KSN

@_AlexBPsych @nik0p0l5 @BlueCheese608 TBH if was going after the OAPs, he should have gone big and went for ending the triple lock. Crash through or crash. Then at least if he did crash, future generations would at least respect him for trying.

@nik0p0l5 @BlueCheese608 Which absolutely needed doing by the way! But our population is lop-sided towards this generation that also happen to be the most politically active, so spiting them cuts off your nose. He should’ve just done it and took the L, it’s not worked out regardless.

Why is Carney in Canada successful and popular while Starmer in UK is a failure and toxic? Both of them are leaders of the center-left in Anglo countries in Trump’s crosshairs.

@NotWoofers To me it’s the same as with Chinese electric appliances. Is a Haier washing machine or dishwasher as good as a Miele? No. Is it good enough for a fraction of the price? Yes. My BYD EV drives good enough to get from A to B in reasonable comfort.

This is why the Chinese automotive industry is on track to take over much of the global market

@YevKopiika You could go retro with thou, sounds less tied to a specific geographical place (the southern USA)

@NotWoofers thedriven.io/2026/03/15/rui… In 2019, the Coalition federal government led by Scott Morrison ran a deliberate scare campaign against vehicle efficiency standards and EVs – remember the “cars that will ruin your weekend” line

@NotWoofers The last Liberal-National Government (conservative) that ruled from 2014-2022 was distinctly unenthusiastic about supporting EV charging infrastructure.

Just in time for the Australian market to get flooded by Chinese EVs!

@Mpolymer The have explained away everything else, I’m sure they will come up with a way to explain away heresy.

Curious how religious Trumpers are going to explain this one away…

@okaythenfuture In Europe this would be the equivalent of travelling from Amsterdam to Cologne but having to fly to Frankfurt first!

@okaythenfuture I don't see that happening until annoying shortfalls are addressed. For instance, there doesn't seems to be any direct flights or ferry from Haiphong and Hanoi to Hainan. You have to fly to Guangzhou and Shenzen first

Hainan is basically going to be the World's next Singapore, China, the government that told you this about Shenzhen in 1989 is telling you its going to be, Even Singapore has realized Hainan is going to partly nuke its entire business model, I know one African businessmen who's been there for a year now and has moved his entire family out there, the benefits for businessmen are legit insane there, but you're not going to do anything or ever visit because of the good old days or AI has claimed every business model or whatever. The Chinese Century.

@phl43 Or simply Trump’s can’t take an L. In his mind there are only winners and losers and his ego can never let him come off as a loser.

The problem is that, before it reaches a point where Trump has to TACO, he may create a situation where it's more difficult for him extricate himself from this mess because he put troops on the ground or it has become pointless because energy infrastructure in the Gulf has already been destroyed anyway and reopening Hormuz won't fundamentally alleviate the economic problem. I also think that the Iranians may underestimate American determination and their willingness to see things through now that they have started this war.

@realtonysm1th He’s a bully at heart and he sensed that Iran was weak and ripe to be picked on. I think he’s unnerved that his instincts have failed him.

I first thought this though with the Iran War. It’s not that he doesn’t apper to have had a good reason… he didn’t seem to have any reason. Which is weird. He always has something he wants to accomplish, even if its just a momentary impulse. But what is he even doing here?

Maybe I’m crazy, but is Trump acting really bizarre? Like he normally has a good read on voters, even if what he says is nonsense. He nailed it in 2024; he knew exactly what to say and to avoid mention of all these wild new shenanigans he’s suddenly into. What is this strategy?

@mattyglesias You could go back all the way to the Sicilian Expedition in the Peloponnesian War for quagmires.

@cszabla I think it gets to the fact that Trump is at heart a bully. When he senses weakness his instinct is to dominate. When he senses that they are too strong and tough to dominate, he will accommodate. Not that different to the schoolyard really.

this continues to be correct and one way to see iran is just a massive miscalculation of where it belonged in the chart of weak enough to be punched successfully vs not not understanding it is also the fatal error of toadying european elites

@graham_euan Nah, I think it a naval manifestation of Australia’ love of big things 😂 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_thing…

HMAS Pickelhaube

@ThatchEffendi Gerontocracy. They are all boomers who insist on meeting face to face.

how does this keep happening

@phl43 I think that at the bottom of Trump’s decision to attack is that he is a bully and that he sensed weakness in the Iranian regime. Whether or not he misjudged is for the history books to say.

Of course, if by that we mean that Netanyahu somehow deprived Trump of his free will, it's not true that Israel made the US go to war against Iran. At the end of the day, Trump made the decision and he could have made another one, but it's obviously true that the "special relationship" with Israel made that outcome much more likely and more generally gives Israel a lot of influence over US foreign policy in the Middle East. First, while Rubio is obviously trying to diminish the administration's responsibility here, his argument is not absurd. It's true that, had Israel attacked alone, there was a risk that Iran would attack US soldiers in retaliation and any US president would almost certainly have deemed the risk of allowing Iran to kill US soldiers worse than the risk of being blamed for starting another Middle Eastern war, especially against a country that has been on Washington's shit list for decades. You could argue that, if the US had stayed out of the war, the Iranians would not have taken the risk of attacking US soldiers, but that's hardly obvious. The Iranians would have known that, even if the US initially stayed out, they would probably join later and that would have given them a strong incentive to strike first. Now, you could also reply that, if Trump had really wanted to prevent the war, he could have stopped the Israelis from attacking in the first place and avoided the dilemma. Many people would say that he couldn't have, indeed that's what Rubio implied, but I think that's bullshit. Israel is almost entirely dependent on the US for munitions, spare parts, etc. and couldn't fight a prolonged war with Iran without US support, so in theory if Trump could have credibly promised to withhold such support Israel would have been forced to listen. But the operative word here is "credibly" and the problem is that, precisely because of the "special relationship" between the US and Israel, Trump could not credibly promise to stay out of the war. Indeed, although Israel's popularity in the US has gone down a lot, it's still more popular than Iran by a wide margin. Perhaps more importantly, Israel has a massive lobby in the US, which would have immediately launched a massive campaign and put Trump under intense pressure to help Israel. It's the same thing with the negotiations. I personally became convinced that Trump would launch some kind of military intervention after he warned Iran that if the authorities killed protesters he would punish them. It was obvious to me that after that he would feel compelled to do something, lest he be compared to Obama for not enforcing his own red lines. But I think in theory he could still have avoided it by making a deal with Iran to prevent them from developing nuclear weapons. The reason why I was almost certain that it wouldn't happen is that any deal he made with Iran didn't just have to satisfy Washington's criteria, but also Israel's and I didn't think Iran could live with the kind of capitulation that Israel would have demanded. Again, you could object that Trump didn't have to let Israel dictate what a deal could be, which is true strictly speaking, but then we just go back to the same problem that I was just talking about, because in practice Trump would have been under intense pressure domestically to only strike a deal Israel could live with. So while it's true that Trump could strictly speaking have made a different decision, it's also true that Israel made that much more difficult in practice. The problem is that Americans have developed such a pathological relationship with Israel that, for structural reasons, the Israelis have the ability to shape US foreign policy in the Middle East to an insane degree. I'm not saying there is an easy solution to this problem or that it can even be solved in a way that is consistent with liberal principles. In many ways this situation is the natural outcome of the distribution of opinions and influence in American society and your political institution. At the end of the day, the main reason why such a relationship exists between the US and Israel is because American Jews care a lot about Israel and are very influential, whereas nobody else in the US cares much about the Middle East. Given American political institutions, this makes the kind of dysfunctional outcome I was describing unsurprising, but at the same time pro-Israel Jews are just using their constitutional right to defend their views, even if they often do so in ways I find highly distasteful. So what are you going to do? I think ultimately it will only change with generational replacement, because the younger generations are much less pro-Israel (even among Jews), but that's a very slow process and I think pro-Palestine activists kind of delude themselves about how fast it will be.

@CoKeynesian Which then also created considerable problems for the Australian parliament in 2017-18 (where the constitution explicitly makes foreign citizens ineligible to run) where many overseas citizens by descent found out they were ineligible en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017%E2%8…

@StatisticUrban Canada doesn't have a rabid hyperventilating Murdoch led media pack.

An exercise: explain why you think Starmer failed while Carney is succeeding, despite being superficially very similar on paper.

@AlexLuck9 And their staffers seem to have spent more time online bagging out reuse of rockets and trolling about it than anything actually useful.

European space launch development complacency continues to pay incredible dividents.

@StevePHolland I’d say that at least some of his significant backers are landlords in CBDs who have a lot to lose if WFH becomes entrenched.

Arguably, this opinion is what lost Peter Dutton the election in Australia. Why do conservative politicians feel the need to express an opinion on how other people work? That's a private matter between an employee and their employer.

@stooeyjay93 @thejacqinthebox Curling is basically lawn bowls on ice. Principles and tactics are basically the same. People have joked that lawn bowls should introduce leaf blowers instead of sweepers😂

@thejacqinthebox oh so curling is Canadian equivalent of Australian lawn bowls gotcha

“curling seems like it would be better to play drunk” im about to blow your mind with what im about to tell you