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Cake day: June 5th, 2023

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  • Because the candidates do have those responsibilities, but have shirked them. Ideally, we’d want a better voting system, that didn’t mathematically garuntee that only two viable parties emerge, so that when the politicians refuse to use their power as they should, people who will may be chosen instead, but we don’t have that, and changing that is a long and difficult process that only gets harder if the more authoritarian types get power anyway. If you’re in a lifeboat with holes, and there are two people that have rigged things so that one of them is going to be in charge, and one wants to stop bailing out water and the other wants to scoop it back into the boat, then even though those two aren’t following their responsibilities, it doesn’t mean you should stop bailing the water out, because it has to get done by somebody or you drown. And if you have a say in which of the two is in charge, the guy that just wants to sit there uselessly is still the option you must pick, because at least they aren’t trying to undo the progress you’re making. Ideally you’d want to figure out how to undo the rigged system too, but you have to deal with the water first, lest you all drown fighting over who’s in charge.




  • Have any of those wars come close to actually threatening the state of Israel itself, rather than just their control over territories they’d occupied from someone else? In any case, you’re also making a false assumption that ending US military aid to Israel leaves it conventionally defenseless, or that US weapons have to be stopped from going there in perpetuity. Israel has both a domestic arms industry and other countries it could acquire weapons from, it would just be at increased difficulty and expense. Further, when the objection to sending US arms there is that they are using them to commit genocide, that objection would naturally end should Israel cease those operations.

    The point is not “Israel should have nothing left but the nukes, because they can just use those”, but rather “Israel’s nukes mean that a full scale invasion of the country is not likely, so we have room to revoke our current military assistance in order to pressure them to behave better, without much risk of destroying them in the meantime by doing so.”


  • I’m not suggesting they actually use those nukes. I’m suggesting that Iran or such will not actually launch an attack strong enough to credibly threaten to destroy Isreal, because it would be suicide to do so. The use of having nuclear weapons is that if you have them, it never makes sense to push you into condition where you feel you have to use them. Using them offensively in Gaza or the like would not be in Isreals interest for a number of reasons.

    If someone’s suggestion sounds so obviously flawed that you feel the need to say that, perhaps you should take a moment and consider if they’re really implying what you think they are.








  • Isn’t it kind of the nature of the left to bicker with itself though? At some level, conservatism seeks to preserve an existing system, or at the extreme end, bring back a system recently removed. There’s some room for infighting between the most and least extreme there, but for the most part, it’s a goal that is easy to unite for. But the left, at it’s most basic level, seeks to change things. And changing things is not a goal that inspires unity quite so well, because to change things, one needs an idea of what things should be changed to, and what you think things should be may not be what someone else thinks things should be, even if you both want change. If it so happens that what someone else wants to achieve is in your view even worse than the status quo, then you can’t afford to unite with that person, because there is the risk that your efforts will further a goal you find even less tolerable than what you get by doing nothing, even though what you both want is change.





  • I highly doubt that, staging something like this would be an insanely dangerous move, a slight miss from the shooter in such a scenario would be lethal, and given other people at the event seem to have been killed, it seems clear that lethal rounds were used. Trump may be a fan of ridiculous stunts, but he’s also pretty self interested; I do not think he would risk his own life for such a stunt.

    I understand the impulse to not want someone one agrees with politically to have done something like try a political assassination, and then immediately leap to the idea that the notion that the event might help the intended victim’s political chances is just a bit too convenient and therefore must mean they orchestrated it, but it must be remembered that, whatever views one has, or groups one is in, or identities one holds, as long as they are not so obscure as to be shared by only a handful of people, it is statistically likely that there will be people who are on your team or side of group who are willing to do something like this given the chance, just by virtue of such people making up a fraction of the population.

    Trump is hated by a lot of people, myself included and a large fraction of the people likely to be reading this too I’m sure. It is not at all unrealistic to imagine that someone hates him enough to try to kill him.