Personally I think the canary was Britain with Brexit, but I grant you that unless one has lived there for a while it’s hard to really understand the politics of it all since due to their cultural favored image style, the Fascists in England are sleazy posh types kniffing others in the back rather than loud, obnoxious types punching others in the gut.
As I see it, America’s Iran is the violent and loud country version of Britain’s Brexit.
According the the lastest polls over 110 million Americans still think Trump is great and doing the right things.
Just keep unwaveringly supporting America and Israel mate!
The cost of the Artemis II mission is estimated to be $4.1 billion
Each day of the Iran war is estimated to cost $2 billion.
There is plenty of money, just not the will.
And this is not just a Trump thing: all US Administrations in the last couple of decades spent many, many times more in war than space exploration - for example the Iraq War was estimated to cost in total $1100 billion, whilst the one in Afghanistan was $2300 billion, which would be a lot more money in today’s terms.
Just not going to Iraq would, directly (so, not counting indirect costs due to increased terrorist threats as result of the growth of ISIS that happenned due to Iraqi military being put in the same prisions as Islamic extremists) have financed 275 Artemis II missions and that’s without taking in account Inflation (if done back then Artemis II would’ve been cheaper)
America, fast going backwards, has today reached 1969 1968, assuming that this mission succeeds.
(Edit: this is not even a moon landing so more Apolo 8 than Apolo 11).
Most headlines about America in the international press in the last month could just have been “Liar lies” and “Liar was once again proven to have lied”
All it needs is a bit of spit and polish.
That plane is resting.
It’s pining for the fjords.
- The BBC
“There were Hamas tunnels under that girls’ school!!!”
Sure mate, the Zionists are just gonna go “No, we don’t want it because this territory belongs to the Iranian people!” if they ever got a chance to capture it.
After all, Israel’s track record on what they do with any territory they capture in that area is not at all “hold it when they can and then when the locals fight against the occupation call them ‘violent’, ‘terrorists’ and even ‘vermin’ as an excuse to kill them, men, women and children” so clearly only an anti-semiteTM would dare think that Israel would take over somebody else’s territory and mass murder the locals whilst putting up Israeli “settlements” there.
Don’t tell us: for your next trick you’re going to click your heels 3 times whilst saying “there’s no place like home” and be teleported from fantasy land to your kibutz in “Occupied Territory”.
Sure mate, Israel isn’t at all trying to conquer all the territory it can and there is no such thing as Greater Israel plan.
On a similar note, there’s this river-crossing piece or realestate for sale in New York which would be a wonderful investment for the likes of you.
If they ever manage to conquer it, Israel would do in Iran (a country of 90 million people) a Genocide so large that it would make the NAZI Holocaust look like a minor footnote in History.
The ultra-racist extremelly violent Jewish-supremacist modern day version of the NAZIs have only not done even worse things than the NAZIs themselves because so far they have yet to occupy enough territory inhabited by people of the ethnicities they openly call “vermin”.
They could just target any ships from or to Iranian ports or of nations which support Iran with artillery or drones.
It’s exactly because it’s so stupidly easy to attack civilian ships in a space like that whilst it’s very hard to defend against it that Iran is able to do so even whilst under attack by American and Israel, so the country on the other side could do the same thing and only target Iranian or Iran-related ships.
Two can play the “fuck the other side’s ship” game there.
By international treaty, in a maritime border were one country is in one side and a different one in another, like that, the border sits right smack in the middle, equidistant of both sides, so soverignty over that Straight is divided.
What Iran has at the moment is the power to limit what passes there, but Oman could have the exact same thing if they so chose, since Oman too could do the same thing - for exactly the same reason Oman cannot stop Iran from attacking ships there (it’s a lot harder to protect civilian ships in range of land-based artillery/drones than to attack them), Iran would not be able to stop Oman from doing exactly the same.
So if Iran tried to have actual sovereignty over the whole Straight (full control, not just the ability to stop traffic there), Oman could fuck them up by doing exactly the same thing that Iran is doing now - it’s a game that two can play.
It’s generally agreed to officially put the border (and assign sovereignty) right in the middle in a situation like that exactly because otherwise the country on the side which “lost” would start fucking things up in that channel for all users.
The only way for Iran to officially get sovereignty of the whole Straight would be to conquer and occupy the land on the other side, and I doubt Iran has the capability to do so.
That might ultimatelly be good for America and Americans, so why would Iran ever do something like that?
I mean, if America was a society with humanitarian values were what’s happenned now with Trump was an exception, it would make sense, but historically the US has been in war most of its existence, of late most of it being in the Middle East causing the deaths of millions of civilians, and very few people in the US were actually against it as a question of principle and even now most are only against it because “American money”, “American lives” or “Gas prices in America” so it’s clearly not a society of good people who normally uphold good values and is just momentarilly under the control of evil people.
The US is not a society where most people think that innocent lives are sacred, be it at home or abroad.
That’s literally the one good thing Russia has done in ages.
Not that I blame Ukraine for siding against Russia (or even Iran) on everything, including this.
As somebody outside both, the very same principle that meant that I was and means that I still am against the Russian war of aggression on Ukraine, makes me be against the American and Israeli war of aggression on Iran.
If you look at the merits and demerits of the actions themselves rather than follow the hyper-reductive take of the easilly brainwashed simpleton of “bad country is bad, good country is good”, it’s perfectly possibly to support, say the US helping Ukraine against Russian agression and Russia helping Iran against American agression (both righteous actions against violent aggressors) whilst being against Russian aggression against Ukraine and American agression against Iran (both evil actions of violent aggression).
but in the meantime I am a rational person who knows that a tactical vote for an imperfect party is better than letting jackbooted thugs and pedophiles run rampant.
I’m sorry but that’s only “rational” if your analysis is very superficial.
Tactical voting is exactly what has been happening in the US for DECADES and the outcome was ever more rightwing policies, social mobility crashing from almost 90% in the 70s to just over 10% now, increased poverty and so on, and even putting aside all social and economic issues and focusing only on political strategy, with this system the Democrat Party has not once but TWICE fielded a candidate so bad that they lost to somebody like Trump.
Logically doing more of the same would yield more of the same outcome - ever more rightwing populists getting elected - and the next time a far-right POTUS is elected (a guaranteed event if desperate people keep getting created in the US by falling median real incomes and opportunities alongside a captured Press specialized in blaming foreigners for it, because both parties have neoliberal policies) that next Fascist POTUS might actually be intelligent and hence even more dangerous than Trump.
Even in a fucked-up, undemocratic, power-duopoly system like the one in America, each vote isn’t simply an A/B choice that’s closed once done - the way things work in the US a vote is a cyclic choice where parties put forward their choices for candidates and the voters say “yes” or “no”, and then some years later the same happens again, so the response of voters to the candidates fielded in one cycle informs who the parties put forward in the subsequent cycle.
In other words, if people keep rejecting a certain style of candidate fielded by a party, that party is pushed to field a different style of candidate. This how the Republicans changed over the years fielding ever more far-right and populist candidates - voters responded badly to “serious conservatives” so the party fielded more and more “anti-immigrant loudmouths”. It’s funny that Republicans have been more responsive to their electorate than Democrats.
So each vote isn’t just a choice of POTUS, it’s also a message to the parties about the suitability of the candidate they have fielded and, last I checked, in Democracy it’s the obligation of parties to responde to voters rather than the other way around.
Under this broader analysis, the Kamala vs Trump result yields two possible views:
As I see it, if one is trully not a party loyalist and genuinelly wants avoid another Trump in the future, the most logical choice is to go with #2 for three reasons:
If one’s objective trully is to avoid having another Trump in power in the US, then logically the most effective way to do so is to push the DNC leadership to change (or replace them) since those people are VASTLY more powerful than votes and are fewer in number so change there is not only way more effective but also more likely.
Sadly, there’s a lot of people driven by party loyalism parroting “blame voters” self-serving propaganda from the DNC in order to avoid that those party leaders suffer repeatedly choosing candidates that don’t appeal to voters.
I thought the subject was about how NOT to have somebody like Trump in power, which naturally means examining EVERYTHING that led to somebody like Trump ending in power, which certainly includes looking at how and why did the other party in the power duopoly system in the US field such a horrible candidate that she lost against somebody as bad as Trump.
Of course if your “subject” is not “how best to beat/avoid a Trump president” and instead is “the electorate should be subservient to the choices of ‘my Party’s leadership’”, I can see how it would seem to you that I changed subject by not going along with the whole “the choices of the DNC are above challenge by the riff-raff” view.
Party loyals never challenge the choices of those they see as their betters - the Party leadership - and instead blame the masses for not going along with them: it’s never “how can we better make sure people want to vote for us” and always “people are horrible for not voting for us”.
If America and especially Israel were treated as pariah states, this shit would’ve been less likely to happen.
As it so happens Australia is one of their biggest cheerleaders.