Nuts, definitely. Bonkers to jump to that conclusion? No, especially with this US administration.
Mexico itself is concerned enough about the possibility that it's made statements to make it clear it wouldn't be acceptable. Mexico thinks it's nuts, too, but not bonkers to think the US might do it.
> You can't be a simple mayor without cartel involvement in Mexico.
I don't know what world you're living in, but this is absolutely not the case. Mexico is not a failed state, don't get all your news from places trying to scare you.
Re: "It's much more comfortable to be the person that 'could be X' than to be the person that tries to actually do it."
I build entertainment experiences (escape rooms, live game shows, etc.), and I find that this also applies to individual projects/products. In the early planning stages we outline the ideal contours of a project, but as we build and run into constraints we start to see the gap between our vision and execution. And, usually, it's fine. We're the only ones who can see that gap because we're the only ones who knew the original plan. Guests only see what exists. We see what almost existed, what was left on the cutting room floor.
The planning stage is the most comfortable because we don't yet have to reckon with how we have fallen short of our plan. Now, during every planning phase, there's a visceral acknowledgment that there will be a gap between vision and execution, but we make choices that attempt to make those gaps smaller or, at least, acceptable.
I suspect they also hope developer choice gets reframed from "Unity or Unreal" to "Godot or Unreal." In other words: Unity gets bumped out of the picture since Godot can do what it does and is open source, while Unreal stays comfortably in the hyperrealism/high-end perch.
Would you ask an amoeba the same thing? A plant? What about an insect? A mouse? Humans are capable of thought that cows are not. Chickens are not.
For example, cows cannot conceive of object persistence. Human infants do not until 2+ years, some parrots do, etc. So what you have to ask yourself, is would the animals even be aware they are captured? And do they have the intellect to care? Or do they entirely live "in the moment", and thus, are happy if healthy, fed, and not being hunted or fearful of a wolf nearby?
Or maybe you might want to ask yourself, would you prefer to be eaten alive? For an animal like a bison, death seldom comes instantly. Death comes while pieces of your body are ripped off of you, as you mewl and scream and cry and bleed to death slowly. Passing out, waking up again only to see you're still being eaten.
Trying to make a choice based upon your mind, your body, your reality is frankly unfair. An example being, there are pack animals and animals that live solo.
By your metric, that is by measuring happiness for an animal by how you would want to live, you'd take those animals that hate living together, and try to force them to? Because that's what you're asking...
What would I want?
So I ask you instead, if we shouldn't interfere, should we then ensure we don't succor or help wild animals in any way? Let's say we stop eating all meat. We do so because "it's wrong to keep an animal captive, even if they are happier and healthier". OK.
So, then by what metric do we have to help animals in the wild? If they have a plague, should we not care or try to help? We have helped wild animals in the past with such things.
Would the animals understand the question asked? Would a cow understand vaccination? Eradication of bot flies?
I think you're missing a key part of the argument. The question is, do you support inflicting excessive suffering on beings that are capable of suffering? Factory farming intentionally forces billions of animals, each capable of feeling pain and suffering, to more of that pain and suffering than is necessary, all in the pursuit of profit.
It is not a question of eating meat or not. It's about inflicting more pain and suffering than is necessary, for money. Some pain and suffering is inevitable for all animals, but there is absolutely no need to add to it because you like the taste of the results.
Just a quibble - children learn object permanence at around six months of age. Also, I don't think the jury is quite in on cows - I've seen papers that argue both ways.
One way we could quantify cow happiness, if we were interested in doing so, is in the amount of stress hormones they produce.
This reminds me of a story, where a utility had buried power lines near a farmer's grazing field. These were milk cows, and he didn't know why but they had stopped giving milk, and seemed sickly.
Vets couldn't figure it out. They seemed healthy otherwise.
Turned out that for some reason, the cows were constantly being low-level shocked.
Most people I know, prefer to think of eating an animal that was happy until it was killed, and killed mercifully. It could be an important metric, much like grass-fed or some other property.
Millennials, I'd argue. During the 90s, culture at large painted a picture of stability and progress, all made possible by democracy. See Francis Fukuyama's The End of History for the kind of tone that permeated the time.
As we Millenials have gotten older, we too have seen through the veil and realized the system isn't perfect. More importantly, perhaps, we've seen the wide range of ways people react to this imperfect system. Some have chosen to undermine its very foundations to get their way, leaving many to wonder what we're left with if -- to loosely quote Whose Line Is It Anyway -- the rules are made up and the points don't matter.
The late 70s through the 90s were kind of our last stable period (the 60s & early 70s were tumultuous with Viet Nam and Watergate, and the 30s & 40s were dominated by Depression and World War). That all starts to unravel with 9/11 and the response to it (starting wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that cost us $Trillions and didn't really help stabilize the region and ironically began the destabilization of the US).
Much as we like to kvetch about Clinton (and I've certainly done my share of it, and certainly much of the criticism has merit), if there was a "golden age" of America in recent memory, the Clinton era was it.
In 2015, a friend and I resolved to ride our bicycles across Japan. I had felt the yearn to go on an adventure that engaged my whole body and encouraged exploration in an environment completely new to me. I deeply desired some version of crossing Middle Earth, and a bike ride with a start and end point but no plan in between felt like just the thing.
In April of 2016 we set off from Kagoshima, and a few weeks later we ended our trip in Osaka. We made it roughly a third as far as we had wanted, but it’s a trip we’ll never forget, and one that we desperately want to continue someday. It scratched an itch I didn’t know how else I could scratch.
US troops in Mexico 'not on the table', Sheinbaum tells Trump https://www.france24.com/en/americas/20260112-us-troops-mexi...