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Robert E Kelly Profile picture
@Robert_E_Kelly
Aug 11, 2020 • 9 tweets • 2 min read • Read on X
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Can we all agree that ‘functional training’ is a euphemism for still being able to tie your own shoelaces as you slide into 50? God, this is depressing
I’m really not very functional, apparently. Ugh
Seriously, I hate all this cross-fit stuff. It’s depressing. It really makes you feel washed out. I’d rather run
So I did: strava.app.link/KrmR1FJkS8
Here we go again. Wow. All these mobility exercises are actually pretty tough. All this ham and spinal twisting makes you feel like a grandmother who can’t get out of a recliner. Very humbling
Seriously, I miss the 80s, when everyone sat around the gym in knee-high Dad tubesocks pretending to bench. That was way easier.
Wait, this gets worse? What the hell are ‘commando planks’? Planks are bad enough. Good grief.
How about some hill repeats instead? At least I know what that is: strava.app.link/ZOsZqrsWU8
So I’ve completed a week of ‘functional training,’ and my conclusion is that I’m, um, dysfunctional.

Pretty sure my wife and my dean would concur with that assessment.

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More from @Robert_E_Kelly

Robert E Kelly Profile picture
Jun 15
🧵
Some broad thoughts on the end of the war:

1. Trump is too lazy & clownish for a project as large & serious as a major war

Once it became clear that a strategic victory required ground combat, he got cold feet. If he had read anything about US wars in the M East or had

1
insisted on a proper policy process beforehand,he might have learned that. He didn’t, bc work bores him & he doesn’t read. So he trusted Netanyahu & his own gut

This is very similar to Trump’s refusal to prep or learn bf meeting Kim Jong-Un. Trump winged it thru those de-nuke

2
talks, which is a big reason why nothing came of them

2. America learned the limits of airpower - again

This is not new, & if Trump had done his prep & wasn’t so incurious, he probably would have asked his advisors if this would work now, where it had not in the past, & what

3
Read 9 tweets
Robert E Kelly Profile picture
Sep 7, 2025
This whole tangle👇 is such perfect example of Trumpian greed, nativism, and incompetence:

1. Trump wants ‘deals,’ not treaties or law, w/ trade partners

No one knows quite what a deal is, but that’s the whole point. It keeps the terms loose & vague so that Trump can renege.

1
2. Trump doesn’t actually care about the details of SK investment; he just wants to market it as a ‘win’ on Fox

So the S Koreans are stuck with whatever thrown-together ‘framework’ emerges from the disorganized, competing interests within the Trump administration

3. The US

2
visa system has been a mess for decades, and xenophobic MAGA wants it that way

So the SKs don’t know how to get in the needed work-force to operationalize Trump’s deal. They end up getting arrested, bc Trump’s gov't is a disunified, disorganized mess which can't prioritize or

3
Read 4 tweets
Robert E Kelly Profile picture
Apr 14, 2025
The Trump administration is not acting on the policy suggestions these books make, so I guess they can’t be that important after all.

Both Huntington & Allison recommend America ally with like-minded states against jihadism and China respectively.

Mearsheimer too recommends

1
allies, given how hyper-competitive he sees world politics - especially territorially proximate allies given the stopping power of water.

Yet Trump is wrecking US partnerships for a belligerent unilateralism even neocons wouldn’t advocate.

Next, all three 3 understand that

2
national power is based on economic foundations. None advocates Smoot-Hawley-style tariffs, especially against allies.

Yet that is what Trump is doing.

All argue that world politics is a jungle, but lots of realists argue that. That’s noting new.

If you really want to see

3
Read 4 tweets
Robert E Kelly Profile picture
Apr 2, 2025
I would qualify this👇: MAGA is an ideology of US decline

- It is explicitly backward-looking for its model (America was great in the past but is not now).

- That past greatness was rooted in a fading economic sector - blue-collar factory work - which no amount of tarriffs

1
will revivify.

- MAGA aches for older social relations - most obviously in its intense dislike of economically independent women - even if it costs the economy.

- It similarly dislikes immigration, despite the obvious economic benefits, particularly entrepeneurialism.

2
- It rejects imports despite the obvious benefits of better quality & lower price from competition.

- It exults small-town and rural America, even though the engine of American GDP growth is cities and regional clusters

- It resents higher education even though that leads to

3
Read 8 tweets
Robert E Kelly Profile picture
Mar 2, 2025
Trump is NOT a realist. Realism uses national power to serve nat’l interests, without ideological blinders, right?

But Trump:

- pointlessly antagonizes the 2 countries with which we have a land border

- aggressively pursues the factional, ideological interests of Christian

1
fundamentalists in the M East rather than US general interest

- undermines NATO which has kept the peace for 80 years in a core area of US FoPo interest

- believes autocracies like Russia or N Korea are credible counterparties

- rejects alliances which supplement US power

2
& enable US global power projection

- thinks trade wars with allies enhance US power

- is guided in foreign policy by his own ego quirks - loathing for Zelensky & female leaders, admiration for dictators - rather than US national interests

If Trump were a realist, he would

3
Read 8 tweets
Robert E Kelly Profile picture
Feb 21, 2025
🧵
Most of this is wrong. Let’s go thru it:

1. There is no evidence to substantiate the claim that Putin would not have invaded Ukraine were Trump president

MAGA keeps saying this as if it is self-evident, but given the size & scale of the Russian invasion,plus Putin's long-

1
running, deep-seated hatred for UKR independence, it is hard to believe this whole thing actually turned on a far-away event 16 months earlier: the 2020 US election. Indeed, the belief that the whole world turns on US decisions is a particular American hubris, probably derived

2
from our long-running superpowerdom. But it is not true. Other countries have agency independent of us, especially great powers like RU.

2. Vance and MAGA did not know that UKR had no pathway to victory for the last 3 years

This is lazy retrodiction – using contemporary info

3
Read 13 tweets

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