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laxam


				

				

				
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joined 2022 September 07 03:11:29 UTC

				

User ID: 918

laxam


				
				
				

				
0 followers   follows 0 users   joined 2022 September 07 03:11:29 UTC

					

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User ID: 918

Israel was well on the way to coming to an understanding with its neighbors prior to 10/7.

The role of the global hegemon here, if we're really talking about 'just do whatever creates stability' would be take the population of Palestine, break it up into families, and scatter them around the globe, then decapitate the regime in Tehran and hand the reins over to a transitional government and leave. The Middle East would calm down very quickly.

If you break them up into conjugal family units, you can even get some cultural change going.

If Western governments had the reach to mobilize the failed protest movements Iran has had over the last decade, we'd have just overthrown the Guardian council and been done with it.

Personally, I think the organized efforts of the media, big tech, and the federal security apparatus to both conceal truths harmful to democrats and propagate lies harmful to Republicans is probably what, if anything, is going to get the Democrats elected in 2024.

It's kind of weird how that didn't get enough Democrats elected in 2022.

Or 2016.

Or 2014.

Or 2010.

Almost any other Republican would have won. Most other Republicans would also have won the popular vote, instead of squeaking through by the skin of their teeth.

The law is much less over-reaching than no_one (and most of the bill's critics) is making it out to be.

Then add a few layers of IRG command structure to the kill list.

Who said anything about invading?

Kill the Guardian Council, the President, the top layer or two of the cabinet and the IRG, and tell the people who were trying to overthrow the government because of the overreach of the morality police that they're in charge now and leave the place to its own devices.

Seriously, OP talked about stabilizing the Middle East. The Oil Princes just want to make money, the military in Egypt wants more or less the same, the Turks just want to be able to play regional hegemon, and the Israelis just wanna feel like they won't all be killed for letting their guard down. It's the Iranian government that throws a wrench into the works. Get rid of them and break the back of the IRG and there's no longer going to be anyone who cares enough to spend time destabilizing other countries (and the Arab world will be all too happy to quietly wash their hands of the Palestinians).

It's oppositional defiant disorder spreading to older whites. While ODD is something that is, from time to time, provided as a cause for black youth underperformance in schools, it's not something you've seen attributed to older whites. The perception of mistreatment by authority creates a permanent attitude of anger and defiance.

This can sometimes feel like just part and parcel of the way modern society seems to outright encourage mental illness in the general population. Attitudes and outlooks that, given time to fester, can develop into something almost clinical are celebrated and spread far and wide, coping mechanisms and other attempts to deal with mental health issues like this are denigrated and people are exhorted to reject them.

I don't really know what should be done about it. It has kind of metastasized into a pan-social malady that can't be addressed entirely because it's distributed and deeply entrenched.

The other Arab states couldn't care less about Israel. The Baathists were the only ones who ever actually disliked Israel at higher echelons of government and Saddam is dead and Assad has got bigger problems to worry about. The monarchies occasionally make anti-Israeli noises for their populaces but otherwise don't give a damn, Egypt has been sucking on the American military funding teet in exchange for peaceful relations with Israel for so long that the mask-for-money has become just standard Egyptian policy, and other Arab states are too distant to actually be bothered.

The IRG is a few hundred thousand personnel. If 'a few layers' was more than a couple of thousand people I would be shocked.

Dunno, but Iran has had several waves of very large scale anti-regime protests. I think you could prevent something exactly like the Mullahs taking back over if you just hand the government over to the right people. Iran isn't really like Iraq, it's a more developed place, even with the sanctions.

I think signing on the R ticket and declaring we give too much money to Ukraine and Israel is a really bad way to grift.

That's an absolutely exceptional way to grift. People like Trump and Kari Lake have been doing it for years and raking in the small dollar donations by the millions for years.

When are you people going to realize that you are the establishment. You are the power now, so every time you sneer about the establishment neocons what you're actually doing is sneering as the heel to the face. The """"establishment"""" is terrified of voters that think like you do and have been bending over and spreading wide for almost a decade to try to please you. All they've gotten for it is cascading electoral failure. As someone who likes it when Republicans win, I'm not very happy about that.

My wife and I work around this by completely banning having a cookie by yourself in the house. If you want one, you have to get one for the other, too. This means you have both the impulse control of each person as well as making it relatively rare for both people to be craving cookies at the same time, so it's very rare for us to have more than one or two each. I can't think of the last time we've done anything even close to having a whole box in one sitting.

It also helps we don't keep particularly delectable cookies like flavored Oreos in the house at all, anymore.

I'm going to take a wild guess and say you probably think it's fine for the federal security services to collude with Twitter, facebook, google, and most major media corporations to manipulate the information available to voters.

Not particularly. I just don't think it's enough to win elections all on its own. A bit better distribution of votes and the GOP picks up 10 more House seats (the 10th closest seat last year was NC-13. The Dem won by a tad less than 9,000 votes out of 250,000 cast. Vote distribution across distributions based on turnout differentials and last minute independent swings and the like are a bitch. The Democrats complain about them constantly). Some saner Gubernatorial and Senatorial candidate choices and the GOP probably picks up a few governor's mansions (or refrains from losing them) and a Senate seat or two.

As an example, the AZGOP received more total votes in House elections than the AZDEMS by more than 300,000. While the AZGOP ran two more candidates than the AZDEMS, it was still a larger gross than Katie Hobbs got in the gubernatorial election and just an inch more than Mark Kelly in the Senate election. The AZGOP also swept the vote totals in the state house and senate, (58-42 and 55-45, respectively, although again the AZGOP ran more candidates in both, 8 more -- two of which were independents who got less than 2,000 votes total -- in the state house, and 1 more in the state senate). Same story in PA: the vote gross was heavily weighted toward the PAGOP in both the state and Federal House elections (by 400,000 in the state house and a bit under 300,000 in Federal House elections). While the gross here doesn't total to more than Shapiro or Fetterman got, there was the obvious anchor of Mastriano that wasn't present in AZ (Lake had her problems, but she was a very talented television presence and knows what she's doing when speaking to the public. Mastriano had no media presence at all and didn't speak to any audiences that weren't entirely in the bunker for him), borne out by the fact the PAGOP US House candidates totaled almost 500,000 more votes than Mastriano got.

Same thing in GA, where both the state and Federal House gross vote totals would have won outright, without the need for a runoff. Same in Nevada, even.

People can and do vote for the GOP, they just need good candidates (and some luck with voter distribution, and Dem gerrymandering doesn't help -- while I'm more skeptical of the jump to gerrymandering accusations than most, some places, like NV, are egregious) and they can do well. People just need a reason to think voting GOP is a good idea. Depending on how this all shakes out, this may be turn out to be that idea. If deal that was worked out successfully instills budget discipline without people experiencing major damage to their lives and livelihood, it certainly counts as a reason to me.

This isn't burning the system down, this is getting the Democrats elected in 2024.

Your claim is McCormick would do better than Oz in suburbs and independents except Oz polled ahead of him with those groups and did better with one them in the GOP primary. McCormick's demo was foxnews boomers who did vote for Oz in the general. Oz got killed not because of indep or suburbs, but because no working class people showed up to vote for him. This is why I think McCormick would have done even worse.

1.3 million people voted in the Republican primary, 5.3 million people voted in the general. Primary results don't mean much for the general, otherwise Mastriano wouldn't have gotten blown out everywhere.

it's convenient for the people who have been failing in PA

What's convenient is that, every time a horrid, worthless candidate gets pushed over the primary top by the Orangenfuhrer, their loss is always excusable by something. Even if those losses are totally discordant with how other elections in the state went, like Oz and Mastriano running hundreds of thousands of votes behind the GOP House candidates in PA, or how the AZ GOP Treasurer obliterated their Democratic opponent. There's always some excuse.

Also, Trump's 2016 'get out the vote program' in PA...received fewer votes in PA than Obama, both times.

Mitt Romney didn't run in 2016, so...

A more mainstream candidate could probably have won Virginia, New Hampshire, and Nevada. And maaaaaybe New Mexico.

Plus, Bush '04 lost Wisconsin by a few thousand votes. Michigan and Pennsylvania may or may not be taller orders.

This argument conclusively fell through about 1860. One population in a group of states decided that the other population in a different group of states was not allowed to have the laws their electorates broadly supported, so they formed a massive mob and... well, you know the rest.

1860?

Dred Scott happened in 1857...

I continue to be unsure of how much you remember, but the invasion of Iraq took place almost two years after 9/11, with a lot of focus on things other than that event to justify the invasion to the people, like WMDs.

The invasion of Afghanistan took place a month after 9/11 and that absolutely was an expression of outrage by the country.

People wanted to know who was responsible the day of.

Unfortunately we can't test that. But the reason I believe in my model is that things as shocking as 9/11 I've seen happen elsewhere in countries where a war on terror wasn't in the interests of the ruling class, and those somehow failed to materialize the will for such a thing despite clearly fertile ground.

Most other countries cannot do what the US did.

If by the "Ukrainian people" you mean the people in charge behind Biden and Zelensky.

No, I mean the people who threw out and would have killed another leader they were unhappy with if he hadn't gotten away less than a decade ago

Ah so he has no option to negotiate?

He can try, but he's significantly more constrained by internal Ukrainian politics than you seem to think he is.

Zelensky has ...

His best option...

so that he can ...

so that Zelensky can...

so that Zelensky can have more...

It's astonishing the level of dishonesty that goes into writing a paragraph like this.

It's not Zelensky doing this. If Zelensky negotiated a surrender to Russia right now, the Ukrainian people would toss his ass to the curb and probably kill him for it.