[News] Post a Political News Story

Ongoing discussion of the political news of the day. This thread is for 'smaller' stories that don't call for their own thread. If a story blows up, please start a new thread for it.

Mixolyde wrote:

Why did everyone give Trump crap for leaving Syria, but not Biden for leaving Afghanistan?

Speak for yourself. I'm always glad when we leave foreign entanglements when we should never have been there in the first place.

farley3k wrote:
hbi2k wrote:

Would we do any better with another five or ten or twenty years of occupation, though?

The term "sunk cost fallacy" comes to mind.

I don't think it is simple so I don't know that one or the other is "right" but feels like there is a lot of space between "occupation" and "abandon"

I'm not sure there is in this case. What's the middle ground? Send aid? Which we send to what legitimate government? So then we leave a contingent of troops behind to make sure the aid is going to people who need it and suddenly, oh sh*t, this is looking a lot like an occupation again.

I dunno. If there's something we agree on, I think it's that it's NOT simple and there are no good options. You're not wrong to feel ambivalent about leaving but I don't really know what else we do.

Mixolyde wrote:

Why did everyone give Trump crap for leaving Syria, but not Biden for leaving Afghanistan?

Because one was a stupid decision when there were good options still on the table, and the other is the least bad option on the table?

Or to couch it in diplomacy speak, because only one of those actions served the geopolitical interests of the United States.

farley3k wrote:

Yes nation building will be the job of the Taliban and other groups who can - rightly - point out the the US came destroyed the country (although it must be said there wasn't a lot of country functioning to destroy). f*ck do we write the recruitment pamphlets? "home destroyed? starving? abandon in the middle of the night by G.I Joes? Join the taliban and respect yourself and your country again!"

This is as bad as Bush's attack on Iraq based on lies just the flip side of a coin called "reasons America should be hated"

You know that the Taliban already did "nation building" in Afghanistan, right? They were the group that knitted the country back together through conquest after the Afghan Civil War of 1989-1992 *and* the Afghan Civil War of 1992-1996.

Of course the Taliban only managed that because they were organized and backed by Pakistan's intelligence service and that only happened because America used Pakistan's intelligence service to get arms and money to the mujahedeen who were fighting the Soviets, who invaded in 1979 and spent a decade doing what we did.

And the Soviets were there because they were "asked" to by Hafizullah Amin, who named himself president, prime minister, field marshal, and vice-president of the Supreme Defence Council after removing Nur Mohammad Taraki, Babrak Karmal and Amin Taha from power in a coup in the fall of 1979. (The Soviets assassinated Amin three months later.) And those fellows had gotten into power because they themselves overthrew and assassinated Mohammad Daoud in 1978. Daoud was in power because he overthrew the monarchy in 1973 who had been in control of Afghanistan since 1926. And before that Afghanistan was consumed for most of the 19th century in The Great Game, which was an international pissing match between the British Empire and the Russian Empire because they both wanted to control South Asia.

Actual nation building would take generations and generations, require trillions of dollars in investments, and, as Gen. Shinseki pointed out and got forced into early retirement for, the continual deployment of several hundred thousand US and allied troops for the entire duration of nation building to ensure basic security.

We were in Afghanistan for 20 years because no politician wanted to take the hit of "surrendering" to the terrorists while at the same time the American public didn't want large numbers of American troops deployed and large numbers of filled body bags coming home. So we spent two decades f*cking around and not accomplishing a whole heck of a lot with a small US presence because there was zero political support for actual nation building, but there was political support for having a military presence there to fight the "terrorists."

It has a long and difficult history. I don't believe our withdrawal will change that, nor that our involvement would either. I find it depressing that we got in this situation and even more depressing that it seems like we will have a repeat of it in a few years.
Perhaps that is just the fate of empires.

Jonman wrote:
Mixolyde wrote:

Why did everyone give Trump crap for leaving Syria, but not Biden for leaving Afghanistan?

Because one was a stupid decision when there were good options still on the table, and the other is the least bad option on the table?

Or to couch it in diplomacy speak, because only one of those actions served the geopolitical interests of the United States.

It also seems obvious that we only pulled out of Syria not because of some military or political calculation but because of Trump’s simping for autocrats. Trump was constantly fanboying Erdogan who wanted us out of Syria so that Turkey could resume it’s assaults on the Kurds, and what do you know- as soon as we pulled out Turkey resumed it’s assaults on the Kurds.

ruhk wrote:
Jonman wrote:
Mixolyde wrote:

Why did everyone give Trump crap for leaving Syria, but not Biden for leaving Afghanistan?

Because one was a stupid decision when there were good options still on the table, and the other is the least bad option on the table?

Or to couch it in diplomacy speak, because only one of those actions served the geopolitical interests of the United States.

It also seems obvious that we only pulled out of Syria not because of some military or political calculation but because of Trump’s simping for autocrats. Trump was constantly fanboying Erdogan who wanted us out of Syria so that Turkey could resume it’s assaults on the Kurds, and what do you know- as soon as we pulled out Turkey resumed it’s assaults on the Kurds.

I should correct what I said earlier. The one thing that gave me pause with the Syria business is that I wasn't sure *why* we were doing it. I was worried that the reason we pulled out of Syria is because Putin / Erdogan asked Trump to or offered him something in return.

It also seems like a lot of progress we might have made in the critical early days of Afghanistan was thwarted by Bush’s decision to invade Iraq. That pulled troops, resources, thought cycles within the Defense and State departments, etc.

I also seem to remember that Trump announced his plans without much consult, and broke promises made to local allies while doing it. Pulling out of Afghanistan has been in the making for years, and should probably have happened years ago.

Collapsed Florida tower could have been repaired faster under repealed law, experts say

NBC News wrote:

Late last year, after years of delays and disputes, the Champlain Towers South Condominium Association began a desperate search for $16.2 million to fix major structural damage that was slowly threatening the Surfside high-rise — and that may have contributed to the building's partial collapse June 24.

The obvious place to look was the building's reserve fund — extra money socked away to cover the cost of future repairs. But the account held just $777,000, according to condo board documents — nowhere near enough to soften the blow.

The collapse, which killed at least 64 people and left 76 others missing, occurred before the condo board could collect the needed money from residents and begin repairs. The cause of the collapse is unknown, and investigators, experts and advocates are trying to determine whether the uncompleted repairs played a role, whether the board could have seen the problem coming earlier — and whether a Florida law regulating condo repairs that was repealed a decade ago could have made a difference.

One way to keep track of needed repairs is a "reserve study," in which condo boards bring in experts like engineers or certified specialists every few years to inspect buildings and estimate how much the boards should collect from residents to prepare for future fixes. The building's financial documents, obtained by NBC News and NBC 6 South Florida, show that Champlain Towers South had not done a professional reserve study since at least 2016. That decision was legal, but it meant that planning was left to the board, a shifting group of volunteers with little training in building maintenance.

"If the owners would have had a reserve study, if the board was proactive and had funded its reserves, this never would have happened," said Julio Robaina, a former Republican state legislator.

Robaina sponsored a 2008 law requiring condo associations to hire engineers or architects to submit reports every five years about how much it would cost to keep up with repairs.

The law lasted just two years before it was repealed in 2010, after Robaina left office. Robaina blamed pushback from real estate lawyers and property managers, who he said claimed that the law was too burdensome for condo owners. The legislator who sponsored the repeal, former state Rep. Gary Aubuchon, a Republican real estate broker and homebuilder, did not reply to messages seeking comment.

I am seeing this a lot where the burden was on the residents to fund repairs instead of the owners?

fangblackbone wrote:

I am seeing this a lot where the burden was on the residents to fund repairs instead of the owners?

I think it's a condo so the residents are the owners.

Exactly. Arguments are flying around the Conservosphere that this is a good example of “Socialism in Action”.

People owning their own home is socialism?
Conservatives, I am confused

At least I learned something new, never noticed the apartment/condo difference. The two are basically called the same thing in my language.

The Christian Right Is in Decline, and It’s Taking America With It

The presidency of George W. Bush may have been the high point of the modern Christian right’s influence in America. White evangelicals were the largest religious faction in the country. “They had a president who claimed to be one of their own, he had a testimony, talked in evangelical terms,” said Robert P. Jones, chief executive of the Public Religion Research Institute and author of the 2016 book “The End of White Christian America.”

Back then, much of the public sided with the religious right on the key culture war issue of gay marriage. “In 2004, if you had said, ‘We’re the majority, we oppose gay rights, we oppose marriage equality, and the majority of Americans is with us,’ that would have been true,” Jones told me. Youthful megachurches were thriving. It was common for conservatives to gloat that they were going to outbreed the left.

Activists imagined a glorious future. “Home-schoolers will be inordinately represented in the highest levels of leadership and power in the next generation,” Ned Ryun, a former Bush speechwriter, said at a 2005 Christian home-schooling convention. Ryun was the director of a group called Generation Joshua, which worked to get home-schooled kids into politics. The name came from the Old Testament. Moses had led the chosen people out of exile, but it was his successor, Joshua, who conquered the Holy Land.

But the evangelicals who thought they were about to take over America were destined for disappointment. On Thursday, P.R.R.I. released startling new polling data showing just how much ground the religious right has lost. P.R.R.I.’s 2020 Census of American Religion, based on a survey of nearly half a million people, shows a precipitous decline in the share of the population identifying as white evangelical, from 23 percent in 2006 to 14.5 percent last year. (As a category, “white evangelicals” isn’t a perfect proxy for the religious right, but the overlap is substantial.) In 2020, as in every year since 2013, the largest religious group in the United States was the religiously unaffiliated.

One of P.R.R.I.’s most surprising findings was that in 2020, there were more white mainline Protestants than white evangelicals. This doesn’t necessarily mean Christians are joining mainline congregations — the survey measures self-identification, not church affiliation. It is, nevertheless, a striking turnabout after years when mainline Protestantism was considered moribund and evangelical Christianity full of dynamism.

In addition to shrinking as a share of the population, white evangelicals were also the oldest religious group in the United States, with a median age of 56. “It’s not just that they are dying off, but it is that they’re losing younger members,” Jones told me. As the group has become older and smaller, Jones said, “a real visceral sense of loss of cultural dominance” has set in.

White evangelicals once saw themselves “as the owners of mainstream American culture and morality and values,” said Jones. Now they are just another subculture.

From this fact derives much of our country’s cultural conflict. It helps explain not just the rise of Donald Trump, but also the growth of QAnon and even the escalating conflagration over critical race theory. “It’s hard to overstate the strength of this feeling, among white evangelicals in particular, of America being a white Christian country,” said Jones. “This sense of ownership of America just runs so deep in white evangelical circles.” The feeling that it’s slipping away has created an atmosphere of rage, resentment and paranoia.

QAnon is essentially a millenarian movement, with Trump taking the place of Jesus. Adherents dream of the coming of what they call the storm, when the enemies of the MAGA movement will be rounded up and executed, and Trump restored to his rightful place of leadership.

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“It’s not unlike a belief in the second coming of Christ,” said Jones. “That at some point God will reorder society and set things right. I think that when a community feels itself in crisis, it does become more susceptible to conspiracy theories and other things that tell them that what they’re experiencing is not ultimately what’s going to happen.”

The fight over critical race theory seems, on the surface, further from theological concerns. There are, obviously, plenty of people who aren’t evangelical who are anti-C.R.T., as well as evangelicals who oppose C.R.T. bans. But the idea that public schools are corrupting children by leading them away from a providential understanding of American history has deep roots in white evangelical culture. And it was the Christian right that pioneered the tactic of trying to take over school boards in response to teachings seen as morally objectionable, whether that meant sex education, “secular humanism” or evolution.

Jones points out that last year, after Trump issued an executive order targeting critical race theory, the presidents of all six seminaries of the Southern Baptist Convention came together to declare C.R.T. “incompatible” with the Baptist faith. Jones, whose latest book is “White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity,” could recall no precedent for such a joint statement.

As Jones notes, the Southern Baptist Convention was formed in 1845 after splitting with abolitionist Northern Baptists. He described it as a “remarkable arc”: a denomination founded on the defense of slavery “denouncing a critical read of history that might put a spotlight on that story.”

Then again, white evangelicals probably aren’t wrong to fear that their children are getting away from them. As their numbers have shrunk and as they’ve grown more at odds with younger Americans, said Jones, “that has led to this bigger sense of being under attack, a kind of visceral defensive posture, that we saw President Trump really leveraging.”

I was frightened by the religious right in its triumphant phase. But it turns out that the movement is just as dangerous in decline. Maybe more so. It didn’t take long for the cocky optimism of Generation Joshua to give way to the nihilism of the Jan. 6 insurrectionists. If they can’t own the country, they’re ready to defile it.

farley3k wrote:

The Christian Right Is in Decline, and It’s Taking America With It

...

Activists imagined a glorious future. “Home-schoolers will be inordinately represented in the highest levels of leadership and power in the next generation,” Ned Ryun, a former Bush speechwriter, said at a 2005 Christian home-schooling convention. Ryun was the director of a group called Generation Joshua, which worked to get home-schooled kids into politics. The name came from the Old Testament. Moses had led the chosen people out of exile, but it was his successor, Joshua, who conquered the Holy Land.

And in 2021 that future is Madison Cawthorn, a homeschooled Nazi enthusiast who lied about being accepted to the Naval Academy, lied about being a Paralympian, and who dropped out of a barely accredited college created by the lawyer for the Homeschooled Legal Defense Fund after just a few months (and yet still managed to have dozens of his classmates attest to how much he sexually harassed women on campus).

Shadout, in American English, a "Condo" development often means apartments in a building where the apartment owner becomes a part-owner of the building. These are also called "Co-Ops", short for cooperatives. Instead of a single landlord company handling the management and repairs, it's done by a board and paid for by fees assessed on the members.

Maybe you have a term for such cooperative ownership situations?

Sorry for turning this into a dictionary discussion Apartment (translated obviously) is the general term, and typically used for rented, but to specify apartments you own, it is just called 'owned apartment' or 'owner apartment' (literal translation), where you are the single owner of your apartment, with shared ownership of everything else, which is handled by a board. Which sounds like a Condo. But yeah, we just call it the same thing, so had not considered that apartment in US didn't also refer to both types.
We do have a third type, that does have its own name, which according to google translates to 'equity sharing', where you technically dont own an apartment as such, but buy a share of the entire building, and the 'right to use' one of the apartments, which is still owned by everyone. Always found that one weird, and have heard horror stories about it. Not something I would "buy" into. Anyway, that doesn't seem to be what condo means.

I’ve never heard a condo described as a co-op. The co-ops I’ve encountered use the same shared-equity model and the board has power over who moves into the property. Anyone can buy a condo but co-ops tend to be more selective and harder to get into.

Shadout wrote:

We do have a third type, that does have its own name, which according to google translates to 'equity sharing', where you technically dont own an apartment as such, but buy a share of the entire building, and the 'right to use' one of the apartments, which is still owned by everyone. Always found that one weird, and have heard horror stories about it. Not something I would "buy" into. Anyway, that doesn't seem to be what condo means.

That sounds a lot like a "Time Share", which mostly applies to property used for vacations.

farley3k wrote:

The Christian Right Is in Decline, and It’s Taking America With It

The presidency of George W. Bush may have been the high point of the modern Christian right’s influence in America. White evangelicals were the largest religious faction in the country. “They had a president who claimed to be one of their own, he had a testimony, talked in evangelical terms,” said Robert P. Jones, chief executive of the Public Religion Research Institute and author of the 2016 book “The End of White Christian America.”

Back then, much of the public sided with the religious right on the key culture war issue of gay marriage. “In 2004, if you had said, ‘We’re the majority, we oppose gay rights, we oppose marriage equality, and the majority of Americans is with us,’ that would have been true,” Jones told me. Youthful megachurches were thriving. It was common for conservatives to gloat that they were going to outbreed the left.

Activists imagined a glorious future. “Home-schoolers will be inordinately represented in the highest levels of leadership and power in the next generation,” Ned Ryun, a former Bush speechwriter, said at a 2005 Christian home-schooling convention. Ryun was the director of a group called Generation Joshua, which worked to get home-schooled kids into politics. The name came from the Old Testament. Moses had led the chosen people out of exile, but it was his successor, Joshua, who conquered the Holy Land.

But the evangelicals who thought they were about to take over America were destined for disappointment. On Thursday, P.R.R.I. released startling new polling data showing just how much ground the religious right has lost. P.R.R.I.’s 2020 Census of American Religion, based on a survey of nearly half a million people, shows a precipitous decline in the share of the population identifying as white evangelical, from 23 percent in 2006 to 14.5 percent last year. (As a category, “white evangelicals” isn’t a perfect proxy for the religious right, but the overlap is substantial.) In 2020, as in every year since 2013, the largest religious group in the United States was the religiously unaffiliated.

One of P.R.R.I.’s most surprising findings was that in 2020, there were more white mainline Protestants than white evangelicals. This doesn’t necessarily mean Christians are joining mainline congregations — the survey measures self-identification, not church affiliation. It is, nevertheless, a striking turnabout after years when mainline Protestantism was considered moribund and evangelical Christianity full of dynamism.

In addition to shrinking as a share of the population, white evangelicals were also the oldest religious group in the United States, with a median age of 56. “It’s not just that they are dying off, but it is that they’re losing younger members,” Jones told me. As the group has become older and smaller, Jones said, “a real visceral sense of loss of cultural dominance” has set in.

White evangelicals once saw themselves “as the owners of mainstream American culture and morality and values,” said Jones. Now they are just another subculture.

From this fact derives much of our country’s cultural conflict. It helps explain not just the rise of Donald Trump, but also the growth of QAnon and even the escalating conflagration over critical race theory. “It’s hard to overstate the strength of this feeling, among white evangelicals in particular, of America being a white Christian country,” said Jones. “This sense of ownership of America just runs so deep in white evangelical circles.” The feeling that it’s slipping away has created an atmosphere of rage, resentment and paranoia.

QAnon is essentially a millenarian movement, with Trump taking the place of Jesus. Adherents dream of the coming of what they call the storm, when the enemies of the MAGA movement will be rounded up and executed, and Trump restored to his rightful place of leadership.

Editors’ Picks

Lionel Messi Tries to Slay His Ghosts

‘Our Menu Is Very Darwinian.’ Leading McDonald’s in 2021.

How Crowded Are America’s National Parks? See for Yourself.
Continue reading the main story
“It’s not unlike a belief in the second coming of Christ,” said Jones. “That at some point God will reorder society and set things right. I think that when a community feels itself in crisis, it does become more susceptible to conspiracy theories and other things that tell them that what they’re experiencing is not ultimately what’s going to happen.”

The fight over critical race theory seems, on the surface, further from theological concerns. There are, obviously, plenty of people who aren’t evangelical who are anti-C.R.T., as well as evangelicals who oppose C.R.T. bans. But the idea that public schools are corrupting children by leading them away from a providential understanding of American history has deep roots in white evangelical culture. And it was the Christian right that pioneered the tactic of trying to take over school boards in response to teachings seen as morally objectionable, whether that meant sex education, “secular humanism” or evolution.

Jones points out that last year, after Trump issued an executive order targeting critical race theory, the presidents of all six seminaries of the Southern Baptist Convention came together to declare C.R.T. “incompatible” with the Baptist faith. Jones, whose latest book is “White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity,” could recall no precedent for such a joint statement.

As Jones notes, the Southern Baptist Convention was formed in 1845 after splitting with abolitionist Northern Baptists. He described it as a “remarkable arc”: a denomination founded on the defense of slavery “denouncing a critical read of history that might put a spotlight on that story.”

Then again, white evangelicals probably aren’t wrong to fear that their children are getting away from them. As their numbers have shrunk and as they’ve grown more at odds with younger Americans, said Jones, “that has led to this bigger sense of being under attack, a kind of visceral defensive posture, that we saw President Trump really leveraging.”

I was frightened by the religious right in its triumphant phase. But it turns out that the movement is just as dangerous in decline. Maybe more so. It didn’t take long for the cocky optimism of Generation Joshua to give way to the nihilism of the Jan. 6 insurrectionists. If they can’t own the country, they’re ready to defile it.

A thing about the calculations here.

"Religiously unaffiliated" sounds a lot like "non-denominational" which is what all of my circle called themselves back in the day, not "evangelical."

If evangelical as a term is out of favor (which I think it broadly is), I wouldn't be surprised to learn that folks are self reporting that they aren't that, they are religiously unaffiliated. They belong to the church in the strip mall or the non-denominational church in the suburbs that doesn't have:

Lutheran
Methodist
Unitarian
Baptist
Presbyterian...

In the title. Stuff like:
Church of the Living Waters
Four Square [Name of Town]
Lamb of the Rock
Holy Book Church

Etc.

A better metric might be records of registered churches, or attendance rates or something.

Top_Shelf wrote:

"Religiously unaffiliated" sounds a lot like "non-denominational" which is what all of my circle called themselves back in the day, not "evangelical."

If evangelical as a term is out of favor (which I think it broadly is), I wouldn't be surprised to learn that folks are self reporting that they aren't that, they are religiously unaffiliated. They belong to the church in the strip mall or the non-denominational church in the suburbs...

A better metric might be records of registered churches, or attendance rates or something.

Since the study was about the decline of the "Christian Right", you would think the best metric would have been looking at people who fit that criteria - who consider themselves both Christian and conservative, for example, or who vote based on which candidate will help bring their religious values to the masses, or whatever criteria we use to determine that someone is part of the "religious right".

It doesn't really matter which individual church (or cult, for some of them) someone considers themselves a part of, does it? You can have crazy members of every sect, not just evangelicals. Not all of them encourage the crazy, but still...

Top_Shelf wrote:

If evangelical as a term is out of favor (which I think it broadly is), I wouldn't be surprised to learn that folks are self reporting that they aren't that, they are religiously unaffiliated. They belong to the church in the strip mall or the non-denominational church in the suburbs that doesn't have:

Lutheran
Methodist
Unitarian
Baptist
Presbyterian...

In the title. Stuff like:
Church of the Living Waters
Four Square [Name of Town]
Lamb of the Rock
Holy Book Church

Etc.

A better metric might be records of registered churches, or attendance rates or something.

IMAGE(https://i.gifer.com/PETa.gif)

Feels weird that over 100 people died in a massive infrastructure failure, and that it was barely a story for a weekend.

It's been top of the press on the major networks since it happened...

It has, but does it feel like this has gotten the same level of coverage the Ponte Morandi bridge collapse got in Italy?

Like, I know there are cultural differences, but speaking as someone who works in news, yeah, stations are leading broadcasts with it, but it feels perfunctory.

Removed until I check the news. Maybe I'm missing something new.