I think US oil interests might have a thing or two to say about declaring Iraq not a country.

More specifically, the US interest in the Suez Canal. This critical piece of intercontinental infrastructure must be secured in order to efficiently transport material within the Mediterranean Ocean and out to the Atlantic. Also a BFD if you’re moving military hardware through the region (like aircraft carriers).

Israel is a gun pointed at the neighboring states, intended to keep them in line. But if that gun keeps going off randomly, it no longer serves as a meaningful deterrent.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_Israel

This is what the Founder of Zionism actually believes.

there have been literal articles and reports by the FBI that Russian interference

There have been literal articles and reports by the FBI of domestic white nationalist organizing and domestic financing. Significantly more money and manpower is documented as entirely domestically organized, although a sizeable amount is moving between NATO and other Five Eyes states. We’re talking on the scale of tens of billions moving between domestic financiers - like the Mercers, Thiel, the Kochs, etc - and domestic fascist media/organizing. That dwarfs Russian state interventions. Its orders of magnitude different.

That’s why it’s been attributed to the Russian government.

Why do you search for the speck in your neighbor’s eye when you have a plank within your own?

Subvert the will and desires of the majority

Come on, dude. This is Reddit, not a vote in parliament. The site’s entire business model revolves around astroturfing.

the Russian disinformation strategy

I’ll never understand why people attribute to the Russian government what was in the obvious best-interests of the Republican Party and the conservative movement.

If you asked who owns and operates the FOX News Channel, or Sinclair Media, or Clear Channel Radio, or any of the other dozen right-wing propaganda projects, I have to wonder how many people would reflexively insist “Russia” despite all of the money spilling in from the UK, Australia, Canada, Wall Street, Silicon Valley, and the O&G Industry.

I remember, back in 2016, when the /r/The_Donald website just used a bunch of bots and other fake accounts to juice their content to the front page week after week.

And then the Mods tweaked the algorithm so you wouldn’t have a wall of Trump memes on the front page every day. /r/The_Donald folks spilled into other sites and started repeating the strategy, so Mods had to tweak the algorithm again. And there was this back and forth that dragged all the way into the general election, at which point the Admins finally decided to ban the sub. But they also had to ban a slew of leftist subs, to make things fair.

And now we have Hexbear, a site composed of purged Reddit-fuges. But Reddit is still full of Trumpies, for some curious reason.

Is this why I never see my mailman anymore?

https://amp.knowyourmeme.com/memes/sea-lioning

Sea-Lioning is an Internet slang term referring to intrusive attempts at engaging an unwilling debate opponent by feigning civility and incessantly requesting evidence to back up their claims. The term was coined in September 2014 by anti-GamerGate Internet users to mock perceived online discussion tactics employed by GamerGate supporters.

A natural consequence of inbreeding.

All Politics is Sexual Pathology, or so I’ve heard it said.

But, in this case, the thing that really throws me is the idea of people being Forever Young. The parents never get older. The kids stop maturing at the toddler stage. I can half see that mom being pregnant into eternity. Just never giving birth, because the imagery of pregnancy is what the patriarchal artist is truly fixated on.

At some point, the older kids are providing child care for the younger ones. But also, its very “infinite economic growth thanks to our ever-expanding frontier” understanding of the family dynamic. As soon as all your neighbors start to copy you, and families start bumping up against one another in their effort to cannibalize the surrounding wilderness, you get conflict. Expand far enough, and the conflicts become things of history - even of legend. The War of the Roses. The French and Indian Wars. The Romance of the Three Kingdoms. The Gaza Genocide.

This is a family style game of The Tragedy of the Commons.

I would argue the age of these characters is peculiar. Also, the age difference between the kids. This seems less like someone envisioning a family with a lot of kids and more someone who is delusional about the prospect of ever getting older or having children that grow up.

“I want a wife who is never older than 30 and children who never hit puberty” is delusional. That’s before you get into the Mormon problem of “surplus males” and how that affects the more orthodox corners of their community. When having multiple wives becomes a status symbol, and having lots of children becomes a status symbol, but the guy/girl ratio isn’t 1:3, you have to start asking what happens to all the horny, defiant, increasingly disenfranchised teenage boys who have to watch their dad marry one of the girls from their high school class.

This isn’t strictly a fetish so much as it is a fantasy. While there’s nothing wrong with having vague, mushy, romantic views, you do need to interrogate them a bit at some point. Especially if the fantasy is going to be the foundation for your political viewpoint.

A politics defined by a 20-something wife covered in Forever Four-Year-Olds isn’t rational. A politics of eternal youth is… not going to end well.

My political views

20-year-old wife with seven children each born less than nine months apart?

In fairness, I’ve received a few crazy notices from the IRS that didn’t include the basis for an investment and just treated the MSRP of an asset as unalloyed income. Consequently, my wife nearly had a heart attack when she got a notice for $32k in taxes owed on a car we sold for $8k.

But also in fairness, this was because I misfiled. I amended the schedule C and updated the bluebook value of the vehicle, the purchase price, the sales price, and the net income. Ended up owing a few hundred bucks.

But if I hadn’t had a decade of experience filing the arcane nuances of American tax filing, I could understand going into a panic.

It’s a very “dumb” implementation of a generally useful feature. Browsers don’t keep track of how many times you’re redirected to the same site or try to consolidate the back-button list accordingly, but they certainly could. Wouldn’t be surprised if there was a plugin to this effect.

I can’t go in get a cup and fill it with water to have a drink while I shop anymore.

You can if you’re ballsy enough.

Levels of white-on-white racism not seen since the fall of the Ottoman Empire.

Talking about “Other Product” in the “Product” sub and getting banned is a tale as old as time. So obvious that the mod community is overrun with corporate accounts and their influencer subcontractors.

The media almost singlehandedly bringing Watergate to the average American’s attention

If you really get under the hood of Watergate, it had all the fingerprints of a soft coup. Nixon was a shit and made for an easy fall guy, but also Trumpian in his stubbornness and his refusal to go whole hog on the Cold War. Ford toed the line - installing Bush Sr to clean Kennedy’s liberals out of the CIA, promoting Greenspan and Rumsfield to the Republican inner circle, and tapping the breaks on our openness with China.

There was no real reason to break into the Watergate given that Nixon was beating McGovern in a landslide. But it did a lot of favors for the movement conservatives like Goldwater and Reagan to get Nixon’s ass out on the curb.

The WaPo (a hotbed of spooks even back then) played a big roll in that for a reason. Ffs, Woodward was an agency man going back to his time in Naval Intelligence. He broke Watergate less than a year after joining the paper.

the lesson he learned from Watergate was that Nixon could have gotten away with it if the media was more sympathetic.

Then we got Reagan, Bush, and Trump, and he proved it.