domain:web.law.duke.edu
remzem
1d ago
He's already testing the waters for regime change
https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/114729009239087163
Israel's goal was never the nuclear program. Most people realize this is unlikely to end here that's why it's costing him so much. At best it'll be a frozen conflict until new made up intel comes out. Israel is already saying they have an idea where the enriched Uranium was shipped. Other people are pointing out that Iran has other bases under other mountains.
And I mean, the president that ran on getting out of the middle east and America First is now posting to make Iran great again? How can that not cost you.
remzem
1d ago
and if you lose the next few terms and the government is full of college campus pro-palestine types and Iran gets the bomb anyways, what then? This isn't a one and done. Iran still exists and has more incentive than ever to develop nukes. There are likely more facilities, new facilities can be built, etc.
shakenvac
1d ago
Seems like preventing a regional power that hates your guts from getting nuclear weapons is probably worth a dozen bunker busters.
CrispyFriedBarnacles
1d ago
This is just idle speculation on my part, but I feel like I'd read before, on the subject of Iran, that one of the giant, deep gulfs within the Democratic party at the upper echelons is the issue of the relative power of blacks, and the relative power of Jews. Just as a matter of deeply important sub-coalitions floating around. I think I saw this discussed specifically in the context of Obama, and important parts of his elite posse, so to speak - a bunch of them deeply resented how much power and coddling Jewish power got within the Democratic party (according to them), and they wanted to see the Jewish part of the coalition taken down significantly.
The last 15 years has been an unrelenting window in to how those groups take other groups down a peg - #metoo puts men on the back foot, #blm puts whites on the back foot, non-stop Pride month puts unsupportive religious people on the back foot. It's always about raising the salience of some public issue, forcing attention on it, and framing the split in ways that foregrounds a specific group and disfavors them. I'm not saying this is entirely astroturfed, either - I think it's something like a savvy awareness of how mass politics actually works. Smart, well-connected activists lay the ground work for narratives, plant the seeds, agitate in the right places, and then if they've done their job well and have luck on their side, other people organically pick up the threads and the whole thing snowballs.
I'm not saying, exactly, that this is all there is to the Palestinian issue. But I am saying, at the very least, that it does pattern match to a preexisting split in highly placed circles that is highly useful to certain powerful people. That's my impression, anyway.
ABigGuy4U
1d ago
It’s just aesthetically a very good axe for her to grind. It lets her criticize Trump, but also distinguish herself from the more hawkish establishment boomer-neoliberals in her own party. It curries favor with both isolationists and third worldist zoomers. And there’s little downside risk since almost no one else in Washington will listen to her.
faceh
1d ago
I had a reply to something about "progressive women having the most to offer over homemakers; they have degrees in journalism" which illuminates the issue perfectly- they think they have more to offer, but are only useful as an artifact of law- completely useless otherwise.
Yeah.
I really don't know how to get it through to a woman's status-seeking brain that all degrees are not created equal, and indeed some credentials are just fake all the way through. A degree in agricultural science from a state university can genuinely be more useful and impressive than a finance degree from an Ivy league, let alone a political science degree from an Ivy.
And worse, some of the most important roles in society don't come with a fancy piece of paper declaring them such.
Dealing with that will require tackling the education-managerial complex- it's a feedback loop, where the same women who benefited from the initial windfall are now in charge of expanding the problem.
Yep. But it sure looks like the early '90s was the one point in time we had the ability to adjust course as a nation... and most of the adjustments were in the wrong direction, it just wouldn't be clear until 2010 or so.
hydroacetylene
1d ago
The difference is 'my opponents literally, not a misuse of figuratively but actually do want to let men and boys in your daughter's locker room and discipline her for being upset about it' is a winning issue for Republicans.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1d ago
Yes, but it was also quite the psychological and even philosophical blow. Before 2001, we just sort of assumed that the world order was USA and Western Europe on top, everyone wanting to be us. We basically ended up not only resting on our laurels, but often tearing up the things that lead to our success.
Culturally, we tore up quite a lot of the social technologies that made success possible. We decided on some level that self-control, decency in a very broad sense, family and the centrality of protecting children from physical and emotional and psychological trauma, excellence as a virtue. Those things became sort of passé. Only old people and boring people still thought that one man, one woman for life with the woman as primary caregivers, or worried about too much sex, drugs, and violence in movies. Who cares, we are the top civilization heading for victory, and everyone wants to be like us.
Educational standards did not keep up, and in fact they are pretty low by this point. We decided that having an educated population was less important than the uncomfortable need to make kids learn things. But again, we were dominant, and believed we would always be dominant.
So what happens when we were rudely awakened by 19 guys with box cutters taking down major landmarks in America. And Americans had no idea how or why it happened or what we should start doing to fix it. We thought we permanently were going to be the utopian future. What now.
My contention is that our stories, especially popular stories are how people deal with the stories. Battlestar Galactics was an attempt to deal with 9/11. We thought everything was fine. Then the Cylons blew up the colonies. You never knew who was or wasn’t a cylon which is kinda like the jihadists who might or might not have been integrated into American society. The story explored all kinds of the different facets of the situation.
I think our current mania for medieval fantasy and romantasy is a longing for things that exist in those archetypes — strong, wise leadership, nobility, tradition, and heroism. And so how would a knight deal with some of the problems we face right now? Or a wise King?
hydroacetylene
1d ago
Republicans have forgotten about the deficit and American industrial policy.
hydroacetylene
1d ago
Medical insurance companies extracting wealth
It's interesting to note that on this specific question, obamacare was an attempt to reach a continental European style universal healthcare system. It just doesn't work. It has the same bones- strictly mandatory employer provided health insurance, welfare-funded healthcare for the poor and old, a subsidized exchange system for everyone else. It just doesn't work as well. There's a lot of reasons for this, but the median Frenchman or German pays for health insurance- and spends less than the US consumer does.
quiet_NaN
1d ago
Think campaign to collapse Syria and not war to oust Saddam Hussein.
It should be noted that Syria had a decade of civil war before the regime finally collapsed (after Israel took out Hezbollah).
Back in the day, the Allies dropped a massive load of bombs on Nazi Germany, which caused people all over Germany to rebel against the regime now that the Luftwaffe did no longer hold them in check. I kid, nothing of that sort happened, because what kept the people in check was ideology and the GeStaPo, neither of which can be effectively neutralized from the air (without killing literally everyone).
I am not convinced that US/Israel can even indefinitely prevent Iran from acquiring the bomb through targeted bombardment only.
morphism
live long and prosper
1d ago
This lemma is not sound -- governments exist to protect the interests of their citizenry; no such obligation exists for people in other countries.
No, it's sound. Any logically correct argument against "immigration" needs to be robust under switching the word "immigrant" with the word "native" or "human". It has nothing to do with morals, it's about the logical structure of the argument. Any argument of the form "More immigrants is bad because of X" that also generalizes to "More people is bad because of X" cannot be an argument against immigrants — it's an argument against people, including natives.
In order to be a genuine argument against "immigration", the structure of the argument must rely on a material distinguishing characteristic between "immigrant" and "native". That's where the culture argument has some merit, but the first two do not. "Is not a citizen of the country" is not a material distinction.
faceh
1d ago
Football is really interesting on the play-to-play strategic level. Its absolutely the most 'war-like' of the sports out there.
But the sport is also so heavily optimized its like there's no room for anything but like two workable strategies. Team composition doesn't change much. And if your QB sucks then you're probably not going very far.
And while I enjoy MMA, its exactly like you said. IN the cage, there's no team. Sure they're off to the side coaching, but its not quite as beautiful as watching the coordinated ice ballet playing out at high speed.
Actually, that is one 'con' with hockey. Plays happen so goddamn fast that you can't realize how much just happened until its over.
Hockey teams can't rely solely on one strong player like sometimes happens in baskebtall, but you can optimize your team's skill stack in a few different ways for success.
We saw that with the last two Cup finals, Florida fielding a team with tons of grit and a deep roster of talent, Edmonton with some elite scoring talent that can skate circles around everyone, and each side trying to find the best matchups for its lines. Florida seems to have perfected the science of shutting down McDrai by game 3.
I don't just watch for the fights, to be clear, but the fact that fights are an integral part of the sport does elevate it.
Its hard to explain, snobs might say that its just ungenteel and not sportsmanlike, making hockey a 'low class' sport, but I have to agree, the fact that on-ice disputes can be settled by dropping gloves then and there absolutely elevates the sport. Trash talk is cheap. For the low, low price of five minutes in time-out, you can check a dude's ego or remind them to stop messing with the goalie, keeping some of the 'unwritten' rules of the sport intact.
hydroacetylene
1d ago
While I'm much less white-identitarian than most people on here, it's entirely possible that among the specific set of 'young blue tribers who never leave the ivory tower bubble of academia' the position really does boil down to 'white people have no right to exist'. As it applies to the USA this is basically a luxury belief- the serious antiwhite racists are mostly a subset of AADOS(+a few natives) who are begrudgingly tolerated by their coethnics. In Israel, on the other hand...
sun_the_second
1d ago
I'd much prefer being told there is something wrong with me and that the game is rigged against me in the sense that I'm somehow inherently inept or dysgenic, than be told to
On the internet, people can't tell you're unfixably socially retarded over one (or zero) posts.
thejdizzler
1d ago
This is a huge W for Israel. And frankly a necessary W for the country. If my generation continues to hold the politics that they hold now as they age, Israel is stuffed in about 20 years. They need to win these wars now, and make peace with the people that they are able to now, or they won't survive when the blue-hairs start being elected to the senate.
I'm not sure I really understand why so many zoomers are so rabidly pro-Palestine. I get being against what is happening in Gaza, but so many people seem to be completely ignorant of the history of conflict, perhaps willfully so. I used to enjoy going on /r/stupidpol, but that place has become as cesspit of pro-Hamas propaganda. Even if you think the state of Israeli was a Western colonialist project (debatable at best), the fact is there are 9 million Jews living there now. If Hamas/other Arab nations get their way, those 9 million Jews will either be all dead or displaced. How is that any better than what they think is happening in Gaza and the West Bank? Part of me hopes that most of my generation isn't really thinking about things that way, but based on reactions in my graduate department to 10/7 (immediate pro-Palestine protests despite the fact that ISRAEL was attacked), make me think that a lot of my generation actually just wants Israel gone. Which makes me pretty sad.
I lived in Israel in 2019, and as far as I could see, it was a country that would be worth preserving. The public infrastructure was functional, vast amounts of food are grown on relatively small amounts of land, and best of all the people there actually seemed to believe in something greater than themselves. I spent a bit of time in the north where most of the 1 million Arab citizens live (and also more time in Jerusalem where non-citizen Arabs are), and while they had complaints about their economic situation/racism from Ashkenazi Jews, it seemed like their lives were far far better than their relatives in the West Bank or even in other Arab countries. Heck in Jerusalem there were Israeli soldiers guarding the entrance to the upper temple complex to make sure I didn't go up there as a non-muslim. Would a Palestinian government grant the same kind of protection to a disenfranchised Jewish minority? For some reason, I doubt it.
I'm definitely much more liberal than a lot of people here, but this is one thing I just cannot stomach from my own tribe. It would be one thing if we just disagreed in the abstract, but most organizations on the left seemed to be obsessed with tying support for Palestine for everything. My grad union for example wants to send union dues to Palestine and to bargain to try and get Hopkins to divest from Israeli companies. I didn't fucking sign up for this shit when I signed my union card.
quiet_NaN
1d ago
The US people will never be allowed to vote on immigration
What do you think he got elected for this time, looking sexy in swimming trunks? I think stopping illegal immigration, deporting illegals and so on was the number one issue with his voters, and so far he is making a good show of this actually being a priority for him.
--
Other than that, I can only advise you to give that system called "proportional representation" a try. It will allow multiple parties to compete. Sometimes, you will have an issue where (n-1) parties are leaning towards one side, but one party canvases with being on the other side and wins big in one election. Often, this will cause the other parties to flip.
Sadly, this often happens with opinions which I do not share. For example, a single state victory of the green party after Fukoshima was enough to kill nuclear power. More recently, the anti-immigrant AfD has won big in the federal elections. While they are not yet in power, Merz has taken to personally drown a migrant child in the Mediterranean sea each morning before breakfast the CDU/CSU/SPD coalition is basically trying to enact the AfD program, as far as migrants are concerned.
ulyssessword
1d ago
I thought it was a good effort at introducing something that may not have otherwise been discussed
I mentioned it downthread, but I literally don't know what the point was. Since you saw something interesting here, could you explain it?
FD4280
1d ago
Dungeon Crawler Carl, on the third book. It’s decently fun after the disappointing “The Devils” from Abercrombie.
The latter was not that bad, by the way. I just have to accept that Abercrombie will never reach the level of his first five books again.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
1d ago
I can't possibly answer that question. You might want to ask the woman herself. I just don't think one should accuse people of hypocrisy without evidence, even (as in this case) people I don't like.
Mantergeistmann
1d ago
I don't think any president wants to have to make the call of "Hey, this country just nuked a non-Nato country and wiped them off the map. Do we... respond?"
You don't want to set the precedent that there's no response or a limited one, and you also don't want to be the one who gets dragged into a nuclear/heavy-handed military response that has to try to force regime change.
In MMA News: Jon Jones finally retired, now that his attempts to hold on to the belt without fighting the interim champ Aspinall failed. Apparently he asked for a ridiculous payday, got it (which is a miracle in and of itself) and then promptly changed his mind. In the perfect capper for anyone who knows anything about Jon Jones, he had another hit and run right before announcing retirement. In terms of objectively successful prospects who nevertheless blew it by being incapable of staying out of trouble he's up there.
Good news: the division can finally move and Aspinall can actually have a career as champ. Bad news: the UFC is now functionally boxing with its own Joshua/Wilder HW mess despite not having any rival promotions and apparently Jon Jones is trapped in a time loop.
Hope they book Aspinall's next fight ASAP.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
1d ago
I hate to use the cop-out, but it's so obvious here;
Physical beauty is inherent and always subjective, no? A higher level of body fat, for instance, has objective downsides compared to being within a more normal range, but there are people, both male and female, who viscerally and immutably prefer it. So, even if a full head of hair is objectively a better marker of virility, vitality etc. it can also be subjectively worse. And the whole genesis of this thread was obviously around female sexual interest (or lack thereof) in balding or bald men.
Mass deportations are on the table? This is news to me. Anything in particular you’d recommend I follow to learn more?
More options
Context Copy link