If your country has a plan to go to war with every other country in the world and a warmonger gets elected then one of those plans will be implemented regardless of whether its justified. See: Iraq, Iran

The next fascist that gets elected will probably start a war with China regardless of the Taiwan situation.

The Red Cross doesn’t make statements prior to investigation, and it’s not like Israel is going to let them conduct one.

But there’s literal footage of the wounds. Where do you think those wounds came from?

It comes from a Palestinian journalist.

That’s convenient, because Israel isn’t allowing journalists into Gaza. There can’t be other sources, Israel has made sure of it.

He was appointed special counsel at age 70.

No one expected him to do anything.

Let them fight.

Their existence is at risk as long as the US has military bases in the region.

They could ally with China and replace their oil/gas dependency with electrification.

But they won’t.

If democracy means anything at all, it’s a system where the people rule. By your loose definition, every country is a democracy! Every king and dictator has enormous propaganda machines because they need to keep their people from overthrowing them.

The Gilens and Page study gave the game away in 2005. “The preferences of the average American appear to have only a miniscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy.” Policies are decided by the ruling class before a single vote is cast, the elections are simply another propaganda machine to trick people into giving their consent to be governed.

And right now the propaganda machine is telling you to just wait for the midterms and everything will be fine. You don’t need to do anything! Just sit back and relax, the system is working as intended, everything will work out. “Democracy”. What a joke.

Carey says autocrats try to co-opt or pressure government institutions that serve as referees but notes that didn’t work last month as the Supreme Court ruled against the president on tariffs.

“One of the things that the tariff decision suggested [is] he has not fully captured that set of referees,” said Carey, a professor of political science at Dartmouth, “and that’s the most important set.”

This is a fundamental misunderstanding of what’s actually happening.

They ruled against Trump’s tariffs because this is a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie and he isn’t allowed to touch the money. Trump is a figurehead that’s being granted power by the ruling class, he’s only allowed to do what he’s doing because it’s useful.

The US was never a democracy. They just let us pretend because it was similarly useful.

Well. They think they’re white. Whiteness isn’t just something someone can identify as, it’s a condition imposed by white supremacy and it’s contingent on the political moment. A lot of leopards-eating-faces moments come when they find out that their whiteness in Colombia is non-transferable to whiteness in the US. If the white supremacists decide having English as a second language or having a dark-skinned grandparent makes someone non-white then their skin color won’t actually protect them.

I favor the theory that Trump can’t tell the difference between news he’s seeing on Xitter and actual broadcast news, because the broadcasters have been extremely generous towards the regime for this war and there basically isn’t any dissent from them

Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group

This one is especially spurious - should they leave the children in a warzone? Evacuating them is humane, hardly genocidal.

That has to be harder after they armed and then betrayed the Kurds in Syria, right?

I usually use my memory when I want to look back on my entire day and know what I did.

Obviously in any society there are going to be people who hate their leaders and want them dead. The question is who do we give voice to? Who gets shown on our TVs and social media feeds, and who is silenced? That’s what makes it propaganda.

Also, is Libya better off after the imperialists killed Qaddafi? Is that what you want for Iran?

Maybe it’ll split up, and there will be more Americas in 20 years!

It’s not just a limited sample, it’s a biased sample. That makes it worse than useless for gauging public opinion.

You wouldn’t keep contact with the kinds of people in Iran that respected and supported Khamenei; they wouldn’t want to talk to you and you wouldn’t want to talk to them. This is the equivalent of people who think Thing is popular because everyone in their social circle loves Thing, and thing Other Thing is unpopular because everyone they know hates Other Thing. Worse than useless.

“”“Friendly fire incident”“”

Consider that the people you have contact with might not actually be representative of the average Iranian, and that’s coloring your perception of the situation. Everyone you know is not a random sample, it’s literally limited by who you get to know.