California HSR has been a zombie project for a while. Even before Musk was a factor, there were annual plans but nothing ever got done, year after year. It’s probably going to take intercity projects to become popular and economical for something as ambitious as long-range passenger rail to actually receive serious attention.

Splitting individual atoms isn’t that difficult, you just need a neutron supply and some material (paraffin wax works) to slow them down and it will eventually happen at least with uranium. Doing it reliably and efficiently is a much harder problem.

I’m sorry what was I supposed to say?

Your comment literally criticised by my argument on the basis that “It was just like Putin’s” which is not only false but completely irrelevant, who else shares my argument has no relevance to it’s accuracy.

So how am I supposed to respond to such a viciously anti-intellectual claim? Is it really so unacceptable to request that you actually produce reasoning for your argument? At the very least to demonstrate that you are mentally capable of holding this conversation?

FYI I never claimed that I was more knowledgeable than IR scholars, I said somewhat cheekily that you need to be educated (which you clearly aren’t) to effectively challenge my statement.

It’s really sad when one has to explain the insult when the recipient party is too stupid to understand.

“Can’t form a coherent thought”

Again I’m going to need some evidence of this, the fact that you failed to understand a statement, does not make it incoherent.

Unlike most people I actually do provide empirical and rational evidence for my core arguments, even the irrelevant insults. My intellectual standards are through the roof compared to you losers (losers because you are willingly too stupid and lazy, to actually learn empirical facts and provide arguments. See I just met a standard that you have still failed to meet).

I’ll just write it in an image macro format, it’s already been established that that is your primary source of information and you have yet to refute it.

They sure will.

So your argument goes like this

1. A total moron is a mentally handicapped person
2. I am correct in calling you a total moron
3. If 1 AND 2 is true, then I am insulting a mentally handicapped person

Conclusions

1. People will not take me seriously making me irrational
2. If premise 2 is not true, then I made a false statement

Here’s where it fails, and I already warned you about this, calling someone “a total moron” is not a claim of mental handicap and hasn’t been for 60+ years it is a long deprecated medical term that is exclusively used as an insult towards the mentally competent.

So premise one is actually false, everyone recognizes that premise 1 is false therefore premise 3 is also false. And neither of the conclusions you are trying to assert are correct.

“with being so much smarter than me”

Clearly.

You can be mean to mentally handicapped people and still be correct.

Now you’re not actually mentally handicapped and it’s obvious, you just have moronic opinions and argumentation. So people would not be perceiving someone being mean to a mentally handicapped person.

I know what game you’re trying to play, but you’re messing it up and it just looks like your reinforcing your own admissions.

So you are admitting to being mentally handicapped?

Why do you try to drum up your stupidity for sympathy?

You’re clearly not mentally handicapped, you’re just a lazy mediocre person who sources their opinions from memes.

But next time I run into you you bet I’m going to be asking why a self-aware “mentally handicapped” person, is still repeating tropes that they know are wrong.

No, I make substantial criticisms and add some insults because I find it funny.

What it achieves is informing people and entertaining me.

Totally dude, would you like to flex your IR degree and show the world that this statement is correct?

You realise these discussions are public right?

I don’t write to address an audience of one, it’s to publicly refute vapid nonsense.

In fact I immediately block people who DM because if you don’t want a discussion public to convince other people, I’m not going to waste my time convincing a single person.

“is totally acceptable and a fine course of action”

Motte-and-Bailey fallacy.

The argument is not that it is okay to invade countries based on historical claims, it’s not. It’s that we have no basis for thinking that Russia’s motivation for invading Ukraine and Georgia applies to invading all other countries of the world, which is the argument you made and repeated here again.

You realise that most invasions in the world are ignored by the global community? They mostly happen in Africa. So you trying to generalize it from Russia to all aggressor states in the world, is also false. Most invasions do not receive major international response, so why would aggressor states look at a lack of response to the invasion of Ukraine for inspiration and not say the Second Congo War?

“Gosh I was so silly”

“Brain-dead” is the term I would use.

“I should pay more attention to geopolitics”

And English class, and elementary logic.

No. The policies that lead to higher quality of life in Russia would probably not lead to lower quality of life in Ukraine.

In other words we have no reason to believe that aligning with Russia would have resulted in worse outcomes than Ukraine already had. The reason they aligned with the West was primarily to join the EU, which due to corruption and markets they weren’t even eligible to join (and still aren’t).

This resulted in conflict with Russia and the current circumstances which are far worse than they started with and are essentially irrecoverable at this point (certainly population wise).

In summary it was Ukraine’s pursuit of an idealised goal that resulted in negative outcomes. And you are asserting that this is actually a good thing.

Remember when you admitted to me that you were a total moron? Yeah. Your evaluation of every circumstance is super juvenile.

Basically. The smart thing for Hussein was to step down. Even if the US wasn’t justified in invading, Hussein was an utter moron and made the situation far worse.

For some reason there is this assumption that “national sovereignty” is morally relevant. It’s not states are not subject to moral harm, you have to show that losing national sovereignty results in worse outcomes for the population.

Ukraine would almost certainly be in a better position if they remained Russia-aligned or even joined them. By virtually every metric the Ukrainian population had worse standard of living than Russia, lower birth rates, higher death rates. That was before the war started in 2014, there situation is even worse now. Millions of people fled, and they aren’t coming back, Ukraine has a very bleak future even if they do win all their territory. And they still don’t have any guarantee of joining the EU or NATO (primarily due to corruption and territorial dispute issues).

Arguing that by conceding some territory you concede all territory (and eventually the world), is literally just the slippery slope fallacy. We have zero basis for thinking that Russia’s invasion of Georgia and Ukraine wasn’t simply an attempt at re-aligning former Russian (and later Soviet) territory. This motivation does not exist for any other territory, and didn’t even exist when Ukraine was Russia aligned, and does not exist in the CSTO.

For some weird ass reason¹ the only two positions on this are “Ukraine are NAzis”, or “Russia is trying to conquer the world therefore Ukraine must fight to the death for every m²” and zero evaluation of geopolitics is ever performed.

1. The reason is people are morons, not actually weird unfortunately.

“The negotiations start with them getting out”

Ideally yes… pragmatically no. Ukraine lost how many troops in the 2023 counteroffensive and got essentially nowhere? If Ukraine’s goal is to reclaim all of it’s territory, it’s going to be a pyrrhic victory. It will cost more than the territory is actually worth, the war and conscription policy have already demographically ruined Ukraine (e.g all the young people they need fled the country).

“No sane person would say ‘let them keep a room’”

Because they have the ability to remove that person. Ukraine does not, and it’s corruption and underperformance in the battlefield suggests that it may never no matter how many weapons the West gives them or conscripts they send to the trenches.

You are arguing for a perfect victory at all costs. The real world doesn’t work like this, and it would be deeply immoral if it did.

Or if there was actually a chemical difference let alone one that humans could detect.

I think it was the Mindy Kaling episode where she tried to convince the gang to relabel their champagne as “Liberal Tears” (because wine/whine).

Sure but what degree of influence is actually “radicalising” or a point of concern?

We like to pretend that by banning extreme communities we are saving civilisation from them. But the fact is that extreme groups are already rejected by society. If your ideas are not actually somewhat adjacent to already held beliefs, you can’t just force people to accept them.

I think a good example of this was the “fall” of Richard Spencer. All the leftist communities (of which I was semi-active in at the time) credited his decline with the punch he received and apparently assumed that it was the act of punching that resulted in his decline, and used it to justify more violent actions. The reality is that Spencer just had a clique of friends that the left (and Spencer himself) interpreted as wide support and when he was punched the greater public didn’t care because they never cared about him.