Gotta have that third temple.

Much as russia just spent their material legacy capacity in ukraine, the us spent their economic legacy capacity in Iraq/Afghanistan. We are driving around a fancy army we spent too much on, and the payments are hurting.

I could go for a few decades of that. We need some humble pie.

Militarily speaking the US is still a force to be reckoned with

Sure. But so are France, Russia, India, and Pakistan. A lot of the US influence comes from its extensive base network. And yet… America can’t keep the Suez open in the face of some Yemeni rebels with access to a Radio Shack. They’ve bowed out in Afghanistan and Iraq. They’re roughly holding the line in Ukraine by sheer weight of expenditure. Logistically, all very impressive. But its playing ten different chess games at once. Only impressive if you’re not losing them.

I’d say in the future the US is going to do a lot more riding on the EU’s soft power than they’re currently comfortable admitting.

I’m not even sure what the EU looks like in another thirty years. The UK is in steep decline, France is in full sell-out mode, Germany and Italy are making kissy-faces at their fascist wings. The Eastern European states never recovered from the break up of the USSR. Scandinavia is a gas station.

Europe’s chips seem to be stacking up in the Middle East, under a handful of petty dictatorships and theocracies. But the real future power players are looking more and more like the member states of the South Pacific - India, China, Pakistan, Indonesia. Enormous populations, high tech industries, rapidly expanding navies, some of the last pristine wilderness anywhere on earth… These look like the countries which will be leading the world into back end of the 21st century.

I’m sure not all Israelis are assholes, it’s just amazing that I’ve met a good two dozen Israelis and all of them have been assholes. Just arrogant as fuck.

especially how many white people don’t see Jews as white, but most non-white people don’t see Jews as non-white.

There are people who are Jewish and non-white though - Ethiopian jews for example.

Which seems to negate the (Zionist-created) argument that there is such a thing as a Jewish ethnicity in the first place, as opposed to Judaism simply being a multi-ethnic faith like Christianity or Islam.

Clearly though plenty of people who are Jewish are also white. And clearly there is a history of denying them this Whiteness once their faith is “discovered” by those they know. Same as Irish or, to a lesser extent, Italians and Slavs. Which is wrong - as is the concept of race/ethnicity/“Whiteness” in the first place

Well, in the tribalist kind of thinking everybody must always be pro-some-faction or against-some-faction and the far-right (including Fascists tribes such as Zionists) are seldom deep thinkers and skeptics, so are almost without exception tribalists.

So it makes absolute sense that Zionists (and members of other political tribes whose “chiefs” have decided to support Zionism) claim that people who are demonstrating because of their Principles (in this case Humanist ones, like “though shall not kill innocent civilians”) are doing so because of being pro-some-faction. Further, I would even say that the Zionists absolutelly believe that claim they’re making and are speaking the truth as they see it: they simply cannot conceive of people being anything but tribalists who will put tribalism above all else (even any leftover Principles they might have) so people must be pro-some-faction or anti-some-faction to be demonstrating.

(PS: Whilst this is not evidence, it does match what I’ve observed first hand in situations like the Brexit Referendum in the UK. It also matches my observations as member of a political party in my homeland, since most political party members tend to be tribalist, even in leftwing parties, which as somebody who returned from abroad with no pre-existing “love for the team’s shirt” and chose a party to join and help based on the principles they seemed to support, made me quite an atypical member and gave a wonderful chance to observe political tribalists in their “natural environment”)

This is also why I believe a lot of the propaganda techniques being deployed by the Biden Campaign to try and get votes from people who are against the current actions of the Zionists because it goes against their Principles are incredibly misguided - Principled people aren’t pro-Biden or even anti-Trump, they’re pro or against some kinds of action no matter who does it, and things like “aversion to the murder of children” tend to be some of the stronguest principles around so likely to be much stronger for a non-tribalist that the “uuh, those other guys are bad” tribalist-heavy arguments.

I wouldn’t be surprised if many people don’t end up in the voting booth, intellectually ready to swallow their Principles and vote Biden purelly to stop Trump, and can’t actually bring themselves to cast a vote.

Anyways, all this are theories and if Biden keeps on supporting the Zionists and their Genocide, we shall see.

You’ve got it backwards. The constant conflation of antisemitism with criticism of Israel by Israel and its stooges is what’s bad for Jews. Making fun of how disingenuous they are is good for Jews who don’t want to be associated with a genocidal apartheid regime.

‘Racism’ is a good enough umbrella term for ‘being shitty to people because of some demographic category’. Whether the basis is ethnic, national, religious or anything else doesn’t seem like an important distinction. Nobody considers ‘race’ to be a useful term any more, after all.

They just think that magically the countries will somehow share a border and then mighty isnotreal will win.

I think they may be able to reach Spain with transport planes (suppose these are not shot down because it’s impolite) and drop a brigade or two.

But considering how incompetent their army has shown itself to be (basically like Russia or Ukraine in the beginning of their war), I’m not sure that’d be very scary.

In any case there’s one country in the EU which has a competent military that participates in various kinds of violent shit kinda often, thus with institutional experience. That’s France.

Yup. They’re very efficient militarily, as is Finland. See the Skjold-class as an example of their engineering style.

Finland didn’t have a small military in the Winter War. In the 90s-00s “era of peace” or something many European countries have all but abolished their militaries and forgot how big they should really be.

Small compared to USSR’s, but it was enormous by measure of today’s European armies, and you still need a lot of people to control territory today, just like 100 years ago.

It’s unreal how people do not understand the difference between defending a homeland, invading a country via an easily traversable large land border, attacking a country across a geographic barrier and attacking a country in a whole different part of the world. Israel’s ability to threaten mainland Europe would not amount to anything beyond terrorism, though potentially nuclear terrorism. All of Nazi Germany, fielding the industrial capacity of most of Europe was probably not capable of successfully invading even the UK across the English Channel, even if they weren’t distracted on the Eastern Front. They simply didn’t have the naval power required.

Not wrong from a historical perspective, but Norway would be outnumbered around 10:1 in manpower in modern times. Kind of hard to measure the… ‘level of military technology’, but Israel keeps it up to date and Norway hasn’t had to make that a real priority beyond posturing for awhile. Obviously not the likeliest scenario, but if everyone else stayed out of the way and they could figure out how to fight each other, that’s a really hard fight for Norway.

I mean, no one said they were? What did you think we were talking about in like at least half the comment you’re replying to. I mentioned that other countries would step in several times, what did you think that meant? Like, are you just restating my comment for me? I don’t get it.

Really, the only scenario where this is more than interesting world building is kind of what you mentioned though. I.e., if NATO falls apart and the US also fucks up relations with Israel leading to them ending up on Russia’s side with others in some kind of World War 3 situation.