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Birb at Arms@birblib.bsky.social |
116 followers 178 following 1033 posts
Tweets about history, politics, martial arts, birbs and post-Soviet space. He/Him
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Birb at Arms
@birblib.bsky.social
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I think "xenophobia" captures it better than "racism" (though it is also racism), where the thing people are *really* anxious about is "outsiders" who have alien (to the British) understandings of how to speak and act, and having dark skin is one of several potential markers for such an "outsider".
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Birb at Arms
@birblib.bsky.social
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The UK also had a panic about immigration from Poland in the past decade, so maybe skin color isn't the only consideration here.
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Birb at Arms
@birblib.bsky.social
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Yeah, the UK is being silly when they say "it's Sir Kier, not Prime Minister Starmer," but they're kind of onto something with "the former President, Jimmy Carter" and the like.
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Birb at Arms
@birblib.bsky.social
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Knighthood isn't peerage, but yes, countries that aren't in the commonwealth are clearly not bound by these internal UK conventions and should apply the same style guides as they do to any other country.
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Birb at Arms
@birblib.bsky.social
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I suspect that convention just doesn't work internationally. In the UK, you can say "Sir Kier" and reasonably expect readers to know who that is, but in another country where people are less familiar with UK politics, [Name of Office] + [Surname] is a lot more readable.
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Birb at Arms
@birblib.bsky.social
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Birb at Arms
@birblib.bsky.social
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Birb at Arms
@birblib.bsky.social
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This year, the UK can also join the US in celebrating a victory over the Tories on the 4th of July
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Birb at Arms
@birblib.bsky.social
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The British pundit class as a whole has been weirdly obsessed with saying "Biden old" for a while now. There are some UK politics shows that have said basically nothing else about him for years, to the point where I can't tell if it's performance art or not.
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Zoomer Antimillenarian
@surcomplicated.bsky.social
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I'm still bullish on the US vs the UK long term, but as an aside, I'll gladly take "we pretend to give this guy total authority but if he tries to use it we'll chop HM Royal Head off again" over "the president is immune from all the crimes, as long as he's abusing his official power during them."
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Birb at Arms
@birblib.bsky.social
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I don't know what it is about the UK in general but they all seem as eager to remind you that Biden is old as any NYT columnist
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Birb at Arms
@birblib.bsky.social
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TBH the Economist are handling this worse than the New York Times, which isn't something I thought was possible.
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Birb at Arms
@birblib.bsky.social
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It's sort of appropriate in that the fourth of July celebrates a bunch of British subjects telling the Tories to go fuck themselves, if you think about it
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Birb at Arms
@birblib.bsky.social
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If I was Nigel Farage, I would also drink that much
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Birb at Arms
@birblib.bsky.social
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It's such a great train, and there's a France-sized chunk of land around the Great Lakes and the US northeast that could really use something like that.
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Birb at Arms
@birblib.bsky.social
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I initially thought this might have been a typo for "mixed race" and would like to go back to that state of relative innocence
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Birb at Arms
@birblib.bsky.social
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I think a lot of people assume that because liking immigration is usually a left-wing position, immigrants and their descendants must necessarily be left wing. It creates an expectation that can make interactions with actually existing Indians (/other diaspora) feel more jarring than they ought to.
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Birb at Arms
@birblib.bsky.social
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I do think there's an important hypothetical to consider where the military mostly stays in their bases and says "look, you guys figure out who's in charge and come back to us." Not *super* likely, but it has precedents in i.e. Ukraine in 2014.
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Birb at Arms
@birblib.bsky.social
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I had a guy threaten me with "the guillotine" on the other site once, then block me when I offered to rent him a U-Haul.
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Birb at Arms
@birblib.bsky.social
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The bad news would be that since SCOTUS delegated the right to decide what is or isn't an "official act" to itself, it would be unclear whether or not the immunity applied. The good news, I'll leave to your imagination.
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Birb at Arms
@birblib.bsky.social
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One thing about guillotines is that you can only use them when your faction controls the area for long enough to indulge in construction projects. The level of security required to use them seems to sort of contradict the claimed necessity of using them. Also, they're terrible for threats.
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Birb at Arms
@birblib.bsky.social
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Like, the Type of Guy who files a lawsuit like this pretty clearly believes that Candidate #2 is better.
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Birb at Arms
@birblib.bsky.social
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RFK is truly a man of the world: eating dogs *and* pigs, and being eaten by a worm
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Birb at Arms
@birblib.bsky.social
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The President saying in his SotU speech "I hope [political enemy] gets what he deserves, which might include falling out a window" would not be admissible as evidence, given that SotU is an official act.
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Birb at Arms
@birblib.bsky.social
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TBH I suspect that would be an improvement over the sentiment expressed in the story above.
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Birb at Arms
@birblib.bsky.social
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The ruling on immunity for "official acts" explicitly gives SCOTUS the right to decide whether something is an "official act" or not. So they haven't actually given the President any new powers that can be exercised without their consent.
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Birb at Arms
@birblib.bsky.social
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Maybe sooner if the democrats had a trifecta.
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Birb at Arms
@birblib.bsky.social
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He could if the democrats control the Senate when Alito and Thomas die
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Birb at Arms
@birblib.bsky.social
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I mean, in any given presidential election, one of the two leading candidates is going to win. That's the reality, and it will happen regardless of whether you try to influence which one will win, or not.
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Birb at Arms
@birblib.bsky.social
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I'm sure quite a few people have explained to you by now that Roe was overturned by Trump-appointed judges. Is there any reason you keep using this framing device?
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Birb at Arms
@birblib.bsky.social
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"Siri, what is an opportunity cost"
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Birb at Arms
@birblib.bsky.social
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Not to mention WWI, where on any given day between 1914 and 1918, the odds of allied artillery preemptively ending his political career were probably in the double digits.
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The Fig Economy
@figgityfigs.bsky.social
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I think this is the real deal threat of yesterday’s decision. The powers of the presidency weren’t expanded, but accountability for their use was stripped. There are cases where Trump could issue a criminal order and be immune, but the people carrying it out wouldn’t be. But…
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Birb at Arms
@birblib.bsky.social
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Cops are cops, but the ones in larger departments screw up less and face more consequences when they do. If you just want to ACAB-post, that's fine, but it's simply untrue to say there are no differences between PDs in the US.
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Birb at Arms
@birblib.bsky.social
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The "military identity" generally isn't OK with killing large numbers of civilians in their own country. That doesn't just apply to the USA either; quite a few literal dictatorships have run into problems trying to do this, though it's not an insurmountable obstacle in either case.
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Birb at Arms
@birblib.bsky.social
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The tech bro compulsion to invent trains is unstoppable
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Birb at Arms
@birblib.bsky.social
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Really, the worst PDs in the USA are the podunk rural forces that will give you a badge and a gun for showing up to your interview with pants on and whose training program consists of an afternoon learning to write a parking ticket. These are not known for the institutional loyalty of their staff.
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Birb at Arms
@birblib.bsky.social
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Loyalty to institutions is different from personal loyalty within the institution. Loyalty to the institution makes you less likely to take actions that you know are against the institution's mission and values. Loyalty to colleagues makes you more likely to go along with whatever they're doing.
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Birb at Arms
@birblib.bsky.social
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AFAIK the big city PDs are relatively competent for the most part, but a lot of the smaller rural ones will give a badge and a gun to anyone who can write their own name and get through an interview without shitting their pants. There's a correlation with accountability as well.
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Birb at Arms
@birblib.bsky.social
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And, you really shouldn't use Weimar comparisons to make points about the US government or military, because they're not at all alike.
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Birb at Arms
@birblib.bsky.social
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Weimar Germany was about 15 years old when Hitler came to power. Its institutional cohesion was quite weak and most people had vivid memories of losing a world war and fighting a civil war. The US is a very different country with a very different history, culture and political system.
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Birb at Arms
@birblib.bsky.social
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They're "militarized" in that they carry carbines and wear tac vests. That doesn't mean they're fit for combat. Some are probably solid fighters, some couldn't win a fight even at a 20-1 numerical advantage. Just ask the Uvalde PD.
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Birb at Arms
@birblib.bsky.social
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Hitler had it easy because the size of the German military was limited by the treaty of Versailles. German rearmament happened on his watch, so he got to build the military almost from scratch. And even then, they tried to kill him a few times.
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Birb at Arms
@birblib.bsky.social
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There are plenty of examples from militaries with a much greater willingness to shoot officers than the US. Matvey Shaposhnikov, for example, was a Soviet general who refused to fire on protesters in Novocherkassk in 1962.
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Birb at Arms
@birblib.bsky.social
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There is a whole chain of command between the JCS chairman and Private Bloggins the infantryman, and all of them would be passing clarification questions back up the chain and taking steps to make sure they weren't the fall guy if anything bad happened. It would be a slow process.
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Birb at Arms
@birblib.bsky.social
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The actually existing US military would "resist" mostly in the form of inertia. Orders to suppress popular resistance would be subject to endless procedural questions and probably resignations if the administration called for violence too openly. But this wouldn't last forever.
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Birb at Arms
@birblib.bsky.social
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That, and if the military is now an instrument of political violence, the loyalty of that instrument is crucial. What that means for an officer is that your service is now a game of performing regime loyalty with career-ending or even life-ending consequences for the losers.
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Birb at Arms
@birblib.bsky.social
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During my brief and unremarkable career in the Canadian military, I had an older platoon sergeant who came across as a hard-right asshole but often said really feminist things. Turns out, his mother had been arbitrarily kicked out of the military in the 1950s "so the men would have more jobs."
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Birb at Arms
@birblib.bsky.social
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But as you've alluded to, this really comes down to the level of motivation of security forces and of any resistance, which is often hard to predict or gauge.
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