I worry that a major ground invasion is the least bad option available to the USA now, and the Trump administration is not capable of carrying it out.

But what about the people with strongly felt but incoherent world-views, like the ones who voted for Sanders before voting for Trump? They need memes too!

I think that most Trump voters support isolationism symbolically. They want a leader who prioritizes them rather than perceived others, but they don’t actually have a strong opinion about specific foreign policies per se. Attacking Iran does challenge that symbolism, but in the absence of direct effects on their own lives, their trust in Trump’s established “America first” reputation will go a long way.

Well if he’s not quite alive, then he can’t be assassinated.

But for the moment if there is one country in this war that is rudderless, it is not Iran.

Ouch.

Most vegans do. The general idea is to avoid exploiting animals, but the wasps are living out their natural life cycle. There are a small number of people who do worry about preventing wild insect suffering but they’re not concerned particularly with figs.

I’ve seen some interesting discussion of this linked to the idea of survive/thrive strategies. Is the world a dangerous place that calls for avoiding risks and protecting what you have, or is it full of opportunities and calls for exploring and being open to novelty? Neither inclination is fundamentally wrong. But I’m not sure how to reconcile that with modern “rightists” who want to burn down the system and aren’t conservative in the lowercase-C sense.

So the preexisting difference in price between CA and the rest of the USA was bigger than three wars with Iran… CA voters are a mystery to me.

Never mind about that, he changed his mind again.

After comments that seemed to suggest President Trump was looking towards an exit from his war with Iran, Trump said in a speech to Republican lawmakers in Florida that “we have won in many ways, but not enough. We go forward more determined than ever to achieve ultimate victory that will end this long-running danger once and for all.”

The enemy cannot anticipate your actions if you have no plan! No doubt Sun Tzu would have said something like that if he were American.

We’re going to end up in a situation where whatever is necessary to train AI is permitted, and the main question is whether that will be through (re)interpretation of existing law or the passage of a new law.

Well, the actual NYT article has the headline

U.S. Tomahawk Hit Naval Base Beside Iranian School, Video Shows

The school appears to be part of the same compound as the naval base. Presumably someone or something thought it was part of that base.

I admit that the articles I’ve read are not entirely clear about the order in which things happened, but my understanding is that the Israelis were trying to sneak in and dig up the grave without being noticed, they were noticed and attacked, and they called in air support. They were clearly prepared to fight, but their mission would not have involved any fighting had it gone according to plan.

who didn’t have anything to do with it

Those people attacked them. The interesting thing is how outmatched the attackers were despite outnumbering a group that wasn’t there with the intent of fighting.

If you don’t want legal or medical advice from an AI, you can already simply not ask the AI for legal or medical advice. But I don’t want your paternalistic restrictions on what I may ask.

The content of the article does not match the title. It doesn’t actually talk specifically about the tech industry or claim that it is in particular difficulty.

The new position is made up and has no authority, so I think “fired” is not totally wrong.

It does no good to fight if you have no realistic way to win. They didn’t have the resources to challenge Israel before the war with Iran started and now they’re in an even worse position. They have two roles - as an irregular branch of Iran’s military and as a power within Lebanon, and they’ve chosen to prioritize the former and fight a losing battle at the expense of the latter (and at the expense of Lebanese people with no particular sympathy for Iran who don’t want to be involved in this).

It would have been wiser for Hezbollah to sit this one out.

Justice League (the cartoon series). A must-watch for any superhero fan.

https://polymarket.com/event/iran-leader-end-of-2026

Currently they’re giving him a 43% chance of still being the leader of Iran by the end of the year. So I suppose his chance of surviving at all is a little higher than that…

Germany gave up anti-US ideology after being bombed to rubble, and Japan gave up anti-US ideology shortly after being nuked. The Middle East is different culturally, but what you’re proposing is clearly not a human universal.

Consider Syria. Ahmed al-Sharaa was a jihadist but then decided that he liked being alive and in power more than he hated the US and Israel.