Ask a Himachali person how far something is and it's always "just around the next hill." Another couple of hours of walking and you"ll still get the same answer.
I think it's more about messaging rather than reality. Only one of these parties fights the safety nets, is against raising the minimum wage and cuts taxes for the rich, and that's the one that's positioned itself as the "party of the poor".
I'd say that proportion of what you might call "vegan" food in india is quite small. Dairy-based products are everywhere in vegetarian dishes, and many (too many, imho) recipes treat paneer as the default stand-in for meat.
If Trump is actually serious about annexing Canada (or at least retaining the option), development of nuclear weapons would seem more likely to precipitate an invasion than to deter one.
Building nuclear weapons specifically to use against the US would also--in some measure, at least--justify any claims that such an invasion is a national security imperative.
Obviously these situations are quite a bit different.
Canada shares a border with the US and is an ocean away from anybody else.
DPRK is an ocean away from the US and shares borders with and enjoyed very credible security guarantees from both China and Russia. DPRK also shares a border with US ally South Korea, whose capital and millions of residents they already held at risk from thousands of hardened artillery positions and mobile launchers.
From what I understand, there were the usual half-arsed plans from the same stable geniuses who invaded Iraq. I've mostly been facetious, but honestly, the fact that you would consider a response to an idle invasion threat from a serially belligerent nation as itself being a threatening act - it's pretty indicative of the problem at hand.
I wouldn't consider it a threatening act. But I am not Commander in Chief of the US Armed Forces.
I am not advocating an invasion of Canada. I deplore the annexation rhetoric coming from POTUS. I don't believe there is a serious intention to annex Canada through military force, but I do believe loose talk like what we've seen harms our national security interests and understandably frightens our utterly vulnerable neighbors.
However, I also believe that in this new Great Game it's important to understand the actual state of the board and the likely actions/reactions of the other players.
Deluding oneself that Canada can resist a full-scale invasion by their only neighbor with overwhelming military, economic, industrial, financial, and diplomatic advantages because foreign nations will be obliged to join the war on Canada's side is unwise.
Deluding oneself that developing nuclear weapons would not be an easy casus belli for an actually hostile US is similarly unwise.
You're right, it's seeking and developing nuclear weapons that has been the problem historically. Once you have them it's fine, the sabre-rattling pretty much stops. Worked for India, Pakistan, China, North Korea.
I recall two SOAP-based services refusing to talk to each other because one nicely formatted the XML payload and the other didn't like that one bit. There is a lot we lost when we went to json but no, I don't look back at that stuff with any fondness.
As someone who shifted from a lot of perl to a lot of python in the early 2000s, it was because the same shortcuts that made perl really great for system "archaeo-devops" scripting made it difficult to read others' code and to write anything larger than a couple of files. I still use grep, awk, sed, cut etc etc a ton, just not perl.
I wouldn't say I was brought up on Visual Basic though. It was not a language that taught structured programming at all.
The far right pretty much across the world is learning just how fragile and consensus-based the institutions of democracy are all at once. They're watching and learning from each other. Hence you have people like Bannon involved in similar tricks in multiple countries.
Are you tracking actual identity politics or the term "identity politics"? Because the meaning of the term applies just as much to ending slavery, womens' suffrage and civil rights movements.
Otherwise, you might as well argue that fake news only existed from 2016 onwards, because that's when Google Trends says it did.
>the meaning of the term applies just as much to ending slavery, womens' suffrage and civil rights movements.
I'm not sure that's true. E.g. Martin Luther King Jr spoke of the "magnificent words" in the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. Modern activists would say: "Written by dead pale male slaveholders. We need more diversity! Where are the voices of women and POC?" For King, ideas took precedence over identities. For modern activists, it's the opposite.
The American Anti-Slavery Society was predominantly white. That's puzzling for a movement driven by identity politics. It does make sense for a movement driven by universal humanitarian ideals.
In any case, if you still think I'm wrong, and identity politics is an essential force behind trends such as the civil rights movement -- then I suppose you'll be happy that it's being adopted by the political right in the United States? Since it's got such a great historical track record, surely results will be good? ;-)
>Otherwise, you might as well argue that fake news only existed from 2016 onwards, because that's when Google Trends says it did.
This is a bad analogy, because fake news itself doesn't use the term "fake news". If "fake news" was an ideology which was characterized by particular terminology, we could graph the use of that terminology to document the rise of the ideology. That's what's being done here.
In any case, I do believe that "fake news" (in the narrow sense of websites which write completely bogus news, with no effort at reporting, to drive clicks) is a phenomenon which has, in fact, become more widespread relatively recently (due to the ease of internet publishing etc.) So that's another way in which your analogy is invalid. Fake news did increase in popularity when Trump was the GOP candidate, relative to when Romney was the GOP candidate. And Google Trends helps illuminate that!
I think our definitions of "identity politics" differ too much to have a useful discussion about it. I'm going off the most common definitions I can find (eg dictionaries, wikipedia), but perhaps I'm looking in the wrong place.
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