MFer trying to make us miss Rex Tillerson.

Alternative headline: Why It Will Definitely Happen

As someone intimately familiar with the Gulf - the “reality check” is just that it’s going to be more expensive to buy Saudi Arabia off for Israel. That’s literally it. As for Qatar, they can either tank relations with it or surrender to the fact that they can’t simply buy and subjugate eveyone to create a Potemkin peace where no Arabs can even speak to, speak in favor of or ise their influence to support other Arabs who are threatened by Israel.

Ukraine is by no means tiny. And the numbers you state are unrealistic to the point of absurdity. Things may in fact end well for Putin. He will be despised forever in the West, he’s old and cannot hold power much longer and Russia will spend at least the next decade distracted with a wide front. But there is a possibility he will consolidate territories taken, keep Ukraine out of NATO through pokiticking and pass on his power to a successor that would convince Western leaders to partially restore relations with Russia out of convenience.

As a true centrisy, for every “Six Days in Fallujah” I want one “Knights of the Al-Aqsa Mosque”. Fuck the ADL.

LMAO

Honestly I think it’s just a make-work job Trump gave them in his transactional sort of way. I think he dislikes Musk on a personal level (I have no evidence, I just presume that they have clashing egos and personalities.) I wouldn’t be surprised if they have a public falling out in which Musk gets mad that he isn’t important enough in the admin and badmouths Trump.

People have been saying that since the first weeks of the war. Don’t count on it. People expected Ukraine to flop over, and it didn’t. But now it seems they’ve greatly overestimated Ukraine. It is in a state of real disaster due to attrition. It was never equipped to fight a war of this scale - Russia has been, going back to the Soviet days.

What Russia lacked in intel, planning, competence or willpower at the start of the war, it has made up for with learning, superior manpower and ammunition and a rather ingenious domestic balance.

Yes, it’s a large economic distortion and the bill will come due, but the weight of evidence points away from the idea that Russia is nearing a 1917 collapse moment.

It’s still a basketcase nation (remember Prigozhin, lol) but so are most nations in the world.

Putin says a lot of things. I don’t know why we bother listening to most of them. He isn’t talking to us.

He is a conformist and a party creature through-and-through. He’s fine if you had no real objecgion to the way Biden governed except for his age. If you found Biden to be disastrous on a moral and political level, and you view the current Democratic Party as unfit or unwilling to chart a better course, then Buttigieg is liostick on a pig.

Bloodshed in the Middle East

Dang, I hate how various parties in the Middle East are killing aid workers. I hate all the many varied parties who keep doing that.

Pete can help unmesmerise us by promising not to run in the next primaries and endorsing a working class, rule-of-law candidate.

LOL earlier he said he disagreed wjth it but it was deserved. Two-faced old bastard.

I couldn’t think of a more absurd analogy. If Osama Bin Laden was Saudi Arabia’s head of state, and 9/11 was carried out by the Saudi military, and Saudi was party to the Rome Statute, then maybe you make such an analogy. As it actually stands, Netanyahu’s crimes were carried out by the state of Israel and that certainly has legal bearing inside the EU’s courts, with very recent precedent - sanctions on Russia citing the ICC arrest warrant for Putin. And Russia is not even party to the Rome Statute - the state of Israel is, and would be violating by not giving Netanyahu up.

The saddest thing is that if they do take action, it will be the lowest bar possible of accountability. They’ll for example ban products from illegal settlements and then let Israel redurect them anyways.

The name of the game is sanctions. Russian can sustain itself under “nuclear” sanctions. Sanction Israel, and the comfortable lifestyle of illegal Lebensraum settlers will start to look rather unattractive.

These warrants absolutely matter in terms of being a trumo card in several legal issues relating to EU-Israel relations.

This is superficial. Neither Russia nor China are particularly antagonistic to Israel or the Gulf states, even if they see the US as a foe in their own region. Russia for example is very careful about balancing its relations with the Gulf, Israel and Iran. China, views Iran as a potential foothold to the region, but China actually benefits from the US presence, it is far more energy import dependent than the US and has no desire to fuel instability by helping Iran pursue offensive goals.

The actual reason that Iran and the USA are enemies has to do with the US’ sectarian alignment with Sunni powers and Jewish nationalism, and more complicated reasons relating to politicial and religious struggles in the entire region that Iran happens to be one side of (i.e anti-monarchism, clericism, etc). And an institutional (and not necessarily rational) hatred of Iran in the US top brass due to its role in helping Iraqis and Lebanese fight American soldiers.

You cannot talk about this issue in terms of “Russia-China-Iran” balancing without mentioning the deeper and much more relevant issues that make US-Israel relationship exceptional on a globsl level: post-Holocaust philosemetism, anti-Islamism, anti-Arabism and (very underreported) Christian piety that actually motivates US-Israel policy. And the Israel lobby, which is so deeply engrained that Israel is treated more or less like the 51st state.

Politics goes far beyond amoral power calculus. You could have justified a ceasefire and even an embargo on Israeli arm transfers in accordance to amoral power calculus, but for Biden, Blinken and the rest, this is a moral question relating to a transcendent moral and religious cause, steeped in centuries of historical memory.

I have zero doubt that Joe Biden believes that by helping murderous racist Netanyahu slaughter and expel the people of Gaza, he has placed himself in the company of Cyrus the Great and other deliverers of Jews rather than Idi Amin and Radovan Karadzic. The GOP puts such things in explicitly religious terms and thus appear less rational or calculating. But it’s not even that well-hidden in the case of Biden and Blinken given what we know of their careers and lives.

There is really no reliable way to calculate the long-term costs for solar and wind because production is dependent on international supply chains and international energy prices. Even fossil fuels can prove pricier than expected over time due to supply shocks (like what Germany experienced in 2022-today).

Often the transmission lines and opportunity cost of so much land usage isn’t included in the LCOE of renewable. You also can’t run certain important industries on unreliable energy sources like solar and wind. Even being initially long to build and pricey, nuclear is the best investment to ensure uninterrupted, invariable baseload power for a very long time.

The US builds plants rather idiosyncratically, instead of using a standardized cookie-cutter model, and the sector is overregulated. In Japan and China, nuclear plants take only a few months longer than gas-powered plants to be up and running. Just north of the US, Ontario province in Canada successfully commissioned 20 CANDU plants in 22 years. They have been on schedule with all their refurbishments too.

And let’s not forget that renewable need to be renewed. They rely on smooth international production and supply chains. Good luck getting cheap solar panels if the South China Sea or Taiwan Strait become a free fire zone.

If we want to talk about the real problem with nuclear energy, the key issue is nuclear weapon proliferation, which is enormously underplayed even in serious scholarship on civilian nuclear programs, but it’s not a pressing concern when it comes to nations who have nuclear weapons or operate under a nuclear umbrella.

I never understood the obsession with big oil. Oil and gas firms have strong lobby power but it’s actually the economics of cheap fossil fuels and nations’ desires to out-compete each other in growth and industry that are driving the demand.