Why does the headline claim he said something that he didn’t in fact say?

I think that most Trump voters support isolationism symbolically. They want a leader who prioritizes them rather than perceived others, but they don’t actually have a strong opinion about specific foreign policies per se. Attacking Iran does challenge that symbolism, but in the absence of direct effects on their own lives, their trust in Trump’s established “America first” reputation will go a long way.

Well if he’s not quite alive, then he can’t be assassinated.

But for the moment if there is one country in this war that is rudderless, it is not Iran.

Ouch.

We’re going to end up in a situation where whatever is necessary to train AI is permitted, and the main question is whether that will be through (re)interpretation of existing law or the passage of a new law.

Well, the actual NYT article has the headline

U.S. Tomahawk Hit Naval Base Beside Iranian School, Video Shows

The school appears to be part of the same compound as the naval base. Presumably someone or something thought it was part of that base.

He’s right. Even when starting a war was a mistake, you can’t just pretend that you didn’t. Stopping unilaterally isn’t necessarily the best course of action.

I admit that the articles I’ve read are not entirely clear about the order in which things happened, but my understanding is that the Israelis were trying to sneak in and dig up the grave without being noticed, they were noticed and attacked, and they called in air support. They were clearly prepared to fight, but their mission would not have involved any fighting had it gone according to plan.

who didn’t have anything to do with it

Those people attacked them. The interesting thing is how outmatched the attackers were despite outnumbering a group that wasn’t there with the intent of fighting.

If you don’t want legal or medical advice from an AI, you can already simply not ask the AI for legal or medical advice. But I don’t want your paternalistic restrictions on what I may ask.

The content of the article does not match the title. It doesn’t actually talk specifically about the tech industry or claim that it is in particular difficulty.

Why did California pick such a clearly terrible way of running primaries? It could have worked with ranked-choice voting but, the way it is now, you get hilarious features like the Republican frontrunner being incentivized to have people vote for the other Republican rather than for him (because if he’s #1 and a Democrat is #2, he definitely loses the general election, but if he’s #1 and the other Republican is #2, he has about 50% odds of winning).

It does no good to fight if you have no realistic way to win. They didn’t have the resources to challenge Israel before the war with Iran started and now they’re in an even worse position. They have two roles - as an irregular branch of Iran’s military and as a power within Lebanon, and they’ve chosen to prioritize the former and fight a losing battle at the expense of the latter (and at the expense of Lebanese people with no particular sympathy for Iran who don’t want to be involved in this).

It would have been wiser for Hezbollah to sit this one out.

https://polymarket.com/event/iran-leader-end-of-2026

Currently they’re giving him a 43% chance of still being the leader of Iran by the end of the year. So I suppose his chance of surviving at all is a little higher than that…

Germany gave up anti-US ideology after being bombed to rubble, and Japan gave up anti-US ideology shortly after being nuked. The Middle East is different culturally, but what you’re proposing is clearly not a human universal.

Consider Syria. Ahmed al-Sharaa was a jihadist but then decided that he liked being alive and in power more than he hated the US and Israel.

I think it’s plausible that they’ve concluded that the Assembly of Experts, a group selected for loyalty to Khamenei, is not going to radically depart from his ideology.

Israel is not going to take over its neighbors. It’s already struggling to rule over the three million Arabs in the West Bank and it’s stretched thin occupying just part of Gaza (less than 140 square miles).

I’m not happy with Trump’s approach to international relations, but there’s a difference between the sort of “pause nuclear program” negotiating that Iran had been doing and the sort that would ideally come out of this war, which would be “give up anti-US/anti-Israel ideology, give up ambitions of regional hegemony, and in return normalize political and economic relations” like the new Syrian government.

Well, the war would be won by disrupting the transfer of power to those who would carry on Khamenei’s policies, and this appears to be a solid step in that direction. I suppose you don’t want the USA and Israel to succeed, but why are you surprised that they would brag about achieving their own goals?

Also, I think someone coming to power who is willing to negotiate (rather than waiting to be air-struck and replaced) is more likely than the collapse of central authority.

Everything ultimately comes down to whether some sort of uprising “on the ground” occurs.

Not necessarily - my guess is that the plan might be to keep killing leaders until someone willing to negotiate comes to power without a revolution.

That’s not quite that what the said.

“We expect casualties with something like this,” the president said. “We have three, but we expect casualties - but in the end it’s going to be a great deal for the world.”

Not the phrasing I would have chosen, but it sounds like he means “a great deal of good” as in “We’ve done a great deal to help.”

With that said, any President has to weigh the costs and benefits in lives of military action - it would be crude to explicitly say that some number of soldiers’ lives is a favorable exchange for a military objective, but it’s essential to do that math in private.