Maybe, but I strongly suspect that there were enough other things going in Trump’s favor that if she’d broken with Biden on Gaza–which is not nearly as easy as you make it sound–then we would have still ended up in the same place, except that different people would now be blaming her for that decision.

(Just to be clear, I am not saying that her campaign was flawless, only that it is easy to second guess.)

To The Moon

I have played that game five times (so I could share the experience with other people) and have broken down into tears at the end every time.

I can be glad that the Union won the U.S. Civil War and and ended slavery yet still consider it to be war crimes that they deliberately attacked civilians as part of Sherman’s March; no logic had been violated there.

The problem with this reasoning is that instability, whether as the result of undermining governments or regional wars, has unpredictable outcomes. For example, overthrowing the democratically elected government of Iran seemed like a great idea to those in power in the U.S. at the time when we disagreed with Iran’s policies, but this decision turned around to bite us when that got overturned. So it is not in our material interests to promote instability, and I think that the current administration knows this, so to the extent it is supporting Israel with effectively no conditions on its actions I think that it is behaving irrationally rather than maliciously.

No dominant organisation in the world like the US state would give a significant amount of money(like it does for Israel) for something that doesn’t serve their material interests, namely the perpetuation and/or increase of their power and influence.

I disagree with the notion that dominant organizations would never give significant of money away in a manner contrary to their material interests. If anything, the opposite is true: if you are dominant, then you have more freedom to get away with acting against your material interests (intentionally or not).

I think that our treatment of Israel is an example of this. All of the money we have been throwing at them does not buy anything at all, since the Israeli government does not even seem to be that grateful for it but just expects it as a matter of course. They seem hell-bent on bringing the entire region into a war that would pull us in and cause a ton of damage to our material interests, and we have barely any ability to stop them from doing this. Worst, this situation is entirely avoidable because we could, at the very least, put strings on our military aid and then enforce them, rather than just giving Israel whatever it wants and ignoring whenever it crosses any of our supposed lines.

Just to be clear, I am not arguing that our material interests are the only reason to care about what is happening or to criticize our government’s actions, I am just saying that it makes no sense to just take as given that a dominant organization will always act in its own best material interests in this way.

If you are comfortable with negative numbers, then you are already comfortable with the idea that a number can be tagged with an extra bit of information that represents a rotation. Complex numbers just generalize the choices available to you from 0 degrees and 180 degrees to arbitrary angles.

Yes, and that is my point: unless you wearing a seat belt somehow made the accident more likely to happen, it really doesn’t seem like manslaughter applies here.

According to this page, you could attempt to argue “lack of causation” if there was no connection between you not wearing a seat belt and your passenger getting killed.

I disagree that the web site is fast; it took at least 10 seconds before the video would start playing.

Just to be clear, the problem is actually not that the guy was being boring but that he was a monster.

I can’t say that my face-to-face interactions with people on contentious issues have been much better than my online ones, honestly, even when I am making a genuine effort to treat their concerns as reasonable and find common ground.

As an introvert, I find the idea of participating in a lot more community events to be exhausting.

Oh, dear child, it goes to the same place where you will go when you inevitably die one day: into complete non-existence, save for an echo in others’ minds, and after a while not even that.

Sweet dreams!

I think you meant to say:

I knew it, no comments yet, everyone’s a sheep

NO! Don’t make it bad.

I feel like the modern name for it would be just “Script”.

My taste buds disagree that this is “unfortunate”.

I did it again. 🫤

Censorship sucks and I can’t believe we let an entire country get away with it and still did business with them the whole time.

It is not clear to me that the country would be less censored now and the people there better off if we had refused to do business with them.

(Just to be clear, I am not saying that we handled China as well as we could have over the last few decades, but hindsight is 20-20.)

Personally, I like to plant gardens that help out natural pollinators in order to change the bees that I want to see in the world.