AMA (YYW)

Pls. advise regarding the three worst decisions of Winston Churchill.

Medicare is a complicated program.  I imagine it would work the way that health care works in France, which is that there is a baseline public option which is covered by tax dollars.  After that, private health care would be available likely with a supplemental insurance option for those who wished to purchase it. 

To explain that, medicare pays for about 80% of all medical services, but the remaining 20% can still be expensive.  So, a lot of people purchase supplemental health insurance after that to cover the difference between the amount charged and the amount Medicare pays.  

Basic stuff like routine checkups and prescriptions would be covered at 100% or almost 100% with a de minimis co pay, especially for kids. 

However, there's no indication that it has to work like I've described.  This is just one of about ten or twelve possible ways it could work.  

The basic idea is to make it so that people don't have to be afraid of getting sick.  If there's a problem, they go to the doctor and get it taken care of.  That's the way it ought to be, and that's the way it is in almost every first world country in the world. 

It doesn't have to be so much harder or worse for Americans, and it shouldn't be. 

>Aliens

That's an absurd question, which you know is absurd, and it is particularly absurd to ask it of me, given what you know about my antipathy towards sci fi.  

> Churchill

That's a difficult question.  I'll have to think about it.  Limiting this to WWII, obviously.  But, off the top of my head, in order:

1.  The universe of failures to anticipate Hitler's ambitions and intentions. 

This is one continuing and ongoing, unbroken line of failures which began with failing to attack the nazis after Hitler invaded Poland, continued with his failure to anticipate that Hitler would advance into France and assuming that he would be content with the Sudetenland; and the list goes on, through to May 1940 when he seriously thought that there was a prospect of peace with Hitler.  The only reason that Germany grew into what it did was that the Allied powers did not dispose of Hitler when it became obvious that he was a threat.  Likely, if he'd been less preoccupied with being paranoid about Stalin, he might have seen what was right in front of him. 

2.  What occurred on his watch as it relates to the Crown's prosecution of Alan Turing.

What the Crown did to Turing transcends immorality.  Alan Turing singlehandedly broke the code that the nazis were using to communicate.  The intelligence obtained from intercepted communications enabled the Americans and the Soviets to go on to win the war.  England repaid him by prosecuting him for being gay, and chemically castrating him before he committed suicide.  Churchill could have and failed to intervene to stop this. 

3.  The universe of the ways he treated Stalin in WWII probably had a direct hand in the Cold War's occurrence.

There is no doubt that Joseph Stalin was a pathologically murderous horror of a man, but he was not worse than Hitler at the time of WWII; nor did he present anything approximating the same level of threat to the world itself that Hitler did.  Nevertheless, it was Stalin who Churchill was more guarded about whereas Churchill thought he could do business with Hitler.  Turns out that the opposite was the case.  

good answers on such short turn around. I’d put his worst decisions around WWI, myself,  the Ottoman fleet siezures, Gallipoli, & repartition of the Middle East, perhaps but I like the readiness of this reply. 

What do you think of the summary of this book:

I have not read Buchanan's book, and don't intend to do so any time soon.  Patrick Buchanan is a pseudo-intellectual fraud, and his reputation precedes him in this and numerous other respects.  That all being said, my criticism of Churchill is for failing to take stronger, more aggressive, more decisive action when it was beyond obvious that Hitler was the kind of menace that had to be disposed of permanently at various different points long before England even entered the war. 

Of course, the same and other criticism could be leveraged against Stalin (who in his naivety and stupidity thought Hitler would honor their little peace pact, and then hid like a coward from news that he was double crossed while soviet soldiers were being massacred as the generals were afraid to act without direction from Stalin).  But, Stalin at least had the logistical excuse that he was legitimately buying time to militarize in terms of his little peace agreement after Hitler invaded Poland.

Churchill, on the other hand, had no excuse.  England was already militarized and he had no need to buy time.  The obvious action that should have been taken was Churchill to ally with France and the remaining allied countries -- and form them -- and reign a measure of hell down upon the Nazis sufficient to dissuade any further conquest on their part.  A working relationship with the less obvious menace Stalin would have been prudent to this end, too. 

I will respond to the rest of your thing in a bit 

I disagree with that characterization of Churchill.  But, however popular neoisolationist frivolity may be among the populist right at this particular moment (due in large part to the fact that we are just far enough away from WWII to have a living memory of what happens in the absence of an indispensable nation underwriting world peace by and through the barrels of our guns), public opinion will change on isolationism as soon as war breaks out anew in such a way that hurts America and/or Americans.  

Great answers, and unlike most people on this site, you address the ideas regardless of your unfavorable opinion of the person with those ideas.

it's too bad this site does not have more like you.

Please identify 3 internet sources you generally trust for recent news.

Well, the reason I have such profound issues with people like Buchanan are because he has been demonstrably wrong on nearly every policy he has opined on; his analysis on nearly every historical event he has weighed on has been misguided; his insight on nearly every current or past issue has been out of touch with reality; and his biases cloud his ability to understand or forecast the probable, or even plausible outcomes of any present trend in the future.  Basically, he's the equivalent of a raving lunatic with a pen... a deranged old man whose understanding of the world is wholly lacking in anything vaguely resembling competency or coherency.  

But, it's not enough to just call him names... however amusing that may be.  There's got to be a justification for all those adjectives, and the justification lies in careful consideration of any position on any issue he has ever taken.  While there may be, I admit, some issues on which he is not totally wrong, I have yet to see them; though a broken clock is right at least twice per day and he may be no exception.  But I don't know.  Though what you gave me about him and his patently absurd theories about WWII... he can't even get the facts right, and given that he can't even get the facts right, there's nothing further to be said about his opinions because they're based on nothing.  It is for this reason that Buchanan is not taken seriously by any person in any competent field, anywhere in the United States or anywhere in the world.  At best, he has a few who adore him among the Hungarian and Italian far right... a modest following of troglydites in the US, and that's it.  

>  News Sources

I get news online from all over.  All in all, Reuters, the Associated Press, and Vice are fairly reliable.  

Beyond that, McClatchy DC, the New York Times, and the Washington Post are usually good. 

For political coverage, CQ Roll Call is the gold standard. 

If you want to look outside of the US, I suggest Spiegel, Deutsche Welle and the Suddeutche Zeitung, as well as the Financial Times. 

For world affairs, Foreign Affairs Mag is second to none.  Foreign Policy mag is to be avoided, because it is the IR equivilent of the National Enquirer (also to be avoided).  

What is your opinion on Al-Jazeera?

AJ is worthless. 

More questions are welcomed, but they should be good questions.  

I'm on record that I don't give a fuck about Sci Fi... so keep that out.

Could the Allies after World War 2 win against a war against the Soviet Union? 

Without question, both immediately after and at all subsequent points from 1945 until 1991, WWII's Allies minus the USSR could have defeated the USSR militarily at any point in time.  The only question was "at what cost" that victory could have been achieved.  The closer to 1991 you get, the higher the cost would have been.  However, in 1945 that cost would have been fairly insignificant. 

The reasons for this require little analysis beyond the obvious fact that the USSR lost tens of millions in WWII, and despite the modest efforts towards industrialization achieved before and during WWII, the USSR was very much an unsophisticated and almost entirely agrarian entity that was absolutely decimated by WWII.  This, after they never even really recovered from the catastrophic losses sustained in WWI.  While much of Western and Central Europe was also in shambles, the United States exited WWII stronger than the rest of the world combined.  The US alone could have taken on the USSR and won. 

Should the Allies have kept marching? Do you think they were close to a nuclear bomb in 1945?

That is a much more complicated question....

First, the allies continuing to march is exactly what Stalin was afraid of; in part because he was a paranoid delusional type out of touch with reality, and in part because Churchill had every intention of doing exactly that as soon as the Nazis were defeated.  So, even though Stalin overestimated the degree to which the USSR was liable to invasion--and it is a matter of historical fact that he did--by the allies, there was one ally (Churchill/UK) that was entirely ready and willing to make Stalin second on their list after Hitler.

Second, the fact that the Stalin was next on Churchill's list does not mean that Churchill was wise in this respect.  There is a fair counterfactual argument to be raised that if Churchill wasn't such an overzealous browbeater, the Cold War may well have been avoided.  Of course, the fact that Truman nixed plans to cooperatively invade Japan by ground with the USSR coming in from the north and the Americans coming in from the south; and instead dropped the most powerful weapons yet developed in the course of human history on Hiroshima and Nagasaki -- and gave the Soviets exactly no warning of this -- didn't help either.

The British knew what we, the Americans, were up to in Japan before a certain point in time in 1945; and they knew about it long before it happened, even to the point of contributing to the nuclear research and development.  The Soviets, on the other hand, had no idea.  They were totally caught off guard and once it became obvious to the world in general and Stalin in particular that the Americans had no intention of cooperating with the Soviets in Japan, and that the Americans brought the Japanese to their knees with a pair of nuclear weapons... and the fact that all the allies except Stalin knew of this long ahead of time (though some knew more than others; as the French were not read in to the same level as the British, for example) it was in the time between Nagasaki and the Japanese surrender that the Cold War began.

Stalin knew of what happened in Japan, but he couldn't believe that the Americans had a weapon of such magnitude.  He was mortified.  Psychologically, he was having flashbacks to when Hitler betrayed Stalin after Hitler invaded prematurely before the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact's expiration.  That is also probably the genesis of the idiotic analogies between Americans and Nazis by the Soviets following WWII, which continue to this day (I mean really... just take a look at the Kremlin's propaganda in Eastern and Southern Ukraine right this very moment). 

Now, given all of this... the thing to have done would have been to keep marching.  Stalin didn't have nuclear weapons until after the soviets stole the technology about 5 years later, and even then, the technology they had didn't even approximate what we have now.  It was, at best, a set of weapons that had to be delivered by a high-payload bomber which would have invariably shot out of the sky before it even got past Hawaii.  But, doing so would have been idiotic; war was perfectly avoidable, and there was exactly zero reason why this should have escalated further.  But it did.

The point I'm making is that the Cold War should not have even happened.  There should have never been an ideological struggle between "capitalism" and communism, and the fears of communism should have never been the sole animating force behind American foreign policy in the first instance.  Any doubt to that end was resolved when Nixon was in office, and when Nixon went to China.  Kissinger's book has some worthwhile perspective on that subject.  Something similar could have happened with the USSR.  It almost did with Gorbachev, but for reasons that had much more to do with the USSR's imminent implosion than because of anything Reagan did or wished he might have done.

Can I have a hug?

You can always have a hug.  

* hugs *

What is your opinion on Sen Joseph McCarthy?

Highly negative.  Want me to elaborate?

Absolutely. A lot of people forget about that part of American History.

>McCarthy

Nearly every aspect of Joe McCarthy's life and political career obviate the extent of his paranoia, personality disorder(s), and mental illness.  

In February 1950, McCarthy got his rise to stardom when he gave a speech proclaiming without evidence that the entirety of the State Department was "infested" with Communists who were working for the USSR and China.  He put together a list of names -- not unlike the list of enemies Nixon would create at a future point in time -- which he divined were members of the communist party but who were nevertheless in the State Department.  This was the first of what you all might understand today as a "Deep State" conspiracy theory.  That obviously got everyone's attention, and people wanted proof.  So, naturally, he doubled down and wrote Truman calling for a congressional inquiry into the same; which happened, in the form of the so called House un-American Activities Committee.  Why HUAC was horrible requires no explanation. 

Are you still fond of Kamala Harris? I myself think she is a disingenuous, deplorable dirt bag, and by a far stretch the worst of the Democratic bunch given what's come up about her recently.

Yay thank you <3

You are welcome.

More questions are encouraged from all.  About nearly anything.

We've covered a lot of ground here.

topic suggestions:

Brexit; hard or soft, deal or no deal

European Union and its Fate

German Politics, 19th Century to Present

Immigration in UK and US

Conflict in Africa and Middle East, and Impact to Immigration

Middle Eastern Politics

Saudi Arabia

Israel

Palestine

Syria

Iran

Soviet History; Lenin to Gorbachev

Russian History; Kievan Rus to Putin

Cold War

Ukraine

Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia

NATO

Russian Literature; Dostoevsky in particular

Central and Eastern European Politics

Central Asian Politics 

Bilateral Chinese-Russian Politics

Geopolitical implications of climate change in the Arctic

Russian politics (on any level)

American History

European History

World History

So maybe you made a second post about her that I am not seeing...

So I assume you heard about the shutdown. How long do you thing this will last?