brickfaced

It's easy to solve once you realize that the US has no strategic interest in Ukraine.

Votes.

You can tell Russia whatever you want, but you can't threaten the existence of the Russian state with American military might backed by the credible threat of nuclear weapons. That has a significant chance of provoking a nuclear Russian response.

For a foreign head of state in the White House on a state visit sitting next to the President in front of cameras, you mean? Or did you mean someone else in an entirely different context?

The first Trump administration lifted Obama's ban on lethal aid to Ukraine and supplied and trained Ukrainians on Javelin anti-tank missiles, night vision devices, counter-battery fire radar systems, and secure battlefield communications equipment among other things. The proposition that Trump is an appeaser does not bear scrutiny. Neither does the speculation that Russia might be capable of or interested in a wider war with Europe, let alone the USA.

Calling the recently-elected Vice President of the United States "bitch" in Russian, on camera, in the White House, was probably not the right way to appeal to the American people.

https://x.com/MyLordBebo/status/1895555421269868776

You're right, he won 49.7% of the popular vote compared to Kamala Harris' 48.4%. Many states like Arizona and California took weeks to finish counting and I had not checked the final numbers.

If you're curious how most Americans feel now, you can read about Trump's approval ratings here; currently his poll results are net-favorable:

https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/approval/donald-t...

You don't speak for all or even most Americans. A majority of US voters selected Donald Trump as their President. I'm pleased with the President's pushback on the disrespectful, high-pressure bargaining tactics Zelensky tried to use today in front of the press at the White House.

All President Zelensky had to do was say "thanks for your support" and have the hard conversations behind closed doors. Instead he tried to use high-pressure negotiating tactics in front of the cameras, on Donald Trump of all people. This was clearly a mistake, and now his diplomatic incompetence and lack of basic gratitude and respect will cost Zelensky and his country dearly.

I'm willing to believe you mean what you say and are posting in good faith, but please read this comment and others on its link and tell me with a straight face there's no strong lib-left bias in HN's community moderation:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43209997

(edit) And here's a nice response to my comment from a user with thousands of karma, illustrative IMO of the average flagger-and-remover:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43211418

I promise not to exceed the level of unmoderated flamebait, vitriol, hatred and froth directed at me and my ideological cohort by the average HN poster.

Getting everything I voted for and more.

Sure, here are some remarks on news dot ycombinator dot com

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43141350

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43141963

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43142108

It's not an illusion. I've been on HN across various accounts for over a decade. There is a hard liberal-progressive tilt to comments and post flagging which has been documented and remarked upon by others on sites where such comments don't get flagged and removed. Your own bias is also quite obvious, as is that of pg, who is now known on Twitter as a block-happy liberal lolcow. But thanks for posting all that, I'm glad Bolsheviks seething at Mensheviks haven't escaped your attention.

Yes, I and others on the right support full-blown authoritarian fascist positions like "freedom of speech"

I hope you're never in charge of anything in which other people find meaning and community.

This is a very sad and soulless way to view Bond's story.

I'm not getting paid to do your homework for you

Taboos on incest and cousin marriage are what actually made the difference there, along with harsh winters

>And now the USA workers wonder if it was all actually a good idea?

We were never asked.

Yes, the human brain

>I'm American, so I've never lived in this kind of nation.

"What is water?", said the fish

You would never apply this reductive, solipsistic lens to any non-white ethnicity or culture and I think you know it

What do you think a nation is? Is it a sports team or economic zone that hands out name tags to whoever steps off the boat with the right attitude? Or is it a specific group of people in a specific place with a shared language, lineage, culture, history, faith, and common destiny? I submit to you that it's the latter, and no empire nor state organized as the former can endure.

This type of solipsistic kumbaya slop is running face-first into reality, fast. People are different. Groups of people are different. Nations of people can be very different. They differ in meaningful and important and obvious ways. You'll live to see these differences continue to manifest in ways that will doubtless surprise you.

And the Ellis Islanders were at least mostly Christian, white, European. They shared a common cultural, historical, religious, and racial frame with native-born Americans. They could and did meaningfully assimilate. Despite this, that wave of migrants almost broke us. Anarchy, terrorism, riots, organized crime, et cetera. The Johnson-Reed Act was passed in response in 1924 and it slowed immigration to a crawl until the 1960s.

Today we have immigrants who speak utterly alien tongues, with no shared history or civilized tradition, arriving at breakneck pace, and who barely learn English because they can scrape by with apps and translation services, who stay in the cultural bubble of their country of origin, who don't see an American culture worth assimilating to. Especially among so-called high skill immigrants, they pick up a US passport and immediately see me as a worse or lesser "American" than they are. That's nuts. The melting pot, if one ever existed, has broken down. What's happening now is something quite different, and it's not good for me or my fellow Americans.

The USSR never did pay us back for the massive, unprecedented, war-winning aid we delivered to them under Lend-Lease. Half a million trucks, thousands of tanks, tens of thousands of airplanes, millions of tons of food. And what did we get out of it? An implacable evil empire that sat like a boot on the neck of Eastern Europe for another 50 years after our "victory."

1,200 men of the same ethnic and religious background of the median American, brought over in a one-time arrangement in the wake of the most destructive war ever fought, versus 100,000 Indian H1B visas granted annually. That's just India, not counting other countries or visa types. Okay. Sure. Totally the same. We couldn't have made it back to the Moon without a million indentured IT workers.

The US didn't win World War 2, break the sound barrier, or put a man on the Moon only or primarily due to immigrant workers. We scoured the country's public school system for the sharpest young minds, sent them to institutions of higher learning with rigorous curricula, and found them positions in industry, government, or the military which made good use of their talent. Fetishizing the "nation of immigrants" narrative at the expensive of the native-born Americans who actually built most of this country's prosperity is, at best, ahistorical.

Having known several great EEs in FAANG who did exactly that job, sometimes paying Chinese income tax due to the length of their stays at the factory, that is my impression as well.

OK but as I'm not a mentally-ill X poster I don't use that one