JTarrou
2d ago
Bro, you should visit America sometime.
And citing a roster of Democratic talking points concern trolling the guy who just handed them their absolute asses time after time is less than convincing.
Both the far right and far left are locked out of power and fighting themselves. The political coalitions that make up the parties are shifting fast, and no one knows exactly when the cultural music will stop and we'll all be stuck again. But it is my estimation that the political energy and momentum is with the right generally, and bog-standard MAGA specifically. Trump is speed-running the Big List of American Opposition Countries on his way to cement his legacy as the most transformational president since FDR (and perhaps just as damaging). Even if there's a glitch or two, the current state of Ukraine, Israel, Korea, Venezuela, Cuba and Iran are all in much better realpolitik position than when he started. The middle east generally is lining up and making nice. These are not losses for Trump, no matter what Huffpo and NPR say.
All the hysterics are just the old guard losing control of a narrative that gave them cultural and political control for half a century. But nothing is forever.
JTarrou
2d ago
The first is the best of the series, sequels are just less coherent retreads.
JTarrou
2d ago
The precedent is also that if you don't actually have the goods, the US will eventually get sick of your shit, and right or wrong, is going to end your tenure.
JTarrou
2d ago
I write, but will probably never finish or publish.
That little ditty was probably a result of rewatching my beloved Suchet version of Poirot.
JTarrou
2d ago
Iran has the capacity to complete nuclear weapons if they want to, and this has been true since the '90s at the very latest. What the Iranians want to do is sell their nuclear program multiple times, while maintaining the ability to quickly fabricate one if needed. Trump is trying to stop that cycle, which no other president has been able to do. Only time will tell if any of these projects will hold in the long term. It may have to be enough to set them back some period of time.
Either way, there's multiple win/loss conditions.
JTarrou
2d ago
The real answer is, of course, that there's a coalition of groups inside Iran who for various differing reasons* want nuclear weapons, or the appearance of nuclear weapons, or just conflict with the west generally and Israel specifically. Allied to all sorts of social, class, scientific and business interests. What this has produced is a kabuki theater of nuclear escalation and leveraging of the nuclear program as a diplomatic/political tool, which everyone is pretty sick of at this point. Which is why the nations in the region aren't raising much of a fuss, and why Iran is bombing them all. There's not even a single Iranian military, they have parallel organizations which are so heavily partitioned and currently attrited all to shit.
*nationalists who for obvious reasons see nuclear weapons as the basic requirement for big-boy international status and realpolitik military clout, which they do not currently possess, for an example. Millenarian suicidal religious nutters for another.
JTarrou
2d ago
Mate, you're just reiterating my points. What's your disagreement?
This was an inter-left civil war which pushed some of the losers toward the right. GG was a bit bigger than /pol/.
JTarrou
6d ago
I honestly don't think I've ever seen a child below the age of like 10, fictional or otherwise, behaving like a child would, whom I didn't find mildly unpleasant and annoying.
Yes, but that's true for almost everyone I've ever met. Why the special kid hate? Everyone is an annoying ass, which is why you keep your hands out your pockets and your Glock loose. Kids ain't special, you're just not allowed to give the the full corrective beating until they're older.
JTarrou
7d ago
Gamergate did not involve "the right". There might have been a minority of gamers with right-of-center political views, but this was always an inter-left fight, with some of the defeated later drifting right having found some safe harbor there/having grown a decade older.
JTarrou
7d ago
Not unique, just cruder methods. The chinese, once they got rich enough with capitalism to be able to afford state of the art censorship, no longer have to use concentration camps very much. Neither does Russia, for the same reasons.
The US can afford the very best, an entire ecosystem of disinformation funded by dead rich people's estates being directed by the current fashionable elites from the best schools. CIA cutouts, partisan outlets, VOA penetration. And because it is so sophisticated and decentralized, there is no need for camps, or even to do much int eh way of directing things. The system does its own targeting, see the SPLC.
JTarrou
7d ago
It's funny how history goes. Nixon goes down for Watergate, but Obama wiretapped Trump's campaign and then used the intelligence agencies to launder Hillary's oppo research to blame Trump for being in league with the Russians that Clinton was paying to try to honeytrap the Trump campaign.
McCarthy goes down as the dumbest prosecutor in history for being right only 99.5% of the time.
JTarrou
7d ago
Trump honestly believing in clean elections and that he won in 2020, and being willing to enforce it even against his own party also fits your facts. I don't think Puerto Rico is a central example of "MAGA", and if it is, that's a whole separate interesting thing.
JTarrou
8d ago
And you think the whole dirty alliance is going to fold up because one of their tentacles got stung? There are thousands of groups doing exactly what the SPLC is doing in every western country. The SPLC is just one of the more egregious examples, but that hole has already been filled and Amazon/FBI/All FDIC banks are now taking their orders from a different communist NGO funded by capitalist robber barons. We should be finding out which one and what it's called in a few decades, and it will be thrown to the wolves someday, maybe even before we die of old age.
JTarrou
8d ago
At an evolutionary level, females being able to control which males procreate is generally done after the fact, rather than before. Both men and women can be ruthless about whose genes get passed on.
Every year, six hundred thousand dudes get culled from the gene pool after they got their swimmers in.
JTarrou
9d ago
What proportion of this is just wildly inflated end-of-life medical care? Seems to me the real trap is that families spend four times the accumulated total lifetime medical costs up to that point in the last few months or years of their loved ones' life. That money isn't going to old people really, it's going to insurance companies, nursing homes, palliative care, home nursing etc. For the most part, it doesn't buy anything except a longer death.
The demand for medical care is, for all practical purposes, infinite.
JTarrou
10d ago
I think you've gotten comfortable in an atheistic space being specifically bigoted against a group you have virtually no experience with. You have fantasies of what bad people they must be. Conspiracy theories. Imagined hatreds and evil intents.
But it's all just you.
JTarrou
11d ago
This some ignorance right here. Just straight up ignorant bigotry.
My folks are super conservative, super religious. They were missionaries for years, my dad has been a lay preacher for longer than I've been alive, and was at Jan 6. Mom's best friend is gay, has been since before she met dad. He stayed in our home for a year or so back in the day getting back on his feet.
My dad thinks old guy is going to hell, so does mom for that matter. Doesn't make him not her best friend. You're projecting your own hatred onto people you don't know.
JTarrou
11d ago
When was the last really contested Democratic nomination? They've all been coronations since '08, and that one was close. No nomination in '12, in '16 they pay off the previous tiara-snatch from Hillary by making her the nominee. Then it's Obama's VP's turn, then his VP's turn. The past three Democratic nominees have been downstream of Obama upsetting the '08 coronation of Hillary, then co-opting it.
I think it's most likely the Dems turn the page and try to hold a contested primary. But that has not been how they've done things for the past twenty years or more. Many of those people are still in power, and you can never count inertia out of the game. In many ways, the next real, competitive DNC primary for president will shape the next several elections and set the tone for our new political divide. If they ever hold it.
JTarrou
11d ago
As a politician to the voters, yes absolutely. But that's not how you get the DNC nomination. Not saying Harris is a strong candidate, but she's much stronger in the party than she is with democratic voters, much less general election voters. And the party chooses the nominee, not the voters.
JTarrou
11d ago
The important part is that your personal beliefs don't have anything to do with the religion you belong to. You belong to a cultural identity associated with a religion, whether you believe in it or not.
JTarrou
11d ago
Religion has always been a part of political identity. Atheists have a hard time with the concept. I recall Hitchens telling an irish joke, the punchline of which was "Protestant atheist or catholic atheist?" He then waxed eloquent as only Hitchens could about what a ridiculous mental construct that was. But it never made any practical sense. The Irish don't hate Protestants, they hate the Scots-Irish. They don't like catholic or agnostic Scots-Irish any more than protestant ones. Religion isn't an a la carte thing, it's part of a cultural and often ethnic identity. Whatever your personal metaphysical beliefs are does not really move the needle for anyone but you.
JTarrou
11d ago
Not in the least! I would say that Iran can only hope the outcomes for their country are as mild as the US got away with.
Much to be seen in the future. I wonder about the anti-semitism though. It's endemic in the middle east, but Trump has managed to get most of the Sunni arab countries to moderate on Israel and many are doing public or private deals, including Saudi Arabia and the new Al Qaeda government of Syria. Something weird is happening, where over half the Palestinians didn't join the last jihad, the Sunnis are mostly out of the mideast terror game, but antisemitism is rising at least publicly in the west. Somehow Iran, the only Shia power, is the last holdout for Sunni supremacy in the Levant, funding the last dead-ender Hamas.
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