More good environmental news from the US - Operation: "Delete Everything Donald Did" is certainly keeping people busy.

https://www.npr.org/2021/03/09/975376670/biden-moves-to-make-it-illegal-again-to-accidentally-kill-migratory-birds?t=1615535179009

"Tibet was invaded by 35,000 Chinese troops who systematically raped, tortured and murdered an estimated as many as 1.2 million Tibetans – one-fifth of the country's population. Since then, over 6000 monasteries have been destroyed and thousands of Tibetans have been imprisoned.

According to different sources, it is estimated that up to 260,000 people died in prisons and labor camps between 1950 and 1984. 34.4% of Tibetans in farming and pastoral areas of Tibet are still stuck below poverty line. What is more, the region accounts for the highest poverty rate in China. It is estimated that there up to twenty million Chinese citizens working in prison camps. Hundreds of Tibetans have set themselves on fire to protest Chinese rule since 2009, with more than 100 dying from their injuries. The numbers are murky due to the absence of official records and the suppression of free press in communist China. However, reliable records show that between 1949 and 1979 the following atrocities occurred: 173,221 Tibetans died after being tortured in prison, 156,758 Tibetans were executed by the Chinese, 432,705 Tibetans were killed while fighting Chinese occupation, 342,970 Tibetans have starved to death, 92,731 Tibetans were publicly tortured to death, 9,002 Tibetans committed suicide. One can only imagine what the actual numbers were for this period, and what the numbers were for the years since 1979. In Tibet today, there is no freedom of speech, religion, or press and arbitrary detainments continue. The 14th Dalai Lama, who fled to India in 1959, now lives among over 100,000 other Tibetan refugees and their government in exile. Forced abortion, sterilisation of Tibetan women, and the transfer of low-income Chinese citizens threaten the survival of Tibetan culture. In some Tibetan provinces, Chinese settlers outnumber Tibetans 7 to 1. The Chinese government has never made a formal apology for their atrocities in Tibet. Within China itself, massive human rights abuses continue."

https://thelogicalindian.com/story-feed/awareness/conflict-between-tibet-and-china/

Some other perspectives:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-pacific-10638506

Not saying that Tibetan rulers prior to the occupation were blameless either. Nor am I denying that China has put money into the Tibetan economy. Empires can give with one hand and destroy with the other. That doesn't mean China is a blameless saviour of the Tibetan people.






Disputed territories yes, but take a look at the map linked below and tell me that China's interpretation of what are supposedly 'Chinese waters' isn't comical. Nothing to do, of course, with the fact that claiming those islands as Chinese and setting up military bases on them gives them a dominant hand in control of a heavily used shipping lane and strategic geopolitical area....

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spratly_Islands_dispute#/media/File:South_China_Sea_claims_map.jpg






https://time.com/5935243/myanmar-coup-china/ Y'know, I'm not sure if Beijing care who runs Myanmar, as long as they can benefit. Which it looks like they will do.

Also, if China was the Suu Kyi government's most important backer, then they were propping up a state which did this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rohingya_genocide

https://unherd.com/2019/12/how-china-enables-rohingya-genocide/

https://www.neweurope.eu/article/china-supports-myanmar-despite-rohingya-genocide-accusations/

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-myanmar-rohingya-china-idUSKCN1M8062





That may have been true 20-30 years ago. It's getting less true now.

https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/chinas-modernizing-military#:~:text=It%20has%20around%20120%2C000%20active,of%20its%20A2%2FAD%20strategy.

"The Chinese government is working to make its military stronger, more efficient, and more technologically advanced to become a top-tier force within thirty years. With a budget that has soared over the past decade, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) already ranks among the world’s leading militaries in areas including artificial intelligence and anti-ship ballistic missiles.

Experts warn that as China’s military modernizes, it could become more assertive in the Asia-Pacific region by intensifying pressure on Taiwan and continuing to militarize disputed islands in the East and South China Seas.

Championing what he calls the Chinese Dream, a vision to restore China’s great-power status, Xi has gone further to push military reforms than his predecessors. Xi leads the Central Military Commission, the PLA’s highest decision-making body, and he has committed to producing a “world-class force” that can dominate the Asia-Pacific and “fight and win” global wars by 2049.

Responsible for maintaining China’s conventional and nuclear missiles, the rocket force was elevated to an independent service during reforms in 2015. It has around 120,000 active troops. China has steadily increased its nuclear arsenal—it had an estimated 290 warheads in 2019—and modernized its capabilities, including the development of anti-ship ballistic missiles that could target U.S. warships in the Western Pacific, as part of its A2/AD strategy. China reportedly has the most midrange ballistic and cruise missiles, weapons that until recently the United States and Russia were prohibited from producing.

The PLA is also developing hypersonic missiles, which can travel many times faster than the speed of sound and are therefore more difficult for adversaries to defend against. While Russia is the only country with a deployed hypersonic weapon, China’s medium-range DF-17 missile is expected to be operational in 2020. The Pentagon has said it will likely be several years before the United States has one."

This article too: https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/navy-ships/a27532437/china-now-has-more-warships-than-the-us/ - although the Chinese navy lacks quality at present compared to other blue water navies. That might change over time, however.


I could go on. China is unquestionably imperialist in its ambitions, as much as the US is.

Something that's interesting to note from a US perspective is that when Khashoggi was murdered by MBS, the left shrugged and said, "why is this so upsetting, they've literally been dismembering men, women and children for decades and are actively engaged in a genocide in Yemen, carried out in part with US weapons, how is the murder of one man somehow more egregious?" To which the liberals lost their fucking minds and screamed, "don't you understand, this is an AMERICAN CITIZEN, it's completely different this time!"

Yet when the subject of the Uyghurs is raised, the left again shrugs and says, "this is bad, but shouldn't we focus more on the atrocities our own country is actively aiding and abetting rather than one largely detached from the US?" To which liberals once again lose their mind and scream, "your whataboutism is vile, you must not care about the Uyghurs, you just hate America and are apologizing for the CCP, it's a genocide you callous fuck."

That's a lot of strawmen and selectively applied tags I see there.

Err no. I just don't agree with human rights violations, flagrant breaches of international law, and genocide. It doesn't matter what country is doing it, be it my own, an allied nation, or somewhere like China.

International law, conventions, treaties and the UN exist for a very good reason. Individuals and nations that breach these need scrutiny and to be called out on their actions. Especially when said nations are members of the fucking Security Council who supposedly are there to provide some sort of international oversight and cooperation and to uphold said ideals (and all five SC members have breached or are breaching those ideals more than once). I was appalled at how the US openly put a middle finger up to the UN in 2003 when Cheney and Rumsfeld destabilised the entire Middle East and undermined world security with no sound pretext or any motive other than to improve Halliburton's share price. I have been equally appalled about how China repeatedly ignores international laws and basic standards of human rights and decency when it wantonly annexes large parts of the South China Sea and organises cultural, ethnic and social cleansing on an industrial scale.

Yet I am even more appalled when people refuse to think in any critical or nuanced fashion and argue on reductionist lines, especially in such a complex and ever changing area like geopolitics. A good example would be the sheer morons - there is no other word I can use - that I have encountered who try and argue that the NATO intervention in Kosovo in 1999 (an action taken to put a stop to a clear genocide for which there was considerable evidence and which has been recorded by the UN) with the illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003. Two very different scenarios and uses of American/Western military power, but some people try and claim similarities between them, mostly on the basis that "wow, US imperialism is so wrong, must oppose 100%, there was an ulterior motive for Iraq, so there must have been one for Kosovo". Such lack of nuance is troubling, especially coming from otherwise intelligent and caring folks.

I have a limited time for many people in the political sphere (mostly those on the hard right). I have even less time for people who claim to want to end oppression yet profess support for or refuse to fully acknowledge the crimes of regimes that openly break international law and meet UN criteria for human rights abuses. There seems to be no subtlety of thought or nuance going on there - and seemingly not much humanity. It is genuinely unbelievable to see ostensibly reasonable or progressive people become unashamed apologists for genocide.

It's hard to know what to make of this article, since it doesn't actually cite its sources. The only link it provides for its figures is to an opinion piece in the Tibet Post, a publication that is explicitly an arm of the Tibetan diaspora independence movement. That piece also doesn't cite its sources, so it is impossible to even begin to assess their veracity. The most likely source of the figures are reports from the International Commission of Jurists, a CIA-funded NGO that was, according to ex-CIA officer John Agee, "set up and controlled by the CIA for propaganda operations."

What is true is that Tibet suffered immensely—along with the rest of China—from the famines that resulted in part from the catastrophically failed policies of the Great Leap Forward era and in the chaos of the Cultural Revolution, when central administration in China largely broke down during a period that was, in effect, an internal civil war within the CCP. It's kind of neither here nor there, since none of that reflects the policies of the current Chinese government, which is the issue we were actually discussing.



Urbanization and modern economic development have wrought great changes to traditional ways of living wherever they have occurred, and that's unquestionably been true in Tibet. Those processes are historically inevitable, however. You can't shut a place off from the world and keep it perpetually frozen in time. I believe the Chinese government has made tremendous efforts to mitigate the inevitable impacts of development, to the huge net benefit of the Tibetan people, and I don't believe that the feudal theocratic regime of the Lamas could have done this as well as China has, much less better.

China and the CCP are certainly not "blameless saviors," and I'm not claiming otherwise. The CCP has over the years made gigantic errors of policy with terrible consequences to be counted in human lives. China today has enormous contradictions that could yet undo all of the gains won by the Revolution at such tremendous cost in blood. It remains to be seen whether the CCP and China can resolve those contradictions and deliver on the promise of the Revolution. Those contradictions will only be resolved by the Chinese people themselves, and they certainly cannot be resolved by blockade and economic strangulation (sanctions), US military action, or by promoting the political disintegration of a country that 1.5 billion people call home. That is why PSL defends China and the CCP. Not because they are perfect. Not because they are "blameless." We defend them because the solutions to China's problems can only come from the Chinese people, and the alternatives offered by US imperialism are far, far worse.



The "strategic geopolitical" significance of the South China Sea and its "heavily used" shipping lanes owe their importance entirely to the fact that they are the primary lines of communication and trade between the rest of the world and the world's second largest (soon to be largest) economy (that would be China). Given the interlocking ring of US military bases spanning the entire eastern periphery of the South China Sea and American plan's to devote 70% of US military resources to INDOPACOM (the joint military command primarily concerned with confronting China), China's government would be absolutely derelict in its duty to defend its own citizens if it wasn't taking steps to secure it's main strategic approaches and lines of communication.



I think that's basically a correct assessment. China's stated foreign policy position is cooperative internationalism, and to that end they have been pretty much willing to work with any government that will work with them. I think that policy position beats the hell of the unilateral interventionism and militaristic aggression that has been the posture of the United States for decades.

Regardless, if the Chinese government doesn't care who rules Myanmar, they really have no incentive to foment a coup there, so we're back at "speculative bordering on conspiratorial."



The United States and its allies were also backers of the Suu Kyi government. Since the military—which retained most of its dominance in Myanmar's political structure even under the nominally democratic Suu Kyi government—was the motive force behind the attacks on the Rohingya people, I don't think there were much in the way of good alternatives for either China or the US and its allies in this particular case, and it is hard for me to imagine how the international community could have intervened in Myanmar in a way that could have ended the crisis there without making things worse. Sanctions and military intervention are incredibly blunt instruments that primarily cause suffering among ordinary people with no power, and those are really the only tools available for dealing with something like the military junta in Myanmar. China, in particular, almost has to be leery of actions that could destabilize a country on its own borders.



What China is investing in is upgrading its existing military hardware to provide it with technological parity to US forces forward deployed to China's back yard. What it doesn't have and isn't investing in is the kind of support infrastructure and force mix that would allow it to operate major expeditionary forces beyond its borders, which is the sine qua non of offensive power projection.



By way of comparison, the United States maintains something between 4-6000 atomic warheads



Those missiles are transparently a defensive measure. Their purpose is to deny the United States the ability to use its navy to conduct offensive operations in the South China Sea.



So? Both Russia and the United States have vast nuclear stockpiles and deployed delivery systems. Their arsenals are incomparably more powerful than China's



Given the vast imbalance between the nuclear arsenals of the two countries, the deployment of a handful of relatively short ranged weapons can't credibly be called an offensive measure.



We might all move to Mars someday, too. The reality is that China's navy consists largely of small coastal patrol vessels optimized for anti-submarine warfare or air defense. It is at present and will remain for years to come a purely defensive force.

So the attitude of our self-declared representatives (of The People, I mean, does anyone elect these idiots ?) is -

"Why do you care about X and not Y ? We care about N, you fascists, N is miles more important. Of course, if N shows up our lot, then we're all about Z and you're a racist"

There's an awfully strong whiff of this, too -

No. Look again at that map. It's a joke. China has decreed that most of the South China Sea qualifies as 'Chinese waters'. Note how the other countries in the area draw their own territorial claims. Then look at China's. The Chinese have claimed a historical basis for the annexation of the South China Sea islands, which appears to have no real grounding in international law: https://www.lowyinstitute.org/the-interpreter/how-china-bending-rules-south-china-sea. Sweden once controlled the whole Baltic, but they don't try now to claim it as Swedish waters on a 'historical basis'.

I have no doubt China is working hard to secure its shipping, trade and communications routes (much of their oil imports come via the South China Sea). But there's a difference between ensuring your trade routes are secure and annexing whole swathes of international waters to ensure that you have a 100% monopoly on shipping in those areas.




This is probably true. Still means that China helped to prop up a regime which committed genocide, though. So did the US. So did the West. No one comes out of this scenario looking good.




They may not have that capability yet, but they sure do seem to be investing in it, as this detailed report outlines: https://www.uscc.gov/sites/default/files/2020-04/China%20Expeditionary%20Logistics%20Capabilities%20Report.pdf

They're also trying to compete with the US by setting up their own Space Force. Can't get much more beyond one's own national borders than that.... https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/defence/china-attempting-to-militarise-space-as-it-seeks-to-modernise-its-military-power/articleshow/77851406.cms?from=mdr

It is categorically wrong to try and suggest that every military build up plan or action China takes is to protect itself against the evil US imperialists intruding in its back yard. All the signs are that such a build up, plus the extension of Chinese influence and power across various parts of the world via the OBOR scheme, is being undertaken to establish a period of Chinese ascendancy and maximise its influence throughout Asia and beyond. Much in the same way the US has done....

This is not an underdog nation preserving its own interests in its immediate area. This is a nation pushing for superpower status as a rival to the US at the very least, and playing the long geopolitical game. And they show no signs of slowing down.




Yes, operations which will probably consist of a US taskforce being sent for a showdown with the Chinese navy because, y'know, China is annexing international waters with no real grounds for doing so. The Chinese know this is coming, or likely to. Why else would you develop and/or acquire weapons that can take out a Nimitz class?




Your point about China's missile stockpile being smaller is noted. That does not mean it isn't growing. The US and Russia just got a much earlier start, and had a better economic base to build up huge stockpiles.

China is upping its missile game and is also developing long-range weapons too, as noticed by The Pentagon: https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/36149/how-chinas-ballistic-missile-and-nuclear-arsenal-is-ballooning-according-to-the-pentagon





Disagree. This article goes into more details: https://chinapower.csis.org/china-naval-modernization/

And this: https://www.nationaldefensemagazine.org/articles/2021/2/5/chinas-naval-buildup-alarms-maritime-leaders

This too is related: https://www.newsweek.com/china-gray-zone-wars-us-lose-first-battle-1573318

All the indications are that China's naval build up is not towards a 'purely defensive force', but one which is designed to 1) take and hold the South China Sea to ensure total Chinese dominance of it, 2) to challenge the US in the Pacific theater. And if it is just a 'defensive' force, why are India, Vietnam and several other nations in the region upping investment in their own navies?




We are basically coming from opposite sides here. I definitely have much to criticise about US imperialism and their actions as the de facto world superpower. But I infinitely prefer a world where they shape the agenda to one where China does, purely because I'll take a flawed and problematic democracy where it is possible for a difference to be made given enough organisation and determination, no matter how long it takes, over an outright police state which brooks no opposition and where there is no oversight.

It appears you have become so riled/disgusted by one set of imperialists that you have used the old argument of "my enemy's enemy is my friend" and in doing so swapped one imperialist minded world power for another who have even greater issues in many areas, and seem to have far less respect for international law and human decency. I can see that neither of us is going to change the other's mind in this regard.

This conversation turned into just the latest iteration of The Iran-Iraq War of Metal Archives schisms, and I apologize for having prolonged it. Nothing changes.



***

My current (somewhat realistic) hopes for Biden's probable Nuclear Posture Review:

1. Eliminate the W76-2 and notional SLCM-N from the 2018 review. These were bad ideas and I said so at the time; if you are trying to make nuclear weapons "usable" or "more flexible" you are kind of missing the point of nuclear weapons, while making the world less safe. The W76-2 ("tactical Trident") has already been deployed and will take some time to remove once a decision has been made, but the SLCM is just aspirational right now, so should be easy to abandon. It hasn't actually been built yet.

2. Stop the LRSO; replace with conventional non-nuclear cruise missiles. This was something a lot of us hoped Obama would do, but no dice. I have yet to see a specific reason why the LRSO's concept of operations cannot be carried out with something non-nuclear; everything I have seen and been told indicates it would mostly be used against fairly light targets in comparison to what our other nuclear targets are. For that matter, I haven't seen many good reasons to build replace our current air-launched missile. And there is an entire spectrum of problems unique to bomber-launched warheads, so we should just be moving away from them in general...speaking of which,

3. Negotiate the removal of nuclear weapons from Europe and a suitable conventional alternative. These weapons are, at the moment, critical to the air defense strategies of European countries, some of whom (due to NATO weapons sharing agreements) expect and train to use American nuclear weapons. Removing these weapons would require uncomfortable conversations with those countries, and we would need to reach some sort of understanding about additional conventional weapons, but I think it's doable. (also, fuck Erdogan).



There's a number of other, more substantial "asks" I have, but I don't think this Congress would approve, with or without the filibuster. The three items above are about as much as I think Congress will bend; any other changes are probably going to be pretty minor. Capitol Hill hasn't internalized yet that the era of bilateral US-Russia arms control treaties started by Reagan and Gorbachev is over; they're still operating on "we'll inevitably reduce anyway in tandem with Moscow" old-think. But that era is gone and it's not coming back for a while; any changes to our nuclear forces, whether great or minor, is going to be a purely domestic fight.

The only way I see that happening is if Vladimir Putin steps down or died in office. His goal was always to return to the Soviet Union style of governance. And unfortunately Russia is basically ran by the mob at this point. They have no real opposition leaders that could take on Putin and his controlling party and are still trolling Eastern Europe and Ukraine to this day.

I see the reuniting of the USSR as not just a possibility but a likely eventuality. With the majority of the population preferring the Soviet Union to whatever the vodka bloated corpse of Boris Yeltsin spawned, and the only viable opposition leaders literally being poisoned and then indefinitely prisoned, the stage is set for a fascist takeover, and the inevitable death drive of invading bordering countries to follow soon after. And before the tankies start salivating at the prospect of Beria 2.0 castrating capitalists, the NeuS.S.R. will be an expressly fascist and nominally capitalist project.

So basically, exactly what they have right now, except worse.

Russians’ opinions about history, and their connection of history to modern politics, fluctuate all the time. I remember a poll during Medvedev’s turn on the chair, tha ranked Nicholas II as the best leader of the last 100 years. And yet the monarchists have remained a piddly fringe group. More recently, there is this poll: https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2020/03/ ... oll-a69735
Three-quarters of Russians now agree with “the Soviet era was the best time in the country’s history”, but in the same poll, only 28% want to actually bring it back. The majority prefer “Russia’s own special way forward” - an oddball phrase that has been used by Putin himself, but probably means gradual democratic reforms mixed with wariness over excess westernization.
Sadly I think your last point is more-or-less correct, that Russia will slide further into fascism. I can see popular unrest spreading to the pont where Putin abandons the last flimsy veneer of democracy altogether; but I think it more likely that will be Russia alone, not some expanding nu-SSR. The military ad ventures of Putin & friends are not popular and not economically sustainable.

"I’ve also been criticized because I made the comment on Jan. 6 – I never felt threatened, because I didn’t. Even though those thousands of people were marching on the Capitol were trying to pressure people like me to vote the way they wanted me to vote, I knew those were people that love this country, that truly respect law enforcement, would never do anything to break the law, so I wasn’t concerned."

I shouldn't expect any different but somehow I continue to be baffled at how stupid, awful, and pathetic Ron Johnson manages to be all at the same time.

Alabama Senate votes to criminalize healthcare for trans youth

This bill will kill children. This bill is a part of a nationally coordinated campaign of anti-trans legislation at the state level. It targets the some of the most vulnerable people in our society in the most callous and calculated way, and the long term goal of the campaign is the elimination of transgender people from public life across large swathes of the country.

Wow. "Truly respects law enforcement" and they bear mace, strike, trample, eye gouge and kill police officers. "Would never do anything to break the law" as they do all that and trespass, break doors and windows, smear shit across the hall, steal stuff.

I'm more baffled at how anyone can hear this guy makes this argument and think "Yup, makes total sense!"

Is the missing statement there that he felt safe "...because I was supporting them all the way" ? I could totally appreciate that he felt like 'his side' wouldn't harm him, if/as he was one of the politicians helping to create that situation ?

If every claim about Alabama’s treatment of its trans minority was true, what would you do about it?


Seems you only care about discrimination & prejudice when it happens to you. Never mind others who may or may not be going through something far worse. We don’t know for sure

In essence: Ron Johnson is afraid of the Republican base. It’s funny because when he first came in he didn’t drink the crazy juice; or he was always this crazy and knew how to hide it for years. Either way, fuck him.

That's a question we'll ask for years about many Republicans: "Were they always that crazy and managed to hid it, or did they just lean too much on the craziness and can't regain their footing?"

Idk about 'killing children' lol. It sounds more like its protecting confused youth from potentially damaging 'puberty blockers' and 'hormone therapies.'

I got a kick out this however....

"These bills are rooted in anti-trans bigotry and are written in defiance of basic science and standards of medical care. The real motivation behind this attack is to inflame anti-trans sentiment and divide the working class against itself by inflicting maximum cruelty on a vulnerable group of children."

I mean... that is where these various anti-LGBT bills of any sort come from, though. One does not simply introduce legislation so clearly designed to harm and impede the societal progress and stability of precisely one subset of the population while saying it's for something else entirely and get away with it anymore.

I'm pretty familiar with the "Don't give kids trans drugs cuz they may change their minds later," argument and I'm here to tell you that it is 100% bullshit. These people are preying on your ignorance of how these drugs actually function in order to make you think kids are getting chemically castrated, when in truth nothing of the sort is happening. The goal of that bill is to push culture war buttons to rile up dumbass parents and the outcome will be, as S&P said, dead trans people. And I don't think it's unreasonable to think some (most?) of the people pushing for that bill want that outcome to happen.

It's also infantilizing to plenty of teenagers who probably damn well know who they are.

Any anti-trans bill like that kind of thing is just bullshit bigotry and fuck anybody who defends it.

I don't know bro, you might be just a tad transphobic if the thing you got a kick from out of all that is the thing that points out the obvious.

Edit to add - probably just a coincidence vs local nastiness in that US state, but - I wonder if the American bill is / has been influenced by the very recent happenings in the UK; TLDR: a person that has been through various reassignment treatments has been part of a case that took the NHS's gender service all the way to the High Court in London & won a ruling that puts the brakes on giving these treatments to children, for now. The BBC link has a long interview / discussion on the personal perspective.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/dec/01/children-who-want-puberty-blockers-must-understand-effects-high-court-rules

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-51676020

The results have triggered a 'review' (which is British political jargon for 'someone's head needs to roll, we just need to find them') into that speciifc provision within the NHS - even the Guardian describes some pretty serious issues there (for those unfamiliar, all NHS services have long waiting times, they don't all suffer from terrible record keeping and opaque decision making, however)

https://www.england.nhs.uk/2020/09/nhs-announces-independent-review-into-gender-identity-services-for-children-and-young-people/

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2021/jan/20/gender-identity-development-service-for-children-rated-inadequate

Friendly reminder that the UK press coverage of trans issues—amd that includes the coverage by BBC and the Guardian—has been consistently awful. Leaving aside the enormous platforms given to open anti-trans bigots and the editorializing of the same, even the news coverage has often been deceptive, and sometimes actively malevolent. It is materially harming trans people.

Russia has recalled its US ambassador. This is more or less expected and shouldn't be construed as a response to an unflattering Biden comment or the recent IC report; we always knew the Kremlin would flail around for a while once they realized the free ride is over. The biggest difference between the Biden administration and the last 4 administrations is they are approaching US-Russia relations from the perspective of having actual, hands-on experience with Putinism. Biden knows what kind of Kremlin he is dealing with; he was there for the "Russian reset," and he was there when they threw it away. His apparent hostility towards Putin is not rooted in ideology; it is rooted in his experience and the real world. He had to unlearn a lot of wishy-washy misunderstandings to get here.

We're in for a difficult conversation, so to speak. Boris Johnson picked a hell of a time to increase the UK's nuclear arsenal.

Not a tad transphobic...I just thought it was a tad dramatic.

I don't mean to be rude, and I'm sure you're very aware of this, but ask literally any transperson who happens to live in the UK what their life is like and how they're treated by the government/health service and then come back to me and tell me that this whole thing in Alabama (I don't mean to stereotype, but the government there has always been notoriously.... Not good) was triggered because ONE transperson decided to de-transition and took the NHS to court. I should also tell you that the amount of folks who transition is less than 1% of folks who go all the way (or even sort of the way). The UK has to be one of the WORST places in the first world when it comes to trans-rights. They have to get government permission to marry, or have children. They have to suffer debilitating wait times because a bunch of TERFs went on the warpath. The Guardian is one of the better media services in the UK and even their coverage of trans-issues is massively skewed and not the least bit fair. But don't take my word for it, just watch PhilosophyTube's coming out video and the subsequent press release.

Also, EricJ, I gotta tell you man, why don't you go ahead and tell trans-folks that they're being "a tad overdramatic" when their already tenuous rights are being further eroded.

Where have you gotten 'government permission to marry' from ? Genuinely curious - you can read the UK marriage regs here - https://www.gov.uk/marriages-civil-partnerships. Basically, if you're old enough and able to consent, you can carry on.

Children I can only imagine is more complicated, but I can think of two recent media circuses here around a trans person carrying & giving birth to a child - I'm pretty sure they didn't have to ask permission there, but do correct me if I'm wrong. (obviously if you're talking about adoption then yes, lots of paperwork, but that's the same for anyone).

I can see you'd have a bad perception of the UK if you've gotten bad information, so happy to discuss !

Also, NHS waiting times (for anything) are a mixture of clinical rules and general uselessness - they need better management, improved infrastructure, a massive culture change, and so on, to cope with increasing demand - but various interested bodies aren't doing that. They'd rather spend money on yet-another-ten-year-IT-reorganisation, or political grandstanding, or inflicting additional levels of bureaucracy on something like medicine development or mental health provision. It's indefensible, agreed, but it's hard to read malice into it. Took me years to see their killing my grandmother as anything other than malice; with much hindsight, they didn't mean to do it, they just aren't able to avoid killing people occasionally.

Wait times throughout the NHS are a product of the chronic and calculated underfunding of the whole system. In the GID clinics, this is compounded by the fundamentally anti-trans logic that pervades the process of receiving trans affirming medical care in the UK. The extensive system of unnecessary and dehumanizing gatekeeping, imposed every step of the way, complicates and exacerbates wait times already stretched into years by the sheer magnitude of the service's underresourcing.

Now, I can't say I'm sure why you've felt the need to blow the transphobic dogwhistle that is concern trolling about detrans, but I'm putting you on notice that this is transphobic. It is currently being used to justify violating the bodily autonomy of trans kids in the UK, and is being advanced as justification for violating the bodily autonomy of trans kids in the United States today. Fuck off with that bullshit.

You're putting me 'on notice' ? You're not at party HQ here, you arrogant tosser

Someone posted about an American state coincidentally putting in place exactly the same rules that the NHS has just had applied via the High Court. I read about this in the news, because I read the news beyond propaganda rags. Now, you might not like that, which is totally valid - you do you & all that - however, other people are allowed to discuss current affairs. Kind of the point of a forum thread of this kind. I know that in commie wonderland all inappropriate discussion is dealt with by exile and death, but happily we're not there yet !

God you're infuriating, go picket a synagogue or something and leave us alone

Methuen, I have received all of my information on this topic via research and listening to experts on trans-issues. Please, again, I urge you to watch PhilosophyTube's coming out video. She can explain this in a much better way than I can, being English and trans herself. I'm happy to discuss with you, but I lack the knowledge and expertise to discuss in good faith. There are plenty of folks on Youtube and other places that DO have the required expertise however. I believe that (I am assuming that you are a cisgendered male) you and I are probably not the right types of people to be having a discussion on trans-rights in the UK, despite you being a citizen.

Thanks, seriously - I will take a look ! I don't have much exposure to youtubers beyond those Germans with garden railways & over-interested cats.

I fundamentally disagree with your last point, but happy to take that to PM or something so we don't derail the thread - there's a long-winded meta/academic discussion in there that would bore everyone silly I think

As a cis person I won't comment much on trans rights as it's a subject I am still learning on but this is an area where I tend to agree with S&P (despite our disagreements on other things).

TERFs are... not helpful people (to put it very mildly - I could use far stronger terms). In a similar way to some of the points I made above in my China rants, it is gobsmacking to witness their actions, in that generally they seem to be quite left wing people - but when it comes to trans issues, they'll happily side with the worst Republican politicians/religious right groups around and give them plaudits if there's anti-trans legislation being pushed through.

Did anyone say you aren't allowed to discuss current affairs, or were you told that something you said was transphobic? I ask because these are not the same things.

Can confirm that UK media is full of TERF. Don't use them as an authority on trans issues, ever.

Statements get atomized, sememic contexts stripped out, and then re-assembled into something more pliable, their base form no longer recognizable. All the time. Our species deserves everything coming to it.

This Matt Gaetz/Tucker Carlson/DoJ/FBI debacle is hilarious. I detect a massive scandal brewing. It wouldn't surprise me one bit if both Tucker and Gaetz have ties to an Epstein-related ring.

There is no such thing as a "massive" scandal in American politics anymore.