did you ever doubt Tiān wài zhī yīn?

look. it's just a fact that degrowth Don (formerly JDPON DON) is real. green degrowth Don, that's what many are calling him!

This is basically why my contempt for the Senate Dems is endless and yes, that goes for even the "good" ones like Warren, etc.

No, you see, this is 36D chess from Trump and Miran to finally get that rate cut to sub-1%! Trust the process!

Look, I am sorry, but if you want to rein in the imperial presidency you need to establish Congress as having a leading role in declaring war or peace, and to do that we need to make some examples of the military who think the president can order anyone on the face of the planet vaporized in a whim.

I mean the big, *big* question is the friend/foe distinction. it's one thing to carry out illegal orders against faceless enemies, quite another to do so against their fellow countrymen.

given how much local evening news stations are beholden to a right wing billionaire broadcasting corp, I am morbidly curious how they will start doing "pain at the pump" coverage. I keep thinking there's no way they will try to obfuscate the problem but, then again, we live in hell, so

like has this led to a more "holy shit the rot is much worse than I thought and goes really really deep" kind of revelation or no?

i'm trying to phrase it in a way that doesn't provoke a fight but I do want to ask some of the milsky people #onhere if they've re-evaluated their mental frameworks after the predictions last year that military would push back/resign/be a mitigating factor on Hegseth/Trump proved to be....not true

like, we cannot have a well-functioning (let alone strong) state if every political faction pursues a race to the bottom in tax policy for nearly everyone.

honestly this is the sort of thing that pushes me towards being a “we’re cooked” guy (which we must resist).

literally why would you advocate for a policy which 1) is objectively bad 2) helps your opponents and 3) is something they would gladly implement

remember how they sent that Roman consul to Carthage to have him ceremonially executed? yeah, that

It's infuriating how many op-eds that say "we never could have predicted this Middle East policy out of Trump 2.0" can be debunked by looking at the Middle East policy of Trump 1.0

Obama made a deal so that Tehran didn't get a nuke and then the GOP nuked it because they thought they could force Tehran to accept better terms

They're gonna do the Hawley thing where every time they want to cut Medicaid he writes an OpEd opposing it and gets a hundred thinkpieces about what a pro-worker maverick he is and then votes for it anyways with Vance, it's gonna be great, I'm gonna be so mad all the time you can't even imagine.

I won’t be shocked when the media paints Vance as the peace candidate and does all the work for him in pitching his foreign policy as different from Trump

It's doubly frustrating because the many ways FDD and other advocates of a regime change war on Iran were wrong could be seen in advance. And were. Here's me in 2018 explaining why they were badly wrong. I was hardly the only one who saw it and said so. Now events have played out as we warned.

Everything the Iran hawks of “Foundation for Defense of Democracies” said was wrong. Diplomacy can’t restrict Iran’s nuclear program. Wrong “Maximum pressure” would get a “better deal,” with Iran capitulating. Wrong The Iranian regime is brittle and will quickly collapse with a push. Wrong again

Iran regime change advocates got what they spent decades pushing for—the US to launch a big war to collapse Iran’s government—and they’re still not happy. Because what they pushed for years was a fantasy of a smooth, easy regime change war that gets everyone to tell them they were right all along.

No one can claim legitimacy in Iran and also let bygones be bygones with the U.S. if those bygones are ‘destroy their power and water and kill a bunch of little girls’

You cannot do this to people and expect Iranian Delcy Rodriguez to emerge to make peace with you. She pulled it off only because the U.S. operation in Venezuela killed mostly security personnel (and indeed, mostly Cuban security personnel)

It’s incredible that the US’s theory for the case here is that they can get the Iranians to revolt and install a government more friendly to them, the people setting their sewers aflame.

Easiest prediction in the world tbh.

i don't fucking need this right now

Israel wants to bomb Iran into Libya and the US doesn’t know what it wants.

Turns out, the Haber Bosch process working best with piles of cheap natural gas means that all the fertilizer is now made in like three places

Awful man theory of history

like i said

we knew this is what had happened, in our souls we knew it had happened exactly like this even as we joked about it, but it's insane to get confirmation it'll be hard to get enough people to remember DOGE to build a movement to put them in jail with ICE but we gotta do it

team "nothing ever happens" found dead in a ditch (in Miami)

I think the current state of affairs is bad, tbh

There being no effective check on SCOTUS—out of some monstrously disproportionate & so self-undermining respect for the court & rule of law—is an utter perversion of the notion of checks & balances

The SCOTUS exception is huge though & demands an answer as to why it enables lawless fascism while lower courts have mostly resisted it so far. The answer must have something to do with there being no effective check or possibility for review or reversal of its decisions even by coordinate branches

Apocalyptic scenes from Koohsar Blvd. in the Shahran neighbourhood of northwestern Tehran.

this you tonight

I think it's important to point out the rest of the world knows we're a major petro state who just started a record breaking amount of drilling contracts and that not only is this kind of action horrifyingly cruel, it's also to raise the price of our own oil for sale in the chaos for profit.

it's always funny

This was going to be an issue from day 1. The second Trump said that his preferred picks to run the country were killed this was obvious. Trump wanted VZ 2.0 where everything stays in place except the leader is more Trump-friendly. Israel just wants destruction of everything, it seems.

Lesson: do not do deliverism for your opponents. If rural people want the next big public infrastructure buildout, they can either convince Republicans to do it or they can elect Democrats. Democrats should not reward them for voting Republican.

Amazing how the ball knowers on here were like “they’re going to run out of military targets in a week” and they immediately start hitting economic/civilians infrastructure on day 8

i'm trying to phrase it in a way that doesn't provoke a fight but I do want to ask some of the milsky people #onhere if they've re-evaluated their mental frameworks after the predictions last year that military would push back/resign/be a mitigating factor on Hegseth/Trump proved to be....not true

Imo a botched raid is the best possible outcome and a successful one is the worst. The last thing we want is them getting emboldened by a second Maduro moment

Nothing bad can happen, it can only good happen

In other words, the US-Israel alliance is a land of contrasts.

Indeed. (Also when you are *not* in a democracy.) And not just in your democracy: a good reason to not join the US is to eyeball US public opinion and go 'yeah, you're not going to commit to this in the longterm, are you?'

REV UP THOSE "TRUMP POINTING AND SAYING 'I DID THAT!" STICKER PRINTERS, FOLKS, IT'S GONNA BE A PRODUCTIVE SUMMER

You can't deny Americans their gender affirming car

and this is why everyone needs to start buying Trump "i did that" stickers and start plastering them on the pumps now