She described the U.S. Institute of Peace as “a bloated, useless entity that blew $50 million per year while delivering no peace.”
So, here's the thing about Trumpworld. The critiques themselves often aren't wrong.
The problem with Trumpworld is that you've got meatheads like Hegseth and Noem whining about how America's Gone Woke with mushy liberal institutions, when what they're complaining about is someone painting a rainbow flag on the side of a cruise missile.
The USIoP is practically sprouting from the hip of the IMF and World Bank, institutions notorious for their roles in global privatization of public commons, international arms dealing to US allies, and libertarian market-based propagandizing. They're outgrowths of American finance capital and heavily geared towards commoditizing foreign markets and prying them open for US banks and businesses to lay claim to the interior at deeply discounted rates.
The USIoP operates as a diplomatic core that can try and rationalize and institutionalize foreign occupation after the US has entered a region. And there's no better example of this than their role in authoring policy to pacify Iraqi resistance movements at the end of the Bush tenure.
A more objective observer might ask why we need Congress to continue to intercede in Iraqi politics five long years after we'd announced "Mission Accomplished" from the deck of a nearby aircraft carrier. But neoconservatives would sneeringly refute that Iraqis simply aren't ready to govern themselves and still need Americans to guide them towards a liberal democracy.
Obviously, Trumpworld disagrees. They think the solution to every foreign policy dispute is to murder dissidents en mass. And that's what we're seeing in Venezuela.
But USIoP hasn't done anything to keep us out of Venezuela. Or to expedite our exit from Iraq or Afghanistan. Or to prevent us from bombing Yemen or Iran. Or to avoid overthrowing the governments in Libya and Syria. Or to diffuse the conflict in Ukraine. Or to end the blockade and Israeli-induced famine in Gaza. So what role are they fulfilling?
anytime someone posts a link that requires you to pay for the journalism
People subscribing to random newspapers via links on Lemmy would not be a sustainable model for funding local journalism. And - historically - plenty of people did subscribe to local outlets. Plenty still do. Hell, go on Patreon or Substack and see how well the nascent podcast journalism marketplace is doing. What changed over the last 40 years was a wave of M&As targeting smaller papers to consolidate the news markets. Case in point, my own city of Houston had half a dozen different newspapers chugging along just fine for decades. But because they were small, they were also very cheap. Loose monetary policy in the 90s made buying up papers very cheap. So the Houston Chronicle went around town buying the smaller papers and shutting them down. Now its the only major newspaper of record remaining.
"Well, people on Lemmy should have paid for more subscriptions to the Houston Post" is a fucking asinine statement, given that their stated reason for failure was cost of newsprint rising in the early 90s and they stopped existing before most of the people on this site were even born.
"Distracting headlines" as a canard gets a bit old. Everything is a distraction from everything else, because we have a heavily monopolized mass media and a shrinking pool of investigative journalists with any kind of budget.
When you had twice as many newspapers and half as many people, the idea of "distracting headlines" was more a matter of consumer choice (you could read serious news at the New York Times or junk pop-media at the New York Post). Now media functions as a cartel, with papers all echoing one another on topics of the day. Or deliberately remaining silent on embarrassments the business community owners would rather not talk about.
This isn't a "Trump" problem, though. Its a problem of consolidation and privatization on a national scale.
If a girl wants to play a sport for which there is a boys team but not girls team, she must be allowed to try out and participate on the same basis as the boys
Sure. And occasionally you get a girl to qualify. Sarah Fuller as the place kicker for Vanderbilt Commodores, for instance.
But the disparity in builds - particularly in a high contact sport like football - makes women qualifying virtually impossible.
So for example, if you cut funding to a boys team and parents more than make up the shortfall in donations and fundraising, it’s entirely possible based on that you might have to cut it further.
This was in response to early efforts to effectively privatize student athletics and freeze women's sports out.
I'm sure it's a matter of time before our current patriarchy fetish SCOTUS to reverse this out. But for the time being, you can't just find a few mega-donors to create a "Private Men's Club" on a public campus. What is ultimately being measured is access, which does get nebulous, but is necessarily the case when so many misogynists are intent on digging out loopholes to render Title XI toothless.
It’s been demonstrated within equality movements that statistical biological strength corresponding to sex does not always correspond to actual performance.
Depends heavily on the sport and the quality of coaching. Direct contact sports - football in particular - present real risks to the players when there's a big disparity in size and strength.
But then there's an argument that middle/high school contact sports shouldn't be allowed to begin with, precisely because of the risk of injury.
Title IX requires gender equity in access and spending. It doesn't strictly require women to access men's sports, but it does require the school fully fund/admit women to equivalent in the abstract.
So, for instance, if you spend $100k/year on the boys-only football program, you need $100k dedicated to a girl accessible sport (typically volleyball or softball or soccer).
i think sport, exspecially in schools, should always be mixed
At the middle school age range, girls are typically bigger and stronger than their male peers. Boys don't catch up until 14-16, at which point they rapidly put on height and mass to exceed their girl peers.
So, here's the thing about Trumpworld. The critiques themselves often aren't wrong.
The problem with Trumpworld is that you've got meatheads like Hegseth and Noem whining about how America's Gone Woke with mushy liberal institutions, when what they're complaining about is someone painting a rainbow flag on the side of a cruise missile.
The USIoP is practically sprouting from the hip of the IMF and World Bank, institutions notorious for their roles in global privatization of public commons, international arms dealing to US allies, and libertarian market-based propagandizing. They're outgrowths of American finance capital and heavily geared towards commoditizing foreign markets and prying them open for US banks and businesses to lay claim to the interior at deeply discounted rates.
The USIoP operates as a diplomatic core that can try and rationalize and institutionalize foreign occupation after the US has entered a region. And there's no better example of this than their role in authoring policy to pacify Iraqi resistance movements at the end of the Bush tenure.
A more objective observer might ask why we need Congress to continue to intercede in Iraqi politics five long years after we'd announced "Mission Accomplished" from the deck of a nearby aircraft carrier. But neoconservatives would sneeringly refute that Iraqis simply aren't ready to govern themselves and still need Americans to guide them towards a liberal democracy.
Obviously, Trumpworld disagrees. They think the solution to every foreign policy dispute is to murder dissidents en mass. And that's what we're seeing in Venezuela.
But USIoP hasn't done anything to keep us out of Venezuela. Or to expedite our exit from Iraq or Afghanistan. Or to prevent us from bombing Yemen or Iran. Or to avoid overthrowing the governments in Libya and Syria. Or to diffuse the conflict in Ukraine. Or to end the blockade and Israeli-induced famine in Gaza. So what role are they fulfilling?