The "law and order" crowd seems to be ok with it being selective in it's application -- those in power always seem to get a pass except if it's the other team's player.
I worked at Arthur Andersen when Lotus 1-2-3 came out. It was like crack to accountants. VisiCalc was in use but this took it to a whole new level.
One of my jobs was making bootleg copies so everybody could have a copy, until the NY office was busted and they paid out enough to incentivize them to buy copies as needed.
I consider this period of time to be a watershed moment for humanity: prior to this, a lot of business was run on notions and assumptions. With powerful spreadsheets and macros businesses could play "what if" and turn the whole affair into a profit/loss scenario (including labor, e.g., people) and think of businesses simply as a pile of numbers where they only care about maximizing the bottom line.
There's plenty to criticize about China, but as far as energy production goes they are a leader and have demonstrated what can be done when the country is aligned (albeit by force in this case) to provide cheap and clean energy to power their economy.
The US, under the current admin, is literally the opposite of that.
Check out improv if that might be your jam. I was effectively in the same situation (more so, via the empty-nest syndrome). Couple that to moving to a new town and working remotely, the isolation was devastating.
Improv pretty much selects for people that are playful, intelligent, and kind (it's a team sport after all).
Another aspect is learn to dance. Dance communities can be very strong, and dancing is a wonderful activity on so many levels. I initially went with expectations of meeting somebody, but now it's solely for the activity and sense of community.
Put country first. Postcode doesn’t make sense without one. Prepopulating one based on location is generally okay, but don’t assume it will always be the same.
That's true, this is more of a retroactive analysis, because the other outcome (where the Earth is destroyed) is the end of everything anyway, so no sense considering it.
I feel like this just further reinforces the point - that need for social connection is a weakness.
I love my husband dearly, and I’d morn him if he vanished, but it wouldn’t make my life hard to live by any means - I lived just fine before him, and I’ll live just fine after him. I didn’t marry him because I needed somebody, I married him because I wanted him. I love him and I’m lucky to have him, but I also love myself and am lucky to be me - and as I said, that was true before I met him, and it’ll be true after he’s gone.
I don’t need someone else to make my worthwhile, or to make my life worth living - I am sufficient. He’s a (much welcomed and deeply appreciated) bonus.
What you’re describing sounds like romanticizing mental illness to me.
The White House has admitted that Israel had actionable intelligence that several of the Iranian political leadership were having a physical meeting together and they decided to attack to decapitate the government. The US decided to attack Iranian capabilities preemptively to reduce the inevitable response to US military, embassies, and allies in the region.
It’s bad enough the politicians lied when they campaigned on no more wars in the Middle East, they don’t need to insult our intelligence with these moronic cover stories.
If they didn’t want Israel dragging the US into wars they could’ve just placed a call to Iran to warn them.
I see the White House adopting the strategy that the Russian and USSR government / state media use frequently: change the narrative early and often, to the point where people don’t feel like they can ever know the truth.
If your “ally” is, as this story goes, forcing you into a war against your will, protecting your own citizens and troops takes priority over any favors you might owe these “friends.”
Of course if you actually wanted to start this war, and wanted a low effort cover story, you’d…do exactly this kind of lazy, low effort lie.
What are you even calling a lie? (not the campaign promises, the recent statements) The claims are something like this, right?: 1. Israel decided to attack 2. The US thought about how that would play out. 3. The US decided to attack too.
Which of those claims is untrue? Is there a claim I missed?
"The US could have snitched to Iran" does not contradict any of those claims.
Also I'm not convinced that warning Iran would have made things much safer for US troops. And you can say what you want about what the US priorities should be, but that's a whole different discussion.
The US claim is that their attack is a sort of pre-emptive self-defense because Israel forced their hand. That’s what I’m calling a lie: Israel could’ve been dissuaded, trivially, if the US didn’t want to start a war with Iran.
Their hand was forced, and it was "a sort of pre-emptive self-defense". I'm still not seeing the lie. You think they should have done something different, but "should have done something different" is a completely different criticism.
And what you think is "trivial" is far from certain.
It’s an absolute howler that the United States would be led around by the nose by a country smaller than New Jersey. C’mon, man. You honestly believe that the massive military buildup that preceded this was just a wild coincidence?
If the Israelis were actually pushing the US around in the way we’re supposed to believe in this story the US would absolutely ruin them in a heartbeat. Netanyahu would be in prison in a timeframe measured in hours.
Pushing the US to make some kind of decision isn't the kind of "pushing around" that would make the US attack Israel. Your ideas of alternate ways for this to play out have gone from weird to absolutely ridiculous.
The US might have already decided it was going to attack, but it just as easily might not have.
It's plenty serious. You don't like how they acted and how they gave partial explanations so you're calling it an obvious lie even though it's not.
They didn't say it was their absolute only option or something like that, as far as I know. (If they did say that you needed to mention it.) That would have been a clear lie. Saying Israel moved first is just... plausible.
> I don't like having my intelligence insulted by such brazen falsehoods, so in that regard this is true.
Okay I guess I assumed you disliked the stuff you were calling a lie and a moronic cover story.
> I'm happy for your heroic amounts of credulity, it must make life a lot easier in this administration.
It's not that I'm being very credulous, it's that they said very little about their decision process. The claims you're objecting to are relatively minor details about the situation. You keep exaggerating the implications of their claims every time you say why they must be wrong.
We live in a post truth age, unfortunately. Many citizens are happy to only hew to the truth that they want, versus the "real" truth. (note the quotes -- truth is tricky).
There's a bitter irony in this issue -- toppling the regime in Iran would be a wonderful thing, but doing so via bombs is not the way. We have Afghanistan and Iraq as very dear lessons in how not to do it.
Absolutely, but the current administration is a whole new level of WTF. I've followed US politics for half a century and this feels like through the looking glass stuff.
This administration seems especially compromised, servile and obsequious. But you're right, both sides of the aisle have been successfully targeted for years. Both sides really don't want the unredacted files to come to light, but Trump least of all.
No idea why you're being downvoted, there is a mountain of evidence that this is the case. We are doing this because of Israel.
Marco Rubio said outright we went in because of Israel. Just watch Trump's speeches, he literally talks about the power of the Israel lobby and hopes he is doing a good job for them. Netanyahu has visited Trump 7 times in the last year, each visit has been leading up to this move. Trump's biggest mega donors are Israeli dual citizens with strong ties to their home country. Miriam Adelson, Sheldon Adelson, Larry Elison (who has conveniently taken control of the TikTok algorithm and banned the phrase "#freepalestine" through his connection with Trump) have donated hundreds of millions for this exact outcome. These donors have direct ties to the Israeli government.
There is very little evidence that the strikes are being driven by oil, in fact oil is the perfect excuse to use as cover. It was the exact same thing with the Iraq war. Iraq and Iran were the two largest threats to Israel, we went into Iraq to regime change them and now we are finishing the job with Iran. Now there are no threats to Israel's expansion to the rest of the middle east. The ruling party (Likud) supports the Greater Israel project, which aims to expand Israel's borders to Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Iraq, and Lebanon.
I'm assuming that it's assumed that I'm slagging on Israel for some irrational hate -- I'm not. I'm commenting based upon reports that I've seen (effectively what you're referred to), not on ideology or feellings.
Thanks for having my back! I think of HN as a community of intelligent people and it's always disappointing to be reminded that that alone is no guarantee of healthy discourse.
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