Bush didn’t care. Dude was an asshole. He tried to drum up support with our allies, and when most of them said no, he just did it anyway.

That said, it was a mistake to warmonger, don’t get me wrong.

I don’t think the invasion of Iraq can be blamed on the NYT. I think the Bush administration and Al Qaeda get the credit for that one.

However much is necessary to arrive at the truth.

Nobody and no system should be expected to be perfect all the time, I would anticipate some mistakes over a course of decades.

Have you checked for any times they were critical of US foreign policy within the same timeframe?

“Consistently” and “in-these-specific-cases” are different things.

Sounds like a fantastic option for folks that don’t like any mandatorily enforced censorship.

They should all go there.

I think Germany and Japan are going to have to re-militarize and conquer everyone back into a civil democracy.

Any evidence for any of this?

Somebody has to fill this place with content…

Paywall blocked me out. My response to the synopsis though:

This is a fucked if you do, fucked if you don’t thing. Militaristic thinkers, because they only care about winning, are often very good at maneuvering their opposition into untenable positions, catch-22s. They’re rationally inescapable, that’s the whole point, so it’s best to fall back onto your feelings, as much as I hate to say it. To paraphrase popular youtuber Ryan McBeth, don’t give your enemies problems, because problems have solutions. Give them dilemmas. That’s what they’re doing to us. When you find yourself in one, just acknowledge pain is your future, and pick something.

I’ve also slowly begun to suspect that there’s Russian intelligence penetration into our broader media ecosystem. I cannot otherwise explain the prevalence of Russian war propaganda coming from western outlets, and how certain American churches seem to be drifting closer and closer to Eastern Orthodoxy.

Let’s just keep our eye on the ball here. We’re trying to prevent the full might of the US military from falling into fascist hands unchecked by any Mike Pence type figures. It’s gonna get really ugly, but we can still win this with political activism and words. We need to remember our ground game. Nobody fully trusts these glowy screens we’re looking at, so its talking to your friends, knocking on doors, getting people registered, volunteering to drive voters to the polls, etc.

We win this one face-to-face, with the good ole fashioned democratic party ground n pound. It’s our greatest strength anyway. Find a couple people somewhere, and talk to them, preferably nicely. Don’t try to make them angry, try to get through to them.

If they’re religious, you can try to gently remind them of Jesus’ teachings, and how he said to pray for your enemies, to forgive others, to be kind and charitable, how the meek, not the strong shall inherit the Earth, how it’s easier to pass a camel through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of God, how he whipped the Pharisees for using the temple to make money, how he sacrificed himself and not someone else to save our souls, how he asked us to follow him.

There’s so much more too. The height of irony in this day and age is how our greatest ally is actually probably the Jesus Christ of the scriptures. Sometimes you just have to meet people where they’re at. Frankly though, if you support people like Ghandi and MLK Jr, nothing Jesus says should be too strange to you. Maybe the praying stuff, he was pretty big on prayer. Philosophically he was just ahead of his time though, and honestly fits fine into the modern world as a broader philosophical alternative to materialism. He shouldn’t be blamed for what people did in his name after he died though, and his direct words are probably the only possible thing that could get through to certain sorts.

If we can remind evangelicals what it means to be a good person instead of a frightened person, though, we’ll sweep this election in a landslide. If by any chance you were raised in the church, there’s a very good use for those skills still. I know they’re still in there, even if it upsets us a little bit because of the shitty actions of various churches in the intervening 2000 years. Jesus didn’t do those things though, he just told people to play nice in a lot of different ways.

Uh, no, not true. Justice delayed is justice delayed. Justice denied is justice denied. It almost always gets delayed over something or another, just because proving a case as best you can is difficult and complex, and often changes mid-process.

And you do want proof to be important, justice isn’t something you want Kyle Rittenhouse types just winging on their own.

That was justice denied, right there. Delayed is fine sometimes though.

It’s important to remember that efficiency is not always what you want most. You want accuracy and precision too, and a balance somewhere between these competing priorities is necessary.

It grinds slow, but fine. Or so the saying goes. And when they say slow, they mean glacially.

This design is intentional to make it difficult to weaponize, which people did all the time through history. Don’t mistake slow for stationary though. Glaciers do move, even if you can’t see it if you sit there and stare at one.

This would be an epic horror movie villain.

Yep, I completely believe it.

I’m fairly political myself, and it takes pretty hefty amounts of effort to remind myself to let things go and try to just keep a respectable level of discourse. And I still fuck it up all the time.

A lot of it is mechanical. I have far fewer tools here than I do with irl political activism, I can’t use facial expression or tone or anything. So it almost feels like negative sarcasm replaces all that or something, I don’t really know, I’ll have to think about it awhile.

Problem is he’s backed into a corner now. He mobilized. How will it look to his supporters if he starts to de-escalate? Reserve troops were pulled from their families, jobs and lives, and for what, political posturing? Yea I don’t think so.

edit: I cannot definitively verify that reserves were mobilized.

Nobody should be ashamed of the history of their people. That encourages some to hide from it. Instead one should not shy away, but try to study and learn from the mistakes of their forebears, so their children might get a better world someday.

Shame for something you yourself have not done, though? Pointless.

Something tangential I’ve been wondering…

Are the profession of doctors ethically allowed to go on strike? People would die if they did. Probably lots.

Well, if you think about it, in order to take over in a democracy, you have to break the democracy first. This is simply a necessary first step towards accomplishing the given goal. There would be no other method that might work here, since military coups are particularly difficult when we make our whole army swear an oath to defend a specific piece of paper from all enemies, foreign and domestic.

Yea that makes sense.

Just out of curiosity, what’s the advantage to them having their account on the same Instance as the community?

People are weird and like collecting things.