seems high to me. In France it would be lower than that, I think, save for maybe a handful of outliers. Google search suggests top earners in physics in academia in Germany is probably between €80K and €90K, or maxing out at €7.5K a month.
Would the LGBT and political prisoner figures be sub-sets of Jews/Romanis? Or would they be in addition to those figures?
I have read before about specific symbols used in the camps to identify LGBT people, but would the person murdered in a camp who was both Romani and gay be counted once or twice in those figures?
If this is the case, do France and the UK even have a nuclear deterrent? They have just over 500 weapons total between them - is there any chance that they are able to “ensure that they aren’t immediately anihalated” by a Russian response?
For reference, that number of nuclear weapons is where China decided to draw the line as a nuclear deterrence against the US until recently.
A hundred modern nuclear weapons is plenty to fucking ruin a country, but no, it doesn't not take "just one". Most western countries would survive say, a smuggled terrorist nuke (or 4) just fine. Angry and mourning, but fine.
France alone has enough deterrent in their nuclear weapons. The UK has theirs in submarines, to ensure even if you magically erased the entire British Islands, you still take tens of nukes up the ass.
Nuclear deterrence is not complicated, and it's pretty well understood in public. I don't know why so many people here are so wildly off base.
Meanwhile, all this was always intended to be roughly "backup" to the US's absurd stockpile, including tons of literal gravity drop nukes so we can cosplay Dr Strangelove as the world ends. And the ending of the IRBM treaty means the US has recently told our defense industry that it gets to play with the cool rockets again.
The article (in English, anyway) is a summary of the plot of the book and there is not a footnote nor any external reference - and why would there be? It’s a summary of the plot, not a commentary or a critique of it. In this case, there’s no need to cite a source. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Game_of_Thrones
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