I literally addressed this exact argument in the comment you replied to, but you just skipped right past that part.

The problem is that to most Republican voters, the fact that this didn’t actually impact drug supply isn’t really all that important. What matters to them is that - theoretically - “bad people” got killed. They’re more interested in punishing people they see as evil than they are in actually improving the world. Even the ones who won’t openly admit - or even admit to themselves - that they just like seeing brown people get killed will still defend this as an ultimately good action because it satisfies their twisted notion of justice. The meting out of punishment is what matters to them, far more than whatever social good that punishment is actually supposed to achieve.

It’s the same reason why they have so little interest in welfare policies even when those policies are demonstrably cheaper than the alternative. They won’t give shelter and money to homeless people even when it’s shown to reduce crime, for example, because the most important thing to them is that no one should ever be given something that they “don’t deserve.” They’re less interested in reducing crime than they are in seeing the poor suffer for whatever imagined sins made them poor.

Jesus dude, you didn’t need to sweeten the deal, I was already for it!

Reminder that it’s now public knowledge that the US had to warn Iran - through back channels - that Israel was going to attempt to assassinate their negotiators in a deliberate attempt to sabotage the peace process. It wasn’t a subtle attempt either; Israel sent jets into Iranian airspace to shoot down their plane.

Israel is openly working against the US’ interests. They’re basically an enemy nation at this point. And y’all want to hand them more resources and access to all your secrets. OK, sure, good luck with that.

Not really. Israel’s primary concern is removing Iran as a regional adversary. I’m not saying they would say no to stealing their oil industry, but it’s not really the primary motivator. They’d be perfectly happy with the US swooping in and controlling Iran’s oil industry as long as it left them free to basically act unobstructed in Lebanon and Palestine.

Again, that comes back to the fact that Israel and the US have fundamentally different goals here, which is a huge issue for Trump.

It’s pretty clear that at no point did the US plan for Iran closing the state. They should have. Every previous US government considered it the primary danger of a war with Iran. But Trump doesn’t surround himself with smart people.

Also there’s credible reporting that their belief that Iran would not close the strait was reinforced by the AI planning systems they recently invested in. So that’s fun. The blind leading the stupid.

Bibi is part of the problem. Israel fundamentally does not want the war to end with anything short of total US occupation or annihilation of Iran. They want Iran deleted as an adversary and regional power. It’s not by accident that Israel keeps fucking up every ceasefire, and that’s exactly why Iran are so insistent on the US proving they can reign the Israelis in.

Bibi will do everything in his power to tank peace efforts. His goals, and Trump’s, are diametrically opposed. Which means if Trump is getting out of this war before the midterms, he has to be the first president in US history to put Israel on a leash.

Trump still hasn’t figured out that Netanyahu is deliberately tanking every piece deal.

He’s wrong, of course. Trump is the purest expression of conservative principles we’ve ever seen.

At this point we need to treat Israel like Apartheid South Africa. Or, indeed, like Iran. Cut them off from the world completely. Total sanctions, total divestment. They’re not going to vote their way out of this; most Israelis are angry that Bibi isn’t doing enough genocide. They’re not going to elect better leaders, just more competent psychopaths. I’m sorry for the few decent people left in that country, but they’re the exception not the rule.

Even putting aside the more outlandish (not “implausible”, just outlandish) theories about what Trump might be up to here, this is an objectively insane thing for an American president to say. He just announced to the world that ~$700bn of the US cash reserves are stored in a location that is not secure enough to prevent theft. At a time when the US debt to GDP is already skyrocketing and foreign lenders are getting increasingly concerned about America’s ability to make good on their debts. Is he trying to engineer a bond market crisis? Because this is the sort of thing you’d do if you were.

Once again the MAGA primary accomplishment is sending billions of dollars overseas, while patting themselves in the back for ending millions of dollars of humanitarian aid.

Funnily enough, there are reports that after that F-15 went down, Trump had to be removed from the situation room because he got so panicky. And he was very specifically freaking out about the idea that this was going to be his version of the 1979 Iranian hostage crisis. So in this particular case he at least has some vague recollection of history (easier when you actually lived through it). It just wasn’t enough to stop him bumbling face first into a total shitshow, because Trump is, above all else, unbelievably arrogant. He thought he could solve the Iran problem where every other president had failed, at least in his mind. Never mind that Obama made huge progress on Iran and then Trump was the one that tore up his deal.

Pretty sure being a hardcore alcoholic is just about the only way to handle being stuck in Trump’s presence constantly. Either that or you gotta start doing ketamine like Elon.

Lemmy.ml: “Waah, protests don’t do anything, wake me when there’s a general strike.”

No Kings: “We’re doing a general strike.”

Lemmy.ml: “Oh, fuck, shit, I didn’t… Um… WELL SCREW YOU, YOU’RE PROBABLY GOING TO DO IT WRONG ANYWAY.”

Both parties refuse to remove the limit because once one of them does, the other has no excuse not to. The GOP knows that they can basically get whatever they want in budget reconciliation (the one bill a year that ignores the filibuster) and the Dems know that if they actually start passing laws people will expect them to improve their material conditions. So it remains a useful fiction for both of them.

I mean, that’s a reasonable assumption in most cases, but with the way this legislation is written I don’t see how that’s possible. It changes the entire process for registering to vote, and you have to be registered in order to vote. This isn’t like bathroom bills where they’ll target people who “look trans”, this is an actual bureaucratic process that they’re rewriting. Stuff goes on file. There are records. There are whole departments of people involved in processing this stuff, not just one single guard at the gate who can wave you through.

Political capital isn’t just voter approval, it’s your ability to cut deals and draw together coalitions within your own party. Trump is burning a lot of goodwill among Republican reps and senators pushing this do or die approach to this bill.

That would be the smart play, yes (although I don’t believe, constitutionally, that they can actually prevent a new congress being seated… But that doesn’t change the fact that it’s politically valuable to have legislation fail so that you can invent a problem that you “tried” to fix). However Trump doesn’t seem to have gotten the memo. The thing about that gambit is that you have to look like you tried, but don’t actually, y’know, burn every bit of political capital you have trying to make it happen. Trump, on the other hand, is now saying he’s going to completely roadblack all legislation until this passes. He’s making it a do or die bill, a "If this is the only thing I pass in my entire term I’m fine with that’ piece of tentpole legislation, which is definitely not what you do when the point is to fail nobly.

That is the most bizarre thing about this legislation; dem voters are shown to be more likely to own passports, and are more likely to keep their original name when getting married. This will obviously fuck over poor voters the hardest, so maybe that’s the point, but it still seems ultimately self-defeating.

I think Trump is just throwing himself behind anything that vaguely sounds good for him because he’s panicking.

And for the “Trump is going to rig the midterms, we’re all screwed” crowd, yes, he’ll try, but if he was confident he was going to succeed he wouldn’t be acting so desperate right now, would he?