It's concerning, and in the modern world, unusual, for war rhetoric to aspire to the literal obliteration of the enemy nation
It's unusual for Europeans but probably not as crazy in that part of the world. The problem, of course, is that the Israelis want to be seen as Europeans/Westerners not like the sort of demented terrorists who run around saying they'll obliterate Israel.
Tanista
9hr ago
No. It's really irrelevant to the relationships involved.
A pretty solipsistic view of relationships. The reality of the situation and the particular problems your ally faces are irrelevant to the relationship you have with them? You don't think that it matters, if only as an extenuating factor, whether your betas are resisting because they want something non-essential or whether it's because it really is a serious matter for them?
Even the most blinkered tyrant doesn't assume that telling someone to jump and telling them to jump into a chasm are the same thing.
I think you mean irrelevant to the power dynamic.
It's embarrassing to me as an American if this is let pass.
That's my point! You're already being embarrassed! If anyone should be bracketing the Lebanon issue it's Iran. They should be glad to get a deal with America. Instead America is so feeble apparently that Iran can basically bully it into not just surrendering in the Hormuz theater but in Lebanon/Israel.
But I grant that this whole thing is a good representation of Trumpian foreign policy: madman theory without the nerve, deference to enemies who will fight back combined with not just disrespect to allies but a sort of put-upon, aggrieved attitude about American honor as if America wasn't already casting it aside with great abandon under his rule.
Israel probably won't hold out against the US for long, it is too dependent. And they have fucked themselves here in a permanent way imo, so you can enjoy that. But to me this whole thing is displacement: you can't actually bring your enemies to heel so you look at the other guy and act like that's where the humiliation is coming from.
I do wish I could see how the realists who've been praying for this sort of break with Israel/approach to Iran reacted upon finding out that fucking Trump and Vance are the ones parroting their talking points now though.
- How do you think America would respond if Mexico just carried off their women in a Bronze Age raid and Canada started launching rockets at them?
- That wasn't the only attack, they fired other rockets at Israel within the week.
Tanista
1d ago
What the fuck did Lebanon do?!
Lebanon was supposed to disarm Hezbollah and couldn't and basically allowed them to continue as is. Post-Oct 7th they started shelling northern Israel and forced many people to evacuate.
Essentially, they declared a (limited) war in support of Hamas and refused to back down until the situation in Gaza was resolved. America invaded Afghanistan for similar reasons.
Not really part of the question here. How we got here and what decisions Trump made are kind of irrelevant.
Ridiculous. It has everything to do with it, and this sort of pivot into fake grievance due to actions people chose to take is not irrelevant.
So Trump started a war with Iran and failed to achieve his ends, folded, and is now trying to buy his way out by forcing the Hezbollah situation to a stalemate again (when they were supposed to be disarmed decades ago, talk about cucked) and because Israel makes some noises via their most demented minister Israel is cucking the United States?
What about the nation whose nuclear program Trump claimed to have destroyed, whose civilization he threatened to extinguish who he's now backing down to and paying and helping maintain the efficacy of their proxy and basically making it clear that blackmailing the world via the strait is now a-okay? Their cock isn't in his mouth?
Question: what's to stop Hezbollah from taking a breather and going back to shelling Israel and demanding nothing be done lest their ally close the strait again? Who'd be to blame then?
I mean, on some level this is delicious karma for Israel. They put all their hopes on the most transactional and changeable man in politics and somehow expected him to take a massive L before the midterms when he could just cut and run and are reaping what they're sowing. Trump isn't Bush, he isn't just going to hang around because global economy/rules-based, liberal international order/blah blah.
But the shamelessness here in the pivoting and scapegoating on the Trump side is intolerable.
Labour is unpopular and it's a long wait till an election. No one knows what'll happen or what pacts will be made.
I think what Lowe would say is that Farage chucked him for being too radical (serious about his positions in his view) and that he's trying to do what Labour did and slide into power off the back of an unpopular party without having to make any concrete but unpopular promises.
Given they've already had one set of Tory politicians promise one thing and then perform a total betrayal it's not insane to be distrustful. Why not pull a Farage and attack him from the right and prevent him from just taking his base for granted and becoming the new Tories?
Well, 2rafa said why but I can see why he wouldn't just slink off into ignominy and trust the competence and good will of someone he think smeared him to cut off any potential challenge to just betraying the base again.
Rupert Lowe quit Nigel Farage’s political bloc out of personal disagreement
Um...I thought Farage defenestrated him and literally called the cops on him? Did I miss something?
At that point, it's war. If you're gonna screw people over, make sure they'll stay that way. Seems like Farage's miscalculation as much as anything.
Tanista
4d ago
Gretchen, stop trying to make European AI competitiveness happen. It's not going to happen.
I think it's past that now. I'm not sure the church is strong enough. Maybe in Sweden, which I'm ignorant of beyond some basics.
And besides, the government doesn't just fund propaganda. It funds actual increases in the status of women, e.g. the support for college loans in the US where women make up >60% of the debt and pay it off slower than men. It's worse: Biden has already made moves to forgive these loans so the government may move towards more subsidies that raise female status.
Tanista
4d ago
They're in the goldilocks zone of allowing women enough leeway for them to this sort of sexualized but high status work but also not so feminist that ridiculous male expectations aren't anathematized maybe?
Tanista
4d ago
As with everything, there is a defense of some alternate universe version of what Trump does. But that never functions as a defense of what Trump actually does because jumping into a war with Iran because you were feeling yourself after Venezuela and were listening to people like Netanyahu and Mark Levin is just so much dumber that you'd honestly rather have the Kennedy School people in charge.
The likely outcome of all of this is that Trump gets a worse deal than Obama did while admitting that the US almost certainly wouldn't use military force. Maybe his "strategy" is more high variance but it hardly seems worth it.
Tanista
4d ago
Yeah, the Bush example can at least be blamed on the chaos and damage (and the lies) that followed.
In the case of Obama it was notable even though the public was war-weary and he was avoiding entanglements.
Tanista
5d ago
Most likely outcome is that Iran pockets any gains it makes in terms of driving a wedge between Israel and the US and continues down its own path of doing what it wants.
The US will gain no ally on the Iranian side (rightfully so).
Tanista
5d ago
It's impossible to imagine a world where Obama or Dubya or Clinton made these kinds of empty threats and promises that went nowhere at all.
Remember Obama's "red line" and the shit he got for that? Ancient history.
Tanista
6d ago
Chalamet should get a retroactive Oscar for Call Me By Your Name, because to this day people still believe that that gay softboi persona is how he really must be. He really can't shake it.
He's always been a white goober who loves sports and he arguably cost himself an Oscar talking like MJ without realizing people won't tolerate that shit from actors.
- That's not soccer, it's kickball.
- Elephants (like dolphins) are honorary Aryans. You picked one of the most sophisticated (and dexterous for its size, given the trunk) animals around.
Tanista
6d ago
Can't wait for Britain to win the World Cup so everyone can retreat to their houses and silently meditate on the fact that it's coming home.
No, what separates us from animals is our flexibility.
Soccer is the game where we show a level of finesse no animal can without even flexing with our opposable thumbs or superior handling. The ultimate mog.
Ability to avoid being arrested with trivial effort by not doing things like getting recorded or incriminating yourself via publicly posted video.
There's rumors that the NI protestors were "suggesting" businesses close and turn off their cameras, protestors leave phones at home and so on. Basic opsec but better in comparison.
Is that blacks, cops, school shooters, and reckless drivers aren't multiplying every year.
If we consider school shooting a white preoccupation (which is dubious using a naive definition but accurate if we mean suicidal spree shooters who actually get attention) these populations are rapidly aging out of peak offending years/into their obsolescence. White people are ancient, even blacks are, iirc, at the upper end of their 30s for their median age.
Tanista
10d ago
I don't think the population is the biggest problem here, though I grant that once the ratchet has been turned they're too squeamish (or easily distracted, thanks to Trump) about turning it back. If anything I think the complacency is a result of a belief that the immigration system is mostly sensible, and people don't want drama about it like they have down south (people also always underestimate how many migrants come in, though they felt it post-COVID).
It's clear that the ruining of the immigration system was a result of Liberal ideology and business lobbying post-COVID. Carney just baldly stated that he cannot do what the public is asking for and end temporary migrants because business is very concerned about losing that spigot.
I don't really think there's an easy political solution to the fact that businesses want cheap labour and are able to lobby Ottawa to get it, especially given the Liberals' entrenched power. There are benefits to being a vetocracy with neither party being able to dominate like in the US. Theoretically you could remove some programs and put everything under a points-based system but the next Parliament (likely Liberal) can just undo it at will.
There's some argument that the Liberals figured it was money on the ground and they would get to slam the CPC for being racist and maybe they've learned their lesson. I don't buy it though. I think you have to do to parties what happened to the UK Tories before people learn. The lesson here is that they destroyed the reputation of an immigration system that was well-regarded enough that Trump made noises about adopting it in 2016 and they had a couple of years of anxiety and then got right back to governing.
As someone with direct experience of the Canadian immigration system, this is not inherent to a points-based system: it's a product of deliberate choices, mostly by Trudeau.
The fraud problem, for example, became exponentially worse after COVID.
And a lot of this could be easily solved by things like a country cap. It's not that difficult to make it harder to coordinate fraud.
You're also vastly overstating how bad life is in the countries of origin especially for those with sufficient resources to make a multi-year refugee odyssey viable. There's a reason they frequently go back to visit on holiday
They go back because they maintain family links.
I was just talking to my dad and he said it was actually dead during Eid because everyone went back to the provinces. Those are poorer places than even what counts as a metropole in a tiny, sub-$1000 GDP per capita country. But they want to see their people.
Make no mistake though, they'll be back for work on Monday. And if they were told they couldn't come back after they left, they're having Eid right where they work.
And there's some obvious benefits that come with having foreign currency in these countries. But they're gonna have to come back and earn more. My mother is in this cycle of bouncing between Saudi Arabia (for the Hajj/Umrah) and then back home to see people and relax and then back to America for work or see the kids, depending on what her bank balance looks like.
There's no genteel way out of this. This idea that you're going to cut off a spigot here or there and it'll stop is the sort of bloodless wonkery that people like Starmer are driven by. If there was some solution like that it'd already be found. It's not going to happen.
Finding a nearby gym (~20-25mins) and walking there to do some moderate-intensity cardio worked for me (though I was going as much for sleep and general health as anything, I lost via fasting) when I was about 100lbs lighter. So maybe something to tack on when you get to that point.
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