Carrolade

such action as it deems necessary

That's a key phrase.

Pariah, possibly, but I don't think a party like the AfD would particularly care about pariah status. I'll also remind you that Article 5 has been triggered once, by George W Bush after 9/11. He then wanted to invade Iraq, and did not receive the full support of NATO members.

It's just not that simple, unfortunately.

This is actually not true.

Article Five states that an attack on one becomes an attack on all. This wording is very specific, and they wrote it with this wording intentionally, to get people to be willing to agree to join.

It does not require counterattacks or declarations of war, merely that you consider an attack on a member an attack on you.

How do people respond to different sorts of attacks? How can they theoretically respond if they so choose? These are the kinds of games being played in Putin's head.

I think they're just reading the room. If he goes full-on authoritarian, do your shareholders benefit more from you getting in his way or licking his boots?

His first term there was a sense that he might shake things up, but they would eventually return to some semblance of balance of power. This second term, people still wonder deep down whether Trump might try to pull a S Korean style martial law declaration at some point, and perhaps meet greater success.

Apparently. Usually there's some sort of angle though.

Who the hell bothers to make something so random and dumb up?

I've seen people within the Harris campaign blame all sorts of things. "Identity politics" is broad enough that it can be almost anything. Republican and democratic are even identities these days.

Any idea where I can find any of those studies? That'd be an interesting read. It's certainly not my experience when driving around the country, where outside of every city dems have almost vanished it seems. Perhaps policy is less important than Fox News messaging.

I dunno, I think Biden promised a lot he couldn't deliver, things frankly outside of his power like codifying Roe, and it hurt us a little bit. But maybe I just prefer realistic, detail-oriented perspectives instead of hope. I want to know how a person is going to get the votes they need to pass legislation, how they are going to convince a Senator from a red state that drifted blue to support their policy, even when the whole gop propaganda machine attacks them for it.

I can agree with most of that. I'm not so sure where you get trans people being thrown under the bus and blamed for the loss, though, LGBT folks in general voted at a pretty high rate afaik.

Ultimately, there's just not enough of us, though. I think that's the core problem. The general sentiment most prevalent geographically across the nation is right-leaning, and due to the electoral college (edit: and Senate distribution), that gets to determine an outsized amount of policy. We can't not make something palatable to the gop, or we simply get nothing. That's what they want, after all, us to get nothing. It's what we have to work with. We can't magically just change that without the actual votes to do so.

Especially when the Supreme Court is considered, which we haven't held in decades. But even in the legislature, our majorities when we infrequently get them are narrow, with no real room to maneuver. The thing I'd personally most like to see is voting rights protections and campaign finance reform, but I know that'll never pass without 60 Senate seats, which feels like a pipe dream. Nobody's leadership can do anything about that, they have to work within the rules too.

One thing I think people miss about Trump's rhetoric is that when he toys with an idea, it's sometimes about feeling out the response. It doesn't have to be limited to seriously floating a plan or just trying to rile up his opponents, it can also be like a person trying on a piece of clothing. You try it on, walk out of the dressing room and guage reactions.

He's not so calculating that he has any sort of singular goal when he acts. He's just throwing things at the wall and seeing what happens, and going from there. He's ultimately, extremely flexible.

Anything that throws more sand into the gears of western allies is to the benefit of a rival. Make people more afraid, make anything more expensive, more inconvenient, etc etc, until we throw our own countries into chaos.

Not entirely true, laws being to the benefit of the rich requires some cherry picking. Dems have allowed tax cuts to the rich to expire, that was not to the benefit of the wealthy. Obama taxed private health insurance to fund the ACA, that was not to the benefit of the wealthy. Free school lunches are not a benefit to the wealthy, nor is increased minimum wage in many states.

People have forgotten all of this, though, which is a failure in communication imo. I do agree that the dems need to fight more fiercely overall, though.

Sure.

My argument was in reply to a general sentiment, as opposed to this particular situation. That person was making an overall statement that people should be harder, that was what I was addressing. People should not necessarily be harder, people should be what they want to be, that's a freedom all people should have.

Sure, I understand what an oligarch is. I just think their influence is overestimated, and the amount of people that think neo-liberalism is legitimately a good thing from a philosophical standpoint is underestimated.

People tend to blame that on oligarchs, which is a convenient cop-out imo. Oligarchs have become this boogey-man we can conveniently blame our problems on instead of having to take a more critical look at our problems in things like messaging and communication.

edit: Like, look at Joe Rogan. I don't think his success in communication is due to oligarchy in any of its forms. That's an example of the kind of communication and outreach that we lack, though. They've got it, we don't.