Yep.

Trump literally got distracted and forgot about it.

Even better, he created the distractions himself.

… What a fucking madman.

Went from ‘I’m gonna invade and annex Canada, and Greenland!’ to… ‘My primary military ally in the most unstable and dangerous geopolitical situation in at least a quarter century doesn’t know what the FUCK he’s doing!’…

Am I losing track of time or was that… less than two months, less than one?

Fillibuster, as it works in the US specifically, is a process to delay a proposed bill/law from going to a final vote, or a vote on approving or denying an ammendment to a proposed bill/law.

Articles of Impeachment, to my knowledge, are an entirely different thing, that follow different rules than a proposed law.

So… filibustering is more like kiting around your last unit in Starcraft as long as possible, even though your entire base has already been destroyed.

Spamming constant repeated articles of impeachment would be more like constantly spamming zerglings.

Theoretically, it would be a new … thing the Congress has to deal with, every single time… but again, no one has ever, in American history, tried to do that, so I legitimately do not know if it even is concievably a strategy.

But uh, unprecedented times call for unprecedented measures, eh?

I think you are talking about when they tried to bring up impeachment last month.

Unless… you have a source from within like the last 3 or 4 hours of a bunch of them saying that for this current attempt.

Yes, no, technically, its complicated, because we just… don’t call it a ‘war’ if most of Congress doesn’t have a problem with whatever military action the President has unilaterally directed.

Russia has ‘special military operation’, we have ‘temporary, low level peacekeeping operations’… that then become the Vietnam War and last for over a decade… or… Congress has authorized the use of force to go get the Taliban in Afghanistan, but also uh, we’re gonna stay there 20 years, with no clear or coherent goal or strategy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Powers_Resolution

Basically, uh, War is supposed to only be declared by the Congress, and then the President is supposed to execute said war.

But also, the Preisdent can kinda sorta do some limited military actions without first having a formal Declaration of War… and there isn’t total agreement on what exactly those limits are… basically, almost everytime this happens in American history, it nearly causes a Constitutional crisis, or at the very least, a whole bunch of vigorous debate, and there really is no consistent framework or metric for evaluating whether or not the President did something not allowed, at least when looking backwards at history.

It becomes both a political and legal shitshow every time.

And also, Congress can… authorize the use of military force, with strings attached, limitations… but somehow that is technically not a war, and also there’s no actual mechanism for tugging on those strings and actually enforcing those limitations.

It’s all very straightforward you see, rofl.

I mean, ‘flood the zone’ of Congress with constant impeachment proposals would at least be some kind of stalling/stonewalling tactic, which is preferable to the uh, mostly lot of nothing other than crying 90% of the Dems have been doing thus far.

I… don’t know if there is any mechanism in Congress that acts as a cool down timer for how often you could try that… I think it just has to be a new House Rep each time?

I don’t know. Is anyone of sufficient House Parliamentarian style wonkery to be able to chime in on that?

I uh, I think we are past the stage of ‘but JD would be even worse!’ at this point, but of course, give it 24 to 48 hours and there’ll be an Atlantic or NYT op-ed making that exact argument.

I’m going with ‘assasinated by Mossad for dinner’, mostly for the lulz, just gotta fully embrace the raw chaos clownshow timeline we live in.

If your idea of ‘democratized’ is ‘now giant megacorps have comparable capital and assets to entire nation states’…

You have a very, very silly understanding of democracy.

Please explain to me how a giant mega corp is… democratic in nature.

You are describing cyberpunk style, hypercorporate techno-feudalism as democracy.

Democracy is one person, one vote.

Corporate governance structures can basically be boiled down to: one dollar, one vote, ie, oligarchy.

Ooooh ok your framework is media don’t say due to fear of being sued for libel.

Uh well, that…

Well ok.

If we pretend the rule of law still exists at that level, which it doesn’t…

Then uh, all the media has to do is just bring up all this stuff, all these documents, have Seymour Hersh on to talk about it, read the quotes from former Israeli PMs, show the unclassified documents and just always give context and caveats… and then just ask ‘Why is nobody taking this seriously? Why do we not have definitive answers?’

Assuming the rule of law as we knew it in say, 2018 existed, they’d be fine. Maybe the ADL or AIPAC could try to sue them, but it wouldn’t work.

But this is all moot because if somebody, MSNBC or whatever, did that, today, what would happen is a Scientology style intimidation/terror/ruin your life campaign x100 on everyone something like 2 or 3 direct personal connections away from everyone speaking in that news segment, orchestrated by Mossad.

And/Or, the entire Republican apparatus doing the same. And then directing stochastic lethal terrorism at them, or just fuck you, executive order says you in particular go to CECOT, bye bye!

Or the Supreme Court just makes another completely nonsensical ruling that goes against centuries of precedent and effectively destroys the first ammendment.

Thats the actual reason why no one does this, at this moment.

…

The ‘state of Israel’ has no legal standing to… sue the US for reputational damages or making false claims.

They would also… in this hypothetical, you know, have to actually prove, in court, that… that they are being lied about.

AIPAC or the ADL would have to attempt to construe it as hate speech. Which wouldn’t work in 2018 land where the law and legal system still exist and work and stuff.

I get what you are saying but there are extensive, publically released offcial documents from the US government that the US has been very much convinced Israel has had nukes since the 60s.

What… what kind of … what can be more official than a declassified CIA document that says ‘yeah we’re pretty sure Israel has nukes’?

From all the minutes (transcripts) of Congressional hearings about the Apollo Affair, which also had FBI reports and CIA reports and I think the NSA as well?

I am not asking this rhetorically, to just belabor a point for emphasis.

I am asking you: If all this shit doesn’t meet your ‘official source’ criteria… what does?

Hahha there is tons of proof, if you use the standard the US used to claim Iraq had WMD and then invade them.

Difference being that Israel actually has nukes and does everything they can for a very long time to stop the IAEA from getting assigned to look at them…

…and Saddam actually let weapons inspectors in, because the only chemical weapons he still had were old artillery shells we fucking sold him in the 80s, ageing and leaking in a few armories that had been cordoned off as hazardous waste dumps.

…

Howabout the fact that Israel has a nuclear weapons doctrine?

That you can find random essays written by West Point grads in 30 seconds of websearching… that are about Israel’s nuclear doctrine?

https://mwi.westpoint.edu/israel-samson-option-interconnected-world/

Despite Israel also having a ‘nuclear ambiguity’ policy?

Despite also Ephraim Katzir, Moshe Dayan, Shimon Peres and Ehud Olmert all actually making public statements that Israel does have nuclear weapons?

That they caused a giant fucking scandal back in the 60s by stealing actual fissile material from NUMEC, a US company that uh, refines weapons grades uranium?

Look up ‘Apollo Affair’.

That the CIA believed Israel had working nukes back in '75?

That they conducted a nuclear test in cooperation with South Africa in '79?

‘Vela Incident’.

That the French helped them build an enrichment facility outside of Dimona in the Negev, that an unclassified US report released in 1980 concluded its had working, functional capacity since 1965?

https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015011997288&view=1up&seq=433

…

Why?

Why doesn’t the world openly call out this bullshit?

Well it certainly couldn’t have anything to do with Mossad and Jeffery Epstein, no sir, nothing like that, definitely not that.

https://www.thenationalliteracyinstitute.com/2024-2025literacy-statistics

https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/piaac/2023/national_results.asp

https://www.newsweek.com/map-reveals-us-adult-literacy-rates-state-2010175

I appreciate the sentiment, on a human level, but on another, the grand scheme of things, the historical level… we deserve it, but the rest of the world doesn’t deserve what will happen because of our self-imposed stupidity.

We are a dying empire, going supernova in spectacular fashion.

I can only hope that we as a country do not lash out further… but we probably will.

As I am from los Estados Unidos, I am the one that should be apologizing to the rest of the world.

When, not if, the US Dollar collapses, it will have an exaggerated effect on South American and Central American countries in particular, many of whom have largely tied their economy to its stability.

Yeah, we are now at about 30ish % of the adult population with reading skills under 2nd grade level, ie, functionally illiterate.

… And that metric is almost 10% worse than it was 10 years ago.

We’ve gone from about 20% illiterate to about 30% illiterate in 10 years.

Normally you only see a decline like that in a country that is an active warzone, or a smaller country has been utterly devestated by an immense disaster.

If you go by ranking of countries by literacy rate, we dropped from somewhere in the top 20 to 30… to between the top 80 and 90… in ten years.

It is an utter disaster.

Entirely seriously:

The average American has a literacy level of a 6th grader. That’s the mean literacy level of the entire adult (meaning 18 years old or older) population.

So… yes.

Yes, the average American is essentially a 12 year old, that is generally how old a 6th grader is in our education system.

Americans are shockingly stupid compared to most other developed countries.

Despite something like 38% of our population having a 4 year degree or higher… only somewhere around 10% or less are capable of objectively comparing and contrasting multiple news articles about the same story, highlight the differences in phrasing, framing, and identify information and context that is or is not present, and also have a general background knowledge of the publication itself, as well as general background knowledge pertaining to the story itself.

Our education system has collapsed, after 30 years of the Republicans working toward that goal, knowing that idiots are easier to manipulate.

alternatively phrased:

reddit is leaking.

Ok, add another bunch of people to the ‘Israeli hostages’ count.

At least they didn’t blow her up, but who knows how much they’ll torture her.

No, I didn’t need to because I was only making the comment that it’s very easy to be seen as racist when you talk about a race of people.

Ah, guess we better just not talk at all about race then and all just do ‘im colorblind, i intentionally ignore systemic racial injustices and judge everyone by my own racially priveleged standards’.

Fuck off.

Context matters, the context of this post and the comments that follow from it matter, you just randomly popping in to ‘agnostically’ critique a single comment, on its own, without context, when the entire point of said comment is that proper context and nuance matter is an insultingly facile and unproductive thing to do, its the insecure, passive-aggressive liberal’s version of ‘just asking questions’ / ‘lets say, hypothetically… (nonsenical rhetorical non sequitir).’

Is… is this what you do, just scan random comments and remove all context and then tell people that with all the context removed this could sound bad?

You reply to specific, detailed posts and then say oh actually I was just commenting generally, it just happened to be on this specific comment for no particular reason?

Go back to twitter or bluesky to clutch your pearls, fuck off with your disingenuous, shit-disturber bullshit.

‘nogooduser’ indeed, almost like an intentional joke name a dedicated contrarian troll would use.

When that story broke, or video footage emerged of … around a year ago now…

Of a ‘hostage rescue mission’… involving a fucking Merkava point blank firing a main cannon round into the building they believed the hostages and their captors were in, that was also in a large multi family apartment building, with tons of other civillians inside…

I fucking lost it.

Even from the perspective of US Rules of Engagement in Iraq War 2, which was… lets say highly insufficient at prioritizing noncombatant safety, at best…

That is fucking godamned insane nonsense. If a US tank crew had accidentally put a tank round into a densely occupied civillian apartment building, they would have been fucking court matrialled, or it would have been covered up and a decent scandal when it leaked out later.

To do this intentionally? In a hostage rescue mission? And every pro-Israel person either ignores it or is totally fine with it?

Just fucking insane, like parody super hero ‘oops, Homelander was gonna save everyone but he got angry or sneezed and lasered the airplane pilots’ fucking insane.

When that helicopter gun cam vid of blowing away suspected insurgents first aired in 04 on ABC, it caused a national debate.

In Israel, the last year or so, we get a video like that every other day, and then people stitch themselves into it making demeaning jokes.

Hey there, bingo, you managed to make roughly the same point as I did but without making it personal, lol.

As a kind of … lol, further, roughly relevant personal example:

My door dash driver the other day was a shorter woman, olive complexion, spoke with a bit of an accent, and had a head covering over her head ao that you couldn’t see her hair, but could see her whole face, along with something sort of resembling a shawl, but quite bright and colorful.

I thanked her for the food, and then, a bit awkardly said… ‘I only know how to ‘thank you’ in Arabic, shyu-ka-ren (sp lol), but I … believe you are probably Persian, how would I say ‘thank you’ in Persian?’

She smiled and was a bit confused: ‘How did you know I am Persian, and not Arab?’

‘Ah, I don’t know the proper names of the different styles of head coverings, but I have seen many pictures, and I think yours is more common in Persia, they tend to be different in Arab countries.’

‘Ah, that’s right! That is how you knew!’ smiled again. ‘Yes, in Arabic it is shyu-ka-ren, in Persian it is tash-ah-kor!’

I then struggle to pronounce it a few times until getting it right, while also semi-short circuiting, reverting back to my ‘Karate training’ and mixing in semi-formal Japanese bows.

… Given where I currently live, I can almost statistically guarantee she’d never encountered a white person she’s delivered DoorDash to here, who even bothered to attempt to tell the difference between an Arab and a Persian, muchless for the purpose of trying to properly thank her in her own language.

All that to say: It is entirely possible to be humble, and attempt to ‘profile’ people… to achieve something pleasant, good, that spreads a smile.

Awkward? Probably.

Racist? … No, more likely quite close to the opposite.

I have not met very many Israelis, that is true…

But the ones that I have met expressed very overtly racist positions that were logically inconsistent in any other scenario: special pleading all the way.

I wasn’t, at the time, back around a decade ago now, telling my white liberal friends ‘all Israelis are racist because I met a few’.

I was telling them ‘this is what this one particular guy said, this is what that other particular guy said, if you applied that same logic you could justify the US extermination of Native Americans, this is concerning to me.’

You are here doing the thing my former friends did: You are assuming I did and said things I did not do nor say, and are pearl clutching… because you’ve head canon’d in your own missing context and additional details.

Notably none of my former white liberal friends bothered to ever ask me about having grown with fairly frequently interacting with… you know, my cousins… and me and them getting along with them well, me learning how to make a latke, me being respectful at hannukah despite me being raised Protestant, me being excited to learn the dradel dradel dradel song as a kid, watching fiddler on the roof together and me liking the songs so much I learned how to sing some of them, and then my actually anti semitic dad telling me to cut that shit out in his house, etc.

Nah they just assumed I was an anti-semite, because they and their families were even more lily white than me and mine, and were projecting their own fears of being viewed as anti-semitic onto me.

It is entirely possible for me to say ‘every Israeli I’ve met has been racist’, that be a true statement, while I can also simultaneously believe that not all Israelis are racist, statistically or by definition… because I am aware of the difference between an anecdote and a statistically valid survey.

…

But did you read the entire article that is this post?

82% of the Israeli public support, at bare minimum, ethnically cleansing all of Gaza.

Thats 4 out of 5.

That is your statistically valid sample.

Turns out my anecdotal experience was not atypical.

…

I’ve only met a few Japanese (as in, born and raised in Japan and ethnically Japanese) people in my life, and they’ve all been skilled martial artists.

This just is true.

Because I met them via participating in Karate for over a decade.

… Does this mean I think all Japanese people are highly skilled martial artists?

No.

Not unless you read that into what I said, despite me not actually saying that, because you head canon’d your own context into the first statement.