Trust Me, I’m a Scientist

Liberal mugged by reality. I aspire to be mildly amusing and occasionally insightful. I talk about politics, science, and games.

[Trust Me, I’m a Scientist @zanuda_nu]

Ignore anyone who tells you “trust the experts.” Pay attention when someone says “here’s the evidence.”

[Trust Me, I’m a Scientist @zanuda_nu]

@davidharsanyi And a Vance-like populist. Backed the tariffs fully when plenty of conservatives didn’t.

[Trust Me, I’m a Scientist @zanuda_nu]

@mtaibbi Imagine thinking Stalingrad was no big deal compared to dodging U boats in the North Atlantic.

[Erick Erickson @EWErickson]

The pressure campaign is on. If you are on the right and you decline to salute the President’s deal with Iran, you are to be otherized — branded a warmonger, a neocon fossil, a man itching to put other people’s sons in the sand. The choice, we’re assured, is binary: boots on the ground or the President’s memorandum. That is a lie, and the people repeating it loudest know it is a lie.

Start with the alternative they pretend never existed. Israel had a plan to destabilize the regime from within — and the President personally refused to allow it, at the behest of the Turks. Erdogan picked up the phone, and the option that wasn’t a land war and wasn’t surrender quietly disappeared. So spare me the two doors. There was a third, and Washington bricked it up to keep Ankara comfortable.

Now look at what we took instead. The memorandum reopens the Strait of Hormuz “for 60 days only,” after which Iran and Oman decide who passes and what they pay. It dangles a $300 billion reconstruction fund, with Gulf money — Qatar’s prominently — already moving toward Tehran. Iran now says Israel must leave Lebanon or the deal is breached. And the grandson of the regime’s founder has called the war the “lesser jihad,” declared that the “greater jihad” begins now, and hailed the agreement as a victory for Tehran. When your adversary calls the deal a victory, believe him.

Then there is the Strait itself — the tell. The entire point of the campaign was to take that chokepoint out of Iran’s hand. Instead, the memorandum leaves the regime holding the switch, free to flip it whenever a strike in Lebanon gives it a pretext, as it has done again and again. A waterway we can reopen by permission of the Ayatollah’s heirs was never reopened. It was rented.

And consider the clock. We bombed Iran for roughly thirty-nine days. Then we let nearly seventy days bleed away between the last bomb and the signature — almost twice the length of the war itself — while panic over oil did Tehran’s negotiating for it. Momentum is perishable. The President took a campaign that was working, put it in suspended animation, and is now selling the thaw as a triumph.

https://t.co/xQpaqvbX11

[Trust Me, I’m a Scientist @zanuda_nu]

@Yassine51172 @EliLake I’m an American.

[Trust Me, I’m a Scientist @zanuda_nu]

@lsnellmandude @bonchieredstate Fair critique but I like the fact that it’s a few weeks before the fourth. Ultimately it doesn’t matter which day we celebrate the abolition of slavery. My point is we need to co-opt it from the left. They want to make it “America bad” when the reality is “America great!”

[Trust Me, I’m a Scientist @zanuda_nu]

@karen1smith1 Yes but most of those are antisemitic garbage so I’m cool with them being hidden

[Trust Me, I’m a Scientist @zanuda_nu]

@TimothyImholt @imagine Uncanny valley

[Trust Me, I’m a Scientist @zanuda_nu]

@davidharsanyi More like carry 300 billion carrots

[Trust Me, I’m a Scientist @zanuda_nu]

@bonchieredstate Given that the holiday is a few weeks before the Fourth, it should be a season of celebration of our amazing country whose founding ideas were so enduring that they paved the way to liberty for all of its citizens. Founded by land owning whites, it’s freedoms are enjoyed by all.

[Trust Me, I’m a Scientist @zanuda_nu]

@bonchieredstate Conservatives need to embrace Juneteenth as a celebration of the promise of liberty espoused in our Founding being ever widened. It’s a testament to American Greatness that hundreds of thousands of white people, many newly arrived Irish, died to free black slaves.

[Trust Me, I’m a Scientist @zanuda_nu]

@daniela__127 They pretend that “the system” is the cause of murder when the reality is that murder is part of the human condition. It existed when there were no prisons, when the punishment was death or exile. Even our closest non human primate cousins murder.

[Trust Me, I’m a Scientist @zanuda_nu]

@daniela__127 This is a deeply held religious belief. Note how the word “harm” is used as if it were an incantation. It abstracts the reality of criminality and cruelty inherent in the human condition and replaces it with a fantasy about “breaking the cycle.”

[Trust Me, I’m a Scientist @zanuda_nu]

@EODHappyCaptain Perfect timing for the 250th birthday

[Trust Me, I’m a Scientist @zanuda_nu]

@BlueBoxDave I’m not sure I’d agree with that. All those wars did was buy Israel and the Arabs time until the next war. The Arabs weren’t defeated to the point they were unwilling to start new ones a few years later. It’s only because Americans helped negotiate that there was peace.

[Trust Me, I’m a Scientist @zanuda_nu]

@sunnyright The dishonesty is revealing. They can’t defend this thing on its own merits so all they do is lie.

[Trust Me, I’m a Scientist @zanuda_nu]

@nypost Wouldn’t have stopped him if he was black and blinged out

[Trust Me, I’m a Scientist @zanuda_nu]

@marklevinshow A bipartisan American habit

[Trust Me, I’m a Scientist @zanuda_nu]

@CorpseKings We wouldn’t expect a DM to forego an athletics check if the player does feats of strength at the table. Dice let the PC’s attributes take center stage instead of the player’s own skills and talents.

[Trust Me, I’m a Scientist @zanuda_nu]

@CorpseKings The nuanced take on this is that it’s okay to forego a dice roll in a social encounter if the PC makes a reasonable case to the NPC. But given that these people are professional actors, rewarding the acting sets unreasonable expectations for home games.

[Open Source Intel @Osint613]

Most of the targets U.S. and Israel struck during the Iran war were military targets.

So the MOU’s $300B reconstruction clause is to reconstruct what again?