You CAN take he piss out of anything you want. It's just that if your take is uninformed, don't grouse when someone says, 'Oh! Here's some context so you can know more about this thing! Enjoy knowing something new!'
I think it's ignorant to call it "shitty" or "fake wrestling".
Pro-wrestling entertainment is a form of camp theater, like drag shows. It's an old, cherished artform with a wide, passionate audience that outsiders routinely dismiss because they don't get it.
I don't watch it. It doesn't appeal to me. But I know people who love it. I think it's largely class elitism that perpetuates the misconception that this form of performance art is somehow unrespectable. It's not, it's challenging, dangerous, physically demanding theater.
It's so painful to read. I'm glad Tawfic's sorry is getting some coverage in the US. It's not enough, but it's more than what most people who die in these pogroms get.
We need an entirely new policy. This is unconscionable.
Did you read the article? I'm not talking about the country of India: I'm talking about Narendra Modi and the BJP. The article is about how he's a Hindu nationalist and his political coalition has built their political success on persecuting Muslims.
Many see the temple’s opening as the beginning of the election campaign for Modi, an avowed nationalist who has been widely accused of espousing Hindu supremacy in an officially secular India. Modi’s Hindu nationalist party is expected to once again exploit religion for political gain in the upcoming national elections in April or May and secure power for a third consecutive term.
I'm talking about Prime Minister Modi. And I'm not calling him a Hindu supremacist because he's Hindu: it's because he's a supremacist.
I think we might be talking past each other in some way.
Ethno/religious supremacy is very different than religious influence.
You can have a political identity that is shaped by your religion and be fully supportive of the rights of immigrants and other religious groups, etc. That's advancing the belief that your religion or ethnic group should have sole authority over state power.
Germany's Christian Democratics: religious, but not supremacist. Germany's National Socialist German Workers party: not religious, very supremacist.
I'm not really sure what point you're arguing. I think you might be reading things into my observation that aren't there.
My point was that it's unfortunate that non-violence civil disobedience appears to have been found to be highly infective under the conditions within Gaza at least circa 2018-19.
I think it's weird when someone says "Oct. 7 is proof that Israel was right to ______." Because while much is up for debate, I think the one thing we can agree is that Oct. 7 showed the overall security arrangement was a failure.
One can argue for any security strategy they like, but I don't think anyone should point to Oct. 7 to justify any policy that led up to Oct. 7.
First, I just want to say that I don't agree with your premise (I don't think Christianity is a common feature of successful democracies), but now importantly, I don't think your sentiments disagree with anything I said.
I don't mind if someone's ideology is shaped by faith. My lament was about ethno/religious supremacy.
It's a constant source of frustration for me that building your political power on promises to elevate a dominant ethnicity or faith over a minority group is such a consistently successful strategy.
And, like ... where's this going? If feels like narratively, rising ethnonationalism never stops itself. It just gets bolder and bolder until something explodes. This feels like the early years of another of history's 'oh shit' moments.
I wish this was a non-violent resistance movement lead by someone that believed in peace and democracy.
A lot of people don't know this, but they tried this in 2018. It was called the Great March of Return. Gazaans tried protesting non violently for weeks, and faced a fierce violent response, but it was largely ignored by international news.
Both are true. It has always been the case, and yet Likud and the country at large have both definitely shifted hard to the right in the last 10 years.
First, the logic works in reverse, too. If they are trying to pull us into a confrontation that they believe benefits them, allowing them to do so also demonstrates a tool for controlling the US that others will be motivated to use, and is also escalatory.
The problem is that we only think in personal, school yard fight terms. We're act sad though each country has a singular, logically operating decision making process. In reality, international actors are much more like natural phenomena, like mold growth or rabbit populations.
I'm not saying the school yard logic is baseless. When the US flinches, that definitely affects how Xi Jinping assesses our willingness to respond with force to a recapture of Taiwan, for instance. But: whether he decides to do that is not based primarily on whether he thinks the country as a whole has balls or not. It's based on a combination of benefits and draw backs.
So in the long run, if we wanted to prevent unification by force, we're far better off engineering conditions that make unification a bad deal, even if we look weak rather than make it appealing enough to go to war even if we seem likely to destabilize the whole world over it
This feels like a bunch of Bush era talking points.
They aren't orcs. There's this notion that our adversaries are unable to demonstrate the self control they need to make environments safe to raise kids but possess motivation for self destruction that is inexaustible.
After exclusively putting more and more weight on the boot on their collective neck with nothing buts decades of successive failure, let's try something else.
For those unmotivated by Christian mercy, I suggest what I am going to call "Machiavellian kindness".
What if their appetite for death is actually weaker than advertised? What if we try to give them a taste of comfort and security with the diabolical awareness that people who become accustomed to weekends of rest and full bellies, who watch their kids reach milestones lose their edge. They get gluttonous and lazy. They become attached to material comforts and the expectations of retirement and grandkids.
Perhaps my cynical machinations are too wicked. But in desperate times when all else has failed, I think they've given us no other choice.
This feels like a bunch of Bush era talking points.
They aren't orcs. There's this notion that our adversaries are unable to demonstrate the self control they need to make environments safe to raise kids but possess motivation for self destruction that is inexaustible.
After exclusively putting more and more weight on the boot on their collective neck with nothing buts decades of successive failure, let's try something else.
For those unmotivated by Christian mercy, I suggest what I am going to call "Machiavellian kindness".
What if their appetite for death is actually weaker than advertised? What if we try to give them a taste of comfort and security with the diabolical awareness that people who become accustomed to weekends of rest and full bellies, who watch their kids reach milestones lose their edge. They get gluttonous and lazy. They become attached to material comforts and the expectations of retirement and grandkids.
Perhaps my cynical machinations are too wicked. But in desperate times when all else has failed, I think they've given us no other choice.
From the position trying to secure the best strategic outcome, though, what does that tell us? That sounds like a lot of opinions on the past, but what guidance do you take from all that?
Direct confrontation still fulfills their strategic objectives, and presents a nearly unwinnable situation. Instead, what would limit their willingness and ability to fight?
One thing would be ending our support for Israel's wildly unpopular violent occupation. I hear people say that the Houthis are just cynically seizing on this morally and emotionally powerful cause to maintain popularity among the people of Yemen. And even if that's true, it still serves our strategic interest to take that valuable asset away from them.
I hate Newsom. But you're right, Biden looks like he's going down in flames. I think he's counting on Trump going to jail, because head-to-head, unless something changes, Trump is getting set up to coast to victory. It's horrifying to watch.
I think your comment illustrates one of the biggest problems with our foreign policy.
We appear to have completely lost our ability to think laterally or strategically. I get why my comment seems crazy when you think our only options are "ATTACK" and "surrender".
We need a strategic solution. The Houthis WANT a direct confrontation. They've said so, and their behavior is consistent with that. To figure out how to get them to stop, we need to ask: why on god's green earth do a group of Yemeni rebels WANT a fight with the United States??
The short answer is that they hate us deeply for the incredible violence and destruction we inflicted on them and continue to inflict on them and the people they sympathize with. And we've destroyed so much of Yemen that they have nothing to lose. We turned it into a hellscape wasteland, so there is nothing more we can really threaten them with, and dying a proud and defiant death is pretty much the best offer on the menu. Plus, they know that if we fight, it'll hurt us badly, just like all the last few wars have. We'll spend too much, probably send troops eventually, and ultimately leave having accomplished nothing. And any surviving militants will declare victory and rule over ashes. Afghanistan provided a very appealing model of how to defeat the US.
So, strategically, what if... they had a reason to not want to die? What if ... I don't know, we negotiated with partners in the region to help them grow some crops, and maybe provide them with a new security arrangement where we don't just sweep in every 10 years and light all their children and grandparents on fire? And concurrently, what if we tried to find ways to reduce their access to weapons?
Violence is not going to work. The region is spiraling out of control, and blowing everything up is easier for all the desperate radicals we've created across multiple nations than protecting our shipping lanes is for us. If violence no longer carries deterrence, it's only utility is extermination. And if we embrace extermination, we radicalize more people. You can't eradicate out of that situation, and trying just turns you into another of history's great monsters.
It's bad. We need to rediscover the concept of strategy.
You CAN take he piss out of anything you want. It's just that if your take is uninformed, don't grouse when someone says, 'Oh! Here's some context so you can know more about this thing! Enjoy knowing something new!'