Exxon’s Rex Tillerson Is The Candidate for Secretary of State

[Tijuana]

I just don't see how the war weariness comes about when the average american isn't in contact with war. It's psychosomatic and driven by masochistic ideologues.

Yeah because friends and families are not at thing.

What a bizarre thing to say.

[Zmaniac17]

No. You misunderstand me in a fundamental way. Don't take what I wrote as an invitation for us to go around the world and beat everybody up. That is MOST CERTAINLY not what I want. My foreign policy beliefs are far more constrained than that.

But what they are is decisive. When you act, you act in a way that allows you to set terms. Overwhelming. Uncompromising. Definitively. National interests should not be overly broad, but neither should they be absurdly narrow (which is Obama's failure).

Want an example? Syria and Iraq. They're like... what, ~10,000 troops in Syria and Iraq now all put together, maybe a little south of that? With thousands more in Turkey, Jordan, Qatar and so forth. Rather than actively decisively, Obama added 500 here, 1000 there. All adding up to the number that was suggested from the get go to act as an instrument of a decisive policy.

This goes with what I said about Syria. Either Obama should have gotten further involved and given the rebels the heavy weapons they needed to win, so America could achieve a desirable outcome... or he should have kept the US out of it entirely. instead this awful middleground was achieved, where we made a situation worse, but denied ourselves the means to which to create a desirable outcome for our interests.

I don't want the US to go to war against Russia, or China, or anybody else. But we must defend our interests and we must act decisively. A decisive policy could have nipped Russia in the bud years ago. A decisive policy could have slowed or halted China island building. Instead in both places, Obama became obsessed with second order effects and ordered a constraining, gradualism policy that just ceded time and opportunities to the other side.

That is just a fundamental mistake. Obama's job is not be a mediator between American interests and the world, or a constrainer of American power in the face of the world's concern about the gap between our power and their own. Rather his job is to be its leader, its chief advocate, its director. That doesn't mean military aggression. That doesn't mean stepping on the weak. What that does mean is making red lines mean something and pushing our interests in a decisive way that serves to build our power.

I'm not gonna pretend I'm an expert on any of this. What I will say though is that perhaps neither are you. Having just enough knowledge to think you know what you're doing is a dangerous place to be. I don't know where you get your intelligence briefings from, but things are never as simple as they look on the news.

In addition to that, this idea that compromise and middle ground are bad places to be seems foolish. The idea that centrist politics and compromising with the other side is weak is an all to common sentiment. Some of the greatest periods in history have been ushered in thanks to leaders who were willing to compromise. Like it or not, the United States is inextricably connected to every part of the world economically and socially. Their success is tied to our success now. With great power comes great responsibility.

[Shadowferal]

O.o

All the states without unions seem to have businesses competing with eachother instead of their employees.

We have benefits that rock, pay that's constantly increasing, and no unions.

Perfect example; I manage a call center in a town with about 9 call centers. We just raised our base pay to steal from them, increased our PTO package, and our dental/vision/medical already rocked.

Never been the case most of the time.
My former union employees in NJ looked at what our "opposite" were making in TX...and it was embarrassing. They needed two jobs just to break even (and because of competing interests they had to do that behind the company's back)
There's a reason why shrinking union membership and the shrinking middle class correlate.

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I'm not gonna pretend I'm an expert on any of this. What I will say though is that perhaps neither are you. Having just enough knowledge to think you know what you're doing is a dangerous place to be. I don't know where you get your intelligence briefings from, but things are never as simple as they look on the news.

He tends to skew his info...When he's not throwing a lot of stuff mixed in to obfuscate it and make some people think he knows what he's talking about, when common sense blows it all out of the water anyway. (He did the same thing to predict Clinton's win which was "inevitable." Now that he's gotten over how wrong he was he's finding ways to cheer Trump's win. But every bit is a card placed ever so carefully...and one sneeze at this house of cards built...)