Germany gave up anti-US ideology after being bombed to rubble, and Japan gave up anti-US ideology shortly after being nuked. The Middle East is different culturally, but what you’re proposing is clearly not a human universal.

Consider Syria. Ahmed al-Sharaa was a jihadist but then decided that he liked being alive and in power more than he hated the US and Israel.

I think it’s plausible that they’ve concluded that the Assembly of Experts, a group selected for loyalty to Khamenei, is not going to radically depart from his ideology.

Israel is not going to take over its neighbors. It’s already struggling to rule over the three million Arabs in the West Bank and it’s stretched thin occupying just part of Gaza (less than 140 square miles).

I’m not happy with Trump’s approach to international relations, but there’s a difference between the sort of “pause nuclear program” negotiating that Iran had been doing and the sort that would ideally come out of this war, which would be “give up anti-US/anti-Israel ideology, give up ambitions of regional hegemony, and in return normalize political and economic relations” like the new Syrian government.

Well, the war would be won by disrupting the transfer of power to those who would carry on Khamenei’s policies, and this appears to be a solid step in that direction. I suppose you don’t want the USA and Israel to succeed, but why are you surprised that they would brag about achieving their own goals?

Also, I think someone coming to power who is willing to negotiate (rather than waiting to be air-struck and replaced) is more likely than the collapse of central authority.

Everything ultimately comes down to whether some sort of uprising “on the ground” occurs.

Not necessarily - my guess is that the plan might be to keep killing leaders until someone willing to negotiate comes to power without a revolution.

The President is merely acting according to his nature - the ultimate explanation of why he is doing this is that the American public chose to trust the sort of man that he is. Challenging the fox’s motives after he has been voted back into the henhouse is a waste of words.

Well, there was that thing with Nord Stream. I’m not saying that Orban isn’t making this up but it isn’t totally implausible.

I don’t think it was strange for them to offer that shirt for sale, especially since they seem to have a print-on-demand system which does not involve any overhead for having an additional design. Offering the shirt is IMO less awkward that trying to pretend that Nazi Germany never existed.

The shirt itself:

I’m not sure why anyone would want one except to be an edgelord but there’s nothing obviously offensive on it.

Idealists are letting perfect be the enemy of the good but I don’t think that’s why Democrats underperformed. Neither Clinton nor Biden/Harris were idealists of this sort (despite some stuff Harris said but didn’t mean back in the 2020 primaries) and they didn’t lose elections because of a lack of support from the idealists. So IMO while the idealists aren’t helping, the very much non-idealistic institutions of the Democratic party which prioritize seniority within the party over electability are to blame.

Really? I wonder what model year will have cars available without it. I was thinking of buying a new car but I can wait.

I’m used to driving a car from 2008, but I borrowed a friend’s 2021 Subaru Forester and there the engine just shuts off after the car is stopped for a few seconds, even without any sort of cruise control. The engine turns back on when I let go of the brake, but I find the noise, the vibration, and the delay of the startups irritating. There’s no way to get the feature to stay off - it defaults to on every time the car starts and it will eventually turn back on while you’re driving even after you’ve pressed the button to turn it off temporarily. I find that especially irritating. (IMO it’s simply not OK for the car to do something after I’ve pressed the button telling it not to do that.)

If they’re undoing changes that customers hate, maybe they’ll get rid of automatic stop-start too?

Are you arguing that it isn’t a scam?

Generally a scam is something done in secret, and if the government finds out exactly what the scammer is doing then the scammer can get in legal trouble. Here Uber is acting entirely out in the open, the government clearly wants to stop Uber, but writing a law that restricts Uber in the intended way appears to be difficult. (Maybe a law written strictly enough that Uber couldn’t work around it would also impact others that the government doesn’t want to target?) So I would argue that this is against the spirit of the law but it isn’t a scam.

I suppose I don’t give “loophole” the same moral weight that you do. Even if this was not intended to be legal, if the law as written permits it then the blame is on the government for passing a law other than the one intended to pass, not on Uber for taking action in accordance with the law.

(Moral obligations can exist without being legally required, but taxes are a legal construct and there is no such moral obligation to pay them which extends beyond the legal one.)

I’m not saying that taxes are bad. I’m saying that if the government says “there’s a new tax you have to pay if you do that” and you say “ok, then I won’t do that,” you have done nothing wrong. You have a duty to obey the law, but no duty to maximize government revenue.

Do you just voluntarily give the government money that you aren’t legally required to pay?

The World Socialist Web Site? Seriously? This isn’t ML.

Demands made by hunger strikers are not democratic demands because rule by those willing to kill themselves isn’t a democracy.

Handcuffs can leave signs, but I’m not sure how examining a body could indicate that the person had been blindfolded. Were the bodies returned with blindfolds on?

Our interpretation is that people who responded positively to these statements would feel they “win” by endorsing misinformation—doing so can show “the enemy” that it will not gain any ground over people’s views.

The article glosses over the distinction between endorsing misinformation and believing misinformation. I think people often interpret poll questions as expressions of political affiliation, so for example a person who thinks that the covid lockdowns were a mistake might say that covid is caused by 5G because that’s the answer that upsets or offends lockdown supporters, not because this person thinks it is the literal truth. In other words, what the authors are seeing is not necessarily sincere belief but rather a deliberate, politically motivated endorsement of statements known to be false.

Edit: a blog I like addressing a similar phenomenon:

You can see that after the Ferguson shooting, the average American became a little less likely to believe that blacks were treated equally in the criminal justice system. This makes sense, since the Ferguson shooting was a much-publicized example of the criminal justice system treating a black person unfairly.

But when you break the results down by race, a different picture emerges. White people were actually a little more likely to believe the justice system was fair after the shooting. Why? I mean, if there was no change, you could chalk it up to white people believing the police’s story that the officer involved felt threatened and made a split-second bad decision that had nothing to do with race. That could explain no change just fine. But being more convinced that justice is color-blind? What could explain that?

My guess – before Ferguson, at least a few people interpreted this as an honest question about race and justice. After Ferguson, everyone mutually agreed it was about politics.