Sure. I’m not arguing its impossible. I’m arguing that anyone that thinks “we all know” is being very foolish. The only reasonable assertion is we don’t really know. Judging based off of the limited information we have is not “we don’t know” though, its armchair theorizing by people that generally don’t even have medical training.

I wonder why we don’t have an active HumansBeingBros style community here on Lemmy yet. The Wholesome community does fairly well, but HBB was one of reddit’s largest subs.

That 36 million is a global figure. And yes, by 2005, two years after it started, public opinion had turned against it.

Here’s an except from that article with some specific events noted:

On September 12, 2002, U.S. President George W. Bush spoke to the United Nations General Assembly. Outside the United Nations building, over 1,000 people attended a protest organized by Voter March and No Blood for Oil.

On September 24, Tony Blair released a document describing Britain’s case for war in Iraq. Three days later, an anti-war rally in London drew a crowd of at least 150,000.[11]

On September 29, roughly 5,000 anti-war protesters converged on Washington, D.C., on the day after an anti-International Monetary Fund protest.[12

Note how much larger the London crowd was than the Washington DC crowd.

Largest that ever happened according to what?

Here what I got, asides actually being alive back then and remembering: https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2023/03/14/a-look-back-at-how-fear-and-false-beliefs-bolstered-u-s-public-support-for-war-in-iraq/

Getting its ass kicked after halting the Tet Offensive in its tracks, eh?

And comparing that to the tiny protests against the ME wars? You’ve got some funny ideas. Desert Storm was a UN coalition move at the invitation of Kuwait. Iraqi “Freedom” had around 90% support in the immediate post-9/11 era.

I don’t know where you get your information, but I’d be curious to see your sources.

That’s cute and all, but history just doesn’t agree. Vietnam is a good example of a war being stopped by public backlash. Regarding the takeover by the neocons and now attempted takeovers by fascists, yeah, that’s sort of what authoritarians do. That does not reflect the system that continues to resist them though.

Depending on how things fall out in the coming decades, you may see what America under a real dictator is truly capable of, and how markedly different it will look from today.

Yeah, that’s unlikely when such a high percentage of his fanbase is Christian Nationalist, doing their best to fight back against their perceived evils in favor of Judeo-Christian rulership, while very conveniently forgetting that Islam is part of that same religious tree.

They’re probably right that he wouldn’t follow Israel into a regional war, but I doubt Biden would either. Someone should remind them that despite Israel fighting many, many wars with US support, we have never deployed ground forces alongside them. We simply have no obligation to do so.

Shooting down some missiles is one thing, sending arms sure, some drone strikes whatever, a lot of Americans still strongly support Israel and don’t mind all that. But putting our forces into ground combat would be broadly unpopular here.

Well, nowadays its become far less common, but we actually used to require Congress to declare any wars.

Ah, I didn’t realize you were coming from a non-American perspective. I can’t speak for the usage of the term in other places, but here in America it was not in academic usage outside of discussions on conspiracy theories, where people in those circles would use it to refer to the part of the US government they suspected of orchestrating the assassination of JFK.

Trump’s firings were not exactly unprecedented, either. Gerald Ford presided over an event that became known as the Holloween Massacre, where he did significant reshuffling within the DoD. Nixon, Reagan and Clinton also did their fair share of firings when they felt it was necessary. What made Trump special was the sheer hostility he demonstrated to the government he was supposed to be running, preferring to make decisions directly instead of delegating by frequently leaving leadership positions unfilled, and installing sycophants when necessary.

The idea that there was some entrenched resistance to him is his propagandistic spin on the idea that our Separation of Powers restrain the President, preventing him from performing any actions that would be deemed illegal by Congressional law, of which there were many. Until the recent SC ruling that granted our President a king-like immunity anyway.

He’s a professional salesman, though, it’s best not to fall for his bullshit and thinly veiled desire to run the country like a family business or cartel, with concentrated power in a single figure.

Uh, no it’s not a technical term.

Yeah, there is a large bureaucracy that implements policy, no question. That policy was initiated democratically though, and can be similarly reversed. Just not unilaterally by a President, who is not supposed to be a king, especially if Congress decided it.

And the blob term to describe the bureaucracy was used by an Obama aide, not Obama btw. Not that I expect honesty out of Trumpets.

edit for clarity

I swear this Trumpian deep state crap somehow seeps into everything.

We’ll see. I’m not so sure that 4 years from now the electorate will look just like how it looks today. I also suspect she can make a bolder move in the first year than she can in the latter half. Biden doesn’t draw nearly the level of heat over the Afghanistan pullout as he did a couple years ago, after all. The electorate has a notoriously short memory.

So, she does have some space to demonstrate that exact sort of leadership, and it could very much benefit her in the long run. It’ll have to outweigh all the AIPAC money on the other side, though, that’s another consideration balanced against how successful she has been with small dollar donations. So, remains to be seen how the calculus all falls out.

Election campaigning. She’s trying to win over voters, and while we like to think she could do that by just going full-on progressive, it’s just not backed up by the numbers. Suburban moderates are necessary to achieve victory, so she’s courting them, along with any conveniently available gop defectors. They lean more pro-Israel than we do, so, so does her election strategy.

Not everyone in the electorate cares much about the plight of Palestinians, a significant number of people remember the Intifadas not as some sort of just campaign for liberation, but as a widespread rash of suicide bombings on civilians just trying to live their day-to-day. They don’t want to see the US cave to that by turning our backs on an established ally.

This is why it remains important to continue grassroots efforts to bring light to the difference between innocent Palestinians and Jihadists, incidentally. Mainstream America isn’t going to jump on any sort of reclaim-Palestine-from-the-colonial-oppressors rhetoric any time soon. Peaceful co-existence by pressuring the Israeli government, supporting Israeli peace protestors and reminding people not all Palestinians are hostile militants is a different story though, that’s potentially achievable. If the electorate continues to swing, more of the politicians will get room to follow. Especially since we don’t actually need Israel’s geostrategic position any more, as of the past decade or two. We have more leverage than we used to.

Better than despairium. lol We’ll see though. Election rhetoric is one thing, policy is another. Biden is from a whole different generation, so there’s an opportunity there.

Really hoping Harris pivots on this once the elections are over.

we all know

No, actually, some of us have more exacting standards for medical diagnosis than armchair theorizing.

Was hoping there’d be something in there about David Knowles, from the Telegraph podcast Ukraine: The Latest. I suppose his death is still too recent for us to know for sure what happened though.

Can always just google her voting record from her stint in the US Senate.

Stupid people are easily impressed.

I too have seen cats pant on hot days.

If I remember right though, they’re originally descended from desert animals, so I wouldn’t be surprised if they have a higher tolerance for temperature extremes than dogs do.