The U.S. government shutdown has halted pay to the TSA, but not ICE, so ICE is taking over from the TSA in airports[1]. If you fly to the U.S., starting Monday apparently, the first think you're likely to see is masked gunmen giving you the eye.
The TSA is responsible for more than just airports. As someone with family who works (worked) on port security in the maritime division, I would argue that Chesterton's Fence [0] applies here just as much as anywhere else.
Many of us were alive when the TSA was created. It's not a mystery why it's there. (Mostly so politicians could say they did something to improve air travel security.)
The Coast Guard has long been responsible for port security. TSA does administer TWIC, the Transportation Worker Identification Credential program, which is a biometric identification system go access to secure port facilities.
Yeah, it was actually a lot of fun. I worked in a port-related area and often we would just cruise around the port and look at the ships. If it looked cool we would yell loudly and ask if we could come aboard. The seamen were usually thrilled to show us around their massive ships and would often invite us to a barbecue. With the introduction of the ISPS all of that was over in an instant.
Depends on what defunded means... if it means pay/control shifting from a Federal agency to local, then yes.
Maning, airports / municipalities should be funding this. If airports were in control the the user experience, I bet you would see a lot better outcomes.
It shouldn't be defunded, because as stupid as it and the 2001 politics that spawned it were, anything MAGA will replace it with in 2026 would be way worse.
I feel like "form your own private paramilitary organisation with minimal oversight, then expand their reach by having them take over the operations of other government departments" has been done before somewhere, as part of a larger plan.
This is a historical pattern: Bringing border forces to bear against your own population, because those border forces are trained to deal with people who don't have the rights of the state.
They dont have all the skills to do anything super complex in a sustainable way. Already proved in the first term. What their existence demonstrates is winning election is not super complex if you can find enough groups to precisely target and pander/capture attention. Social media has been a force multiplier for such behavior and the people that have emerged dont have any other skill other than attention capture. But thats short term win like full focus on marketing while product and operations have no hope of catching up. Every "large plan" will fail. Large plans in complex ever changing environments always need massive cooperation of very different skills. Never happens sustainably with just one skill dominating all.
Yeah, I was aiming for irony but I should probably have added /s at the end there. It's definitely in the mid-late chapters in any "how to install a fascist regime" handbook.
Hey, tone doesn't translate well over text, they did not use anu tone tags, and I'm already terrible at reading tone in the best of times. Lol, can you really blame me for at least asking? Haha.
I dunno, it is the most obvious nazi reference I've ever seen. Personally I feel like tone does translate well over text, although it's proportional to the speakers' familiarity in how to do it whereas for verbal communication it comes through without effort.
Nothing wrong with asking of course. But maybe it's useful data that it was, in fact, obvious.
Enter the country and you interact with CBP and that hasn't changed. CBP agents are the ones who murdered the legal observers in Minneapolis so there's that.
TSA checks bags for commercial airlines which is a service that should never have been nationalized.
TSA is mostly people who want a job and act pretty professionally in the hundreds or thousand times I’ve encountered them. ICE encourages people with anger issues who hate brown people to apply. These are not the same.
it isn’t about people and which group is mostly this or that. Americans have long accepted to have their Constitutional Rights violated at the airports so it really doesn’t matter if it is TSA or ICE or whatever three-letter gang runs it
This is binary thinking that has no place in predicting the real world. In practice, the specific person violating your constitutional rights makes a big difference in how badly your rights are violated.
oh I love this… so good! like OK to violate me a little but don’t but know where to draw the line. this is like an excuse of a chronic domestic abuser, “I slapped her/him around a little but did not slam/her against a wall”
They rebranded to the department of war but its not a war. We definitely don't want war, but we want all soldiers to be warriors. Still not warmongering.
It's the only thing he knows. Declare victory, never admit losing anything, ever.
"Dobias later said that young Trump “always had to be number one, in everything. He was a conniver, even then. A real pain in the ass. He would do
anything to win” (D’Antonio, Never Enough, 43)."
They're referencing Trump's constant insistence that we won or are currently winning. He never, ever admits defeat or concedes any ground, everything is a victory, nothing is a loss. Trump also famously said (paraphrasing) "We're gonna win so much, we'll be tired of winning".
Yes, they are flooding the zone with many alternative explanations so that they're both all deniable, and all accessible to anyone who finds just one of them convincing. This is a strategy.
The Iranians chant Death To Israel because Israel is a Middle Eastern ally of the United States, who propped up the Shah. This is why the US is the Big Satan, and Israel is the Little Satan. This was all spelled out clearly by Khomeini.
You have the cause and the effect backwards. I suggest reading more about Khomeini, you might like his viewpoints. He decreed that the unmarried female protesters must be raped before being executed, so that they would not enter the Kingdom of Heaven.
It’s bold to get presumptuously snooty about people’s understanding of history, and even mention the closeness of the Shah with the US, without acknowledging how the Shah came to power…! To say nothing of the US’s more recent interventions in other Muslim-majority countries. Do you not think that might go further to explain the discontent, especially considering Khomeini’s comments that you refer to, than some nebulous idea of “values”?
Fine, the US propped up the Shah. I didn't see it as relevant but there you go. Khomeini himself didn't see it as too relevant either, as he barely mentioned it after the revolution. He did state that the US was the source of all Muslims' problems, many times, but he did not mention the US support of the Shah as part of his regular rallies.
I stated that the United States is based on Christian values. Not that the United States is a Christian state.
Do you value separation of state and religious authority? Women's rights? Minority rights? Human dignity? Equality before the law? Sanctity of life? Individual moral responsibility? Monogamous marriage? The objective study of history? Fair trial? Witnesses at trial? Tolerance of alternative viewpoints?
Those are all Christian values. For what it's worth, I'm not Christian.
They were trying to gain energy independence, not develop nuclear weapons. This has been confirmed by plenty of independent auditors. Drunk Hegseth is a literal white nationalist Christian with a crusades tattoo.
You really want to be on the side of a white nationalist who openly says all Muslims are the enemy and openly advocates for christian prophecies that require the US to submit to Israel? These aren't conspiracies. Hegseth openly believes all this stuff.
Would the current state of affairs qualify for cancelling the mid-terms? Is that overly cynical?
Not in the US, not a US citizen or voter. My suspicion is the answer is "no, but it is not a given that a competent supreme court which looks likely to overturn the WH exists, if they say they want to do this"
Hopefully that is reassuring. Worryingly I would like some sense of confirmation but in any case I expect a declaration it's not a valid real result because that's what happened before, counts not withstanding.
The US does not have a legal avenue for cancelling elections regardless of circumstances without a constitutional amendment. It cannot happen under any conditions or circumstances.
To do so would basically be an open announcement of dictatorship and - more than we have already - the end of rule of law and a likely civil war.
seems from outside, that many things happen, that's never happened in the entire history of this country, as your prez says many times a day, that "you've never seen before".
otoh, i saw ice agents to murder a super aggresive protester, who was actually trying to help a super aggressive woman dumped to the earth by ice agents, from many angle. also, and i followed minnesotans aggressively filming everywhere what happens to them. and i saw, how aggressive they were to bovino and co.
All Red states. So if you roll over and let the federal government trample your state's sovereignty, they won't murder people in your state? Somehow I don't think that's what federalism was supposed to mean.
Trump nearly passed out with glee when he was talking to the Ukrainian president and found out elections are canceled, by their law, due to martial law because of the war. I would not so casually assume he won't try it here.
Seriously, it’s totally fair to think that there’s no way they’ll be cancelled. There are some checks and balances left. But if you voted for Trump, you should be DEEPLY concerned about how much he loves toying with the idea. It’s frankly more impeachable than nearly anything I’ve heard of, since it’d be fucking treasonous to cancel elections. Demand better from your representatives and officials, and stop voting MAGA so we can get out of this mess.
If the checks and balances are fine, what do his voters have to worry about?
I'd like to be wrong, but Congress failed to convict him the last time he tried to overthrow the election, SCOTUS has partisan justices supporting him. If they're creative enough and people are scared enough...
This is just more victim fear being pushed so (mostly Christian) conservatives can claim to be the victims, once again, as they colonize another people/land.
I got jumped in Italy couple of weeks ago. I was wearing a "volleyball dad" hoodie my kid bought for me but did not realize that the "volleyball dad" is etched in the middle of a large American flag covering my entire back. Luckily (for him, not me :) ) three police officers were 10 meters away walking the area dealing with apre ski drunks and restrained him. fun times
didn’t even know I was wearing it (honestly never even noticed anything other that “volleyball dad”) but rest assured I wore it every day for the rest of the trip
yes, this is exactly the kind of story one would be dreaming up to share, I think if one was to make up a non-existent story one would come up with a lot more "interesting" one that this one :)
All the people who decided to stay in the Middle East even when the second carrier group was en route, and then thought they were news worth enough to get on camera and comment about there being no commercial flights out of there.
So the presidents personal law enforcement that is tasked with racially profiling people who overwhelmingly do not pose a threat are going to now be conducting security directly from the source where millions of foreign travelers come through…hmmm…ridiculous
That's the strategy of Project 2025, make all the nice things we have much worse and broken so there's no choice but to scrap and start over. While they're in charge, of course.
Very few other people have Trump's ability to channel frustration in a nonspecific-but-charismatic way that connects the various extreme factions of the American right.
None of those factions will be gone, but their battles will weaken their cause more than they have since 2016.
Some of this can be seen by how even his own popularity falls any time he actually has power, since there are no effective ideas there, only misplaced blame, and that doesn't sustain support for four years. Without him there at all in an out-of-power period, the "blame the Jews"/"blame the brown people"/"blame the women"/"blame the baby-killers"/"blame the anti-Semites"/"blame the sexual deviants" factions will likely fail to find another person they all rally around.
The extreme factions of the right are a very small portion of the electorate. They generally don't decide elections beyond the primaries and generally turn out in favor of the right regardless.
Dems lean more on moderates/independents. Trump won because he persuaded that group, particularly the young men.
25-33% of the electorate is no small fraction. There's a group of people who have been consistently supportive of this government's policies since 2016. Take any policy survey, and the fraction that supports the right-wing side of action always amounts to a consistent 25-33% of the votes.
While being largely correct, looking at his popularity misses the forest for the tree.
Trump is very much a symptom, not a cause. He is simply the kind of personality most fit for the media environment.
The media environment on the right has essentially eschewed journalistic standards for political and economic velocity.
Fringe theories get introduced during podcasts, which then get brought up by guests on Fox. Members of the government point out that the news media is talking about fringe theory X, which then gets repeated by the news media. Eventually the government opens up an investigation or creates a task force to address the issue.
It is not that people don’t come up with objections or counter narratives on the right, it’s just that they don’t get platformed.
Verification is the expensive part of journalism. If you eschew verification. You can be more efficient. Today the right is simply the more “efficient” political consensus manufacturing machine.
This is foundation upon which the rest of the events occur. This is why there will always be space for another character to appear.
Many liberal people think he is an abberation, they would gladly return back to "normal". The point is, he is a symptom of a larger unaddressed sickness, there is no return to business as usual, it will only return far worse.
To prompt with something more specific: there is a possibility of a Gavin Newsom vs. Tucker Carlson in 2028, it's crucial to understand why Tucker might win and why he would be ten times worse than Trump.
Having somebody less incompetent, senile, and corrupt at the helm may not make things "magically go back to normal," but it's a step in the right direction. Necessary but not sufficient.
Perhaps you'll be explicit though, what is the "sickness" you perceive?
>Perhaps you'll be explicit though, what is the "sickness" you perceive?
It's that a significant number of Americans are mean, selfish, racist, arrogant, and delight in the victimization of those they perceive as belonging to an outgroup.
2/3 of your electorate either voted for him (meaning they liked what they saw) or were sufficiently unbothered by him to not vote (meaning they were more or less okay with Trump).
These crocodile tears about how "we were bamboozled" are just that. It was plainly obvious to the rest of us looking in from outside, even before his first term but certainly after, that he was exactly the person he is now, and fully two thirds of American voters accepted this.
Today is MAGA, yesterday it was the "Tea Party" faction, before that it was something else, and tomorrow there will be another.
Every time there's a cycle of fringe-right blowing up in popularity, pushing an agenda and flaming out, it's still the same people they're appealing to who are voting for them.
>The left won’t accept this awful truth about the American soul, a beast that they believe they can fix “if only the people knew the Truth.”
>But what if the Truth is that Americans don’t want to know the Truth? What if Americans consciously choose lies over truth when given the chance–and not even very interesting lies, but rather the blandest, dumbest and meanest lies? What if Americans are not a likeable people? The left’s wires short-circuit when confronted with this terrible possibility; the right, on the other hand, warmly embraces Middle America’s rank soul and exploits it to their full advantage. The Republicans know Americans better than the left. They know that it’s not so much Goering’s famous “bigger lie” that works here, but the dumber and meaner the lie, the more the public wants to hear it repeated.
The main problem with your thinking is that you fail to realiZe that a lot of conservatives criticism of Trump is that he is too weak on the things he promised to be hard on.
They want MORE ICE, more cuts to government programs, more police.
America has neglected working class people for decades. The economy has shifted from supporting earning income to make a decent living, to protecting assets (bail outs etc.) Trump tapped into this and tricked these people into electing him, bringing along right wing or whatever they are.. and they got hold of power. Don't think numbers are there for this culture war crowd to stay in power unless they hitch a ride with someone.
(edited: typo)
> A totalitarian theocratic regime with long range ballistic missiles and nukes.
Man, imagine that, how scary. I bet in theocratic regimes there's a bunch of stupid stuff going on, like a ~Secretary~ Minister of ~War~ Defense that justifies an attack on a foreign nation by calling it a holy war and prays every time he gives a speech to the troops.
Those theocrats probably do things like de-funding every science project they can when they get power. Or worse, maybe they think vaccines are against god's will and get a bunch of kids sick by opposing vaccines for preventable diseases. Hell they probably don't even teach their kids about evolution or gay people.
Can you imagine if a nation like that had nuclear weapons and long range missiles? Why, they might start a war for no reason.
I did assume you were being hyperbolic when writing it, but yes. I would think that anyone looking at the state of the US right now may see "A totalitarian theocratic regime with long range ballistic missiles and nukes" as referring to it.
Totalitarian: hyperbolic, but the state of the executive branch over the last couple of decades is moving things in that direction. And clearly one could say this to make a point.
The kind of whacky religiousness that you find in the US matters because of foreign policy, among other things. (There are also domestic things like right to abortion.) The US ambassador to Israel is a Zionist that talks about the Bible with Tucker Carlson as if should have any policy weight, because he believes so. There are other (Republican) politicians that say something like the US having a Biblical responsibility to support Israel.
> The narcissism of small differences on full display here.
And what is your pose, here? The selfishness of implicitly dismissing the foreign policy implications of American religious n*jobs because you don’t live in the affected countries?
Yeah it's a good thing we dismantled that regime and totally didn't empower the most extreme and radical portion of it while removing the politicians who'd tempered that and turned the population against the US and Israel.
But hey, at least we've lifted sanctions and we are now sending them even more money because the oil market was completely destroyed so that's great right?
Obviously this is the best strategy because we can see how the Taliban was completely dismantled in Afghanistan after 20 years of occupation right?
Unless you are proposing genocide of Iran or an eternal occupation, what we've done is kicked a hornets nest.
I wish we could throw in a giant arena every person believing in "inherent evil", be it "of islamism" or "of zionism" or "of America", give them knives and books, and let them fight until they figure t out.
I agree THAT ethno nationalist country in the middle east, with long-range ballistic missiles, secret nukes and a secret nuclear doctrine that hasn't signed any Non-Proliferation treaty should make everybody worried. But that country isn't Iran.
It's the only country in the world with nuclear weapons that at this moment gets bombarded by missiles right now, if that doesn't make you worried you aren't paying attention.
That's not what made it sound like Yoda. It was sticking "has been" at the end, and I agree there was a better choice stylistically: "Crazy how effective this admin has been at making everything worse."
One of President Donald Trump’s lines during the 2016 presidential campaign was his promise that, “We’re gonna win so much, you may even get tired of winning. And you’ll say, ‘Please, please. It’s too much winning. We can’t take it anymore, Mr. President, it’s too much.’ And I’ll say, ‘No it isn’t. We have to keep winning. We have to win more!’”
Would you qualify complaining about starting an unnecessary war as "whining"? Why? What about ICE agents killing American citizens? Adding unprecedented numbers to the federal deficit, etc.?
How nice it must be to be able to just dismiss these things.
> How nice it must be to be able to just dismiss these things.
I don't know anyone in the US in real life who is happy with the current situation, including people who voted for Trump. The cheer leaders are only visible online.
The people who voted for Harris are saying "we told you so," and the others are saying "he conned us."
There are petty peevish folks too, to quote myself lately
October 2025
"I believe Trumps gutting of institutions of learning, culture, democracy, law is punishment for the Branch Covidians. I believe this punishment must continue for some time until the lesson is learned about abuse of power"
Should we reconcile this great nation, not balkanize, not be in an antebellum period, not be a Weimar republic, and walk back the rubicon and cross into more quiet waters, we must turn our attention to what made this country great.
What has made it unique? That our constitution is explicit about what freedoms and rights are reserved for the people and are not to be trampled, touched, or looked at by the government. State, Local, or Federal.
Our founding fathers and great men who preceded us recognized government as a necessary evil, one that must be kept at bay, not used as a violent tool to achieve outcomes.
All of these institutions must walk back their power, give the rights back to the people, to be truly afraid of the populace. Each tax collector must shiver when he goes to work, and each police officer be fully aware that a single parking ticket is an act of violence.
All said, I am afraid, we have lost that. And now we must face the future hoping that someday, another group of smart men can realize something so unique, so right, so innately just and moral was achieved by the signing of the constitution that it must be tried again.
"Branch Covidians" is just buying into more Trumpist reality-rejecting nonsense. A president is supposed to lead us all through a crisis, not turn it into a needlessly divisive issue as if he doesn't know how to do anything but campaign.
Less than half the states had stay at home orders with the force of law ("lockdowns"). The states with the most authoritarian overreactions were red states full of social-media-addled nutters rebelling against reality - when citizens actively work to help spread a pandemic, is it any wonder that the bureaucrats respond even stronger in the only way they know how?
What reconciliation actually requires is for the maggots to take some responsibility and realize this is exactly where reactionary media has been leading them by the nose for the past four decades - destruction of the Constitutionally-limited government in favor of rule by unaccountable corporations. Signed, a libertarian who actually believes in those lofty ideals you're fallaciously invoking.
I'm not sure where you live, but try going to some of the super-small towns in the Midwest. I unfortunately still see people openly wearing MAGA hats and have MAGA flags on the flag poles in their yards.
Trust me, as sad as it is, those people still exist.
Not in the US, just reporting what I'm seeing on signal/WA groups consisting of mostly former classmates and colleagues. A sample size in the low hundreds. These are CA, OR and WA centric with exactly one guy in TN.
For the people I know, it's mostly just been quiet silence, they don't really want to talk about it (and I don't force it). I know this is uncomfortable for them.
Outside that, what I've noticed in my area is a whole lot less trucks driving around with cartoonishly large American flags and pro-trump bumper stickers. Even homes that proudly flew the "Trump 2024" flags and flew the 2020 flags for a long time have taken those down.
Republicans here (Idaho) have been gleefully touching every 3rd rail (Medicaid, public school funding, public lands). I don't really have hope that the electorate will do anything about it, but who knows. I've never really seen such bold actions against the citizenry.
I don't understand the "he conned us" stance. He was literally saying all these things before getting elected. He wasn't being coy about it, we all knew it would be terrible, and here we are. What was the con exactly?
If there's one thing you can't accuse Trump of, it's ever masking how utterly nonsensical he is.
Grump said all of these things before getting elected, but he also said their exact opposites as well. That he can say blatant lies while having a "charisma" such that people hear what they want to hear is exactly how a con man operates. Hence, they were conned.
However, the responsibility still arises as half of their fellow citizens were telling them that they were being conned. But rather than listening to the critics they actively remained ignorant while gloating about "liberal tears" and so on.
He was never anti-war. There are videos of him ranting about Kharg Island dating back to the 1980s. (I wonder if he had friends/relatives in the hostage crisis.)
Don't know why you're getting downvoted, but I believe the con was the "no wars" line. He was supposed to stop the Ukraine war in 24 hours, remember but he seemed to just lose interest in it.
On the flip side, I _think_ there's actually less and less about Epstein visible, so I think WH is winning that war. Or at least successfully postponing battles.
The current situation has been giving me so many flashbacks. Here, my GWB-era teens had the terror threat level, and now we're lazily reimagining State Department traveling warnings as a dark slapstick version (be afraid everywhere, American!)
1. Distracting from domEstic ProblemS. StarTing a rEgIoNal war is an effective way to do that.
2. Kidnapping Maduro made the rest of Venezuela's government roll over and play fetch, they are stupid enough to believe it would have worked again.
3. Israel says jump, GOP asks 'how high'?
4. There are no negative consequences to them killing people, driving the country into ruinous debt, or blowing up the American economy through higher energy prices. The drawbacks simply don't exist.
Hegseth is a white christian nationalist with a crusades tattoo. Whatcha think the intended purpose is here? People said this was going to happen when he was nominated.
There's a christian prophecy involving israel occupying certain lands, a cow, and some other nonsense. A weirdly high number of Americans, mostly christians, believe it. There are a ton of them in the Trump admin.
That's still ten years of collaboration that could have built greater trust, led to a new agreement, or worst case provided enough evidence to take a more precise military action instead of bombing girls schools.
Build greater trust? The Iranian regime's identity is based on anti-American rhetoric. They fund Hamas and Hezbollah because Israel is an American ally. They say this in their marches and their speeches and their rallies.
You are suggesting that these people change their entire identity to suit your notion that the world should be peaceful. Would you suggest that a metalhead not wear leather because you don't like loud music? Would you suggest that a gay man "be normal" because "God doesn't like gays"? Identity is not something you change in other people. Unless you're some colonial conquerer forcing your culture on others.
Should nuclear weapons be kept out of the hands of people who threaten neighbouring and allied countries with military force? Who threaten distant countries with destruction if they don't comply with their demands, which change every day? Who have a support base that makes up 30%+ of the country, and chants absolutely insane shit at their rallies?
By any rational, third-party standard, such a country should not have nuclear weapons.
That’s going to age as well as weapons of mass destruction in Iraq did. The reality is that only Israel was threatened by Iran and the US is caught up in it simply because we act as their vassal.
Then how do you explain the rockets taking on Saudi Arabia? Baharain? UAE? Even Diego Garcia - which is further from Iran than Israel is. Just as far as Europe is. So they were only developing weapons that could target Israel?
Well, it was more to target Soviet satellites in Latin America which might, in a foreseeable scenario, host Soviet missiles (also, to hit the Soviet Far East, which would be even more likely to host Soviet missiles.)
But it also wasn't not to have the capacity to target the US; if France implicitly trusted the US they wouldn't have opted out of the NATO unified military command for 43 years as well as developing their own nuclear deterrent.
I gave the example to show dotancohens absolutely ridiculous insinuation. All militaries always want to expand their capabilities. To say it somehow means Iran wants to target Europe is absolutely ridiculous.
Only Israelis have given nuclear threats to Europe. Iran hasn't. Id you say the man who threatened to nuke Europe wasn't a government agent, would you have extended the same clarity to an Iranian saying the same. Objectively all points show Israel is much more of a threat to Europe than Iran is. Every countries military wants as adcanced capabilities as possible, it is telling you ignored my France example. You simply saying the range of icbms of a country annd without anything else implying thats a threat. That's frankly unbelievable.
The obvious and flippant answer to that would be "the parts of the world that do not have incompetent leaders". But that will only lead to the incredulous claiming that all governments are equally incompetent (yet some are more incompetent than others) and that's not a discussion I'm inclined to entertain.
People vote for the current government. I’m not sure why you would expect others’ to pay for americas internal messes, we’re already busy dealing with the external ones.
I'm American, I didn't vote for Trump, so I don't feel like it's me dealing with adverse effects of my decisions.
I did vote for Eric Adams in NYC, and while Eric Adams didn't advertise blatant corruption as part of his campaign, insofar that I can be blamed for his idiocy and bribes I will accept responsibility. I didn't vote for him the second time around and I feel foolish for voting for him the first time.
Democracy is a collective thing. Americans may strongly believe in individualism, but democracy is a collective responsibility. Its kind of a key design feature.
I guess? I mean I actively did not want this president. I actively voted for someone else. I tried to get people to not vote for him, though I doubt I was successful at that task. I suppose I do still pay my taxes and as such I'm still kind of funding this stupid unnecessary war, but I don't think it's entirely fair to judge me just because I live in a country where demagoguery appears to be in vogue.
Don't get me wrong, I know I'll deal with the consequences of other people's bad decisions here, that's just the price of democracy (or whatever the hell we have in the US), but I have a hard time accepting that it's my fault since I did what little I could to stop it.
That's literally the opposite of what I said if you read the second paragraph.
I understand that ultimately I have to deal with the consequences of the group's action, not just mine. If the group decided to elect a convicted fraudster and alleged sex pest, I don't like it but that's just what I'll have to deal with. If something bad happens because of it, I don't have to like it but I have to deal with it. If something good happens, I probably will like it but I have to deal with it.
But I don't take responsibility for either the good or bad things that happened from a president I didn't vote for. If it turns out that Trump is actually much smarter than I think he is and everything ends up going swimmingly because of his seemingly-incompetent decision making, that would be great but I would concede that I did nothing to enable that. If something bad happens, I will also say I did nothing to enable that. It really isn't hypocritical.
The federal government hasn't passed a budget because the Democrats are blocking it. They feel it's worth the political gamble to cause Americans pain and that it'll turn on Trump.
Indeed, particularly given that ICE agents are going to be deployed to airports. Their penchant for killing civilians and otherwise violating civil rights only to lie about their actions hardly seems like a good fit for airport security duties they haven’t been trained to perform.
I worked in the Pentagon for 10 years, and got my beak wet with neural nets there very early, back when we were using Playstation 3s for their GPUs.
I was staunchly against the Iraq war, but even when Bush was president I didn't let it compromise my patriotism.
The amount of people on here who ignore the fact that Iran was the primary enabler of Hamas' attack on 10/7/23, and therefore sowed the seeds of the destruction of Gaza, is insane. Basically, if Trump does a thing, they are against it, independent of the thing. There is no principle, just reactionary hatred. If Biden had launched this war, none of these people would have had a problem with it. I am 100% positive on that assumption.
It seems like about 20% of people judge the actions of a us administration independent of their partisan positions. I am recently joined and cannot claim it is from any virtue on my part. A backlash against an attempted autocratic takeover is a common starting point for successful ones by an opposing party. Leftist autocratic coups are only slightly rarer than rightist ones. We are in the middle of an attempted rightist one, but that doesn't mean we are safe if we remove them.
I liked Biden because he's a genuinely good statesman, with decades of experience building bipartisan relationships (some admittedly bad, most good) both domestically and internationally. I didn't vote against Trump in 2020, I voted for Biden. And you can bet your sweet bippy that I'd do it again.
>If Biden had launched this war, none of these people would have had a problem with it. I am 100% positive on that assumption.
I think you're wrong here. As a Biden stan who's gone to the mat debating Biden's policies here on HN many times in the past, he lost pretty much all of the remaining good will he had by defending and supporting Israel for so long after it became clear what they were doing in Gaza. Biden wouldn't be getting a free pass in the Middle East if it were helping Israel's goals (ignoring the fact that Biden is much more of a dove than Trump).
I highly disagree, one clear thing conservatives and liberals largely agree on is no more wars in the Middle East. It’s astonishing to me that Trump supporters who voted for an isolationist policy are happy with him intervening in the Middle East (not to mention South America) again.
Yes, I am “reactively” hating our president for starting wars without congressional approval and with very handwavy explanations. Besides, he has a track record for saying whatever the fuck he wants if he thinks people will like it, so you can’t trust the words from his mouth anyways. It’s pretty infuriating, actually.
I would be much happier if there was a clear justification and rational explanation for the president starting more wars in the Middle East. And yes, because Biden has a slightly better baseline of not telling bold-faced lies, I could see more people giving the benefit of the doubt at first. But overall, liberals did not like Biden very much. Trump, on the other hand, has a pretty hardcore base of people who don’t seem to care what he says or that he does/says the opposite of what he used to say. Pretty weird.
By the way, this opinion is not formed by reading or listening to any kind of mainstream media. It’s formed from listening to the words coming out of Trump’s mouth for the past fucking decade.
If "no more wars in the middle east" means that America can not protect herself from a nation that regularly chants Death To America, then it really means "I'd rather see America as a society fail than stand up and defend myself".
Chanting for death to any country or religion is not violence dude. Until and actually Iran launches an attack on the USA.
Iran didn't start this war, America and Israel did, while right in the middle of a pretend negotiation with them.
I believe this is a strong sign that any time Israel or America are asking to negotiate with any country, they should prepare a full scale military action ready for the real "negotiation".
edit: Are you a dual citizen? Everyone has a right to free speech of course and to support or not support any country or cause. But if you feel so strongly about a foreign country, why don't you be honest with yourself and pick a lane. I say this to everyone, not just Israeli, but Chinese, Dutch, any other dual citizens.
Arming the Huthis, Hezbollah, Hamas, and various Iraqi militias _is_ violence. When an aggressor with a history of violence says that they are coming for you next, it is prudent to believe them. Iran has been chanting Death To America and Death To Israel for decades. They have been attacking Israel and are developing technology to attack the United States. It is the United States' responsibility to ensure that the attack will not come.
Claiming that Iran is not violent is a lie. Promoting the idea that the US should wait to be attacked first is a nice way to allow Iran to arm properly and ensure US interests are sufficiently harmed.
Iran is violent...to its own people yes. If we want to play the proxy game then there is an unending list of proxies used by the USA all over the world to commit terrorism and war. Then by that the USA and Israel should be nuked multiple times over in proportion with the extreme level of proxy violence they commit. Since you haven't said this about the USA, then I will have no choice but to say you are lying about Iran and applying a different standard.
So tell me, if Israel is justified in invading Iran due to alleged proxies of Iran attacking them, would you agree that all these countries should invade the United States?
The Contras were anti-Marxist central American revolutionaries, yes? The Marxists overthrew the president of Nicaragua, and the US supported them, along with other nations. Israel is mentioned as being an ally, but is not mentioned in any other capacity in the article. The US was funding them with arms sold to Iran, in the hope that Iran would pressure Hezbollah to release American hostages. The Contras were found to be terrorists, that the CIA claimed were due to poor discipline, and then the Contra leader was executed.
Did I get that right? Seriously fill in the blanks for me, the Wikipedia page seems written for somebody who already knows the story. I also read part of the linked Iran-Contra page hoping it would shed some light.
Yeah "poor discipline" /s. It was well known what the Contras were engaging in. And they are far from the only terrorist group the USA has actively sponsored. I do not think Israel is involved in this. These were examples of America funding and supporting terrorism all over the world. So if you say that Iran deserved to be invaded despite not having physically attacked anyone else but due to supposed proxy agents activities, then what should countries do to the USA who has funded much larger and worse terrorist networks?
Was the intention of the United States, when funding the Contras, specifically to murder people? Did the United States publicly support and legitimise murder, rape, and hostages as a political tactic?
Serious question. I don't see any evidence they did.
Would you be asking about intent if the end result of some "well intentioned" program was the murder of thousands of jews and terrorism all over Israel? Do you ask about intent for example when speaking of the deaths caused by well intentioned Soviet communism?
And I have given a much longer list than just the contras, where you can't even hide behind "but the origins were noble", they supported already terroristic entities.
I'm not hiding behind anything, I'm asking about the only notable example you gave with a link to more specific information. I'm actually learning - that's probably the problem. People on the America-Israel side are willing to ask questions and learn. People on the Muslim axis side find the idea of asking questions and learning so foreign that you don't even recognize it.
And yes, of course, when we study e.g. the German genocide of Jews we ask about intent. The Yad Vashem museum is all about examining the intent - you should go visit. One of the first exhibits is a Deutschmark restamped with a higher denomination, demonstrating the unbearable inflation that the German people were suffering prior to WWII. And the reasons for that suffering are explained as well. As I remember it, the major contributor was the Treaty Of Versailles, which mandated far too heavy war reparations against Germany.
And regarding the Soviets, are you joking? Yes, of course the reasons are discussed. How else does anybody learn a lesson? Have you seriously not studied history at all, to insinuate that one does not ask why?
It is very clear why I asked, because for good reasons you would not accept the "original intent" that led to these massacres the way you were wondering about America's "original intent" regarding Contra and other terrorist groups
Most importantly, Iran has always complied with audits to its nuclear program. I would much more urgently worry about the only country in the middle east that lies about having nukes, refuses to get them audited and continually starts wars with anyone and everyone, and proclaims everything under the sun as "antisemitism" and then gins up military action against supposed "antisemites" whenever it can. Hundreds of illegal nukes in the hands of such a volatile entity are grounds for immense world wide existential concern.
The Gazans are armed by Iran. Hamas, the Islamic Jihad, the Popular Front for Palestine Liberation, the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, the Popular Resistance Committee, the Mujahideen Brigades, and the Islamic Republic all claim this.
Then likewise why shouldn't dozens of countries across the world launch invasions against the USA due to the USA sponsoring countless terroristic proxies around the world. If "Iran" did oct 7th then America did 9/11, America did the contras massacres, America did Saddam Hussein chemical attacks.
Yes, nothing to do with the interference on Iran from the US since the coup in 1953.
Nothing to do with how aggressive and expansionist Israel has been since its inception, not to mention how it abuses and oppresses the Palestinian population.
If you don't know this, then you probably should cut your bullshit.
Who am I kidding? Of course you know this. You just choose to ignore it.
> Nothing to do with how aggressive and expansionist Israel has been since its inception,
Israel has been expansionist only during active wars started by her neighbours. Arabs kill people, Jews counter by taking the land used to kill her citizens, and people like you decide that land is more important than life.
Then when Arabs invade Israel, and publish maps of areas they have considered, and Israel goes in to rescue her hostages, suddenly life is more valuable than land and Israel is at fault again.
> not to mention how it abuses and oppresses the Palestinian population.
The only oppression the Palestinians have suffered at the hands of Israel are measures that Israel has taken to defend her citizens. The Palestinians themselves will tell you that they suffer far more from their own leaders and from the neighbouring Arab states, than from Israel.
There was absolutely no reason to flag my comment, other than the fact that you disagree with it because it penetrates your Bay Area bubble of distorted reality.
I don't know what the comment you are replying to was talking about, and I agree that "white culture" is an absurd false construct, because "white" is a false construct. I understand flagging stuff like that, but nothing in my comment warranted it. I expressed a logical opinion. The percentage of people in the United States present on legal visas getting caught up by ICE is near-zero. It's an entirely propagandistic narrative to suggest otherwise, based entirely on motivated reasoning.
And before you label me a bigot or whatever to feed your sense of moral superiority, be aware that I'm the only "white" person in my household, and I'm also, by far, the most "liberal". Outside of the Bay Area, a lot of people of color like my wife and her family absolutely despise your politics, viewing them as luxury beliefs.
My politics are basically identical to Garry Tan's, but you've lost the plot so much that you felt a need to flag my comment.
What do you mean by European? Because as someone with Slavic heritage, I'd rather you excluded my culture from your offensively aggregated "Western European" culture. You don't get to claim Dostoyevsky, Pushkin, and Solzhenitsyn just because the color of our skin has a similar shade. In terms of religion, the Orthodox Church only has surface-level overlap with Evangelical Protestantism. And much like the Irish, Polish, and other "less desirable" European ethnicities, we weren't even considered fully white until sometime in the 20th century.
Europe is a massive melting pot, not some single, monolithic "culture." In fact, I have much more in common with my Latino neighbors than the WASPs having conniptions over the purported decline of "white culture."
> the end of slavery
Lol, lmao. Well, it's pretty obvious what fetid corners of the web you lurk in.
Please don't respond to an inflammatory comment with another inflammatory comment. Flamewars about the relative merits of racial/cultural groups is the kind of bottom-of-the-barrel internet dreck that we're most trying to avoid here. Please don't perpetuate it even if it's others who've started it.
Yes, we uphold the guidelines no matter what “side” the commenter is on, and yes, we flag/kill comments and warn or ban users who engage in battle over race or religion, regardless of who they’re for or against. Stop poisoning HN with this kind of rhetoric and stop trying to deflect from your own disrespect of this site and its guidelines. The whole reason HN is something anyone thinks is worth defending is that we have guidelines and we uphold them consistently, regardless of topic or side. If you want to participate here, we need you, like everyone, to make the effort to raise the standards rather than drag them down.
On the one hand, I do know where you're coming from, on the other ...
White European culture [..] including [..] Australia, Canada, South Africa and Zimbabwe before they turned to shit.
Freedom of expression, not executing gays or hunting them for sport; the end of slavery,
Congrats, you've named places that in my lifetime have had effective slavery (stolen generations, imposed domestic servitude) and the freedom to hunt and execute gays (illegal, but common and commonly overlooked).
Iran's source is the one who said they did it in the first place :facepalm: and it was confirmed by UK
As soon as they felt like denying it would be better for them they did and took down https://en.mehrnews.com/ where it was published. Unless you say mehr was defaced and the news were planted by Mossad
No thankyou.
[1]https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cede0qyvqz3o