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Very little common sense has prevailed on any side in the last week so this is a very welcome announcement.

Middle East crisis live: Iran’s president apologises to neighbouring countries as Israel pounds Tehran Masoud Pezeshkian says no more attacks against neighbouring countries unless they were the source of an attack against Iran

This is easily mockable but like, this is good? This is a textbook case of a positive deescalation.

Is Israel delighted Trump's doing this? Obviously. Is Riyadh/Doha/Abu Dhabi? Maybe, though I doubt it. Did they somehow convince him and have the power to call it off? Come on lol.

Whether you believe Trump is blindly following the directives of Israel or the Gulf States, both are just silly concepts unless held in conjunction with the knowledge that there has been a cohort of Yank conservative pundits that have urged this war since before most of us here were born.

I think it's um rather interesting how desperate people are to believe that America can't possibly be invading a country that its conservatives have talked about invading every single year for the past forty six years except if a nefarious foreign force bribed it to.

Why do you all seem to struggle so hard to believe that Republicans are just a bit dim and extremely racist?

This whole Vulgar Marxism of "there must be a Money behind Trump" is so vulgar that I am actually getting sick of it, it's the discourse equivalent of a marmite pizza.

Corollary: the Gulf States did not make America back the Gulf States in doing bad things.

Now on the other hand, the oil prices,

There is more or less no reason to believe Trump is not gonna just keep bombing until /Americans/ stop him. I think the influence of the Gulf States on this whole process is, to be frank, negligible.

I'm not entirely certain this is true tbh at all

It is the nature of small nations and cultures that we are never quite safe. Some degree of this has to be accepted as baseline fact that cannot be mitigated except at intense cost to our own souls.

I actually understand Israelis almost completely. I just disagree with their conclusions about the nature of the world, what guarantees Jewish safety in it, and, you know, most importantly, whether it is acceptable to inflict pain on others to mitigate your own lack of safety.

we cant keep doing this every single time, im sorry, its just not very practical

like ok i do but you do realise that you are asking folks to prioritise what is essentially a Feelings question over a People Are Dying question

one thing i kinda find frustrating is a certain type of person who doesnt even actually really support the Occupation but will get extremely mad if you in any way say anything about Israel that does not include a disclaimer saying you understand that 2000 years of oppression tends to break brains

Buddy I shit you not one time there were marches on both the street adjoining mine to the north and the street adjoining mine to the south

Like I agree that people should not have suppressed left-wing and liberal critique of Israel, among other things because I was making that critique. But I am quite unhappy with the proliferation of the racist crank critique now and I can't really just shrug at it because it's a direct danger to me.

This is both emphatically true and, like, just a disaster.

like just try saying "i'm pushing France to the left" for instance

mr oliver up there is an idiot but you are aware that this is an unbelievably funny sounding post yes

It's so good how after a couple of years of almost being a real newspaper the National appears to have decided that being a fanzine for the most illiterate section of the independence movement paid better.

Mainly because it wouldn't work, including for achieving morally positive aims.

Yeah I'm not being funny but not a single diplomatic corps in the history of mankind has been run on the principle of Speaking Truth To Power.

The lies we tell ourselves is like 70% of what nerds call "material reality"

Yeah but that still mattered

The correct answer to someone saying this is "why. for what"

There was sort of a period where at least you guys were ashamed to say it

Yeah I mean I don't give a shit if a Pole or a Spaniard or indeed an Irish person says something bad about Catholicism. But in Scotland it is bigotry against /Catholics as a minority group/, not the church.

Yeah no I mean you guys do not have entire football teams whose fans chant about hanging the Pope.