I’m a pilot’s son so I don’t like it when pilots are stabbed personally and I would especially hate that happening on my flight

What control does he have over what someone else says about him? In your book, should he have just given up and let the guy who stabbed him crash wherever and kill the whole flight?

They were saying that they need like $100 billion in investments to get Venezuela back up just to its own peak oil production (which is still small compared to other producers) and only like single digit percentages of that have been pledged over the next five years. Also Venezuela’s oil is a poor quality acidic sludge which can only be refined with specialized equipment like at America’s Gulf Coast refineries and it must be diluted with expensive imported fluids prior to shipping to be usable so exporting it is uneconomical when oil prices go down.

Why would Israel want to start from scratch in literal desert in Sinai when they’ve already invested a ton in illegal settlements in West Bank economically integrated with them right now that they hold as more culturally and militarily valuable? That hundreds of thousands of Israelis are squatting on?

This is an unrealistic proposal that would make basically everyone unhappy. I’m not sure why I’m still engaging so I’ll stop now

I’m frustrated that you keep insisting you under Israeli ethnicity when you just tried to say every Jewish person East of Israel is ethnically Arab.

Care to quote me where I said this? I did not at any point say Mizrahi = Arab. Some Mizrahi hailed from communities that had been living among Arabs for over a thousand years and were speaking Judeo-Arabic variants while in such countries (ex. Iraqi Jews) but by no means all, nor does that necessarily mean that they consider themselves Arabs or that others likewise consider them as such.

I’m not sure why my use of the term ‘Mizrahi’ was such a point of contention for you. I don’t misunderstand the term. They use it as an umbrella category to refer to many Jews that descend from populations in what’s traditionally regarded as the Islamic world in part to differentiate them for different habits they have like in culture and voting and so on, and as shorthand it’s definitely snappier than saying Egyptian & Yemenite & Tunisian & Iranian & Iraqi & […] Jews. In the US similarly broad groups like white and Asian and so on are used and they are artificial constructs certainly (Asian in the UK for instance brings to mind completely different populations than when you say Asian in the US) but regardless are still used heavily and no one wants to do the alternative of listing out English- & Scottish- & Welsh- & Irish- & German- & Norwegian- & […]-Americans when they rather than saying like white people or European Americans or what have you despite the shortcomings inherent in such broad brush terms.

Religion and ethnicity are not, and have never been, the same thing.

No matter how much Israel tries to blur that line, it’s still a scientific line. Your religion doesn’t magically change your DNA.

Not sure where you think I was arguing that religion changes your DNA…

Anyway, if you want a source it’s easy enough to look up on the Wikipedia page you yourself provided to grab the population and do some division compared to the total population of Jews in Israel or else to look here.

OK so to repeat myself in different terms that don’t upset you half of Israel’s Jewish population descends by Jews from areas that are not European like countries in North Africa, the Middle East, Ethiopia, India and so on. That particular subset whatever you choose to call them do not have a European background so going to Europe would not be moving “back” for them, so it would be weird to expect it of them similarly to how it would be weird to expect the Japanese of Hawaii to “go back to England.”

Well, for one… Israel? There would still be a segment of Israeli society that want to control the West Bank at all costs that could take control of the government at some point, and now Egypt has a weakened strategic position in Sinai.

There’s a reason Israel was willing to give away Sinai for peace with Egypt but insisted on occupying West Bank when they’re sought peace with Jordan. They consider West Bank of far greater importance than desert land that you yourself said is much less productive. And do you think there would be the tiniest bit of a problem if there is a Palestinian rebellion in Egypt that has Egypt intentionally call on Israel to occupy the Palestinians? How would they ever regain Palestinian trust after that? And once Israel intervenes in such a way do you really think they would leave?

They may want a state of the own but as the article we are discussing suggests, that is unlikely. The choice would be to live under Egypt possibly as a state within Egypt or be displaced or dead.

The article says that two state is unpopular on both sides. That does not mean that Palestinians have given up and want to be annexed to random other countries. The idea of Palestinian backing single state supporters is that if enough pressure of some kind is put on Israel (which could be diplomacy and economic means or military and other depending on who you talk to), the apartheid treatment of Palestinians under occupation will be put to an end and they can exercise political power in conjunction with Israeli Arabs and currently displaced Palestinian refugees which would put Palestinians in the majority. There are groups in both Israel and Palestine that support a single state and it can be the good kind of single state where everyone gets along with equal rights or the bad kind of single state where everyone on the wrong side gets kicked out or worse or on some sort of spectrum between those depending on who you talk to. Obviously there are big problems with achieving a single state desirable to Palestinians because Israel does not want occupied Palestinians to have political rights nor for Palestinian refugees to have right of return so that Israel may be maintained as a Jewish state which is a giant obstacle. The two state solution was once considered the most viable path that but it’s been undermined for many many years.

It’s an umbrella term created because they share certain similarities in culture (or at least cultural differences that stand out from the Ashkenazi groups) and it’s handier than listing out Yemenite Jews & Iraqi Jews & Morroccan Jews & so forth for each individual country. The group term being new does not mean that the components groups under the umbrella term sprouted forth from the aether when the term was coined. I am not using te term to say that they exclusively come from the Middle East but rather to say that many do not come from Europe.

Beta Israel is not considered to be Mizrahi, Ethiopia is not North Africa but East Africa and they have some additional differences such as looking Black.

Just as it’s not good to have Irish Americans come back and mass displace the Irish to ‘reclaim’ Ireland it would also not be good to mass deport the Chinese Americans and Puerto Ricans from NYC to England out of some idea of sending them back to their country, particularly when they’re not actually from there. Forced displacement of people is generally something I frown upon and it’s especially ridiculous to expect it of people who don’t actually have a tie to their imagined ancestral land.

This is just after they formed an expanded rebel alliance that includes the Fano militia which used to be with the government against TDF and OLA, which was surprising because they warcrimed each other quite a lot.

Also many of Ethiopia’s neighbors hate them now for drone strikes & training rebels (Sudan), trying to recognize separatists for a port (Somalia) and former ally in the Tigray War Eritrea was cut out of the peace and has had Ethiopia saber rattling about annexing parts of it for a port. Though Kenya and South Sudan relations are still good and they have partners like UAE and the like.

Ethiopia did not acquit itself well in the last war and got kind of carried by some of the same partners now aligned against it, but Ethiopia does have an edge in drones which ex. allowed them to chase Fano out of Debre Tabor a while back. Unclear how this will turn out aside from that full scale war would be very bloody. Some calculated hundreds of thousands of excess deaths from the last war.

There are a significant number of Jews with an Ashkenazi background which generally is associated with Europe (though an individual person’s family may have been in like the US or far east of Russia or something) but the number with Mizrahi background from the Arab world is approaching almost half of Israel’s Jewish population plus there’s others like Beta Israel (from Ethiopia) and the like. Some (though definitely not most) of the Mizrahi lived in Palestine alongside the Palestinians all along. Not at all saying that gives them the right to take Palestinian land, it doesn’t, but Europe would be an alien place to many.

Connection by ports, one being glued onto the end of a paper thin corridor, is rather tenuous and that chickenneck is virtually impossible to defend. Egypt once had much easier connections over the sea that at least weren’t constrained by a tiny corridor to Syria as a part of the UAR but that fell to disaster when a coup was launched in Syria that rapidly assumed control of that area and resulted in Syria exiting the UAR.

Israel for its part is unlikely to go along either. It considers West Bank as some of the most important and most desirable land to annex for many reasons; long long ago it was the core territory of both the southern Kingdom of Judah and the northern Kingdom of Israel so they consider it as ancestral land, it is close to built up areas of present day Israel and already has many illegal settlements which in total contain well over half a million people so it already has strong economic weight to it. They are obsessed with strategic buffers and this idea would literally cut their state in half, plus leave some of their most populated areas right on the border with a state that would be very difficult for Egypt to exert any control over i.e. one likely to be easily overrun by Palestinian groups hostile to Israel yet able to use the area being technically Egyptian territory as a shield.

Neither the PLO nor Hamas nor other Palestinian groups of significance seem to be making any overtures to being annexed by anyone else, unless you have found some evidence otherwise? By all accounts I’ve seen they want a state of their own. And the states neighboring Israel have not taken new Palestinian refugees for decades specifically because of the concern that Israel would displace the Palestinian population to any country that allows it and not allow them back.

Gaza isn’t nearly big enough for an equivalent sized strip of land to be able to connect West Bank to the Red Sea, at least not without bisecting Israel which they would have no interest in… so it all remains inaccessible.

Even back at the height of Arab nationalism and when Egypt actually administered Gaza it did not lay claim to Gaza and claimed to govern it on behalf of the Palestinian people until they had a state of their own, and refused to take Gaza even when offered as a part of the peace treaty with Israel. So it seems unlikely that Egyptian politicians would suddenly want to be in charge of Palestine now.

Jordan meanwhile had annexed the West Bank and laid claim to it for two decades even after Israel occupied West Bank but that was deeply unpopular with Palestinian people and led to unrest, assassination of the king and civil war in Black September, even despite the ongoing Israeli occupation of West Bank. That doesn’t indicate that Palestinians would be happy to suddenly be considered Egyptian rather than having a state of their own.

Why would Egypt want this?

They would lose out on a ton of land in Sinai in exchange for less land in West Bank that they could only access with the blessing of other states, and which is populated with people who do not want to be Egyptian. Egypt would have no real way to exert control. The Egyptian people would get quite upset at Egyptians being displaced for Israel to be made bigger.

I don’t think even Israel would want this for various reasons either.

Half of the $40 billion was vaporware that Trump tried to get the private sector to chip in for with very limited success. He finds it very easy to say biyyuns and biyyuns while coming up with headlines that have other people break out the checkbook, but those other people are not always too eager to follow up and put their money at risk on whatever the new thing is. See also Venezuela where Trump is saying that the private sector will be investing $100 billion in the oil industry but only like single digit percentages of that has actually been pledged… and of that, spread over the next five years.

The other half was the $20 billion currency swap line of which Argentina only actually drew on $2.5 billion to deal with the liquidity crisis.

That money was not for free though, they had to actually take out loans to pay it back with interest after they got through the crunch and their peso was no longer being dumped as much.

Which is not to say that Milei is not corrupt, ex. him directly shilling a memecoin to the people while president. He, or at least people in his orbit, certainly profited from the pump and dump but the regular people who bought on late got rugpulled.

In theory yes, practically speaking it is not necessarily as clear cut as one attack means everyone jumps in. Putin loves that gray zone of using domestic agents in other countries or deniable situations like wayward drones and also low stakes. Keeping the stakes low in such incursions keeps the wider NATO alliance from jumping in like they would for a clear cut all out invasion, but still allows for antagonizing countries and making NATO look weak because they can gradually push the envelope so long as they managed to stay on this side of the moving line. For example, they bombed an apartment complex with a drone in Romania recently and went teehee we didn’t mean that. The assembled NATO countries agreed with them because it’s not considered worth declaring war on Russia over a partially damaged apartment complex, particularly since no one actually died. Similarly a Russian missile blasted a field in Poland but while technically an attack on Polish soil people will not respect going to war over a disruption of just literal Polish soil. If Russia pushes just slightly and slightly harder over time then at any particular step it can seem pretty unreasonable to upend the table and go to war with a nuclear power over something that is just a twinge worse than what you accepted a month ago. That can sow dissension in the alliance on how to respond. And since Lithuania is quite weak on its own, it’s very reassuring to Lithuania to have states with more oomph invested in their defense.

All the ongoing stuff above and the intelligenece recieved are in the backdrop of the ongoing war with Ukraine anyway so we know that that whole endeavor is evidently still not enough for Putin to give up on gray zone shenanigans. It seems unlikely that one tank brigade would make the difference when each side has somewhere around a million people slugging it out right now.

This is serving a different purpose than that. The idea of this is that IF Russia were to do something in Lithuania, the presence of German soldiers means that the German public is more invested. “Our people were hurt” is generally more resonant than “a small country way east of us was attacked”. Their very presence limits Russia’s options for what they can do in Lithuania without provoking a harsher and more united German response. There is apparently intelligence that an attack on Lithuania is likely so it’s in the EU’s interests to deter such a strike before it even happens. As Lithuania is an EU member its safety as an EU member likely ranks above Ukraine which is not one in EU priorities. Besides which, tanks are not being used as heavily as earlier due to the hostile drone environment on the front lines anyway.

edit: bad choice of words to say “our men” rather than “our people” lol

Serious question, if the boys that fought fascism knew the future is where their grandchildren wouldn’t be able to afford a house, would stop having children on masse, and wouldn’t be able to get hired. Do you think they’d still have fought? It made their sacrifice worth it?

That generation themselves took charge of the new councils that in many cases would then veto further housing development to put upward pressure on the value of the homes they had secured, starting to pull up the ladder after many new homes had been freshly built for them following the destruction of the war. Their direct children who inherited the housing are still profiting quite handsomely with similar incentives, although it’s terrible for the great grandchildren. So the bad part is basically working as they themselves intervened to achieve, and regardless of that now reducing homeownership rates those rates still remain higher than those of when that generation was growing up and the homes are much nicer in quality than the slums of the time which were destroyed.

People stopped having children en masse because new technology allowed for family planning and for people to do what seemed important to them in life rather than suddenly winding up as parents and being forced to lock in.

The unemployment rate of 4.9% is much lower than what that war-winning generation had experienced in the interwar period.

None of this situation seems like it would be helped by becoming the slaves of a self-proclaimed master race who themselves were under the unrestrained despotism of a rabid band of bloodthirsty lunatics.

I think the immediate aftermath of an unsignaled lane change is the worst time for the car to automatically cutting from presumably highway speeds of like 65-70 mph (105-113 kph) [assuming they weren’t speeding…] down to 31 mph (50 kph) if there are people driving in the new lane. Not only did someone pull out in front of you but you also have to immediately slam on the brakes to have a chance of not hitting it

Interestingly I’ve seen some claims that it is possible Saudi Arabia failed to aid Tariq Saleh’s National Resistance Forces not from incompetence but rather due to not wanting to lift a finger for a proxy that had a lot of lingering UAE influence. The NRF was a lot more independent minded than the Saudi backed militias and did awkward things like cozying up to the UAE-backed STC (South Yemen separatists) after the STC basically rolled the recognized government of Yemen’s forces in much of former South Yemen… which would have been great for the NRF if things stayed that way but by like a month later the Saudis had booted out the UAE and dissolved the STC entirely.

Compare these unfortunately blurry maps from before and after the offensive, the NRF is the one in blue in the before picture.

Doesn’t seem like a great time for backstabbing and scheming but having a fragmented opposition has been a tremendous headache to the Saudis throughtout this war so I guess if it’s annoying enough… but Ansar Allah has like three quarters of Yemen’s population so they’re hefty (almost up there with the population of Saudi Arabia)

Yeah if there was a major screw-up fitness for duty was one of the first things they did along with taking statements of people who were there