I think that would be more believable, or at least the US/Israel would be more supportable in this, if they hadn't testily insisted on terms like "obliterated" and "set back by years" several months ago. You can only cry "nuke" so many times in a year. https://www.whitehouse.gov/releases/2025/06/irans-nuclear-fa...
How many civilian deaths as the direct result of US/Israel action do you consider acceptable to achieve killing the unelected murderers? 150 school children? Wikipedia cites hundreds more civilian deaths, but I don't know what sources to believe. How many layers of the regime's onion do we have to peel before we know we got all the murderers? How many children are we going to radicalize into future unelected murderers by murdering their family members and plunging their region into worse chaos? Should we kill 'em all and let God sort 'em out? Hegseth has crusader tattoos. Is he just another unelected theocratic murderer of a different stripe? Are we the baddies?
It's a different definition of the word for one thing, and anyway, unless their compensation is prepaid this would only suggest that "raise" doesn't mean liquid money in an account, because an employee's raise is a promise to pay an amount over the remainder of the year with the stipulation the employee continues at the job.
They've been in power for at least 10 years, "joking" about a third term, telling us America should be ruled by dictatorship, and you just trust that they won't actually do it? How do you know?
> In Iraq you can easily predict how people will vote based on which group they belong to. It’s not real democracy.
What is democracy then? On what reasons are people allowed to base their vote on? I don’t think it's possible to cleanse your brain of every iota of cultural, ethnic, or religious background and just vote as "yourself." Your preferences are melded, in part, by your group identity.
And you think decades ago before your suburb was "corrupted" by anti-assimilation, that people's group identity didn't predict how they voted? I think you can find a poll link to disprove that. At the least there were probably some Black people voting how Black Americans tended to, or maybe another ethnicity in your area. So your complaint is nonsensical to me, or at least it’s been a "problem" for decades longer than you say. Was the 15th Amendment the start of the problem, to you? A bunch of unassimilated non-Anglos were dumped into the voting pool en masse, only to get worse with the 19th and a bunch more people who were different than the dominant voting base were added.
> What is democracy then? On what reasons are people allowed to base their vote on?
Who is doing a good job. Non-sectarian ideological preferences. Policies. Who they want to have a beer with.
> I don’t think it's possible to cleanse your brain of every iota of cultural, ethnic, or religious background and just vote as "yourself." Your preferences are melded, in part, by your group identity.
No, but you can demand assimilation to where traces of group identity become secondary to non-sectarian factors. Catholics and Protestants in the U.S. used to be deeply divided politically and now that’s not much of a predictor.
> And you think decades ago before your suburb was "corrupted" by anti-assimilation, that people's group identity didn't predict how they voted
In my suburb growing up everyone was highly assimilated and any group identity had become extremely shallow. Our group of neighborhood kids was one person with a Russian surname, two pairs of siblings with Anglo surnames, and then me with my Bangladeshi surname. Not once the entire time growing up did we perceive ourselves as having a different group identity from each other.
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...
I would reply point-by-point to show US hypocrisy, but that might be too much whataboutism. I think I'll just say this one: this is the only time Trump has pretended to care about the lives of brown-skinned protestors. He literally has asked whether he could intentionally shoot American protestors legally.
He doesn't care about the Iranian people either, so there's some other reason. I'm not going to carry water for a secretly-motivated war where the "good" effects are secondary, post-hoc rationalizations.
At least just say they're a grave threat we should destroy or whatever, don't play along with the game that the American government and people care so much for Muslims on the other side of the world.
Chronic pain probably changes your personality, so I think we should give the idea more of a chance, that being plopped into a new body/no body would alter you too.
To be fair, it would cost them more to fully test the iOS 18 patches on all devices, than what it cost them to test a few devices. So I wouldn't quite call it artificially holding the patches back. But yeah, it is probably mostly motivated by avoiding bad PR of letting slightly-older devices get hacked, and then forcing everyone else to be on the new release. (FWIW I'm running iOS 18 on an iPhone SE 2020, so probably going to have to embrace all the change and bugs in iOS 26.)
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