it's been the glaring hole in the theory my whole life

Hence my usual attitude of generalized despair.

this is something of a problem because it sure hasn't been underpinned by anything else

As one of the fifteen or twenty genuine Liberal Internationalists in the US, all of whom are active on this site, I do think we really need to confront the fact that a genuine liberal-democratic "rules based" international order cannot be underpinned by arbitrary and hegemonic US military might.

there is 1 (one) braincell in the administration and it belongs to susie wiles. she does not lend it out bsky.app/profile/poli...

If it's any comfort, crypto is getting kicked in the balls.

The thing about violence is that it all so often is *not* senseless. It's tragic and unfortunate.

That's ultimately a huge issue: really justified grievances people aren't just going to get over

crucially there is no guarantee that it reduces cultural and emotional tensions or animosity, it just makes actioning on that animosity more costly

also behooves us imho to take a lesson from both the EU experiment and the state of great power relations since the 1990s: economic integration really can make conflict much more costly to wage, which doesn't really bind autocrats and irrational regimes but does bind democracies a lot

I think the biggest mistake outsiders have about Israel and Palestine is assuming everyone in or connected to the region hates each other for stupid reasons when in fact they hate each other for pretty good ones that are very hard to undo.

tbh i think a big problem is that most of these guys have no idea how to use New Media

like, uh, not to be mean but compare Zohran to Starmer's socials

this is fucking nonsense. we know this because he got a second tattoo after getting the first and left the tattoo parlor with all his teeth. i am not willing to believe that a history buff didn't know what it is but it really strains credulity that a tattoo artist didn't.

Please don’t spread misinformation. Tomahawks fly at low altitude. It’s climbing like a THAAD interceptor (we are out of interceptors).

in today's environment, Akin, Moore, and Mourdock are senators. because all those high info voters who cared about their scandals are just partisans now (mostly democrats) while undecided voters coast on vibes

in the to my estimation fairly likely probability Platner is no less reliable a vote than Angus King (derogatory), I think the appropriate comparison is not to Fetterman, but to Tom Carper, who weathered credible domestic abuse allegations by being an obscure mostly party line guy from a small state

and yeah, this is Bad! I am not pretending otherwise. I'm not a brain-poisoned weirdo from X saying 'well lots of working class people have nazi tatoos' or whatever

Counterpoint that Akin and Moore lost on vibes

Counter counterpoint that at least for Akin, that vibe was dogsweat

he grew up middle class, was working class as a bartender/military/other jobs, is now a business owner. not hard

see, what's absolute loser shit is to see he's got 'working class' vibes, see all the ways that's not grounded in reality, and pretzel your way into believing all the data fits your priors actually.

Like I said.

But that doesn't mean his regime was actually *good*, and still less does it mean installing his son at the behest of a foreign power would actually be good in the long-term.

(2/2)

Like, I get *why* some Iranians, both here and in Iran, are nostalgic for the Shah. The current regime is genuinely terrible, and it's natural to feel that anything it hates *must* have something going for it. And you can make a good argument he was less bad, though that's not saying much!

(1/2)

The way I always put it is "I can listen to somebody, and even understand where they're coming from. But that doesn't mean I have to *agree!*"

Also, given how the Pahlavi dynasty behaved when it was actually in power, I'm not convinced that that scheme, even *if* it was somehow successful, wouldn't just be replacing one dictatorship with another.

It's funny because the Iranian diaspora members I know, while all being anti-Islamic Republic, are clearly in different camps politically.

And they often seem to be using social media to subtweet each other.

"But all my Iranian friends *want* Bibi to install Reza Pahlavi as his vassal-king"
yes there are multiple levels of selection bias there, can you spot them

The close ties with the parts of the non-Jewish Iranian diaspora who really hate the Iranian regime haven't done either group favours in sounding sane either

Yeah I don’t begrudge them their position. But it doesn’t make any difference to anything else

we very much enjoyed our time in little havana and i one hundred percent do not want those folks setting american foreign policy