Sonori

Perhaps, but to people who have spent the last few decades in the halls of power surrounded by members of a western style military who take it as given that they are a western nation just as formidable as their close allies in Europe and Asia, the idea that the nation itself could falter in such a way is certianly far from many of their minds. Doubly so for a party that is used to bulldozing its way through critical media outlets, courts, and public protests.

They’ve had general success in previous wars with most if not all of their neighbors, and something tells me the focus in their telling is not on the massive amounts of foreign aid they received in the lead up or duration.

They may often talk about how any given threat may be an apocalyptic end of the nation, but I don’t think they actually believe it, at least when it comes to the court of public opinion in some far off foreign lands.

Could a senior politician be so disconnected from the basic reality of their situation by yes men, loyalists, and wishful thinking? Well by all accounts Putin did honestly believe the FSB’s reports that Ukrainians would welcome any Russian forces in droves as liberators, and that any conflict would be over before well before the west could respond, so I’d say yes.

The path they are seeing is the path for Benjamin Netanyahu and his far right party to hold on to power for a few more years, all else be dammed.

His far right campaign and political messaging pre October 7th focused hard on how he was the only one strong enough to control Hamas, and on how he could ensure the fires of conflict would burn just hot enough that they would never find common ground and unite with the West Bank (the pretense that Isreal and the US demands they do before the West Bank authority can be recognized as a nation by the UN) but never got enough to possibly harm Isreal itself.

Between constant legal battles and scandals with Isreal’s supreme court, he was just bearly able to hold onto power when Hamas demonstrated that they clearly weren’t actually under his perfect control, and so now he needs a win a war to play the strongman and distract everyone from what he had been saying up until that point. He needs a reason to shut down media outlets criticizing him, and war powers to run over the opposition.

He also needs the votes of the farthest right of his far right party, and thusly needs to appear amenable to their position of complete Israeli annexation of the West Bank and Gaza.

All of this means that the IDF must be seen fighting a great war for the very survival of the nation, not a series of hostage rescue or series of commando raids to capture high value targets and more importantly intel. It’s also why he cannot let this end in a ceasefire or give into Hamas original terms of a hostage exchange for the Palestinians being held without charges for years in Israel, but must fight on until whatever passes to the far right as a total victory.

Little things like burning though most of Isreal’s foreign support and international reputation are at best problems for the future, and maybe even opportunities for campaigning, because when the world turned its back on Isreal only he and his party of strong men are going to be able to keep things going for the average citizen.

Ok, i’ll bite.

While I get the instance name is lost on some visitors, it’s fascinating to see Republican campaign material posted here in complete seriousness. So much about how dare the government possibly have impeded people heavily involved in far right campaigns in making money off distracting the working class with made up culture war. How dare other private businesses want to throw the out and proud Nazi’s off their platform.

A few offhand points, it is absolutely within the State Department’s remit to identify foreign infuance campaigns, even if they don’t always get it right.

The fact that the Twitter Files also showed that companies can and did push back on numerous recommendations after their own investigation disagreed without repercussions would seem to be pretty damming evidence that they really were recommendations about potential misinformation accounts and not government censorship.

Similarly, the comments on identifying misinformation is based on the ludicrous idea that there is just no possible way for an investigation to tell the difference between a truth and an outright lie, and thusly anyone attempting to do so or tell others about the serial liar much be censoring them.

The best evidence that the government isn’t actually trying to censor these group is government doesn’t use this sort of lukewarm, you might want to take a look at these accounts methods on pleople who it actually wants to censor like leftists, they just declare them a potential terror theat and send the FBI or police in to rough up the environmental group or activists.

But hey, they called the New York Post sensationalist and massive transphobe campaigning to get trans people banned from public restrooms prone to misinformation, so I guess the deep state really is censoring poor Donald Trump and his friends and we should be outraged not at the blatant campaign to mislead the poor into voting against their interests, but of the most lukewarm, liberal, halfhearted response possible to it.

In short, get back to me when they’ve done something more than politely ask the mods to look into a questionable user, like have even approached the sort of things they do people trying to block pipelines on a weekly basis.

Personally I tend to think that the Bengal famine is better compared to the Holodomor, as it is closer in time, area, and effect. If there is a lesson to these things though, I think it’s that it doesn’t matter what economic system you use of the people in charge are fans of eugenics, and that’s why it’s so important that there be strong independent checks on the government and politicians, minority representation, multi-party rule, etc…

Really? Doesn’t seem that wild to me that a place where cartels have openly claimed responsibility for assassinating politicians that threaten the status quo might see a large pushback against a change to the status quo.

Politically, major outside military forces like aircraft carriers tend to be viewed at a stabilizing force in the local region, but more to the point Redrum and I were talking about Isreal’s primarily being useful politically rather than militarily to destabilize and break up leftist and Soviet groups in the region.

Except OPEC still had significant power and influence in the US well after the Yom Kippur war ended in 1973, and said war didn’t even involve the majority of the OPEC member countries.

I think the US becoming the largest oil producer in the world might have had more to do with the decline in OPEC’s influence on the US but what do I know?

Yes, but it’s presence in the region being a destabilizing force is a very different thing to being primarily an unsinkable aircraft carrier as the commenter I responded to described it.

I mean Saudi Arabia also does all those things, most of them far better than Israel ever could due to geography, and at a far lower cost. If Isreal snapped out of existence tomorrow, between Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Greece European and North American power projection in the Middle East and North Africa remains almost entirely unchanged.

Honestly the military benefits of supporting Isreal while real are definitely not as important as the domestic political benefits to the US, which is to say that the conservatives like Isreal because it provides a nice place to deport all the Jews to while also maintaining precedent for an enthnostate with race based citizenship, and the Democrats like it because they get a lot of gifts, friends, and in their minds potential voters, all for doing exactly what the conservatives want them to do.

While I’ve only used one or two types of bluetooth headphones, i’ve never hand any trouble replacing the battery with them. The cups just snap out and then you unplug the lithium cell and plug a new one it, at least in my experience, so that may just have been a thing with the model you got.

To be fair, Venezuela also makes a show of wanting to collapse Guyana for its Oil, so at times it feels more like a case of goes around comes around for a dictator who implemented left wing policies for the first few years of their party’s reign before realizing they could do better by not implementing anything that didn’t benefit them and the rest of the party elites directly, and just saying that they really would return to being leftists at some time in the future.

Well you were just suddenly teleported into the world, so I guess the question is, do you want to find out?

Because as we all know, Natrual Gas has an extremely steady and nonvolatile price, especially now that we’ve spent hundreds of billions tying North America’s previously independent pricing to the gobal price.

Or we could, and this is a very crazy idea, go back to not attaching a tradable minute to minute commodities market and instead give control back to reliable contracts and the operators who actually manage the grid.