Meekostuff

@thematidog @Beirutspring Relax. They're only allowed to hate Jews who are pro Israel.

Lebanon can offer Israel, for starters, the immediate erasure of antisemitic tropes in its textbooks. This will go a long way. Trust me, I am Israeli. I know what we are sensitive to. Doing that will be more effective than any promise to disarm Hezbollah. The mere suggestion that Jews are equal humans may be a multi-billion dollar boon for Lebanon. Think about that.

🇱🇧I support this government and I hate Hezbollah. But can anyone explain to me what the Lebanese Government has that it can offer Israel? Is today's meeting anything but a symbolic exercise? We don't like it, but Iran is the player with the cards

@vcdgf555 @KimberlyHalkett @AJEnglish I think the deal was more or less done when Trump announced the talks. The talks are about how the deal can be implemented without destabilizing Iran.

@KimberlyHalkett @AJEnglish Now after midnight in Pakistan and negotiations are still ongoing. 7/

I'm starting a thread of posts regarding the negotiations. 1/

Some considerations on the economics of warfare kamilkazani.substack.com/p/some-conside…

@BaxterWilliams_ Don't defend Christianity. Defend the widows and orphans.

I guess it doesn't come up much because people in my personal life don't criticize Christianity often, but I'm discovering that I squirm in my seat when Christianity is being criticized almost as often as I squirm in my seat when Christianity is being praised.

I've been defending Christianity to my wife recently. She knows I'm not Christian and I think because of that she thought she could make any complaint about it to me and I would agree, but I think she was surprised that I ended up defending it. Two examples recently:

@moghaoui We have to wait and see, but to me it sounds like the IRGC have chosen their Delcy Rodriguez and the next two weeks will be theatre.

Tomorrow then Tuesday Hezbollah while protesting against negotiations with Israel wants actually Iranian regime to bundle the deal... To save face here is my prediction on the IRA game play tomorrow leaks about the Iranian delegation threatening to leave, or withdraw Until...... Everyone (including bibi himself) has begged them to enter after Trump promised and crossed his heart that he will stomp over Netanyahu and force him a complete ceasefire and accept all their terms, which then they will show the world how US and Israel did not abide by the terms they said that they told them they begged them to sign after their defeat ( yea Israeli and US defeat)... Pops to mind a trashy arabic limerick about a whore who was invited to the room but swore she never done this before, but when she asked to undress so she does while swearing she never done this before U should get the next steps by now...

@kamilkazani Seems like a mistranslation. Official video: youtube.com/watch?v=6_w3E8…

@akarlin We have to wait two weeks but I think IRGC has found its Delcy Rodriguez.

Just to be clear I think the chances of this ceasefire holding are low. There's a huge gap between US and Iranian minimal peace conditions. Rare that countries just voluntarily accept defeat, least of all superpowers ruled by narcissists.

Difficult to see anything remotely like this occuring, as this would be an obviously decisive, but voluntary, US defeat. On off chance it does: * Great legitimizing victory for Iranian regime. * Hopefully what finally discredits MAGA and RW populism. * Ruinous for Gulf states.

@haravayin_hogh There's no way a missile launcher could go over that bridge.

Can't help find this admirable if incredibly dumb. Both very sad and ironic than Iranians genuinely still believe in a "Rules Based Order" of Human Rights whilst its ex-guarantor USA has torn up the whole book. Trump & Bibi don't care about impotent Western (i.e European) disgust

@mostlyreplies @BaxterWilliams_ Thanks for the stats.

@Meekostuff @BaxterWilliams_ Hmmm, it's less than I thought...christianpost.com/news/most-amer…

Christians would you prefer me to be a Christian heretic attending church and taking communion without telling anyone my views or an agnostic that doesn't attend church?

@akarlin The only way this campaign could have gone better would be if the interceptions had been 99%.

I may soon have to take my first L on the Iran War amidst an otherwise spotless record, I had assumed it would dissuade Americans from testing China, to the contrary though knocking Iran around has bulled them up bigly on their prospects against an actual peer superpower.

@Katapetasma2 @94_415 Because John and James are so obviously made anonymous, e.g. John 1:35-40. John 21:1-7 And readers aren't going to conclude that James wrote the book when he was executed by Herod.

@Meekostuff @94_415 How so?

If the Gospel of John purports to come from the testimony of John of Zebedee, why is every single Synoptic tradition regarding John of Zebedee absent from the Gospel of John?

@94_415 @Katapetasma2 I can't understand that. Readers are meant to conclude that the beloved disciple was John.

@Katapetasma2 Hugo Mendez argues that the beloved disciple was a literally fiction and not a historical person. This could potentially explain all of the concerns you mentioned.

@Shayan86 @GeoConfirmed How did you verify the Iranian casualty stats?

This video, filmed on the first day of the Iran war, shows three strikes on a sports hall, a residential area and an educational centre in the town of Lamerd. The strikes killed 21 people, including four children. Location: 27.336932, 53.190622 @GeoConfirmed

@Beirutspring The saying merely implies that the true believers aren't the ones who get to the top.

@Meekostuff The argument is not that everyone is a true believer. The argument is that True believers exist

Excellent from Janan Ganesh (one of my faves at the FT): “Trump does not understand people who believe in things [..] Iranian slogans sound like the opening bluster of a negotiation. That Iran means it — that anyone means anything — strikes him as incredible.”

@Beirutspring "Idealism is the noble toga that political gentlemen drape over their will to power."

True: “There is a kind of cynicism so extreme that it crosses over into naivety. If Trump will not credit that people often act out of conviction, that human behaviour can have a moral or ideological root, he isn’t “based”. He just has a faulty picture of the world.”

@Palestinia12961 "Everybody has to have someone to look down on."

I can never understand why it is so easy for me to condemn the Oct 7 massacre or any violence attack by Palestinians and it is impossible for many Israelis to condemn atrocities done to us 80 years ago. They really believe they are morally superior to us.

@QuodNostra @witte_sergei Or arrested or charged.

@witte_sergei Could have something to do with the media saying things like “fired” vs “found dead” or “executed”

Imagine how this would be covered if it happened in Russia. “Hegseth, who had held only a field grade, was selected for the Ministry of Defense on the basis of his political reliability. He later purged more than a dozen senior officers, including the Army chief of staff.”

@kamilkazani Homosexuality was illegal in England until 1967

I think that degree of repression unleashed against the pro-Palestinian and anti-genocide voices is unprecedented. I am struggling to remember anything like that in the history of modern West

@akarlin Isn't RWA just a stream of consciousness account until they're given a directive from their minders?

> Some Western "pro-Russians" have been accusing us of "dooming" [and] loudly denouncing us... To clarify: "Putin's stability is over" is an objective fact... the Kremlin's panicked move to "ban the internet", is about as far from "stability" as you can get. LOL. Even RWA is waking up to the metaphysical inevitability of jail. 🚨🏃‍♂️🚓👮‍♀️

@Alfredovich65 I dunno. I'm pretty sure there are experts on specific religions who also think they are at least in some way silly.

@Meekostuff There are counter-examples, that's why I say seldom. I don't think there are any contemporary flat-earthers that are both honest and experts in some relevant field. Yet there clearly are such people among the Buddhists or the Hindus, and so on.

If you think that Atheism or Buddhism is silly then your arguments, insofar as they should convince anyone, most likely suck.