The best existing phrase I have is, “Dropping your guard.”
It doesn’t necessarily imply anything about why you dropped your guard, and only slightly implies that the bad thing happened while your guard was down.
We could coin a new phrase here by brainstorming. I’ll start:
Fumbled the shield
the modern American use of “liberal” as a synonym for the progressive left… but word usages change
Modern American civics education is, on average, basically non-existent. All changes in word usage trends toward less nuance, greater redundancy, and greater ambiguity.
And that’s fine, I guess, because Descriptivism or whatever. But in the event that moderately educated people use the terms “Liberal” or “Leftist”, it’s probably okay to assume the formal meanings.
makes references to the “liberal media” confusing."
You seem to not be that confused, since you correctly pointed out that these companies are owned by conservatives.
the baking
Is this a typo, or a new term for me to learn?
Given the global response to the situation, I would bet they probably realize that you don’t think they’re significant.
Then again, there’s a chance they’re just focusing on food and water and shelter and medicine and not-getting-blown-up… rather than worrying about the opinions of people who couldn’t even pretend to be significant.
I struggle to rationalize this for countries not already in armed conflict.
Legally, practically, or morally?
Practically, armed conflict is way more expensive, and it’s riskier. If you had two strategies for changing someone’s behavior: 1) Punch them until they agree to change, 2) Tell them they can’t borrow any more money from you until they agree to change… you would probably prefer number two because it’s less risky.
Legally… we only have 80 years of precedent for the USD being the world’s reserve currency, amd 50 years of weaponizing that power with the IEEPA. Rules for armed conflicts, on the other hand, are ancient. We have a lot of examples for acts of war in armed conflicts, and we can quickly define them and recognize them. For defining and regulating financial “attacks”… we have basically nothing.
Morally… you and I have different moral systems from the people in charge. People can rationalize some truly heinous shit.
We would need a LOT of new international guidelines for this.
It’s not clear to me where we would draw the line, since there’s not really an enforceable difference between, “Allowing you to use our financial system is causing us harm, so you can’t do that anymore,” and “You can’t use our financial system until you <insert demands here>.”
While a blockade is recognized as an act of war, an embargo is not. The US sanctions usually operate like a specific, services-based embargo, so there’s no interpretation of CURRENT international law rendering it an act of war. Again, we would need new guidelines to meet your goal.
I think shared ownership goes against human nature
I think the vast majority of things are shared. Air, water, soil… roads, schools… your education… the bathrooms at the supermarket… the murals/sculptures that make your town look less like a shithole…
It’s perfectly in line with human nature, actually, to share things. People who amass hoards of wealth and fight for power and control… those are the weirdos.
Is there one centrist dem a majority of people even like?
The people voting in the primary are the people who would vote for a Democrat in the general… and this is who they chose.
Who we trust more: the people who vote, or the establishment Democratic Party leaders?
Yeah, their budget is now 90% secret police activities, and only 10% the kinds of things that are actually important… like interfacing with INTERPOL, and acting as a barrier to arms dealing and human trafficking.
Since we can’t abolish something 90%, we need to assign those duties to another organization, until ICE is left with nothing except evil/redundant duties, and THEN abolish it.
… Let’s unpack this.
Person points out this is just another case of wealthy and powerful people stirring up trouble between two groups of people. This is easy because people are easy to trick. If the headline is to be believed, even AOC, who isn’t stupid, believes boomers are the source of the problem.
You point out that, based on the people you know, there’s a conflict between boomers and millennials.
but… that’s not proof that the source of the problem actually IS either group. It’s still the case that this conflict is caused by a third group of people who have a vested interest in making sure the poors fight each other.
That’s not how that works. A smart person would recognize that there are degrees of smartness and degrees of immunity. Even if we accept that smarter people are less susceptible to propaganda, there is no threshold of smartness that grants immunity to propaganda.
The most important service one can provide to a kind-of-smart person is to tell them when they’ve said something stupid. I’m happy to provide this service. Please rate 5 stars.