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French President Macron on the Strait of Hormuz: "Opening it by force is not the option we have chosen, we consider it unrealistic. A military operation would take an infinite amount of time and expose forces to immense coastal and ballistic risks. From the beginning, we have said it must be reopened, but only in coordination with Iran. The world cannot live with a strait that can be opened or closed overnight."

This is what terrorism looks like, state terrorism, we do it to others and then we act shocked when others do it back to us. War crimes:

I was having a conversation with a Christian friend last night about some of the reasons I do not believe the gospel accounts of the death and resurrection are reliable… one such reason was when Jesus Christ was actually crucified. I told him this isn’t some obscure detail….it’s the central event of the entire story. And yet when you line up the accounts, they don’t just differ slightly, they contradict in a way that cannot be reconciled. I started with the Gospel of Mark. In Mark, Jesus eats the Passover meal with his disciples…that’s the Last Supper. After that, he’s arrested overnight, tried, and then crucified the next mornin at about 9 a.m. (Mark 15:25). So in this account, the crucifixion happens after the Passover meal. Then I showed him the Gospel of John. Here, everything shifts. Jesus is still before Pontius Pilate around noon on the day of Preparation of the Passover ….the very day the Passover lambs are being slaughtered (John 19:14). That means Jesus is crucified before the Passover meal, not after. So in one account, Jesus eats the Passover, in the other, he dies before it even happens. My friend tried to say maybe it’s just a minor timing issue. But it’s not. This completely changes the sequence of events. In Mark, the Last Supper is the Passover meal. In John, it can’t be…because Jesus is already dead before the meal begins. You can’t have both. Then I asked him why John would move it. And that’s where the real issue comes in. John is the only gospel that strongly pushes the idea of Jesus as the “Lamb of God.” So what does the author do? He places Jesus’ death at the exact time the Passover lambs are being slaughtered in Jerusalem. This is not history shaping theology…it’s theology reshaping history. Once you see that, it’s hard to unsee. The timeline isn’t just reported differently…it’s reworked to make a symbolic point. And that raises a bigger question I asked him directly…if the author is willing to change the day of Jesus’ death to fit a theological message, what else in the story has been adjusted for the same reason? At that point, he didn’t realy have a response. Because this isn’t something you can harmonize without doing violence to the texts. Jesus cannot both eat the Passover meal and die before it. He cannot be crucified the morning after and the afternoon before at the same time. This really clearly shows that these accounts are theological narratives written by believers shaping the story to express what they believed. And once that door opens, the reliability of the entire narrative becomes a serious question.

Basic human decency predates Christianity by thousands of years. Humans had empathy, reciprocity, taboos on murder and care for each other long before the church turned up and tried to claim copyright over morality.

So this argument works for citizenship debates but not for background checks and red flag laws?

These. Are. Concentration. Camps.

There is a great book called Dying of Whiteness that posits that white americans will deliberately choose policies that create self harm as long as they believe people they don't like are being harmed as well. For example:

Oh my fucking God — our allies have correctly calculated that we’re going to lose (regardless of the assistance that anyone contributes), and they still want to be able to import oil from the Gulf states when the war is over. This is why you don’t engage in patently moronic wars.

The Bible spends far more time on poverty, greed, and personal conduct than it does on homosexuality. Yet some people center everything on that one topic because punching down on marginalized people doesn't take courage. It's actually cowardice.

The New York Times recently published a column about a dairy farmer who deployed robots after immigration authorities arrested one of his workers. The farm now produces three times more milk per worker, while employees earn more, work shorter hours, and do less grueling work.

58,000 Americans died in Vietnam. Over 3,000,000 Vietnamese died. And for fifty years, American culture has centered the grief of the 58,000 while treating the 3,000,000 as a backdrop. As scenery. As context. As "the Vietnam War experience." They built a wall in Washington with American names on it. A beautiful wall. A solemn wall. Good. Mourn your dead. But understand what that wall does not say. It does not say why they died. It does not say what they were doing there. It does not say what was done in their name to the people whose country it actually was. It does not mention My Lai, where American soldiers massacred an entire village, old men, women, children, babies, and the officer who ordered it served three years of house arrest before being pardoned. Three years. House arrest. Pardoned. For five hundred people murdered in a ditch. It does not mention the 2.7 million acres of Vietnamese forest doused in Agent Orange, a chemical weapon disguised as herbicide, that is still deforming Vietnamese children today. Not in 1970. Not in 1985. Today. Children born in 2020 with bodies twisted by a war their grandparents fought. And the chemical companies that made it are still in business. Still profitable. Still un-prosecuted. And yet they send us human rights reports. They grade our democracy. They warn us about our behavior. The audacity is so enormous it becomes almost impressive. Almost.

Tens of millions of Americans voted for this guy to lead them, twice.

Some of us expressed great concern about the Iran War when it was first launched. We were shouted down and condemned as “panicans” and “blackpillers” and even Islamist sympathizers. But it’s pretty clear from how things have gone that our concerns were absolutely reasonable and legitimate. Maybe Trump will get us out of this thing soon and it still won’t spiral into a long and drawn out war. But even if that happens — and I’m not convinced it will — no thoughtful person can deny at this point that the spiral and long war scenario is very much a possibility. No reasonable person, at this stage, can say that our concerns were irrational. What looks irrational now — and always did — is the demand for blind allegiance and unthinking “trust” in our elected leaders, as though we are called to have faith in politicians like we have faith in God.