Erik Haugen @ech@qoto.org

@realcaseyrollins @hornblower @freemo https://www.politico.com/news/2024/04/04/trump-israel-gaza-war-00150577 I think he's saying the right things: get this done quickly, move for peace deals, etc, etc.

@realcaseyrollins @hornblower @freemo Didn't military aid go slightly down with Trump, after going up a lot under Obama and then before going up a lot again with Biden?

@realcaseyrollins @hornblower @freemo maybe, but https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2023-09-29/ty-article/trump-wanted-to-condition-aid-to-israel-on-peace-deal-with-palestinians-new-book-claims/0000018a-ddf0-dfee-a9ee-dffce8790000 for whatever that's worth.

I like Trump's isolationism, but sometimes I worry if he's a bit *too* isolationist.

@Rhube @PerryM @augieray Might say the same about asthmatic dental hygienists.

@Barbramon1 @fm2279 @Trilobyter https://mrlovenstein.com/comic/608

@ErikUden RWNJ here – what makes you think conservatives care if you call it X or Twitter?

@arno_in_sing @anneapplebaum They could do more, but don't see the need, because they have a policeman already. Even if you don't think they have the means: If they had the will, even, there'd be at least that 300b. They don't even do that. Appeasement.

Yeah, I think Poland gets it: better to support Ukraine now than place all existential hope in article 5. Money they send to Ukraine now is pennies on the dollar. The rest of Europe, not so much.

@freemo I don't get the desire to get this last word in before blocking.

@anneapplebaum Is it the "pro Russian" caucus or is it the "don't want to be the world's policemen" caucus? I mean why isn't Europe handling this – they easily could? (It's shocking that *we* have to coax them into commandeering the $300B!)

@thepoliticalcat @anderspuck @randahl maybe Trump's support for Johnson is giving him the cover he needs? https://thehill.com/homenews/house/4591214-trump-johnson-ouster-threat-greene/

@stadsplanering @randahl The Republican party recently has taken an isolationist turn. (Trump is just the most obvious archetype of this.)

There's a lot more talk about trade policy, immigration, etc; it's not just about avoiding foreign wars.

Like you might think that Ukraine's cause is totally righteous (I do), but maybe we shouldn't be paying for it? If they need help, maybe the countries that are more directly impacted by the threat should be the ones carrying the most of that burden: Poland has certainly stepped up, other European countries could as well. (As a practical matter, Europe could easily contain this threat.) A+

Another way to look at it is this: over the last decade or so, a lot of Americans don't want to be the world's policeman anymore. I think a lot of other countries probably don't want us to be either.

Don't don't confuse that with support of Putin. (I mean, obviously there are people who like Putin.)

Same with the Houthis in the Red Sea: Europe are the ones hurt by that, and they can easily deal with it. (Shipping companies could probably deal with it on their own, even!) US support for free trade and access to the sea has really generated a lot of wealth over the last 70 years, great, but who really wants a world where we are the ones enforcing that all the time? More and more, not us.

@randahl I thought Trump was giving Johnson support so he could do this without getting replaced.

@freemo But how about something that doesn't involve ethnically cleansing the victims.

@freemo I would love to read an articulation of what Israel could do instead of what they're doing. I'm vaguely under the impression that they're doing more than anyone else ever has to avoid civilian casualties, but for all I know that is false. And after 10/7 obviously they need to at least degrade (or get someone else to degrade) Hamas' military capabilities and do something to keep them degraded.

Given those, I don't really know what could be done differently here.

@medigoth It's usually more useful to try to understand where someone is coming from rather than rail on a strawman of what you'd like to imagine their position to be.

Is there something specific you're responding to here?

One area I've seen this come up is in things like covid policies. "science" has been used to justify various vaccine mandates, lockdowns, etc, but phrasing the argument that way is 100% a category error; the question of whether it's worth e.g. the downsides of an information collecting and enforcement apparatus is just not a science question at all, it's more like your tasty dinner example.

Scientific inquiry can help inform that decision with estimates about things like vaccine effectiveness (against spread or death), or human cost of various lockdown measures, and so on. But weighing those off each other has little to do with science.

I mean, that's obvious, and ~nobody thinks otherwise, so I'm not saying something particularly interesting here. I'm just noting that someone railing against "scientism" might have an actual point, and your OP doesn't really address it.

@carolleisa @charlotteclymer an hour away? these sound like problems that would go away with school choice?

@Threadbane @randahl did polling about abortion change after Dobbs differently for women than for men?

@carolleisa @charlotteclymer I'm curious how you see school choice as taking away rights. (For the others I can probably guess the circuitous argument.)

@Pourroy @charlotteclymer The US has done that as well, sort of. But sure: almost all governments can and do compel and ban all kinds of things (including many kinds of medical care).

@special-boy @freemo How Biden et al seem to think Israel's right to defend itself even though it of course causes collateral damage seems to end when the collateral damage is white people.

I totally disagree with @freemo on a lot of this: I think Hamas started this war, Israel needs to at least significantly degrade its ability to do that again, and collateral damage is unavoidable, and Israel seems to be doing as much as can reasonably be expected to prevent innocents' deaths (less confident on that last point).

So: these aid workers being killed is absolutely tragic, but certainly no more so than any other innocent Palestinian deaths. Those deaths are on Hamas' hands.

But I totally agree with @freemo that this is absolutely rank hypocrisy.