Good point. I should have qualified what I said by saying that the Israeli operation may have the effects I listed. But, as you say, it might backfire and have the opposite of the intended effect. I guess that is always a risk with these types of operations.
This is the conclusion I’ve come to as well. I used to be frustrated at how stupid Trump supporters are. I would wonder how anyone could be so gullible, cynical, racist, or mysogynist as to vote for Trump. How does he get away with, even prosper, saying such crazy and harmful things? But I’ve come to the conclusion that Trump voters are just extremely unhappy. A vote for Trump is a big fuck-you to the establishment. Both parties were basically run by a modern day aristocracy. The Kennedys, the Clintons, and the Bushes are the most obvious dynasties, but they also have many, many surrogates. More importantly, they defined a kind of cursus honorum for becoming president, including all of the right schools, fraternities, clubs, contacts, donors, etc that you have to follow to move up through the various offices to get to the top. The Tea Party disrupted the Republican aristocracy, but then Trump came along and just obliterated it.
Now, on the one hand, we can probably all get behind the idea that breaking up the aristocratic hold on political parties is a good thing. However, history has also shown that supporting populist demagogues who specialize in chaos and hateful rhetoric often leads to a bad time for the country and the people.
These last five years are the first time in my life that I’m genuinely worried for the stability of the republic. It has been said many times by people who have lived through it that people never think civil war will actually happen until it does. And then they look back and the signs were obvious. Whoever actually wins, when half of the population is voting for a hateful chaos candidate, that’s a big red flag.
It wasn’t “stupid”. As a psy-op, it further complicates Hezbollah’s communications, sows fear among Hezbollah members, demonstrates Israel’s far-reaching capabilities, makes civilians suspicious of Hezbollah officials, etc. If Israel does something similar a couple more times, Hezbollah will have to resort to bicycle couriers and smoke signals.
It also undermines Hezbollah’s credibility. The Lebanese people are not stupid. They know that Hezbollah is a shadow government allowing Iran to control Lebanon and use it as a staging ground for attacks on Israel. That leaves Lebanon in a permanent state of semi-war with Israel, not to mention its involvement in multiple other external conflicts. None of which is helpful for the health and prosperity of Lebanon.
Lebanon is a natural trading nation and always has been. It is a beautiful country full of kind people with excellent commercial instincts. They are held down as a nation by the fact that Hezbollah has turned the country into a pawn of the Ayatollah.
My guess is that assassination isn’t as easy as it is made out to be in the movies. The CIA, the best funded intelligence agency in the world, tried to take out Castro hundreds of times and failed. They couldn’t find Osama for a decade, either, and even then the US used Seals, not the CIA. Sure, killing some rando is probably easy, but not a government leader who is actively avoiding assassination, as I’m sure Hamas leaders are doing.
It isn’t such a simple question and I don’t remember all of Scaramucci’s points, which is why I gave the reference. Also, given how long OP’s post was, I figure they probably do want the longer explanation in the podcast. But since you ask (even though you claim its not important to you), here’s what I recall:
That’s all I can remember right now.
It’s not an advertisement, dumbass. I found the last two episodes of that podcast pretty much exactly answered the question that OP posed.
If you really want to know why Trump is still competitive, listen to Anthony Scaramucci, a.k.a. The Mooch. He worked for Trump for a couple of weeks before being fired by him. The Mooch is a long-time conservative investor-type who knows Trump well and can’t stand him, so he has been helping the Democrats. Thr Mooch really understands Trump and his followers. I’m pretty sure he helped with Harris’s debate prep, especially helping her understand how to get under Trump’s skin.
He hosts a great podcast along with Katty Kay called The Rest Is Politics US (as opposed to the parent program The Rest Is Politics UK). https://tripus.supportingcast.fm
In particular, check out the last two post-debate episodes:
#27 Trump vs. Harris: What You Didn’t See
#28 Why Kamala Harris Still Has a Problem
You misunderstand me. I don’t think I know better than doctors. Far from it. What I want from a doctor is information and informed choice, not a gatekeeper who makes decisions for me. As a group, physicians have been slow to adopt the patient-centered informed choice mentality that, for example, nurse practitioners and midwives have more thoroughly adopted.
The fact that you’ve doubled down here on calling patients idiots for being somewhat distrustful of the typical arrogant physician attitude confirms what I’m saying.
If I was going under anesthesia for a planned procedure, I would not drink or use drugs beforehand. If it was an unplanned emergency, I guess it would depend on the circumstances, but you are citing an extreme circumstance. If someone is actively high at the time they end up in the emergency department, well, that’s bad luck and it might be wise to disclose since the staff will figure it out pretty darn quick anyway. Same if you are a severe alcoholic or opiate addict. That’s not what I’m talking about, though. I’m talking about when doctors or nurses ask you about it as a lifestyle question.
You know as well as I do that the health care system classifies people in terms of their risk factors and then use that profile to make decisions about you. Once classified as a “drug user” in your chart, many doctors and nurses will treat you differently. They may or may not “care” from a moral perspective, and we know that they won’t tell family or police, but that won’t necessarily stop them from denying you necessary pain relief or deprioritizing you in triage. That’s the actual concern.
There is absolutely no reason to tell a doctor if you use cannabis or engage in moderate alcohol use or occasionally use cocaine, LSD, or psylocibin. If you are prescribed a medication that has an interaction with a recreational drug, the doctor can simply tell you that. They don’t need to know if you use that drug from time to time. Only you, the patient, need to know that so you can avoid the interaction. More extreme forms of drug use are a different story, of course.
Edit: Let me add one other overarching point. I think people are sick and tired of having doctors make decisions for them. I don’t need a nanny. I need information about risks and benefits in order to make an informed choice. Doctors rarely do that. Instead, they decide what should be prescribed, or not prescribed, regardless of the patient’s wishes. I know the reason is fear of liability, but here we are nonetheless.
That is a good analogy. I think phones and tablets being app-centric has really handicapped Zoomers in some ways. As Gen X, the first thing we learned about computers was the file system. That gave us a map of the computer. It also made it clear that the operating system, the applications running on the operating, and the data you generated and stored on the operating system were all different things. With app-centric devices and cloud-storage, people aren’t exposed to that paradigm so much.
The new paradigm is more account-centric. You have a Microsoft account or a Google account or an Apple account and that’s the ecosystem you work within.
I had a girl drop out of my University class because she couldn’t figure out what a “file” was or how to “email” it to me. She just kept trying to share her Apple storage with me. Really sad. It’s hard to help someone who gets to university without even grasping the basic nature of a file system.
I used to trust HCPs, but I know many of them now and have heard them shit-talk and judge their patients for mental health issues and drug use (among other things). I would NEVER, EVER tell a doctor or nurse about any form of drug or alcohol use now, or any kind of anger issues that could possibly be interpreted as aggressive. Especially not in a hospital where everything gets recorded in an electronic chart and may be used against you in the future. Fuck that.
Oprah? Did AI get so advanced that it invented a time machine and sent us back to the 1980s? Next you’ll be telling me that Phil Donahue is back.
I think you are misunderstanding the nature of the conflict. The war is between Iran and Israel. Gaza is just one tiny battlefield in the larger war. Iran and its proxies don’t want to solve the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. Cui bono? Iran and its proxies, that’s who. Kamala Harris knows this. She isn’t stupid and she is well-advised by experts. You and your fellow protesters aren’t helping at all, you are just making her job of defeating Trump harder. Wake up, my friend.
Hezbollah and Hamas are Iranian proxies that have wrecked Lebanon and Gaza respectively. Hamas’s murderous attack on Israeli civilians on October 7 was all about creating chaos, provoking Israel, and undermining the Abraham Accords. It wasn’t about solving the problems of the Palestinian people, it was done to further Iran’s “Axis of Resistance” goals. In that sense, Hamas’s October 7 operation was very similar in nature and purpose to Bin Laden’s 9/11 plan, and Israel is responding much the same as the US did back in the early 2000s against the Taliban and al-Qaeda.
Iran and Hamas started the current clash with the purpose of provoking Israel into a drastic response in Gaza. Gazan civilians are caught in the middle, but if you think it’s Israel’s fault, you are falling exactly in line with what Iran and their proxies intended.
The Russians, for all their faults, have a well-developed sense of realpolitik, and they have a term for people like you and your fellow protesters: useful idiots. I prefer the term “naive but well-intentioned”, but there is quite a lot of overlap in this case. That “naive but well-intentioned” outlook is fine, even laudable, most of the time, but it is quite unhelpful at this moment when the competition between Harris and Trump is so close.
The Middle East is strategically important, so the West can’t just ignore it. But it doesn’t make sense to get emotionally involved in what happens there. The protests against Israel do not make sense to me given the wider context in the region.
I know it isn’t a popular position right now, but I believe the Israelis are correct in their assessment that Hamas needs to be thoroughly crushed. True, it is only a short-term remedy because Iran will simply fund another generation of jihadis, but it may give Israel another decade or two of relative peace. Hamas only wants one thing and that is to destroy Israel. Hezbollah is similar and also needs to be crushed and Lebanon liberated, but that is a more difficult job that’ll have to wait. Both Hezbollah and Hamas are so thoroughly entrenched in their ideology and, more importantly, in a black market economy, that they will never become legitimate state actors.
So, how does the situation with Iran and their proxies get resolved? Peace processes have been tried for decades only to be scuttled by extremists. The West has sanctioned the hell out of Iran and yet they are still able to supply their proxies with tens of thousands of rockets. Protesters say that Israel needs to give the Palestinians their own state and then the hostilities will end. Yes, that’s a nice goal, but I don’t believe for a second that Iran will stop fomenting violence against Israel no matter how many concessions the Israelis make to the Palestinians. Does anyone, in their heart of hearts, truly believe that Iran will ever stop funding terrorism against Israel and the West as long as the Ayatollahs are in charge? Will any amount of justice for Palslestine appease the Ayatollahs? I don’t think so.
I hate to say it because war is the worst way to solve conflicts, but I suspect that the Middle East will remain a violent stalemate until the Ayatollahs are removed from power.
Interesting. I’ve got a fast internet connection and a server running 24/7 with Transmission and 9 TB of hard drive space. I run it behind Gluetun/NordVPN to avoid those copyright strikes. My setup has been extremely successful so far. I only delete torrents once they hit a ratio of 1.5 at the moment, though I could extend that if necessary. I don’t use cryptocurrency, though, and don’t intend to start. I assume my setup would be somewhat valuable to a private tracker. Do you have any recommendations?
Edit: oh yeah, I forgot to mention that I, too, only use bittorrent to share Linux ISOs and other non-copyright material. Definitely. Piracy is bad.
I thought I read that private trackers are hard to sign up to. Or that you have to prove yourself somehow and people get stressed about maintaining their ratio. Is that true? If so, that doesn’t sound fun.
I don’t live in America either, but I went on a cruise once and there were many Americans, including a black American couple who were very obviously urban. By which I mean, the wife wore high heels and a tight jeweled mini-skirt on a sea-kayaking excursion…clearly signalling that she hadn’t spent much time outside of a city.
Anyway, I was shocked when they spoke exactly like The Jeffersons, with all the exaggerated whooping, non-stop vernacular, and stage-like mannerisms. It was so over-the-top that I honestly thought they were play acting, but after chatting with them for a while I realized that was just how they were. They were very nice people and clearly having a great time.
Well sure. Modern war is all about adaptation. Exploding pagers were never going to be a knock-out blow, just a clever psy-op. One among many, I’m sure.