@Political_hoops @DerekPederson3 He never responds to the sanctions bit. Yo it's ok to admit Iraq was a bad decision
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asidd
4.3K posts
@DerekPederson3 A huge part of that is because of heavy sanctions stunted the economy. GDP per capita before the gulf war was $10k compared to $6k today. But the worst and possibly irreversible consequence was the rise of religious sectarianism.
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The reason it was so bloody was because of non-interventionist polices.
Iraq, where we intervened the most, had the least destabilizing and destructive transition.
Libya somewhere in between.
Luan@Luan75937152
@DerekPederson3 If the Assad was toppled by foreign intervention it wil be WORSE.... Only worked now because SYRIANS defeat him.
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@PoliUnLimited @Acyn The most amazing thing, SERIOUSLY UNCANNY MAGICAL thing, about the MAGA election claims is that they only apply when Trump loses.
Whatever state he win in... The election process is fair and accurate. Amazing how that works! Wow.
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@Acyn Given that Trump's first term was hobbled by Democrat's Russia lies, and that the 2020 election was toyed with by mail in ballots, water main breaks and stopping the count (but not really), my vote was utterly disenfranchised by the left.
And so, anything goes now.
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The Deep State groomed Jake Sullivan to become the next President. They arranged a marriage for a 40+ year old bachelor Sullivan to marry Goodlander, the money. The wedding took place in 2015, around the start of the presidential campaign.
Hillary was going to be installed but the Sullivan-Goodlander dynasty was going to take over from the Clintons.
That's why you have Bill Burns, Tony Blinken etc attending.
To stop Donald Trump, Sullivan and Hillary, with the help of Obama, Soros, US and British intelligence devised the Clinton Plan to tie Donald Trump to Russian intelligence, aka Russiagate.
President Trump won against all odds. Sullivan was devastated. So he, Soros, Obama and co plotted to take out President Trump.
The conspiracy continues to this day. Maggie Goodlander is the ringleader of the Seditious Six.
Alex Thompson@AlexThomp
Scoop: Nat Sec Action—the foreign policy hub for the left co-founded by Jake Sullivan and Ben Rhodes—is rebooting ahead of the 2028 Dem primary with a new director, and more. Nat Sec Action became a key source for staffing the Biden admin. axios.com/2026/05/03/dem…
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Axios: Senior Democrats are rebooting an influential foreign policy group to help potential 2028 presidential candidates and bring together national security specialists who could staff the next Democratic administration.
National Security Action has picked Maher Bitar, who has worked for Democrats on Capitol Hill and in the White House, to lead the group going into the 2028 primary season.
Founded in 2018, National Security Action (NSA) influenced Democrats' messaging on foreign policy in the 2020 election and ultimately helped staff much of President Biden's national security team.
axios.com/2026/05/03/dem…
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@optimistgopher @VALlovesdumbtv This sounds scary if you a) don't know about Islam, b) do not know about moderate Iranians.
More importantly, we had objective ways to keep them from developing nukes. Your fake spray tan reality TV actor president tore it up .. and now he wants a worse deal 🤝🏽
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@asidd0 @VALlovesdumbtv Iran is not that?
Dude, seriously. I think you need to pull your head out of your own ass and do some independent research.
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I can't think of anything more comical than a 23 year old with zero real world accomplishments explaining to "MAGA Operators" how warfare and geostrategy intersect.
Oh do tell Adam, and where did you gain this tremendous insight none of us with decades on the ground and in the game failed to?
I'm not some Ivory Tower academic or think tanker
I have deployed to dozens of countries I doubt you could find on a map. I've watched out political leaders fail and tried my damndest to show them the light.
Now we have a leader who understands American power and exceptionalism and has the stones to employ it. But instead of seeing how that plays out, we should take the advice of an un-experienced, smarmy toad who vomits political talking points as if they are wisdom.
They are NOT. They are not even founded in the slightest reality, but you have no way to know that because you are the ultimate know nothing. Sniping from the sidelines of a life and death game in which you will never participate.
Talk is cheap. Uninformed trash talk from a fatuous, fat-faced, featherbrain is the cheapest of all.
Adam Mockler@adammocklerr
I know Scott Jennings tantrum got all the attention yesterday, but I want to talk a little bit about what I said that got him so mad. The bottom line is: Trump’s war with Iran has failed. This has made it mentally strenuous for MAGA operators to defend it on TV. For 8 weeks now, Scott has pointed to the U.S. destroying the 50 year old Navy and Air Force of Iran to try and prove we have won. This is dishonest for many reasons. The point of war is not to kill your enemies and blow up their navy. That’s an infantile view of war that MAGA is pushing to trick Americans. The point of war is to use force to extract political concessions from your enemy that benefit you on the world stage. Trump has been unable to translate his military success into a SINGLE political concession from Iran. Not one. This is a failed war. The Strait is closed. Iran won’t even negotiate. The enriched uranium is still in Iran with their blueprints stored in the Cloud. So enter Scott Jennings. He has claimed weekly that victory is right around the corner with this war… but we have blown past the 4-6 week deadline set by this administration and have failed to get a single concession. So I asked the simple question: “Can you name a single political concession we have gotten from Iran?” He couldn’t answer. Never forget the weakness he showed when he had no answer for Trump’s mistakes.
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@DerekPederson3 Israel is a religious-extremist nut country. Settler expansionist. War crime enthusiast. We need to straighten them out or decouple. Enough games.
What's with your 1990s views on Israel
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Nah, Kinzinger's take here is stupid.
It's a really weird and dumb attitude to respond to the fact that you find the online defenders of a cause particularly obnoxious (and they are obnoxious) and so you're going to flock to the opposite position.
The Bulwark@BulwarkOnline
"If Adam Kinzinger is pissed at Israel...that is a bad fucking sign." "I can rip on the Germans...the French and the UK and everything else...but Israel's off limits? B.S." @Timodc and @AdamKinzinger on why asking hard questions about an ally shouldn’t be treated as betrayal.
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@optimistgopher @VALlovesdumbtv Yes. Iran is not that. But you need to pull your ass out of right wing media to realize that
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@VALlovesdumbtv If the US had intelligence that Japan was going to attack pearl harbour, would it have been better to pre-emptively attack Japan?
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@jakehmccoy silly to get radicalized by a 1:08 clip and its responses.
The fact is that the causes of fertility are complicated. certainly not reducible to dopamine hits.
Social welfare programs are for fairness reasons.
Separately, they might or might not help fertility.
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The response to this has radicalized me. Most are calling Sasse out of touch and claiming that if we provided free healthcare/childcare/housing or otherwise made life more affordable, fertility would increase.
I am very confident in saying that as affordability increases, all else equal, fertility will continue to drop. The spattering of free stuff above would knock it to zero for a good portion of the country.
60 Minutes@60Minutes
“We've stopped making babies. We've decided that being distracted by a dopamine hit around Candy Crush might be a good way to spend your time. Not if you're a full human," former Sen. Ben Sasse says in an extended interview. cbsn.ws/4cA1Jrp
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@SenatorSlama He's for the working class. You seem like an asshole.
Ben Sasse, for all his virtues, voted against Obamacare, was part of the effort to intentionally make it fail, losing Americans healthcare. All for what? Not good reasons
Meanwhile he pays top dollar for private care.
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Fish, we were undergrads at Yale together.
I was the first-gen kid from rural Nebraska you regularly belittled. Your dad was in Congress for 40 years, and you’ve spent life with your ego stoked by proxy.
Leave my Senator’s name out of your mouth, you spoiled insufferable brat.
Fish Stark@fishstark
All right @BenSasse, let's make a bet. Let's divide the US in half. I'll let you pick which half. In your half, you ban Candy Crush. In my half we institute 16 weeks of paid parental leave, universal childcare, & a restored child tax credit. Let's see which has more babies.
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@IamMikeHunt420 @fishstark @BenSasse People chasing a dopamine hit still have babies. Actually, some of them have lots of babies.
Remember, making a baby is easy. But it's about what else you want in life
And we want a lot (apart from candy crush). Right now, affluent societies everywhere are having less.
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@fishstark @BenSasse Saying people are being distracted by chasing a dopamine hit, has been brought up for years. He used some bad mobile game from 2006 for an example and that is what you focused on.
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All right @BenSasse, let's make a bet.
Let's divide the US in half. I'll let you pick which half.
In your half, you ban Candy Crush. In my half we institute 16 weeks of paid parental leave, universal childcare, & a restored child tax credit.
Let's see which has more babies.
60 Minutes@60Minutes
“We've stopped making babies. We've decided that being distracted by a dopamine hit around Candy Crush might be a good way to spend your time. Not if you're a full human," former Sen. Ben Sasse says in an extended interview. cbsn.ws/4cA1Jrp
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@realJeremyCarl @pmarca Really? Not the soulless, greedy, violent, barbaric, blackpill/redpill culture that your party has wrought?
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@pmarca When you replace the people you also replace the public morality.
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What could it be, what could the cause be. Unfortunately, we'll never know. It'll be a mystery, like Bigfoot, or the Loch Ness Monster.
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@DerekPederson3 All the following are true.
1) Israel committed the biggest number of war crimes during Biden.
2) Biden admin felt responsive to leftist protests.
3) With time, awareness of Israel's actions has grown, they've become even more aggressive, more illiberal.
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It's often noted that leftists seem to become less fixated on Palestine after Trump succeeded Biden.
But it's also worth noting that, simultaneously, liberals became vastly less pro-Israel at the same time. That was a much starker effect.
It's all kind of just pathetic.
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@DerekPederson3 Oh that guy has dumb takes. Free market vibes, no substance
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@roddreher I like the part where you completely ignore the documented gerrymandering, corruption, and corrosion of democratic norms.
Also, very ironic for the guy who moved to Hungry and bonded over conservatism AS A RESULT OF GLOBALISM. Not to mention the Murdoch funded globalist media
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Oh, horseshit. Orban won four free elections in a row. He lost this one because the economy has been lousy for three years, & ppl wanted change. Fair play. It’s hard for globalists to understand, but it’s still democracy when ppl vote in ways you don’t like.
Barack Obama@BarackObama
The victory of the opposition in Hungary yesterday, like the Polish election in 2023, is a victory for democracy, not just in Europe but around the world. Most of all, it’s a testament to the resilience and determination of the Hungarian people – and a reminder to all of us to keep striving for fairness, equality and the rule of law.
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@bryan_caplan at some point you gotta look at your political coalition and recognize you picked the dumber side.
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@ericmreiner @_ZachFoster @amnesty @hrw @btselem @MSF @alhaq_org @UNHumanRights @UN_HRC @pchrgaza @AlMezanCenter If I punch you really hard in the face, does it follow that a light punch is no longer a punch?
The Holocaust of Jews, gypsies, disabled, etc., was unlike anything else in history.
And, also we needed a concept to describe intentional ethnic elimination at all scales.
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@_ZachFoster @amnesty @hrw @btselem @MSF @alhaq_org @UNHumanRights @UN_HRC @pchrgaza @AlMezanCenter Use your brain.
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On Yom HaShoah, I feel the need to reiterate that calling the Gaza war a “genocide” empties the word of any meaning.
Holocaust: ~34% of the global Jewish population systematically exterminated.
Gaza: ~75k deaths since Oct 7 and 120k births. Amidst a brutal urban war.
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@RichardHanania @micsolana brain rot indeed. That guy always has the dumbest, most unhinged takes. Probably a result of getting his views validated by the same circle of tech bros.
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Mike Solana thinks that because the NY Times made a typo, it's hard to make a case that they're better than Catturd.
I used to think leftists were the ones who hated the Enlightenment, rationality, and merit.
But this is a new level of nihilism.
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@micsolana Ezra is right though. The civic virtue of Citizenship calls on you to engage with the "despicables" on all places of the spectrum. It's not for everyone, but there is a prima facie duty to do so. They already have voting power, they share the institutions with you.
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as predicted, the normalization of violent marxism from the “abundance” dems carries on. ezra briefly co-opted a bunch of great ideas from tech and right wing spaces, but it was only ever to obscure the dangerous reality of his party.
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@AlecStapp Actually the answer is a mix of both policies. Redistributive and free markets.
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@gummibear737 This is such a dumb tweet. Mamdani is very different from Hasan. Which are both having a very different kind of impact on Dem politics than the woke movement.
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10 years ago it was Ta-Nehisi Coates, Ibram X. Kendi, and the wave of radical Black critical theory. These grifters turned “anti-racism” into an industry and dragged the Democratic Party into full woke territory…completely divorced from what normal Americans actually think
Now it’s a new wave: Muslim socialists influencers like Hasan Piker and Zohran Mamdani pushing hardcore communist economics, open borders, and “from the river to the sea” antisemitism
It’s the exact same phenomenon. Both times a radical identity-based movement captured the activist class, turned grievance into a grift, demonized any dissent as bigotry or “Islamophobia/racism,” and forced Democrats to embrace fringe positions that don’t align with voters. Same playbook, different minority group, but it’s basically the same repackaged radical ideology
It’s the exact same phenomenon
And normies are noticing…
You know what they say: “fool me once…”
hasanabi@hasanthehun
i have my differences in opinion with ezra klein but i appreciate his thoughtfulness on the discussion around reducing ideological opponents to 10s quotes / platforming & ofc, the reality that the israel discourse has shifted out of the old constructs msm clings on to.
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