andrewrgross

If it makes you feel any better, I remind myself that I myself am subject to the same irrationalities and motivated reasoning as anyone else. We're all just people, and people aren't logic machines. We're bundles of impulses and habits that live within whatever stories our minds have to create to make sense of all of this.

In this context, if you're looking for some kind of remedy, the best I can offer is that instead of trying to bother disputing with myths and superstitions, recognize that anyone who grows out of them usually does so because they find some other way to the same fundamental bedrock notions. Your friend wants to adhere to the rules laid out by the creator. They want to be worthy of Christ's love.

I think if you were inclined to change their mind -- which I'm not recommending -- it would be when this comes up to remind him how many people have been seduced into supporting ungodly things thinking they were following God's will. That's Satan's number one tactic. So all we can do is stay humble and listen to our hearts. If seeing kids living in Bethlehem struggling to survive under an oppressive king just as Jesus and his parents did seems wrong, it's okay to not have a confident stance. Maybe your pastor says it's God's plan, but no one -- not even the disciples -- could ever no God's plan for sure. You don't have to have a stance. You can say "God's will will be done. He does not require my involvement."

I think you're arguing a strawman version of my point. I'm not claiming that it's impossible for them to know something we don't. I'm just saying that the assumption that there is secret information that makes his actions sensible is not well founded.

There are numerous examples of leaders claiming expertise that wasn't borne out. And if this were the case, I think it would be reasonable to expect them to at least claim this to be the case.

As it stands, this behavior can be fully explained with the information available to us and Biden's foreign policy stance. So there is no reason when you see him doing something that can be easily explained by the observation that he has poor judgement and priorities that are wildly different than most Americans to believe that there is a reason outside of the public facts and our existing knowledge of his poor judgement and unpopular priorities.

Do you have more info?

This is very stupid in the best possible way

Hell yeah baby

I'd like to refer you to my reply to a similar comment: https://slrpnk.net/post/14228501/11555288

No, you're very mistaken. Let me explain.

In the past, the US has stationed supporting troops off of Israel, in battleships far away. It's meant to provide support while keeping things calm.

The reason that putting any soldiers IN Israel is significant is that it means that if Iran tries to kill any Israeli soldiers, they can't do it without risking killing Americans. And if they kill an American, it is understood that we will retaliate and they will be at war with the United States of America.

That's the point of sending 100 troops to offer "tech support". It's to deliberately create conditions that could start a war. If you ask a general, they'll claim that it's just shrewd tactics, because letting Iran know all this means that good judgment will prevent them from attacking Israel. But every war in history is preceded by people making those claims (even when they don't believe them) before going to war.

This is foreplay. This is how you flirt when you're a NatSec pervert thinking of going to war against someone.

That's a shame. For what it's worth, his position isn't a mystery to me. I believe that he's been convinced by his church that unquestioningly supporting Israel's expansionary goals, regardless of any other moral question is an absolute necessity for anyone who truly loves Jesus and believes strongly in his rebirth and in the promise of everlasting life in heaven.

It is -- with all due respect -- as crazy as anything you'd hear in a Texas cult bunker. But I'm guessing that it's real as a wildfire to your friend. It makes me sad to think about.

Wow. Thanks for sharing that.

I see this often, and it's frequently, consistently not the case.

I understand the sense in this belief, but if you review history over just the last five years you can consistently see this not being true over and over. Going all the way back to the Iraq War: it was obvious at the time that the Bush administration was lying about their claimed evidence that there was an active program creating weapons of mass destruction. And at the time, there was a deafening movement of regular voters who loudly protested that we were absolutely convinced that it was complete and obvious bullshit.

And people like JOE BIDEN loudly expressed exactly what you're saying: they know things we don't know. They know what they're doing.

And they didn't! They did not have any meaningful information we didn't have!

Sadly, it's debatable whether they knew what they were doing. Did they expect it would be such a historic clusterfuck? That it would create decades of worsening outcomes for us? Probably not. But did they know they were making up a fake case for war because they wanted to let off some anger over 9/11 by killing hundreds and hundreds of THOUSANDS uninvolved Muslims, and build some new military bases near oil in the process? Yes. Obviously yes.

And after the fact, the people who claimed that they knew things that we didn't became president and Secretary of State.

They do not know something we don't know. They are doing exactly what this looks like. Biden would absolutely go to war with Iran just to serve the cause of Zionism even though he knows that Benjamin Netanyahu is a fascist. That is exactly what this is. There's not chess logic behind this, you can absolutely know everything you need to if you read newspapers regularly.

Ohhhh... this whole thing just routinely gives me new moments of feeling utter neausea at what our government is doing.

I knew the US war machine was capable of great brutality, but I honestly didn't expect it to be so strangely cruel in it. It feels so strangely malicious and purposeful. Why? Is passive enabling of genocide not enough? Must they participate so deliberately?

Again, I find myself at a loss for words.

I'm not sure what your point is.

I understand that this is in a real sense the US's war, and that Biden is not being dragged into it, he's fully committed to it. I'm not sure what that changes about my observation that it's weird that Harris appears to be facilitating an electoral hit job on herself.