A defense analyst said, "we can't be sure that the administration has met their war aims" and it made me scream at the radio. What aims? They didn't even bother making something up. At least Bush 2 respected us well enough to lie. I have no idea what any of this is supposed to accomplish.
You're watching a nuclear power putter around a marina with fifty brawling toddlers climbing all over the tiller.
But yeah fair callout about Israel.
It's been all throughout the news throughout March and April, here's some examples (please excuse the LLM summary, but summarizing lots of repetitive news links is actually one thing that LLMs do not hallucinate on often):
> March 29-30, 2026: Trump told the Financial Times that his "preference would be to take the oil" and discussed seizing Kharg Island, which handles over 90% of Iran's oil exports.
> April 3, 2026: In a social media post, he claimed that with more time, the U.S. could "OPEN THE HORMUZ STRAIT, TAKE THE OIL, & MAKE A FORTUNE".
> April 6, 2026: At the White House Easter Egg Roll, Trump told reporters, "If I had my choice, I'd keep the oil," but noted that he hadn't fully done so because he wanted to "make the people of our country happy" who wanted the war to end
March 29 - https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/trump-says-pre...
April 3 - Trump posting on social media https://uk.news.yahoo.com/trump-makes-cryptic-social-media-2...
April 6 - https://www.politico.com/news/2026/04/06/trump-says-he-would...
They additionally said it was to free the Iranian people from the oppressive regime, and later said we would end their civilization if they don’t agree to a cease fire.
I’m sure obtaining their oil is a goal, but it’s not their primary goal.
Historians will debate the true reasons for this invasion, but in the end I think they'll conclude it's just the random actions of a very incompetint and not very intelligent person that acts with pure id.
The historians are already saying this war is for Israel, that’s what John Mearsheimer and Jeffrey Sachs are saying. I’m sure the companies that produce the textbooks will find a way to say how it’s all rather more complicated than that though.
Any media worth its salt spend a brief time explaining why invading Kharg would mean mass US casualties, while having no critical objectives only achievable by seizing Kharg.
If one of your media sources only echoed "reports of the US looking to seize Kharg island" without that context it was wasting your time for attention.
The war will continue at least up to elections, maybe longer since Zionism has bipartisan support in the US, but they’ll at least have to change the messaging or approach somehow. These ceasefire negotiations are a farce and will invariably fall through. The US will get no benefits and the spin will be how incompetent the Trump administration is for creating another quagmire but there was never anything for the US to gain from this and the real objective of exhausting the US military resources to undermine Iran will have been achieved. They ideally would still like to install the descendant of the last Shah as the new prime minister, but if that can’t be accomplished they’ll just reset the Iranian civilization back 20 years by destroying infrastructure, oil fields, and killing influential and popular leaders.
The only redeeming factor of the Trump admin is that they are genuinely incompetent so this hidden hand influencing our foreign policy is more apparent but they’re not so incompetent to have started a war they have nothing to gain from.
I stopped visiting the HN front page months ago, when all the absurd over-flagging started to happen
I tried... but it looked like it would take awhile...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quest_for_Glory%3A_So_You_Want...
I mean it'd make sense for it to loop, but I'm just wondering if I'm missing something or should I just call it there.
But it only works on Firefox for me, not on Chrome.
Error Message on Chrome:
Error: Failed to initialize graphics.
at SceneManager.initGraphics (rmmz_managers.js:1957:15)
at SceneManager.initialize (rmmz_managers.js:1929:10)
at SceneManager.initialize (CGMZ_Core.js:1662:41)
at SceneManager.run (rmmz_managers.js:1918:14)
at Main.onEffekseerLoad (main.js:150:22)
at _onRuntimeInitialized (effekseer.min.js:35:44)
at effekseer.min.js:35:327
at Module.onRuntimeInitialized (effekseer.min.js:15:164351)
at doRun (effekseer.min.js:15:164904)
at run (effekseer.min.js:15:165064)>bush
Created two wars, direct deaths and enabled ones are 500k to 1M, $4-$6 trillion cost, it destroyed iraq and Afghanistan.
>obama
No new wars, cont previous plus libya plus drones strikes in the region (check how many kids killed in those), 100k-200k deaths, $1-$2 trillion, destroyed libya, yemen, syria, plus iraq/afghanistan
>biden
We all saw what was going on in gaza (~50k killed) and still paid billions to israel
Meanwhile trump had doha deal, reduced spending and pulled military from there. Hate trump for whatever reason you had that’s your own (maybe justified in domestic stuff), but the fact that what he did in that region is nothing compared to what previous presidents did, and unhinged tweets don’t count.
So we know that it isn’t.
https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-x-twitter-account-... https://www.the-independent.com/tech/elon-musk-twitter-ban-t... https://x.com/elonmusk/status/2011519593492402617 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/December_2022_Twitter_suspensi...
This behavior does not lead to clever or constructive conversation. There are much better ways to get your point across.
It feels weird to have to write this but it seems warranted: A religious preference is something that extends beyond the limited time and space of a US political party.
Also don't insult our intelligence. It's pretty clear what side of the partisan line someone who says both - "I'm a free speech absolutist" citing Musk while in the same breath complaining someone is being mean to Jesus - is on.
Maybe you are simply projecting some guilt about your electoral choices. I can't come up with a better reason for your comment beyond empty moral posturing.
He says, unironically.
> This behavior does not lead to clever or constructive conversation.
He says, unironically.
Physician, heal thyself.
nothing about it is deranged, a strawman, or a borderline personal attack though.
>GP never said he was against or in favor of the current US administration
they have, actually! i quote: "I personally like Trump as a president."
All definitions come from Google's AI summary, of course we can argue about those but I think they are pretty accurate.
deranged argument: a "deranged argument" refers to intensely illogical, paranoid, orpathological reasoning that often disrupts rational public discourse, characterized by extreme, often toxic, comparisons. It seems to me like that label is warranted, GP just wrote "I don't like that the game mocks Jesus" and got a somehow extreme response that I would definitely characterize as an "extreme, toxic comparison".
strawman: a dishonest debating tactic where someone misrepresents, exaggerates, or fabricates an opponent's argument to make it easier to attack. In this case, GP wrote "I don't like that the game mocks Jesus", whereas the discussion was turned by some people into "I like the Trump administration".
Criticizing someone because of their political and religious preferences (and nothing else) is as personal as you can get. Most laws against harassment around the world specifically point out this behavior.
YMMV, if you consider this to not be relevant, it's actually ... ok. We all have different points of view and even "logical" things might seem illogical to others and I mean this honestly and without snark. We don't have to agree, the best I (we) can do is to thoroughly explain our points of view.
On the other hand, antisemitic slurs or other attacks on oppressed groups can result in real emotional and physical harms against real living people, your neighbors, your coworkers, your friends, even your family.
They do not say why in the returned html.
I do not approve of such blockage.
Nevertheless. Knowledge is knowledge. So I post for everyone’s sake.
> Important Dates: Created 4/28/2026
Many an ISP these days blocks domains that have been registered less than a month ago because most scam campaigns have to cycle through domains way faster than that time.
Check if you have enabled some sort of "malware protection" at your ISP, because that usually is based on DNS filtering.
> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.