I presume they are evaluating all his actions in order to estimate how much domestic disapproval he’s willing to tolerate. They’re won’t be convinced that he will tolerate a lot simply by him saying so (since that’s what he would always say if he was rational) but if he were saying that he was very worried about prices going up, that could be significant to them (which is why he shouldn’t do it).
This is the correct thing to say, no matter what he might actually think. The less that he appears to be concerned about the cost of the war, the stronger his negotiating position against Iran is.
Students fail to make the is/ought distinction.
So? Maybe I’m weird, but I don’t have the moral intuition that an employer generally ought to keep employing people if it can afford to.
I’m rather more libertarian than most but I don’t think the free market, as generally envisioned, implies the freedom to send money to countries that your country is currently at war with.
I wouldn’t want to be one of the dudes in the speedboat though…
He’s saying that because the population of the USA is approximately 40 times larger than that of Israel, the loss of one Israeli life would diminish Israel to an extent proportional to how much the loss of 40 American lives would diminish the USA.
I find AI to be a better conversation partner than humans in most circumstances. It’s not perfect but it’s knowledgeable about pretty much every topic and it’s always fully engaged and attentive. Most people, by contrast, aren’t very interesting and most interesting people are busy. Of course I would prefer to talk to someone who was also subjectively experiencing and enjoying the conversation, but I can get a lot out of a conversation even without that.
There’s very little chance that the USA will accept the plan - among other things, that would mean paying reparations to Iran.
Are we? I’m looking to buy a car and I think gas cars make the most sense even now, because the change in the price of gas seems like a relatively small part of the cost of car ownership. A one dollar increase in the cost of a gallon of gas works out to about $300 a year in extra costs for me. That’s not enough to tip the balance towards an electric car.
For reference, I’m comparing a Hyundai Elantra N to a Tesla Model 3 - the Hyundai costs as much as the base Tesla at about $36.5k, but to get similar performance you’d need the $42.5k premium Tesla, and that price difference pays for enough gas to go 40,000 miles.
I didn’t expect someone explicitly opposed to majority rule to call me an enemy of democracy…
As a matter of fact, I agree with you that there’s a difference between maximal democracy and good government. Sometimes it’s good to have a barrier between people’s whims and power, whether that barrier is anti-majoritarian procedure in Congress which is preventing Republicans from passing this law or a rule that prevents someone who didn’t go through the process of getting valid ID from voting.
There’s a difference between reinterpreting and simply considering a quote in context. “There” is the Strait of Hormuz and “it” is oil shipped through the strait.
He clearly meant defending the Strait of Hormuz specifically, not attacking Iran generally. Still a bad idea, but not what people are taking the quote to mean out of context.
It’s not enough to have fair elections - a democracy needs elections generally perceived as fair. It would have been better if the Republicans hadn’t created the widespread, false perception that voter fraud is common, but the fact of the matter is that they did and merely trying to convince the public that there is really no problem hasn’t worked so far. If 71% of the voters want to have to show proof of citizenship, and if most of the ones prevented from voting because of that are low-information voters likely to vote for Republicans anyway, I say let the Republicans shoot themselves in the foot.
I feel like Democrats shouldn’t have been fighting the Republicans on this. The law is popular, not entirely unreasonable, and potentially going to hurt Republicans rather than Democrats at the polls.
Reporters and networks are prohibited from publishing the precise location of Iranian missile impacts, or even filming or photographing the extent of the damage in a way that could give away the location — restrictions designed, in the words of the army’s chief censor Col. Netanel Kula, “to prevent assistance to the enemy during wartime.”
The restrictions sound completely reasonable. This reminds me of how we would laugh when Russian soldiers uploaded detailed depictions of the damage done by Ukrainian attacks, because they were being so foolish.
I worry that a major ground invasion is the least bad option available to the USA now, and the Trump administration is not capable of carrying it out.
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.
I’m not claiming that he always thinks before speaking, or that he’s thinking before speaking this time. I’m just saying that he happens to have said what a person who did think before speaking would have said.