Rottcodd

Lied. The word you want is lied. They lied.

Good to see this - this is a story that needs to be repeated often, so that more and more westerners will come to see where and how things went wrong, and most notably, who bears the responsibilty for it.

It's also what first led me to the theory that the underlying goal of American Middle East policy is simply destabilization - that the American authorities, and the interests they represent, broadly seek to avoid the threat to western hegemony that would be posed by Middle East oil wealth administered by stable and progressive governments, and to provide recurring enemies to empower the military/industrial complex, so have deliberately pursued policies designed to keep religious fundamentalists and paranoid authoritarians in power.

Is anyone actually confused about this?

It's common knowledge that the Kremlin's propaganda machine is pushing Trump. But the doltish Americans who support Trump need to believe that they're not just tools for the Russians. Since they're both stupid and desperate, it doesn't take much - they just need something to cling to. And Putin's given it to them.

And I guarantee that right now, on Vichy Twitter and truth.social and all the other places where those angry morons hang out, they're all telling themselves and each other that all of the stuff about the Russian propaganda machine backing Trump - all of the evidence that's come out sbout Russians funding American conservative influencers and politicians and all of the examples of American conservative influencers and journalists and politicians brazenly sucking up to Putin - that all of it's just Democrat lies, because after all, Putin supports Harris. He said so.

And that's why he said it.

I have no more right to interfere in someone else's life than they have to interfere in mine.

Avoid people who don't share that view.

A nation of psychopaths.

an annexed West Bank and Gaza under Israeli army control.

That's the plan, right there.

Actually, the plan was to annex Gaza too, but it's looking like Netanyahu isn't going to be able to keep sabotaging cease-fire deals long enough for that to happen. So the fallback position is to hold the Philadelphi corridor so that Gaza is completely encicled, so that Israel can fully control the flow of food and water and can prevent foreign access (and most notably foreign journalists), so they can then carry out their final solution for Gaza unhindered, and annex it sometime later.

Of course he is.

It's really a very simple calculus - any deal is going to include a timeline for Israel's withdrawal from Gaza, and if Netanyahu signs off on a deal that includes a withdrawal from Gaza, the hard right assholes are going to turn on him. And if the hard right assholes turn on him, he's not going to be able to hold onto the office. And if he doesn't hold onto the office, he's likely going to jail, because he's not just a psychopathic piece of shit, but a grotesquely corrupt psychopathic piece of shit.

And that's really the whole deal right there - tens and potentially hundreds of thousands of people are dying and millions of people are displaced all so that one grotesquely corrupt psychopathic piece of shit can evade justice.

People are almost more susceptible to simpler charts with race and IQ than they are to the really complicated stuff

Ironically enough, that's because they're stupid.

He's not just a manipulative psychopath, but a craven coward.

The entire Republican worship of him is weird, but that to me is the weirdest part. They seem to like him so much because he's a conservative strongman, so he represents their ideal. But that means they have to be oblivious to the painfully obvious fact that his shows of political strength are really all about the fact that he's a frightened little poseur.

He blames everyone else for everything he does, he constantly cries about how supposedly persecuted he is, and every time that someone challenges him, he has them killed. So he doesn't have the courage to take responsibility for his own actions, much less to face their consequences or to stand up to anyone who disagrees with him.

Or in other words, he's a coward.

And you know... that opens up a whole line of thought I haven't followed before. Is the fundamental driver of conservatism fear? It appears to be anger - that's the broad impression - that conservatives are angry and hateful. But is it really, underneath that, that they're frightened and insecure?

I think that just might be the case. That explains a lot of things that didn't make sense to me before...

Hierarchism never puts the working class on top.

The class on top, no matter its origins, is always and without exception and literally by definition the ruling class, and it inevitably and not coincidentally ends up broadly indistinguishable from any other ruling class throughout history.

"Their authoritarianism is bad but our authoritarianism is good."

Said every hierarchist ever.

It amuses the hell out of me every time the conservatives whine about their brazen disinformation getting censored, since whenenver and wherever they get an opportunity (including, especially ironically, Facebook), they reveal themselves to be the most cowardly censorious people on the planet.

Everywhere, without exception, where conservatives have control, anything that even hints at undermining their comforting delusions is instantly censored.

But if anybody dares to censor anything they might want to say, including overt and deliberate lies, they wail and cry like the spoiled children they are.