mekka okereke Apr 4, 2025

I'm a good negotiator. I'm not mincing words or being awkwardly humble about it. Your boy is nice with it.

Because negotiating is about empathy. It requires the ability to put yourself in the other party's shoes, and to think about their wants and needs, and their concerns. It requires you to care.

A person that doesn't even pretend to care about other people, and that lacks the ability to see the world from perspectives other than their own, cannot be a good negotiator.

I said what I said.

Threatening people is not good negotiating.

Brinkmanship is not good negotiating.

Those are just different ways to cash in previous goodwill, and cause trust to evaporate. And they only work when you have something to threaten with.

They make people never want you to have power over them again.

Show threadNow at @[email protected]

@mekkaokereke Trump's version of negotiating basically amounts to bullying and belittling someone until you get your way.

It's a zero-sum game. There's a winner and a loser.

It's transactional. There is no broader strategy. There is no long game. There is no giving up some ground in this negotiation to support a broader aim elsewhere.

There's no understanding, for example, that a peaceful Europe with low trade barriers is a good environment for the likes of Apple and Nike and McDonald's and Exxon to sell their goods and services.

Or supporting Ukraine in its war against Russia helps protect that trade environment, which is profitable for *many* American corporations.

And he's playing geopolitics against opponents who are playing a long game.

China is playing a long game to supplant the US as the world's hegemonic economic, political, and military superpower between 2035 and 2045. It's positioning itself as a superpower of the Global South, building alliances and alternative institutions now to support that goal: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shanghai_Cooperation_Organisation

Ex-KGB Kremlin guys like Putin are playing a long game to be the dominant Eurasian power, and extract their vengeance against America for the fall of the USSR.

And yes, some of Trump's oligarchs have a Curtis Yarvin inspired long game. But it's more domestic than geopolitical.

Shanghai Cooperation Organisation - Wikipedia

Apr 5, 2025 at 9:14amWeb
Show thread(rainynight65) has movedApr 5, 2025
@ajsadauskas @mekkaokereke @ajsadauskas @mekkaokereke key problem with the right wing is that *everything* is a zero-sum game to them. Economics. Politics. Human rights. They've reduced zero-sum down to this- they either win it all - or they're losing. And losing is not an option to them. By that token, for them to win, others *must* lose, and lose badly. Anything else is weakness. If someone else wins even just a bit - they're losing.
Show threadSteveg58Apr 6, 2025
@rainynight65 @ajsadauskas @mekkaokereke
I'm not sure the right wing even understands what a zero-sum game is. Any number of things that ARE zero sum games they treat as open games ... such as: you are poor because you are lazy rather than the more accurate: you are poor because we have allowed privilaged people to draw too heavily from a finite pool of wealth and there is none left for you.
Show threadJürgen HubertApr 7, 2025

@Steveg58 @rainynight65 @ajsadauskas @mekkaokereke

I think it's less a matter of "work ethic" as such than that they believe that some demographics are _inherently_ lazy.

I.e. "I am white and therefore hardworking and good. You are <X> and therefore lazy and deceitful, and any success you might have had has come at the expense of people who are clearly better, i.e. people like me!"

Calling someone "lazy" is just window dressing for their racist/fascist beliefs. They do not work from the same dictionary definition as the rest of us do.

Show threadSteveg58Apr 7, 2025
@juergen_hubert @rainynight65 @ajsadauskas @mekkaokereke
I wouldn't focus on the use of the word "lazy" there there are many claims made using different terminology but they amount to the same thing a limited resource that is inequitably allocated to privileged groups.
I think you are agreeing with my but it is hard to be sure because you have been sidetracked by an irrelevant detail.
Show threadSam BriesemeisterApr 6, 2025

@rainynight65 @ajsadauskas @mekkaokereke

It’s as though they never heard of “the seven habits of highly effective people” …

Such destructive foolishness.

Show threadDwight Williams (💉 x9)+😷🇨🇦Apr 5, 2025

@ajsadauskas @mekkaokereke We will outlast all three.

#NeitherXiNorPutinNorTrump nor anyone else who thinks about the rest of us humans as those three do.

Show threadAndrew ElderApr 6, 2025
@ajsadauskas @mekkaokereke Putin is not playing a long game. He will have succeeded if he dies in his bed, like Stalin. He invokes religion to appear timeless, like Trump does, and as with Trump it's hollow because neither man acknowledges a power bigger than himself. He is so corrupted by the compromises he has made and is surrounded by his long-term enablers that any notion of a vision that outlasts him is nonsense
Show threadDoug Baker - Elbows Up! 🇨🇦Apr 6, 2025
@awelder @ajsadauskas @mekkaokereke I think Stalin died on a couch, didn't he? Took a stroke at a meeting? I had a Ukrainian cabbie, a WWII vet (fought at Stalingrad) who said he thought one of the cabinet ("a Georgian, like Stalin...because they've got big hands, you know?") actually finished him off with strangulation. Great cab ride that one was.
Show threadNow at @[email protected]Apr 6, 2025

@awelder @mekkaokereke If you haven't already, I'd strongly recommend getting up-to-speed on Aleksandr Dugin: https://tec.fsi.stanford.edu/docs/aleksandr-dugins-foundations-geopolitics

Even if Putin is not a Dugin-ist himself, I will almost certainly guarantee that his thinking on geopolitics is similar. Likewise, many senior people in the Kremlin, who came up through the KGB or Russian military during the dissolution of the Soviet empire.

The big strategic aim is the re-creation of a Eurasian empire, with Russia at the centre, and to position it as the world's hegemonic superpower.

In Europe, that means reclaiming all the Warsaw pact/czarist Russian states, either through military force or by appointing subservient governments.

That also means ending US and UK involvement in NATO.

With the US, withdrawal from Europe is not enough. There is a deep desire for vengeance and humiliation — particularly for the breakup of the Soviet empire, but more recently also for supporting Ukraine.

Not even Dugin is delusional enough to think there's any hope of Russia conquering France and Germany. So the aim is to get friendly-to-Russia far-right anti-US/UK governments in power.

And then build similar alliances with India and Iran.

China is a whole separate matter—but this post is long enough.

If you know that's the long game, then a lot of Putin's moves make sense.

Aleksandr Dugin's Foundations of Geopolitics

Show threadNearly Normal (=>÷)Apr 6, 2025

@ajsadauskas @awelder @mekkaokereke

This is a very pertinent analysis and it certainly puts Pootin's actions into perspective.

Show threadAndrew ElderApr 6, 2025
@ajsadauskas @mekkaokereke I think Dugin is a blowhard and the Russians can't make the Eurasian thing work, economically, militarily, diplomatically, in any other way