Under Trump, US foreign policy involves helping the businesses of Trump and his friends rather than just a focus on what’s best for the United States and its people as a whole. This allows countries to indirectly bribe Trump to change the foreign policy of the United States.
US democracy is declining, and democracies often slowly shift into something that is not really democracy, rather than suddenly becoming autocratic in one dramatic moment.
Trump tariffed India for buying Russian oil, and now Trump is buying Russian diesel, which is a form of refined oil. He has turned the United States into a hypocritical country with no principles, who no one should trust because no words, no deal, means anything. The country has always had to look out for itself, but the repeated backing out of deals, including ones made by Trump, the repeated economic and military aggression, and the naked unprincipled hypocrisy has turned the United States into an asshole country.
Rent control has bad effects, but politically, when a city gentrifies, this can cause rents to raise so fast as to effectively be an eviction. Gentrification is good for creating flourishing urban areas, but it is unfair to the tenants already living there and could lead to political demands to stop the gentrification.
A rent control that slows the raising of rents, gives the current tenants more time until they can’t afford rent, and gives them more time to make more money, while allowing inflation-based rent raises and letting landlords charge market prices to new tenants…may be a net good.
Multi-year rent freezes that allow no rent increases are bad.
China’s covert ops are penetrating many countries, including the United States. Fifty percent of US counterspy efforts are against China. China likes to threaten Chinese living in the US to help their operations, if they don’t obey, the CCP will harm their family members still in China.
The CCP is threatened by American military power, but it’s most threatened by free expression and free peoples and that the Chinese people will demand more freedom and say in government, and the CCP fears what this will mean for their control of the country.
The Houthis aren’t simply an ethnic nationalist group, they are Islamist who want to conquer all Yemen and indoctrinate people into their theocracy. They are brutal and oppressive to the people they conquer.
If the world wants to defeat the Houthis, they need to diligently train a Yemeni force, support it with air power, and see the war through to the end.
China hasn’t simply over invested in their property sector, their credit system is politically biased to invest in unproductive assets, their consumption seems hopelessly suppressed, making China dependent on exports, and all of their amazing new technology is not enough to overcome their malinvestment.
Abdul El Sayed is either so biased on the Israel-Palestine issues that he can’t think clearly about it…or he is bullshitting in this interview.
He thinks we should use words because of the moral imperative they cause not because of the actual meanings of the words!!!
He said that as an official leader in the US government, the lives of Jews are equally as important as the lives of Palestinian Palestinians. On some higher level, all lives are equal, but the leaders of the US should prioritize the lives of Americans and not consider them equal.
His claim that Israel is systematically annihilating tens of thousands of kids is ridiculously misleading! They are systematically trying to kill terrorists who don’t fight in the open, forcing Israel to either just let enemies plan and build up, or to accept killing kids as a cost to fighting terrorists using human shields.
His appeal to authority is bullshit. Things generally get complicated legally, but the word genocide is not that complicated! It’s an attempt to destroy a people. Given Israel’s power to wipe out and kill almost ever Gazan, does it look like Israel is trying to systematically kill every Gazan? The answer is no! It looks like they are fighting a terrorist organization determined to destroy their country that hides amongst civilians and that Israel is open to a lot of collateral damage and at times is committing war crimes.
His answer did seem to imply that he doesn’t think it is an actual genocide. Either he doesn’t think that and is lying when he uses the word, or he gave a bullshit answer in this interview because he thought it would come off better than getting into an argument about what genocide actually means.