Apparently he's still at it. I'd have thought he'd have stopped having a go at Europe/NATO while he needs them, but he seems to be insulting them for not joining, rather than trying to persuade them to.
Conflict between Palestine and Israel escalates
- Thread starter dreng3
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It's his nature, what he defaults to: the demands, threats, abuse and coercion of a petty tyrant and bully. This misadventure is out of his control and making him look bad, so his anger management and impulse control issues are even more pronounced that normal.
But even if he offered anything for assistance, who would trust him to deliver? Let's imagine he offered to remove the tariffs he slapped on everyone if they helped out. Who would trust him not to reapply them a month later in a fit of pique?
I wonder if kidnapping Maduro didn't awaken a new high in Trump, a rush he wants to feel again. Chasing his new high like a drug addict, as well as wanting to distract from Epstein are ''good'' enough reason to awaken Trump's hunger for war.
That and he never genuinely was against war. He just wanted the votes of people still angry about Bush's wars. Though even those voters were likely more angry that the US lost those wars rather than the wars themselves.
That and he never genuinely was against war. He just wanted the votes of people still angry about Bush's wars. Though even those voters were likely more angry that the US lost those wars rather than the wars themselves.
I don't think he cares about concealing Epstein any more: he's already ridden that one out. I think he's more bothered by low approval ratings, or yes, just the rush of being someone to do something, high on the Venezuelan kidnapping.
In Trump's positive column used to be that despite his crassly macho rhetoric, he appeared to be relatively skeptical of actual military activity. However, Trump values the status of the presidency rather than the work: he has a poor grasp of how things operate and what's going on. He's thus the kind of guy likely to just repeat what was told to him by the last person who had his ear. In Trump 1, he stuck with traditional US interventions because he left the traditional military/intelligence establishment in place. This time in Trump 2, he's put gung-ho morons in charge, and thus we see the outcome of them being his advisors.
He's already throwing out the idea of going after Cuba, so he definitely seems to be enjoying himself.
Trump predicts he will have ‘honour of taking Cuba’ amid power blackout
US president declares he can do ‘anything I want’ after oil blockade plunges country into darkness
www.theguardian.com
I have no evidence, but I honestly believe Israel is threatening to nuke Tehran if the US doesn't help to enact regime change in Iran. If anyone is still alive and hasn't died from climate change in ten to twenty years, when this conversation and others are declassified, I hope they know.
Trump has argued against bombing Iran multiple times in the first administration. He was on route to doing so with F-18s, and likley B-2s at some point, but the doves in his admin stopped him.
web.archive.org
www.independent.co.uk
Trump has argued against bombing Iran multiple times in the first administration. He was on route to doing so with F-18s, and likley B-2s at some point, but the doves in his admin stopped him.
Carter says Israel has stockpile of over 300 nuclear bombs
Former U.S. president says U.S. should not attack Iran even if Iran develops a nuclear bomb • Carter praises Secretary of State John Kerry's "heroic" effort to broker Israeli-Palestinian peace deal, but says Kerry should have more help from White House.
web.archive.org
Leaked email reveals Israel has '200 nukes'
The detail is the latest revelation to emerge from a cache of leaked communications which has set Washington on edge
www.independent.co.uk
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I'm not. Firstly, like I said, anger management and impulse control problems, so he lashes out. Secondly, he's bullying, cruel and greedy, so the idea of getting something for nothing* by extortion is always preferable.
* Threats do have a form of cost in things like reputation and goodwill, but these aren't things people like Trump tend to understand and value.
Israel's strikes have killed 1001 people in Lebanon, according to the Lebanese health ministry. Includes 118 children, 79 women, and 40 health workers. So Israel's willingness to slaughter civilians continues as expected.
Of course that's not what's happening.
If Israel fires a nuke outside the most critical of self-defence justifications, Israel's global reputation will plummet beyond salvage. Israel has no intention of firing a nuke, and if it says it does, the leaders of the USA aren't so stupid to believe it. The USA can rein in Israel any time it likes: Israel is exceptionally dependent on US political and military backing, and the USA can simply threaten to turn off that tap.
In the end, the USA goes along with all this because it's convenient for its leaders. In the general strategic picture, Israel provides considerable military and intelligence advantages to the USA. Israel has a lot of backers who spend heavily on political lobbying, and that means many US politicians are swayed by them. Until very recently, Israel has always been vastly more popular than its opponents, which translate generally into political support. And then there are circumstantial issues around the leaders themselves: Biden is just pro-Israel, Trump is corrupt and incompetent, etc.
Well, after going back to check, I see that you based your conclusions on the laundering of ZAKA and other israeli propagandist testimony through western media such as The Guardian and The Intercept, then argued that Hamas having a track record of being (non-sexually) violent and problematic in some other ways is evidence that they employed a strategy of utilizing rape as a weapon of war. Which was always pretty silly.
The Intercept article was written by a different person than the one I quoted, so it's not really "the same source"; your cited article's topic was not the veracity of claims of sexual violence on October 7, and the concession that it occurred was accompanied by nothing other than a single report issued in November 2023 by Physicians For Human Rights-Israel, which relied on suspect israeli testimony including things like this on page 7:
"An eyewitness described seeing a woman
being raped by several Hamas militants who pulled her hair while
taking turns raping her. One of them cut off her breasts, and the other
played with them like they were toys."
Such plagiarism of the Martyrdom of Saint Agatha is thin evidence, to say the least, especially given the context of israelis being discovered to have made wholesale fabrications of and about their attendance of the Nova Music Festival to obtain financial reward from the israeli government. I have to diagnose the author of your cited The Intercept article as having the particular liberal brain worm called "Two Things Can Be True At Once (And Therefore Are)" which manifests as a compulsion to pair any criticism of Western aggression or the narratives justifying it with an acceptance and amplification of the allegations made against targets of Western aggression regardless of veracity. This one seems to be going around. I'm all for believing women, but the israeli government is not a woman.
I may return to the rest of your post; I've already spent too much time reviewing some really quite good and thoroughly rude posts that I made in this thread and it's 4:30 AM.
Pentagon seeks $200 billion in additional funds for the Iran war, AP source says
A senior administration official says the Pentagon is seeking $200 billion in additional funds for the Iran war.
apnews.com
They could raise a windfall tax on oil companies to help cover it: I've heard the prices have gone up a lot recently.Those lobster tails won't pay for themselves
Pentagon seeks $200 billion in additional funds for the Iran war, AP source says
A senior administration official says the Pentagon is seeking $200 billion in additional funds for the Iran war.
I did not argue that their track record provided positive evidence of any specific actions, that's just a lie.
You had argued that Hamas was unlikely to have committed the acts in question, specifically because of fundamental religious proscriptions against such things. That was transparent bollocks on the face of it, and the track record of dishonesty and brutality-- against religious guidance!-- is a relevant response. You have also argued that the abysmal track record of the US government & CIA is reason enough to assume the worst in other endeavours.
Lol, good grief. You treat outlets as homogenous mouthpieces all the time when its convenient.
You certainly need some sleep.
You argued that it made denials by Hamas "ring hollow", which amounts to the same thing when the case was so thin to begin with and very obviously being weaponized to drum up support for mass murder. You seem to have a pathological inclination to defend the veracity of allegations against targets of the United States.
There is nothing whatsoever inconsistent about analyzing the motives of and pressures acting on a news outlet and seeing that all its information is suspect on one hand and on the other distinguishing between two different articles made by a more generally credible outlet when someone tries to make the argument that treating some information as credible requires treating other information as credible (which is ridiculous). Sometimes a whole institution is not credible. Sometimes a particular guy isn't. Sometimes a particular claim is made in haste or to avoid flak from certain quarters. Sometimes an outlet is generally credible but still has certain biases that make particular information suspect. All of these are possible. All of these can be true at the same time.
I don't think I've ever relied on them on a matter that is so directly tied to Qatar's stability. The quality of their reporting can vary, why should it not? I am not sure why you need me to spell this out.
And yet they still give us all the information we need to see how that is ridiculous.
Not so much as you are characterizing it.
More specifically..?
What I've said didn't stop being a good point because time has passed. I'm not talking about excusing anything-- that is a simple category mistake. Excusing and being skeptical are not at all the same things. Although, now that you mention it, the fact that Iran is defending itself is relevant to what can be excused. The fact that for israel and the United States this is a war of choice and for Iran it is a war of self-defense or even national survival, means that more is permitted for Iran: everything the US and israel do to Iran is the crime of aggression on top of whatever else it may be.
But that has nothing to do with what I was saying: your media environment is structured to get you to believe certain things. You should be more skeptical of the things that your media environment is trying to get you to believe in order to accomplish its desired outcome. Disagreeing with the desired outcome does not make you immune to the propaganda justifying it, nor does it mean you should participate in the normalization of that propaganda. Your unwillingness to recognize when you are being sold a bill of goods is not principled.
I'm apparently trying to get a fish to understand what water is.
As positive evidence? No, it categorically doesn't. You might notice that in the same exchange, when you said this "doesn't mean it happened", I responded, "obviously".
Indeed, they can! Nuances that you never consider when griping about "western media" as a monolithic stand-in for military propaganda, or automatically dismiss anything produced by western sources-- independent or not-- if it doesn't accord.
If you extrapolate something from what they say (which they didn't actually say), that's not the same thing as them acknowledging it.
Let's return to the post that attracted your particular ire. The initial statement is that Iran bombed 12 other countries, and it's that claim that you characterised as "libbing out".
That Iran attacked its neighbours, that much is directly acknowledged in Pezeshkian's statement.
Masoud Pezeshkian: "The armed forces have so far acted with a kind of ‘fire at will’ authority, but they have now been notified that from now on they must not attack neighboring countries or target them with missiles. I personally apologize to the neighboring countries that were affected by Iran's action".
Fairmont, DIFC, ICD Brookfield Place, & Creek Harbour neighbourhood in UAE; Era View, Crowne Plaza Hotel, & Millenium Tower in Bahrain. Dhubai international airport & Zayed international airport, Kuwait International airport.
And nor does disagreeing with one violent state actor mean that other violent state actors must be innocent.
You also exist within a media environment. One in which you are healthily sceptical of narratives used to justify your own country's foreign policies. Yet, also one in which you are credulous towards insubstantial twitter talking-heads or anything positioning itself as 'anti-establishment', even when they advance the lines of other countries' (equally dubious, equally violent) foreign policies.
As someone's whose against ground troops on Kharg island, Iran Sam Seder made me lose IQ points listening to him talk. He states that PBD's polling his fan's is stupid since of course that's not a rigorous poll, then proceeds to cite fucking youtube comments as evidence that PBD's fans don't agree with him.
Your dumber than Patrick Bet David/ PBD. Those comment sections are botted by China, Russia, and Iran who paid people in global south countries to spam comment sections, and upvote things that are against US interests. Fucking hell the left has no place in serious governance if this is one of their best streamers that people on the right were supposedly afraid to debate.
Your dumber than Patrick Bet David/ PBD. Those comment sections are botted by China, Russia, and Iran who paid people in global south countries to spam comment sections, and upvote things that are against US interests. Fucking hell the left has no place in serious governance if this is one of their best streamers that people on the right were supposedly afraid to debate.
The last I heard the air force buys flat screen TVs if they are under-budget.Those lobster tails won't pay for themselvesPentagon seeks $200 billion in additional funds for the Iran war, AP source says
A senior administration official says the Pentagon is seeking $200 billion in additional funds for the Iran war.
Trump is saying that "very productive" talks have given him reason to postpone a series of planned strikes on Tehran's energy infrastructure.
But the Iranian government denies any such talks took place. Trump has offered no details, including refusing to name who he spoke to.
So, uhrm, did they take place? Or is Trump actually backing off because of Iran's threat that if their oil fields were targeted again, they would obliterate the rest of the middle east's energy-generation infrastructure?
I'm starting to get the sense that, bullish after Venezuela, Trump expected this to be a lot easier than it has turned out to be. Now he cannot simply back out, or it will destroy his 'strongman' reputation. But he is also terrified of a long drawn-out conflict, raising fuel prices and making him another 'war' President in a failing quagmire, like Bush. So what does he do...? Find some way of claiming progress, even if no such 'talks' have taken place, perhaps?
But the Iranian government denies any such talks took place. Trump has offered no details, including refusing to name who he spoke to.
So, uhrm, did they take place? Or is Trump actually backing off because of Iran's threat that if their oil fields were targeted again, they would obliterate the rest of the middle east's energy-generation infrastructure?
I'm starting to get the sense that, bullish after Venezuela, Trump expected this to be a lot easier than it has turned out to be. Now he cannot simply back out, or it will destroy his 'strongman' reputation. But he is also terrified of a long drawn-out conflict, raising fuel prices and making him another 'war' President in a failing quagmire, like Bush. So what does he do...? Find some way of claiming progress, even if no such 'talks' have taken place, perhaps?