it’s fucking raining. no joke.
@_dm it’d be nice if that were immunity enough. but people are very generous with tendentious accusations unfortunately.
@Alon me too, as a prior, but born billionaires are at least better than those who flatter themselves self-made!
@eARCwelder I agree, but as I say I was predisposed to, so I need to take myself with a few grains of salt.
@Alon i know next to nothing about Pritzker, so it all seems fine! my how we love a fresh face!
@eARCwelder i’m predisposed not to be enthusiastic for Shapiro, for his general ostentatious centrism and his less measured support of Israel / opposition to protests. all of that strikes me as within the bounds of ordinary political tussle, however. 1/
@eARCwelder but some of the allegations coming from his time as AG strike me as hard to deal with. on the one hand they smell like the sleaziest sort of oppo, on the other an almost perfect conspiracy/distraction unless they can be definitively debunked very quickly and certainly. /fin
kind of a wild possibility, suppose for whatever reason the Harris campaign decides in its vetting there’s some matter of concern with Shapiro, but they fear accusations of antisemitism if they overlook him, so they go with Pritzker.
The sound of this tropical storm is kind of incredible.
@GreenFire yes. the andrew johnson model did perhaps leave something to be desired.
sometimes VPs do have an impact on governance. that, it seems to me, is a more pressing concern than (apparently very modest) electoral impacts.
even the smallest fish is not so small, if the pond is small enough.
@LesterB99 It is quite possible. Very lucky, but possible.
@LesterB99 Startup nation and all of that, but I think on the question of the Palestinians they’ve been tremendously stupid and their nation now faces existential risk that could easily have been avoided.
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@LesterB99 I think the goal, from an outside perspective, is for the response to be something like the last salvo. But it's far from foreordained. Israel has been historically stupid, but it ought to have seen that the "Abraham Accords" strategy was working to marginalize the Palestinian problem, and shld have worked to restore the status quo ante, rather than rendering itself a global pariah. In the name of "deterrence" (but really something more emotional), nation states often do dumb things.
@LesterB99 you don't think Iran will respond? i'm quite sure there will be something. Iran hasn't escalated, already and incautiously, because it (correctly!) has confidence that Israel (with or without the US) would exact a terrible cost on Iran's people and proxies, regardless of the ultimate outcome. mutually catastrophic wars are best avoided, regardless of your (always questionable) take on whether you would or wouldn't eventually "win" them.
@LesterB99 Iran's proxies can do a lot of damage to Tel Aviv. Iran itself has a tremendous stock of missiles capable of reaching Israel, individually perhaps vulnerable to air defenses, but at quantities large enough to exhaust those and exact a huge economic cost (Western missile defenses cost much more than the Iranian missiles they would down.) Iran might be able to put together a nuke within weeks or months. I think your view is overly sanguine.
perhaps it is too generous of me, but i take the fact that the Middle East has not already erupted into a broad war as a success of the Biden foreign policy crew. Iran will undoubtedly respond, but the delay suggests conversations about how to titrate a response between an Iranian government’s need to demonstrate deterrence and save face, internationally and domestically, and a broader imperative to prevent a war that would result in a tremendous amount of mutual destruction and human pain.
@BenRossTransit @Alon pretty much everything on the birdsite is trolling. most of the voices on every side.