Yet another war, this time with Iran

[Jimmy Higgins]

Not a cult.

Great. We are now onto the North Korean level of lying about the accomplishments of the President.

Again, yes, politics is all about fibbing, but Trump and now others in the GOP are going on about how Trump has done more for *insert demographic* than anyone ever. And we need to forget that the price increases are a result of Trumps' whatever the heck he is doing with Iran. #justthreemorebombsinIran

 

[SLD]

It is pretty obvious to all that Trump cannot conduct further strikes on Iran.

Of course he can, and he should. The pain of increased oil prices will be temporary, but failing in Iran now due to Trump chickening out will only lead to more emboldened theocratic regime.

Israel bombarded Gaza for over a year with bombs and targeted attacks and Hamas is still around.
Russia has been bombing Ukraine for four years and Ukraine is still not Russia as of yet and Russia has troops in Ukraine.

You think a few more bombs will do fuck all in Iran?! To overthrow the theocracy, you need two million or so troops in Iran and an uncomfortable number of body bags and Trump / Hegseth autopen signed 'sorry you loved one died' letters.

As far as "pain" from oil prices... we are heading towards a fuel shortage. You shat your pants over 'Biden spending' causing modest inflation? Can't wait till you see your reaction to stagflation.

Precisely. Certainly Trump can bomb Iran. But realistically he can’t without seriously damaging prospects for the economy. We saw what happened when he was bombing Iran before. Oil prices skyrocketed, and the Dow tumbled. The Dow, as I type this, is back above 50,000. If he attacks, watch that and his poll numbers tumble. That’s why he had another Taco Tuesday yesterday. He will continue to do so and continue to make threats at least until the mid terms. Then he might try something.

 

[aupmanyav]

I don't think anyone suggested that you were either of those things.

I was talking about Trump and not myself. Fault with punctuations accepted.

 

[barbos]

Not a cult.

Well, Senile Piece of Shit Biden is partially responsible for fertilizer catastrophy.
He sanctioned russian fertilizers and even closed ammonia pipeline which goes through Ukraine.
But most of the blame technically goes to the Orange Asshole.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

No fundamentally you are being asked to actually read current news events. I absolutely believe in the right of Israel to exist. But what Israel has been doing re: Gaza can only be called genocide.

Bibi convinced Trump to attack Iran. WE are the aggressors towards Iran! It is the US who is entirely in the wrong in the current conflict.

I read current news events. I understand what happened in Gaza and it is not remotely a genocide. And most of the bad stuff was engineered by Hamas. They put awful stuff on camera, you respond by bashing Israel to make it go away--but you are actually rewarding them for doing horrific things and thus there will be more of it.

It wasn't "Genocide". However, after a while, it wasn't "moral" either.

You keep defending the defense, but ignoring the offense. Every bomb was justified according to you. Had Israel kept bombing, it'd been fine. The Western World looked the other way after October 7th, so Israel could respond. They sent Hamas back a while, but years from now, will any of the bombs have helped? And people like you and Derec will say 'Only if Israel dropped two more bombs...'

The western world "looked the other way" because they understood they couldn't expect Israel to abandon the hostages.

And it is completely normal for a city to be basically leveled if a war is fought there. Hamas knew this, yet chose to create the situation. What we see in Gaza is actually less than typical for urban war despite the massive amount of military infrastructure buried beneath.

Hamas engineered the whole thing to get horrors to parade before the camera and you fell for it.

Please back up that claim I fell for Hamas propaganda or recant your bullshit.

You've repeated the Hamas false narrative many times.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Iran shot first. Period.

What are you smoking? Iran did not attack the US first.

Nice evasion.

Shooting at an ally constitutes shooting first.

At the ally, yes. At us, no. We don’t have a mutual defense treaty.

Irrelevant.

You attack someone, you risk their allies attacking you even if there isn't a defense treaty.

You’re shifting the goalposts. Whether attacking an ally is not necessarily the same as shooting first or requiring retaliation. Your use of “risk” tacitly acknowledges that reality.

You are doing contortions to avoid Iran being at fault.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Quit changing my words.

I said status quo ante, not merely status quo.

How is your "solution" anything but status quo ante?

Stop misrepresenting posts. I didn’t change your words, I forgot one. I apologise,

Status quo vs status quo ante are very different things.

So now you are on about “Iranian genocide”. Are you referring to Trump’s threats or Israel’s attacks or your fear that sometime Iran will make nuclear weapons and use them?

We've been mentioning it for quite a while, you keep sticking your head in the sand. Remember how the Sudan thread quickly died out? That's part of the genocide I'm referring to. Most of sub-Saharan Africa has Iranian-backed genocides going on. Millions dead.

Israel has been claiming for over 20 years that Iran is close to making a nuclear weapon. And Israel and the US claimed to gave destroyed Iran’s nuclear capabilities.

So I really have no idea what you mean.

If you have no idea what I mean you're being willfully blind.

And the Iranian nuclear program has been an exercise in plausible deniability for a long time.

Making a bomb is fairly easy. Making weapons grade fissionables to put in the bomb is not easy. Thus we are measuring their nuclear program by the production of the material to make the bomb. But Iran can "truthfully" say they aren't working on a bomb because they're not actually producing the hardware. But the reality is you only make weapons grade uranium for a bomb or for cases where size is really important (ships, in the old days Russia launched some satellites with small reactors.) Iran has no legitimate use for weapons grade material, thus high level enrichment is a bomb program.

And what we destroyed was their enrichment plant. The chance we actually got the bomb material is about 0%. And while you're trying to be in denial about their bomb program--they had absolutely no legitimate reason to bury their enrichment plant like that. Nobody would have wanted to bomb a plant that was merely producing reactor grade material. Thus the fact that they hardened it is extremely telling.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

No fundamentally you are being asked to actually read current news events. I absolutely believe in the right of Israel to exist. But what Israel has been doing re: Gaza can only be called genocide.

Bibi convinced Trump to attack Iran. WE are the aggressors towards Iran! It is the US who is entirely in the wrong in the current conflict.

I read current news events. I understand what happened in Gaza and it is not remotely a genocide. And most of the bad stuff was engineered by Hamas. They put awful stuff on camera, you respond by bashing Israel to make it go away--but you are actually rewarding them for doing horrific things and thus there will be more of it.

It wasn't "Genocide". However, after a while, it wasn't "moral" either.

You keep defending the defense, but ignoring the offense. Every bomb was justified according to you. Had Israel kept bombing, it'd been fine. The Western World looked the other way after October 7th, so Israel could respond. They sent Hamas back a while, but years from now, will any of the bombs have helped? And people like you and Derec will say 'Only if Israel dropped two more bombs...'

The western world "looked the other way" because they understood they couldn't expect Israel to abandon the hostages.

And it is completely normal for a city to be basically leveled if a war is fought there. Hamas knew this, yet chose to create the situation. What we see in Gaza is actually less than typical for urban war despite the massive amount of military infrastructure buried beneath.

Hamas engineered the whole thing to get horrors to parade before the camera and you fell for it.

Please back up that claim I fell for Hamas propaganda or recant your bullshit.

You've repeated the Hamas false narrative many times.

Repeating an accusation when asked to back it up isn't supporting said allegation. Rather it is being a broken record.

I'd ask you to support your claim again, but I already know you can't actually cite me "repeating" "Hamas false narratives".

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

Irrelevant.

You attack someone, you risk their allies attacking you even if there isn't a defense treaty.

You’re shifting the goalposts. Whether attacking an ally is not necessarily the same as shooting first or requiring retaliation. Your use of “risk” tacitly acknowledges that reality.

You are doing contortions to avoid Iran being at fault.

Iran not having the moral high ground isn't making urea, fuel, and plastic prices go down. I can't go to the gas station and flash a Iran's Fault card at the screen that decreases the gasoline price by $1.10 a gallon.

Nor is Iran's lack of moral high ground helping with the lack of any US plans whatsoever to deal with Iran's predictable responses to the US attacks.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

I can certainly see a problem But it is most probably not the problem you see.

You don't see that you were counting on other people having racist beliefs about the inherent characteristics of Palestinians to make your argument sound reasonable?

You keep claiming racism where race isn't relevant. There is no race "Palestinian". "Palestinian" is a political grouping that has had a lifetime of indoctrination in hate. Of course they are a major problem. But it is no more racial than saying "Nazi" is racist because Nazis are white.

The problem is the way we (humanity in general) treat the Jews. For far too much of their long history the Jews have suffer discrimination, attacks, persecutions, exiles, attempted genocide etc. They have suffered far more that any other group of people.

I don't think Jews have suffered more than enslaved blacks and their descendants. I don't think they have suffered more than the Dalit. If things don't change for the Rohingya, they might surpass Jews in the long history of persecution category if they haven't already.

The majority of Jews were killed. What other group has had that happen? (The New World doesn't count--that was disease, not deliberate action. While the actions of Spanish were reprehensible they are responsible for only a small fraction of the deaths.)

And the Rohingya aren't exactly innocent. This is another branch of the Islam vs everyone else conflict.

But let's suppose Jews have suffered more. That doesn't mean they are now allowed to inflict suffering on others. Doing to others all the terrible things that were done to you and yours isn't fairness, it's generational trauma being passed along to the detriment of everyone.

And you fail to understand that Hamas is deliberately engineering the Palestinian suffering.

All they wish to have a place to be able to live in peace with their neighbours, raise their children, make a life for themselves. Incidentally that is exactly what you and I wish for too.
Yet that is not afforded to them. Constantly living on edge, forced or exiled from too many places. Attacked, harassed. Non-Jews (including myself) would have no idea what living as a Jew is like.
If we were to treat the Jews properly then a lot of trouble would disappear. The Jews did not ask for all of this. It was given to them.

Everyone wants to have peaceful, prosperous lives. What we do to achieve it matters. It matters if we are willing to buy, to beg, to borrow, to steal, to murder, to oppress, to become just like the assholes we are trying to escape, or to build a system where oppression is the enemy, not the go-to tactic for getting what we want.

No one asks to be oppressed. But how we respond to oppression, both the kind we experience and the oppression of others, matters.

The problem with this is the terrorist forces deliberately engineer the repression you are complaining about. But Israel has had many decades of education in being harsh brings safety. So long as being harsh protects their people and being soft hurts their people they'll be harsh. And note that the terrorists engineer much of that harshness--things like forcing civilians into the no-go zone around the border until the world made Israel stop enforcing it--which was an important part of setting up 10/7.

What you fail to understand is that the terrorists answer to their sponsors, not to the people they control. And their most powerful weapon is to get their people killed. You get more of what you reward--and you reward dead Palestinian civilians. Standard playbook, Saddam did the same thing. Got half a million of his people killed to make the sanctions look bad.

How much of that is due to the Palestinians and how much it is due to having a convenient mutual eneamy in Israel.

Yes to both. By not really looking after the refugees they had a convenient stick to use again Israel.
Lebanon allowed in some and we can still see the results today.

Why shouldn't the Palestinian refugees have been allowed to return to their former places of residence in Palestine?

Can you think of any reason other than racism or religious bigotry?

Fear of the past events reappearing?

Past events in Europe, or past events in Palestine?

The past events in Palestine were centuries of peaceful relations, interfaith marriages, and a dull, boring, quiet march to modernity. What's so bad about that?

That it didn't happen. Jim Crow was so normal that it goes almost unmentioned.

The Arab Proposal called for preserving everything that had been working for Palestinians of different faiths and ethnicities, ensuring continued religious freedom, peace and stability in civil administration, accepting the legal immigration that had already happened, and ensuing the people of Palestine were on-board with accepting more immigrants before allowing them entry. What's so bad about that?

The Arab Proposal had a poison pill--right of return. It existed to fool people into thinking Israel was the problem.

Loren likes to talk about the 100,000 Offer. He is completely wrong about the details so don't take his word on the provisions but let's suppose it was as he describes it. As I recall, you were in favor of that plan. So let's suppose it was the Palestinians who offered to allow 100,000 refugees from Europe to settle in the State of Palestine. Does that sound good to you? If not, why not?

I have no idea what you're talking about. Right of return has always been about all of them, including descendants that are only a small fraction Palestinian. It is a poison pill to ensure an agreement can't be reached.

I wish there will an easy solution but there is not. There is so much fear and hatred in the ME that is unlikely to ever end.

Even if there is no solution that is perfectly good, it's still possible to sort potential solutions into "better" and "worse".

It is better to respect and protect human rights.

It is worse to make racism, bigotry, and religious bias a founding principle for a system of governance.

It is better to always seek peaceful resolutions to conflicts even if/when you have to fight to protect and defend your friends and family and "They started it!".

It is worse to brutalize and terrorize others into doing what you want.

Back in 2024 I posted a link to a Cinema Therapy video titled See With Eyes Unclouded By Hate. I don't know if you ever watched it. It's all about conflict resolution when people are fighting for their lives and livelihoods. I'm offering it again as an example of what I'm talking about and why the approach it illustrates via the character Ashitaka is better than throwing up your hands and letting the most selfish and brutal elements in a society be in charge of it.

The problem is you have no understanding of the situation. This is not Israel vs Palestine. This is Israel vs Iranian puppet. You can't make peace with a puppet! Who pulls the strings has varied over the decades, but it's been string-pulling from the start.

 

[laughing dog]

Quit changing my words.

I said status quo ante, not merely status quo.

How is your "solution" anything but status quo ante?

Stop misrepresenting posts. I didn’t change your words, I forgot one. I apologise,

Status quo vs status quo ante are very different things.

So now you are on about “Iranian genocide”. Are you referring to Trump’s threats or Israel’s attacks or your fear that sometime Iran will make nuclear weapons and use them?

We've been mentioning it for quite a while, you keep sticking your head in the sand. Remember how the Sudan thread quickly died out? That's part of the genocide I'm referring to. Most of sub-Saharan Africa has Iranian-backed genocides going on. Millions dead.

Your mentioning something doesn’t make it true. Especially when you don’t provide sources. Whenever I read about the violence in that region, the UAE is mentioned and no mention if Iran. Without substantion, your claims are nit credible.

Israel has been claiming for over 20 years that Iran is close to making a nuclear weapon. And Israel and the US claimed to gave destroyed Iran’s nuclear capabilities.

So I really have no idea what you mean.

If you have no idea what I mean you're being willfully blind.

And the Iranian nuclear program has been an exercise in plausible deniability for a long time.

Making a bomb is fairly easy. Making weapons grade fissionables to put in the bomb is not easy. Thus we are measuring their nuclear program by the production of the material to make the bomb. But Iran can "truthfully" say they aren't working on a bomb because they're not actually producing the hardware. But the reality is you only make weapons grade uranium for a bomb or for cases where size is really important (ships, in the old days Russia launched some satellites with small reactors.) Iran has no legitimate use for weapons grade material, thus high level enrichment is a bomb program.

And what we destroyed was their enrichment plant. The chance we actually got the bomb material is about 0%. And while you're trying to be in denial about their bomb program--they had absolutely no legitimate reason to bury their enrichment plant like that. Nobody would have wanted to bomb a plant that was merely producing reactor grade material. Thus the fact that they hardened it is extremely telling.

Essentially you are asserting both Israel and the USA are lying. Ok. But you take their reporting as to Iran is doing as valid.

Sounds more like cherry picking.

BTW, every attack by Israel or the US giveds the Iranian hardliners more legitimate readon to want a nuclear bomb.

 

[Playball40]

No one mentions all the Arab "prisoners" being held without charge in Israel either. Kids accused of infractions such as throwing rocks. How are they 'political prisoners' while the stealing of lands by Israeli settlement expansion is just a-ok!

 

[Toni]

I can certainly see a problem But it is most probably not the problem you see.

You don't see that you were counting on other people having racist beliefs about the inherent characteristics of Palestinians to make your argument sound reasonable?

You keep claiming racism where race isn't relevant. There is no race "Palestinian". "Palestinian" is a political grouping that has had a lifetime of indoctrination in hate. Of course they are a major problem. But it is no more racial than saying "Nazi" is racist because Nazis are white.

The problem is the way we (humanity in general) treat the Jews. For far too much of their long history the Jews have suffer discrimination, attacks, persecutions, exiles, attempted genocide etc. They have suffered far more that any other group of people.

I don't think Jews have suffered more than enslaved blacks and their descendants. I don't think they have suffered more than the Dalit. If things don't change for the Rohingya, they might surpass Jews in the long history of persecution category if they haven't already.

The majority of Jews were killed. What other group has had that happen? (The New World doesn't count--that was disease, not deliberate action. While the actions of Spanish were reprehensible they are responsible for only a small fraction of the deaths.)

And the Rohingya aren't exactly innocent. This is another branch of the Islam vs everyone else conflict.

But let's suppose Jews have suffered more. That doesn't mean they are now allowed to inflict suffering on others. Doing to others all the terrible things that were done to you and yours isn't fairness, it's generational trauma being passed along to the detriment of everyone.

And you fail to understand that Hamas is deliberately engineering the Palestinian suffering.

All they wish to have a place to be able to live in peace with their neighbours, raise their children, make a life for themselves. Incidentally that is exactly what you and I wish for too.
Yet that is not afforded to them. Constantly living on edge, forced or exiled from too many places. Attacked, harassed. Non-Jews (including myself) would have no idea what living as a Jew is like.
If we were to treat the Jews properly then a lot of trouble would disappear. The Jews did not ask for all of this. It was given to them.

Everyone wants to have peaceful, prosperous lives. What we do to achieve it matters. It matters if we are willing to buy, to beg, to borrow, to steal, to murder, to oppress, to become just like the assholes we are trying to escape, or to build a system where oppression is the enemy, not the go-to tactic for getting what we want.

No one asks to be oppressed. But how we respond to oppression, both the kind we experience and the oppression of others, matters.

The problem with this is the terrorist forces deliberately engineer the repression you are complaining about. But Israel has had many decades of education in being harsh brings safety. So long as being harsh protects their people and being soft hurts their people they'll be harsh. And note that the terrorists engineer much of that harshness--things like forcing civilians into the no-go zone around the border until the world made Israel stop enforcing it--which was an important part of setting up 10/7.

What you fail to understand is that the terrorists answer to their sponsors, not to the people they control. And their most powerful weapon is to get their people killed. You get more of what you reward--and you reward dead Palestinian civilians. Standard playbook, Saddam did the same thing. Got half a million of his people killed to make the sanctions look bad.

How much of that is due to the Palestinians and how much it is due to having a convenient mutual eneamy in Israel.

Yes to both. By not really looking after the refugees they had a convenient stick to use again Israel.
Lebanon allowed in some and we can still see the results today.

Why shouldn't the Palestinian refugees have been allowed to return to their former places of residence in Palestine?

Can you think of any reason other than racism or religious bigotry?

Fear of the past events reappearing?

Past events in Europe, or past events in Palestine?

The past events in Palestine were centuries of peaceful relations, interfaith marriages, and a dull, boring, quiet march to modernity. What's so bad about that?

That it didn't happen. Jim Crow was so normal that it goes almost unmentioned.

The Arab Proposal called for preserving everything that had been working for Palestinians of different faiths and ethnicities, ensuring continued religious freedom, peace and stability in civil administration, accepting the legal immigration that had already happened, and ensuing the people of Palestine were on-board with accepting more immigrants before allowing them entry. What's so bad about that?

The Arab Proposal had a poison pill--right of return. It existed to fool people into thinking Israel was the problem.

Loren likes to talk about the 100,000 Offer. He is completely wrong about the details so don't take his word on the provisions but let's suppose it was as he describes it. As I recall, you were in favor of that plan. So let's suppose it was the Palestinians who offered to allow 100,000 refugees from Europe to settle in the State of Palestine. Does that sound good to you? If not, why not?

I have no idea what you're talking about. Right of return has always been about all of them, including descendants that are only a small fraction Palestinian. It is a poison pill to ensure an agreement can't be reached.

I wish there will an easy solution but there is not. There is so much fear and hatred in the ME that is unlikely to ever end.

Even if there is no solution that is perfectly good, it's still possible to sort potential solutions into "better" and "worse".

It is better to respect and protect human rights.

It is worse to make racism, bigotry, and religious bias a founding principle for a system of governance.

It is better to always seek peaceful resolutions to conflicts even if/when you have to fight to protect and defend your friends and family and "They started it!".

It is worse to brutalize and terrorize others into doing what you want.

Back in 2024 I posted a link to a Cinema Therapy video titled See With Eyes Unclouded By Hate. I don't know if you ever watched it. It's all about conflict resolution when people are fighting for their lives and livelihoods. I'm offering it again as an example of what I'm talking about and why the approach it illustrates via the character Ashitaka is better than throwing up your hands and letting the most selfish and brutal elements in a society be in charge of it.

The problem is you have no understanding of the situation. This is not Israel vs Palestine. This is Israel vs Iranian puppet. You can't make peace with a puppet! Who pulls the strings has varied over the decades, but it's been string-pulling from the start.

The absolute truth is that various peoples have long been targeted for violence based solely upon the fact that they belong to certain groups. Jews have been persecuted for centuries. Currently they seem in favor with the Trump and right wing conservative evangelicals, some of whom long for the end of days and who would be horrified if a Jewish family moved next door. Certainly Hamas bears much of the blame for the strikes on Israel and for refusing to release hostages, thereby prolonging the conflict and the suffering of their own people to ‘expose’ Israel as horrible and criminal. There is far too much blame to assign to be shy about healing it on the heads of all parties involved.

Certainly these days, it is Iran who is helping continue the conflict but it’s been various Arab states for nearly 100 years. And why?

Because it is profitable and allows heads of state who are struggling to stay in power and accrue wealth in the face of genuine , serious issues facing their peoples who struggle to modernize while holding on to their culture, traditions and way of life to blame other Satans rather than the fact that these are enormous problems for every society and take a lot of time and effort and resources, not to mention humility to begin to address.

Racism exists because it allows us to quickly identify an enemy or an ‘other’ upon whom to place blame for whatever we are struggling with. It allows us to justify treating other human beings as less than, as sub human, as livestock because then their wants and needs and thoughts do not matter. What matters is only their utility and a large part of that utility is in serving as scape goat and beast of burden.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

The UAE will leave OPEC effective May 1st.
The UAE is the third largest producer of oil.
Expect Trump to push harder now for opening back up the Strait of Hormuz.
The UAE has a lot of spare capacity and can flood the oil market putting downward pressure on oil prices.
Should suck for Russia.

It's a huge win for Trump btw. Even a retarded buffoon can get it right sometimes through dumb luck.

I think the rest of the Middle-East is incredibly grateful to USA for finally kicking Iran in the nuts. Iran is the equivalent of a an uncle that keeps being invited for Christmas but can't stop himself from molesting the children. Yes, I still think Trump is an idiot

It would have been a huge win if he had a viable plan to keep the Straight open. He didn't.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Perhaps the rule should be that no country that has used nuclear weapons in war is allowed to have them, on the basis that they should only ever be a deterrent.

The problem is that conflicts are often not direct.

Remember all the Marxist terror groups in the last century? Note how they withered away when Russia quit funding them? Note how now it's Islamist terror groups? Iran wants the bomb so there will not be retaliation for what their terrorists do.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

Looking like Israel wasn't certain they could manage the Iranian response if they acted alone. And then let the US do the heavy lifting. And after all this... we gained what...?

The U.S. military has depleted much of its inventory of advanced missile-defense interceptors after expending far more high-end munitions defending Israel amid hostilities with Iran than Israeli forces used themselves, according to Defense Department assessments described to The Washington Post.

The imbalance, according to three U.S. officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive security matters, underscores the extent to which Washington has shouldered the burden of countering Iranian ballistic missile strikes during Operation Epic Fury, and raises questions about U.S. military readiness and security commitments around the world.

The United States launched more than 200 Terminal High Altitude Area Defense, or THAAD, interceptors in defense of Israel — roughly half of the Pentagon’s total inventory — along with more than 100 Standard Missile-3 and Standard Missile-6 interceptors fired from naval vessels in the eastern Mediterranean, said the U.S. officials, who, like others in this article, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive security matters. By contrast, Israel fired fewer than 100 of its Arrow interceptors and around 90 David’s Sling interceptors, some of which were used against less sophisticated projectiles fired by Iran-backed groups in Yemen and Lebanon.

Military analysts said the data described to The Post offers a rare window into how the United States and Israel work together.

“The numbers are striking,” said Kelly Grieco, a senior fellow at the Stimson Center. “The United States absorbed most of the missile defense mission while Israel conserved its own magazines. Even if the operational logic was sound, the United States is left with roughly 200 THAAD interceptors and a production line that can’t keep pace with demand.”

 

[Loren Pechtel]

IMO, it is logical and sane to think it is a bad idea for any country to have nukes. Especially one run by Trump.

Stop it. The degree of comparative evil in Trumps government is on a complete different level than that of the authoritarian world (the west is up against)…..

. Learn to read with comprehension and such straw men of yours may stop. My first sentence is the logical equivalent of no country should have nukes.

Your trust in the US Constitution preventing Trump from using nukes is based on pure ignorance. The US president is the commander in chief. Nothing in the Constitution requires military personnel to disobey illegal or crazy orders. Moreover, anyone paying attention would realize that Trump does not necessarily feel constrained by it or any law.

Actually, military personnel ARE required to disobey illegal orders—or face prosecution

But it often not obvious whether an order is illegal.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Putin figured he could beat Ukraine in a few days (a belief that turned out to be spectacularly wrong); Had they had nukes, he might have made the equally poor bet that they wouldn't dare use them, or that he could overrun their siloes and bases before they could be launched.

The only winning move is not to play.

Yeah, Putin had a serious misunderstanding of the true capability of his military. I can easily seem him counting on taking out their silos by surprise and have it go as badly as his first push into Ukraine went.

Most of the Soviet birds (and what Ukraine gave up were ex-Soviet birds) are liquid-fueled, that means a well-done surprise strike will take them out. Imperial Stormtroopers, though...

 

[Loren Pechtel]

No, I hate calling people antisemites. I'd rather people weren't racist. When they are I think it's good to call it out.

I remember Gospel saying I was white knighting when calling out anti-semitism at a time of the greatest global rise of anti-semitism since WW2. I'd say it was more important than ever to call out that racist conspiracy at the time when I did. I don't like racism. I don't like racist conspiracies. I don't like racists patting eachother on the back and denying they're racists. The most dangerous racist is one convinced they're not. Right now it's not a question of sticking up for Jews in particular. It's a slippery slope. Once we're ok with minorities being targetted I think it poisons the culture and makes us go numb to it. I just refuse to let it happen without calling it out. If that makes people here feel uncomfortable... so be it.

Yup. Any society in reality only has the level of rights granted to every member of that society.

The left keeps talking of systemic racism--yet perpetrating systemic antisemitism. They pretend it's opposition to Israel, but again and again we see that this is not the case, Jews that aren't Israeli are treated the same as Israelis. Just look at things like the attacks in Europe--basically automatic acceptance that the Jews were the cause--yet last I knew none of those arrested about it were Jews.

 

[Toni]

IMO, it is logical and sane to think it is a bad idea for any country to have nukes. Especially one run by Trump.

Stop it. The degree of comparative evil in Trumps government is on a complete different level than that of the authoritarian world (the west is up against)…..

. Learn to read with comprehension and such straw men of yours may stop. My first sentence is the logical equivalent of no country should have nukes.

Your trust in the US Constitution preventing Trump from using nukes is based on pure ignorance. The US president is the commander in chief. Nothing in the Constitution requires military personnel to disobey illegal or crazy orders. Moreover, anyone paying attention would realize that Trump does not necessarily feel constrained by it or any law.

Actually, military personnel ARE required to disobey illegal orders—or face prosecution

But it often not obvious whether an order is illegal.

But sometimes it is.