Mr. Miso Paste

Yeah probably going to be Hyper-Hezbollah instead, IRGC is bad but they have different characteristics

I'm in Washington DC so non trivial consideration of people here being collateral damage for someone who wants revenge

I'm hoping my train to work doesn't end up in the news as I get turned into chunky chili

He could definitely half ass it and be easily getting as much credit or more

I'll say he at least seems to be going out of his way to do the right thing

When I saw the news source being The Japan Times i had a very different mental image of what might be meant by "gun"

Yeah on further reading he actually looks pretty good (although I'm very cautious about taking it all at face value)

It was relevant but didn't really have to do with the Soviets, more religious in nature (cf. the Dersim Alevi uprising)

I'd rather have them in the tent pissing out than our of the tent pissing in, but this will always be deeply unappealing to me I guess

Tbh hard for me not to see the "Catholic left" as a force to pressure Dems to give up on abortion rights and LGBT rights to varying degrees

When we talk about Baby Boomers not getting off the stage: In 1997, the US president was born in 1946.

In 2007, the US president was born in 1946.

In 2017, the US president was born in 1946.

And next year in 2027? The US president will have been born in 1946.

All Caesars and no Cincinnatuses

I think Moscovitz probably does have a moral duty to give it all away: if that's psychologically impossible for >99% of people (which it very well might be) then that's another argument against that kind of wealth hoarding being legal

I'm kind of skeptical about the idea of a good billionaire, because why would you have that much money if you're actually a decent person

There were some half baked ideas of a Kurdish SSR or aligned state being carved out of occupied Iran but this never left the planning stage. Pre WWII conflicts with Kurds like the Dersim Rebellion had very little to do with the Soviets.

Soviet territorial designs on Turkey, specifically right after WWII did draw on Georgian and Armenian irredentism, and this was one of the factors that motivated Turkish NATO membership. For Stalin, Armenians themselves were mostly just props who were quickly ignored once inconvenient though

Ukraine would be doing a hell of a lot worse in the hypothetical alternate timeline where the Russians aren't a pariah state rn

They also don't have a convenient legal mechanism to remove their leadership, unlike Israel, which has actually jailed its own former prime ministers before

Make every Israeli farmer complain that their produce is rotting because nobody is able to legally import their oranges or avocados anymore

Make "Silicon Wadi" relocate to Cyprus and Serbia the way the Russian tech industry did after the USA et al nuked its links to the international business community

Force them to choose between being able to have a job and maintaining colonies

Yeah I mean the Palestinians should not have their civil rights contingent on other Arab states coughing up reparations but this should absolutely be addressed at the same time considering how it has compounded their problems

Israel also does not have a land border (and very friendly relations) with China, a country approximately everyone knows for its industrial base

One olive branch (no pun intended) IMHO should be to include the (very small number) of pre 1948 West Bank Jews (settlers or not) as "Nakba victims" with unconditional citizenship rights considering how a decent number of them were expelled from eg Gush Etzion by the Jordanian army during the events

Absolutely a precedented situation considering eg most proposals for the Turkish settlers in Northern Cyprus, residency but (not immediately at least) citizenship for most "ethnic Russians" in the Baltics, and the peculiar autonomous status of Serbs in Croatian Slavonia and those villages in Kosovo

A lot of 2ss peace deals would offer Palestinian residency or citizenship to the settlers who are pigheaded enough to stay, the notion of which alone would thin out their numbers pretty fast

But sanctions have fucked their shit up, although haven't gone far enough yet

I think most people consider Russia to be more resilient for a variety of reasons, including the huge deposits of natural gas, arable land, enormous (now quickly depleting) Soviet era weapons stockpile, rusting but semi functional vast post Soviet industrial base

I'm trying to find a less charged synonym for "treatler", my first draft is "Slobberon Treatlosević" to describe the politics of recreational ethnic cleansing from very comfortable populations seen in the US/IL/most of Europe

Israeli "democracy" also makes the government more vulnerable to a shift in public consensus than say, Iran or the DPRK, and a higher standard of living means that people have more to lose from the USA allowing the rest of the world to fuck their shit up