You’re mostly right about the benefits of college, but this idea of a transition into functional adulthood is outdated. It reflects a bygone era of the job market.
After graduating college and being unable to find a job, I am much less functional and significantly less adult.
But what about the SAVE act?
The presidents primary domestic legislature is set to rewrite the rules of voting, if passed.
The way the law is currently written, your Real ID will not be sufficient to vote. You will need a passport to confirm your ID, which is something 50% of Americans do not have.
Think about all the oil you use as a regular person- for heating, transportation, fertilizer for your foods, etc.
Now say the price goes up by 20%. Would you, in response, consume 20% less? Would you heat your home 20% less and eat 20% less and go to work 20% less? Of course not.
The estimated 20% reduction in worldwide crude production means, somehow, somewhere, as a world we have to use 20% less oil. Then the question is, how high does the price have to rise to force people to consume 20% less?
How expensive will it have to get to force people to heat 20% less and eat 20% less and drive 20% less? I don’t know, but it’s going to get worse, because we aren’t there yet.
Israel does use the same argumentation, the “human shields” narrative was used as justification to bomb Gaza.
The difference is that Israel bombed pretty much every building in Gaza, whereas the IRGC reportedly only struck select hotels where US or Israeli troops were being moved off base.
That is a significant difference, because one is a war crime, and the other is a legitimate target under the rules of war.
Moving troops from military bases into hotels means that those hotels are no longer civilian infrastructure.
Worse than Biden’s “We finally beat Medicare”?
Biden’s debate performance was so bad that it got Trump elected.
I would be a confident criminal too, if the most powerful army in the world pledged to invade as a response to any criminal charges against me.
Hague Invasion Act - Wikipedia
I’m guessing this is a reference to unexploded ordnance in Cambodia, which has killed 20,000 and caused 45,000 amputations since the war ended in 1979.
That war ended 50 years ago, and there is still 700 square miles of land contaminated by unexploded bombs.
At least one child will lose their hand to a US bomb this month in Cambodia, you can bet on it. And next month too.
What makes you question the story?
Certainly the Trump administration had been lying about it losses, and they are releasing many face-saving coverup stories. It would be foolish to give them the benefit of the doubt.
But the Kuwaiti friendly fire incident actually has lots of evidence to back it up. You can watch video of the “dogfight”- a Kuwaiti jet is clearly attacking US jet at very close range. The US jet appears to be surprised, as they fail to deploy most counter-measures.
Preemptive war and regime change is still a terrible option. If you actually want to solve the problem you have to get to the core of the problem, and decapitating leadership has a consistent history of making things worse.
Take NK for example, how did it get to where it is now? In the Korean War, America bombed everything. We bombed hospitals, schools, water treatment, power, factories, homes. Douglas MacArthur complained that there was nothing left to bomb. Then we set up a brutal sanctions regime, effectively cutting NK off from the rest of the world for many decades.
The Kim dictatorship tried everything they could think of to lift the strangling sanctions. Diplomacy has made some gains with Russia and China, but very little with the West. The Kim regime has been taught that the only way to receive Western goods is through threats, missile tests, and nuclear capabilities.
If we would decapitate the Kim dictatorship and keep the sanctions regime in place, then another brutal dictatorship would just take their place. I’m certainly not a fan of the Kim dictatorship, but regime change war is not a solution, it would just make everything worse.
I find it interesting you mention Saudi Arabia. They are a client state of America, why would we want to decapitate them? There is a mutually beneficial relationship- we get oil and regional influence, they get military toys and legitimacy. This mutual benefit is so strong that we let them get away with 9/11.
Mentioning ISIS is curious too. ISIS is not a state, so the UN was able to vote to attack them. The UN (along with Iranian forces) did decapitate their leadership, multiple times.
Here I don’t agree - I think the 1988 Hamas charter is utterly indefensible.
If the only thing you know about Hamas’ history is one line from one charter, then you haven’t read enough to form a comprehensive opinion on the subject, and I would encourage you to read more.
Blaming ‘older Gazans’ for the way they voted is utterly ridiculous. You do know that Gaza has been an open air concentration camp since at least 2012, right? Their vote has little effect on matters. Gaza would still be a concentration camp if Fatah had won instead of Hamas.
And as for the 2006 election that you blame ‘older Gazans’ for, did you know that election was orchestrated by George W Bush and his “democracy promotion in the middle east”? Are you aware that he was warned Fatah would lose to Hamas? Israel committed many horrific war crimes as they withdrew from Gaza in 2006, so Gazan voters were feeling especially radical at the time. Bush needed a victory so he pushed for early elections. I think Bush has more blame than ‘older Gazan voters’ for the outcome of this election.
Give 1 child a vaccine.
Shoot 1 child in the head.
Under your logic, these two are equal, and cancel each other out.
US imperialism is a disease, please get well soon.
what if not stopping the IRGC ends up causing orders-of-magnitude more suffering and deaths?
This is the logic of preemptive war, and it is blatantly illegal under the UN charter. This type of logic is very dangerous because it can justify any war without evidence.
Would Hamas not be vastly worse than Israel if they had the same military power as Israel? ISIS?
How could they possibly be worse than Israel, who is invading it’s neighbors, starting wars for territory, doing ethnic cleansing, and threatening to drop nukes?
I agree that I do not want to see a Hamas government, and an ISIS government would be horrific, but history shows these type of groups form as a direct result of imperial violence.
Israel funded Hamas and killed it’s more moderate competitors. Hamas’ early leaders like Ahmed Yassin and Abdel Aziz al-Rantisi were scholars and academics, serious people interested in peace. Israel killed them and their families, and their successors, over and over until you end up with a violent, uneducated leader like Yahya Sinwar.
The US acted similarly when we meddled in the Syrian civil war, giving weapons and money to ISIS.
Shouldn’t intent count to prevent access to biological and nuclear weapons?
I don’t know how this would work at all. How do you measure intent? Does the US have good intent with its nuclear arsenal? Russia? Pakistan?
I think your question has 2 logical conclusions:
Why does desire matter?
I have a desire to kill billionaires. Does that matter? Should I be tried for murder? No, because I’m not actually going to kill anyone.
Putting violent desire on the same moral plane as actual murder victims is a silly thing to do.
Do you think that if the socioeconomic positions were reversed, the current Iranian regime would have been any better than the US, or Israel?
In this hypothetical the details really matter, but in general I think no, the current Iranian regime would not be better.
I think a better hypothetical would be that, if the US never did a coup in Iran and overthrow their democratically elected government, and the socioeconomic positions were reversed, would Iran be better then? I think yes.
I don’t think it’s nitpicking at all. There is a serious difference between thousands of dead and millions of dead.
Anyone who ignores that reality is downplaying the evil that the US has wrought.
I’m not forgetting that at all. I have critical support for Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Huthis in their struggle for freedom and territorial integrity against genocidal Israel.
It is Israel’s invasions and apartheid that causes unrest in the whole region.
America has funded more terror groups in the region than Iran has.
And in terms of numbers of dead, the number of people killed by Iran’s proxies is just another rounding error.
Obviously they’re both evil, but calling them “equal” feels like hegemonic propaganda. What makes them equal?
Over the years, Iran has murdered 10s of thousands of people. Over the decades, a good estimate is in the hundreds of thousands of people murdered.
For the American and Israeli death tolls, you’re going to have to add two zeroes to those numbers.
The Iranian murders are a rounding error when compared to the death America has been exporting for decades.
Unfortunately the hard data on UHC’s denial rate is not public information. The company wouldn’t want all the bad publicity that would come with transparency.
There would be other signs, though. For example, UHC investors suing to increase the denial rate.
The lawsuit argues that the company’s changing corporate practices in the wake of Thompsons murder have been too consumer-friendly, and the investors’ profits are suffering as a result.
This unequal exchange rate logic has been firmly established for decades.
“On October 18, 2011, captured IDF tank gunner Gilad Shalit, captured by the Palestinian militant organization Hamas in 2006, was released in exchange for 1027 Palestinian prisoners held in Israel.”
List of Arab–Israeli prisoner exchanges -Wikipedia
“Palestinian prisoners” have become a form of currency for the Israeli state. Whenever they start to run low, they just go to the West Bank and get more.
Are you sure you aren’t underestimating the huge volume of demand that needs to be destroyed? I believe something like 20%-25% of demand needs to be destroyed, in both the crude and LNG markets.
The last time demand was 20% lower than baseline was during the two worst months of Covid, when the majority of people were staying inside their home
So the question is: how high does the price of oil have to get in order to force people to consume like they did under the worst of Covid?
I’m no economist, but my gut feeling says it will be sustained significantly higher than $160/barrel.
Your scenario suggests that the friend ‘just started’ to act out, but this breaks the analogy because the US has been doing war crimes for decades.
This isn’t a friend that just started acting out, it’s a friend that has a history of talking behind your back, stealing your stuff, crashing your car, sleeping with your SO, killing your pet, and offering you a cash bribe in return.
Why is this person still your friend? Why didn’t people reach their limit when the friend killed a million innocent Iraqis?