Bush didn’t care. Dude was an asshole. He tried to drum up support with our allies, and when most of them said no, he just did it anyway.

That said, it was a mistake to warmonger, don’t get me wrong.

I don’t think the invasion of Iraq can be blamed on the NYT. I think the Bush administration and Al Qaeda get the credit for that one.

However much is necessary to arrive at the truth.

Nobody and no system should be expected to be perfect all the time, I would anticipate some mistakes over a course of decades.

Have you checked for any times they were critical of US foreign policy within the same timeframe?

“Consistently” and “in-these-specific-cases” are different things.

Bullshit.

Israel is a nuclear-armed nation, it is as immune to large-scale ground invasion as N Korea or Pakistan. They do not need our thousand pound bombs, nor our military alliance. This just isn’t the 80s anymore.

Similarly, Reagan wasn’t facing a criminal trying to take down his own justice system, relying fully on being propped up by ethno-nationalists that want Palestine, all of it, exterminated, just to maintain his own position.

We could probably stop them, if we threatened them with severe economic sanctions. Cutting off the weapons would simply make Netanyahu use even more indiscriminate tactics though, like starving them all, or firebombing the whole place. He can’t accept a permanent cease fire though, because one would cost him, him personally, everything he has left.

That’s the problem with strongmen. They don’t actually give a fuck about people, just themselves. And they’d rather be an evil tyrant than a loser.

Probably can’t fix that with a phone call, don’t you think?

Assuming those officers are following their training, we need to change officer training. That behavior is more military than police.

Right. Just like God.

I think the important thing is to remember how important it always is to fight for them, at any rate.

Right. Because rights are created by God, right?

Sounds like a fantastic option for folks that don’t like any mandatorily enforced censorship.

They should all go there.

It’s not good enough to simply say you’re a conscientious objector, otherwise everyone and their brother would do it and conscription as a concept would fail.

So, if you are one, you gotta fucking prove that shit somehow. Words aren’t good enough. Go protest, join an org, donate to charities, whatever. Need some evidence though.

It’s not complicated to understand.

If you’re not doing anything illegal then I highly recommend keeping your hands out in the open where they can see both of them, and politely answering their questions.

They have a gun, so its not about right/wrong, it’s about your own safety. You don’t know if that’s a decent one or a shitty one.

If you don’t want to parent your own son, there is someone out there willing to do it for you. They will not do a good job.

I think Germany and Japan are going to have to re-militarize and conquer everyone back into a civil democracy.

No one wants this war, or wishes it on anyone,” said Tal Beeri of the Alma Research and Education Center

Bit naive imo. Netanyahu is a bit of a strongman that catastrophically failed to keep his people safe, which betrays the most foundational appeal of such a figure. His approval rating demonstrates this, and he’s facing criminal charges to boot.

He has one route forward for personal preservation–more war.

Somebody has to fill this place with content…

Paywall blocked me out. My response to the synopsis though:

This is a fucked if you do, fucked if you don’t thing. Militaristic thinkers, because they only care about winning, are often very good at maneuvering their opposition into untenable positions, catch-22s. They’re rationally inescapable, that’s the whole point, so it’s best to fall back onto your feelings, as much as I hate to say it. To paraphrase popular youtuber Ryan McBeth, don’t give your enemies problems, because problems have solutions. Give them dilemmas. That’s what they’re doing to us. When you find yourself in one, just acknowledge pain is your future, and pick something.

I’ve also slowly begun to suspect that there’s Russian intelligence penetration into our broader media ecosystem. I cannot otherwise explain the prevalence of Russian war propaganda coming from western outlets, and how certain American churches seem to be drifting closer and closer to Eastern Orthodoxy.

Let’s just keep our eye on the ball here. We’re trying to prevent the full might of the US military from falling into fascist hands unchecked by any Mike Pence type figures. It’s gonna get really ugly, but we can still win this with political activism and words. We need to remember our ground game. Nobody fully trusts these glowy screens we’re looking at, so its talking to your friends, knocking on doors, getting people registered, volunteering to drive voters to the polls, etc.

We win this one face-to-face, with the good ole fashioned democratic party ground n pound. It’s our greatest strength anyway. Find a couple people somewhere, and talk to them, preferably nicely. Don’t try to make them angry, try to get through to them.

If they’re religious, you can try to gently remind them of Jesus’ teachings, and how he said to pray for your enemies, to forgive others, to be kind and charitable, how the meek, not the strong shall inherit the Earth, how it’s easier to pass a camel through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of God, how he whipped the Pharisees for using the temple to make money, how he sacrificed himself and not someone else to save our souls, how he asked us to follow him.

There’s so much more too. The height of irony in this day and age is how our greatest ally is actually probably the Jesus Christ of the scriptures. Sometimes you just have to meet people where they’re at. Frankly though, if you support people like Ghandi and MLK Jr, nothing Jesus says should be too strange to you. Maybe the praying stuff, he was pretty big on prayer. Philosophically he was just ahead of his time though, and honestly fits fine into the modern world as a broader philosophical alternative to materialism. He shouldn’t be blamed for what people did in his name after he died though, and his direct words are probably the only possible thing that could get through to certain sorts.

If we can remind evangelicals what it means to be a good person instead of a frightened person, though, we’ll sweep this election in a landslide. If by any chance you were raised in the church, there’s a very good use for those skills still. I know they’re still in there, even if it upsets us a little bit because of the shitty actions of various churches in the intervening 2000 years. Jesus didn’t do those things though, he just told people to play nice in a lot of different ways.

Uh, no, not true. Justice delayed is justice delayed. Justice denied is justice denied. It almost always gets delayed over something or another, just because proving a case as best you can is difficult and complex, and often changes mid-process.

And you do want proof to be important, justice isn’t something you want Kyle Rittenhouse types just winging on their own.

That was justice denied, right there. Delayed is fine sometimes though.

It’s important to remember that efficiency is not always what you want most. You want accuracy and precision too, and a balance somewhere between these competing priorities is necessary.

It grinds slow, but fine. Or so the saying goes. And when they say slow, they mean glacially.

This design is intentional to make it difficult to weaponize, which people did all the time through history. Don’t mistake slow for stationary though. Glaciers do move, even if you can’t see it if you sit there and stare at one.

Every time we get a wave of fresh influx, it seems to bring a fair number of upset people here. I’m not particularly surprised, they’re coming from a less-pleasant environment just in general.

People do seem to settle down a little bit after they get some time to unwind from that all, though.

Yep, I completely believe it.

I’m fairly political myself, and it takes pretty hefty amounts of effort to remind myself to let things go and try to just keep a respectable level of discourse. And I still fuck it up all the time.

A lot of it is mechanical. I have far fewer tools here than I do with irl political activism, I can’t use facial expression or tone or anything. So it almost feels like negative sarcasm replaces all that or something, I don’t really know, I’ll have to think about it awhile.