Why should Israel allow themselves to be attacked by Syria and Lebanon? Did you miss what Lebanon did to people in northern Israel? Seems like you think Jews should just sacrifice themselves for some reason.
Hezbollah declared war on Israel, unprovoked, on October 8th through to late 2024, by launching constant missile attacks on civilian areas, notwithstanding their violation of UNSC Resolution 1701. Israel is justified under international law to invade South Lebanon and completely decimate Hezbollah unless it offers an unconditional surrender.
I am more sympathetic to your views regarding Syria, however. That is a less justifiable war with nebulous preventive/preemptive motivations, which is somewhat coherent on a pure self-interested security basis but is likely validly unjust under different frames of reference (morality, modern global norms and taboos, and international law).
The Netherlands and the United Kingdom (specifically, the Isles of Scilly) were at war from 1651 until 1986, with war declared by The Netherlands. In practice it only lasted for a few months during 1651, was bloodless, and they simply forgot about the formalities. A peace treaty was only signed after a historian asked the government whether they were still at war, and they discovered that they never got around to it so technically they still were!
Does that mean the United Kingdom would not be the aggressor if they were to bomb The Netherlands in 1985?
I'm in the same boat as you. Even if there's slight issues with Firefox, being able to synchronize my profile with my phone using the Firefox app outweighs all of that. AFAIK, Chrome doesn't have that.
Maybe not exactly what you're looking for, but I highly recommend "The Real North Korea" by Andrei Lankov. It really helped to demystify the country for me.
I don't think that people realize that this is bigger than just the tariffs now. Even if Trump completely backs down, he's shown himself to be too unstable to do business with. I don't think that I'm exaggerating when I say that American hegemony is in terminal decline because of this. Maybe forcibly removing Trump (which will never happen) can help slow the decline, but the international community is still going to divest from America.
Yeah. Trump 1.0 had a lot of the same mindless flailing but I think a lot of folks were prepared to write it off as an aberration. For him to be reelected after everything (and I mean everything) shows the world that, no, it really is true that a considerable segment of the American populace will gleefully burn it all down as long as they can totally own the libs along the way.
Quite so. JD Vance has shown himself to be at least as xenophobic as Trump, and while one might say it's the job of the VP to help sell the President's ideas it's very obvious that these two individuals are just the incumbent leaders of a much larger American political movement oriented around international isolation and zero-sum transactionalism. The gradual erosion of American supremacy as a safe default assumption in almost every field has led to an intellectual retreat into a geographic fortress mentality which helps to explain the verbal and economic aggression toward Canada and Mexico. It's like a Civ/HOI player cashing in all diplomatic and economic chips in favor of full military mobilization.
The whole Pax Americana/Invisible Empire concept is dead now. Competitive great powers feel liberated from it and erstwhile allies are just never going to believe it again.
RIP. I think history will find Pope Francis to be a man who was a fairly average pope that constantly got taken out of context. Nothing he did was really far out of line with Catholic doctrine, but he was often portrayed as being more liberal than he really was.
That's really much more of a comment about who controls media narratives these days and how to get your message out undiluted directly to the intended audience, and not anything specific to Pope Francis.
Surprised noone here has mentioned yet that Pope Francis was only the second pope ever with a social-media strategy (Pope Benedict was the first, in 2012 [0][1], and didn't get as much traction as Pope Francis).
"The Most Followed World Leaders on Social Media 2022" [2] ranked Pope Francis 3rd in 2022 with 53m followers, which is/was still low compared to singers, sports stars, celebrities and tech figures. It would obviously be crass and reductive to try to estimate the Pope's impact this way (and not, say, country visits, appointments, encyclicals, other official statements, reaction/criticism by other religous/political figures, administrative and legal actions, measures of popularity by specific groups, by factions, by country, by politics or religion), but as traditional media channels become less relevant, the Vatican will presumably have to move with the times, as in many other ways.
Maybe the better question (as Dick Cheney would have put it) is which voices do/don't determine the media narrative on Pope Francis' papacy?
As to your take (that he was wasn't that far out of line with Catholic doctrine, but often portrayed as more liberal and
constantly taken out of context), that's the debate we're largely about to see happen.
Yeah, I can see that. Having a pope that's denounced by more conservative Catholics for truly believing in Catholic ethics shone a light on how far people were straying from the church. Really makes the pope look a bit like a Christ figure, when you think of it like that.
Doesn't help America as much as some people might think. The world has seen that Trump is erratic, and America imports too much from China to just ignore the 125% (!!!) tariff on the country.
Exactly. The damage has been done; the fact that economic policy could dramatically change day-by-day makes investing and planning very difficult. In addition, the tariffs on China are insane.
One of my biggest concerns is the value of the dollar. If foreigners are discouraged from doing business with America either due to tariffs or due to other matters, how does this affect the dollar, which is a fiat currency? The US dollar is currently the world's reserve currency, which is the result of the United States' emerging victorious from WWII while Britain, holder of the world's previous reserve currency (the pound), had to contend with rebuilding as well as dealing with the loss of its empire. Fiat currencies, by definition, are not backed by assets, but are instead backed by "faith"; not in the religious sense, but in the faith that people have in the government issuing the currency. How will the world keep the faith if the custodian of the dollar acts so recklessly?
For many years I've been concerned about deficit spending and easy-money policies from central banks. However, for the past few months I've become very concerned about Trump's policies that alienate our allies and partners. What Trump and the rest of MAGA simply do not understand is that the United States is part of an interconnected world. American strength is more than just weaponry; it's also in our economy and our reputation.
Unfortunately Trump and his cabinet have done extraordinary damage to our nation in less than three months. He's like an angry man with a baseball bat smashing up irreplaceable artifacts in a museum, and sadly there is no police to stop him, because he is the chief of police. He is by far the worst president America has ever had to endure, and if this continues our nation will end up at war, either with itself or with other nations.
>It's not that hard as a foreign student to not join political protests in favor of terrorist groups.
I obviously don't support terrorism, but people unambiguously have the right to protest in favour of terrorist groups. It's only when they provide material support to these groups that they actually commit a crime.
I really doubt that worked, given that North Korea does most of its trade with China and Russia, who don't participate in the sanctions. Besides, they already have nukes and the ability to launch them over the ocean. The military presence has grown as much as the regime needs it to with the sanctions, so there's no point to keeping them anymore.
