US foreign policy is completely incoherent right now. The answers don’t really matter. They’re just making these individual policy decisions based on trying to bully their allies/enemies to test the water as to how far they can impose their will on the rest of the world and be unpredictable.

Why does the US need critical minerals from Ukraine if there’s no global heating and therefore we wouldn’t need Elon Musk’s EVs? Their positions make sense (to them) individually, but don’t make any sense when you put them together. But when your electorate has the memory of a squirrel and is glued to social media propaganda feeds, you don’t need coherent policy to stay in power.

ycombinator is shit lol

Some kind of crowd-sourced tagging would be a cool anti-troll technique. A lot of less experienced websurfers struggle to spot “inauthentic behaviour” (bots, astroturfing, etc) so it could be beneficial. Reddit has a huge problem with sleeper accounts though, where they build up reputation with low-effort comments over years, then activate when a campaign needs them. The social media marketers seem to sometimes use the same techniques as the state-sponsored troll farms.