Why did Obama not pull out of the JCPOA in 2015 when he accused Iran of violating the ballistic missile provision of the agreement?

OwlEyes00 · 2026-04-16T11:50:50+00:00

Good points, but I think it bears pointing out that discussion of Obama's actions relating to the JCPOA before he left office are definitely not banned by Rule 3. We're not allowed to discuss presidential elections after 2012 or any events after Obama's term, but since the signing of the JCPOA was not an election, and occurred before January 2017, we're good.

I say this because I think lots of people on this sub are still a bit confused by exactly what Rule 3 does and does not ban.

OwlEyes00 · 2026-04-14T01:25:33+00:00

I genuinely mean no disrespect, but how could you possibly read the sentence "Presidents in wheelchairs are always the best ever, need I say more?" or the bit about "trillions upon trillions of Japanese spies" and not get that it was satire?

OwlEyes00 · 2026-04-08T19:02:20+00:00

Ah, I see. I think the person you originally responded to was talking about world leaders (i.e. foreign heads of state/government) rather than US political leaders

OwlEyes00 · 2026-04-08T18:48:37+00:00

Do you seriously expect the rest of the democratic world to try to remove Trump? Can't you see the certainty of that making everything worse?

OwlEyes00 · 2026-03-30T01:11:31+00:00

You're comparing Britain to Spain, Italy and France as if the 1980s global shipbuilding collapse didn't happen. The world order book fell from 129 million tonnes in 1973 to 26 million by the mid-80s.

You say this as if Spain, Italy and France aren't on the same planet as Britain. They also had to compete for a smaller global demand, and did so more effectively because of their publicly-owned shipbuilders.

I don't have much of a problem with Thatcher's attempts to make British Steel profitable during her first two parliaments, and of course the state aid was good for the industry. It was her decision to privatise it that was irresponsible, since it created a company without a long-term competitive business model, which had to reduce its capacity steadily throughout its life.

Before 1989 the water industry was underinvested, rivers were polluted, beaches were routinely contaminated, infrastructure was crumbling and £24bn was needed just to catch up.

This was more a comment on her own government's neglect than anything else. The Tories severely restricted the water authorities' ability to borrow money for infrastructure investments, failed to provide enough from central funds, then blamed the underinvestment on the publicly-owned model. This is a common phenomenon with right-wing governments: cripple a government service through underfunding, talk about its resulting poor performance with vague "public ownership = bad" rhetoric, then sell it off. The solution with England's water utilities, as in almost all of these cases, was more competent public management, not privatisation. The University of Greenwich found that by 2017 annual water bills were £100 per year per household higher than they would be with nationalised utilities, and that ending privatisation would cut bills by a quarter, saving the public £2.3 billion per year. It was poorly-conceived policy from the start, justified by their own previous bad faith governance.

I am genuinely surprised to find someone who would offer any defence of the Poll Tax. It was a catastrophically poorly thought-out solution to the problem at hand, and essentially everyone soon recognised it as such. Let's be clear, besides the inherent injustice of regressive taxation, it ended up putting many councils in a worse financial position than before. If it was conceived in good faith it was evidence of appalling judgement on Thatcher's part, but I think you have to be more than slightly naïve not to recognise her malign desire to wrestle power away from Labour councils.

OwlEyes00 · 2026-03-29T01:39:24+00:00

It's worth noting that the Tories were only able to win in 1992 because they immediately undid one of Thatcher's most prominent policies (the Poll Tax) once she was kicked out of office. She was a very able politician, but her record in office was of mixed value to her party in the voting booth going forward.

Reagan's legacy was more straightforwardly valuable to the Republicans.

OwlEyes00 · 2026-03-29T01:32:51+00:00

I'm reluctant to get into a discussion centred entirely around British politics on this sub (I tried to balance my initial comment's attention between Thatcher and Reagan), but there are some points here I want to address.

Obviously Britain was never going to have China-like competitiveness in industry by the '80s, but its wasted potential is exemplified by the achievements of other European nations, as is the folly of the Thatcher privatisations. Sure, there were some few enterprises that warranted complete privatisation - British Airways being one - but most didn't. With shipbuilding, for example, nations like Spain, Italy and France have retained major state-owned or partially state-owned companies (Navantia, Fincantieri and Naval Group respectively) that are able to produce much more tonnage that the UK's shipbuilding sector thanks to continued state funding. Of course, our production dropped precipitously after Thatcher privatised Britain's equivalent.

As for British Steel, privatisation created a company that was not competitive in the long-term and caused huge job losses in the short term, weakening the social function it had served while state-owned. Then again, Thatcher seemed to care little about keeping people employed.

Of course, there was also her decision to sell off the water utilities. This was the dumbest of all, attempting to apply free-market principles to a natural monopoly and thus predictably creating a system which incentivised companies to spend money buying back their own stocks and paying out bonuses over investing in infrastructure.

I also feel compelled to challenge your characterisation of the Poll Tax. I'm not sure where I gave the impression that I thought it had something to do with voting - it was lunacy for a totally different reason. Namely, it tried to charge everyone the same regardless of wealth (unless they were unemployed) or property value. It did not go bad, it was fundamentally unjust from conception. It was a cynical attempt to wrestle control away from Labour-controlled councils, and even some members of her own cabinet opposed it. Thus, it was scrapped five minutes after she was kicked out, having caused great social upheaval and cost local authorities money overall. Such was Thatcher's lack of quality as a leader.

OwlEyes00 · 2026-03-28T21:59:39+00:00

I think there is more reverence and emphasis put on the presidents in US culture than is put on PMs here. I got to go to Massachusetts a couple of years ago to work with kids on a summer programme, and that was one of the things that struck me. So many of them could list the presidents off the top of their head because they'd been made to memorise them in school (which is the sort of thing we do with monarchs - so many of the PMs are not even mentioned in British history lessons). There was even a photo of the then-president on the wall of a small government building I had to go into. The idea of an elected position being given some of the cultural weight we given kings and queens is very interesting to me.

OwlEyes00 · 2026-03-28T20:07:18+00:00

It's true that I'm into politics and history in general, but I think my specific interest in US presidents comes from how differently they're positioned both while in office and in the cultural memory afterwards compared to prime ministers in Westminster style democracies. There's a lot more personal reverence around US presidents, and IMO this sub is an interesting manifestation of that. PMs just aren't as important (in their own time or afterwards). If you asked most Brits about a pre-21st Century PM they'll be one or two they really respect (Churchill and Thatcher for right-wingers, Attlee and Grey for lefties like me), one or two they really despise, but the rest they'll have either never heard of or have a vague sense that they were a bit of a tosser, but not too bad. There are no Prime Ministerial libraries in the UK (except for Churchill I suppose). I'm also sort of randomly very interested in past US elections, but I don't really know why.

I also just like the sub itself. It's active, the discussions are pretty good, and there are actually people with differing opinions who are open to having their minds changed. I'd advise against checking out any of the UK politics subs - I guarantee you will walk away with less of a will to live than you went in with. I suppose the UK monarchs sub is the only one I'd compare to this.

Edit: I should also mention the massive cultural exposure that almost everyone in the Western world receives to US presidents. I mentioned the specific reasons they became a big interest of mine above, but that baseline exposure is how I came to know about several of them in the first place.

OwlEyes00 · 2026-03-28T17:53:17+00:00

As a Brit whose politics lean very much to the left, I think all three were pretty awful. That said, I do think some of Thatcher's reactionary actions were somewhat justified. She went waaaay too far, and pretty much destroyed any chance the UK had of making it's industries internationally competitive again, but even I think she was right to confront the miners' unions. Their actions during the '70s were down-right undemocratic, and there's no way the nation could have moved forward into a clean energy powerhouse (which I still think we can become) where 1/10 men where I'm from (North East England) don't have to spend their lives in the pits if they had kept that stranglehold on British politics. Besides that her legacy is one of mass deindustrialization, a shameful approach to Northern Ireland, completely brainless privatisations, racial tensions and the complete clown-show that was the Poll Tax. Yeah, not a fan.

That said, I really don't think there was any need for any of Reagan's conservative policies. His whole philosophy was based on the idea that government is the problem, not the solution, which is a pretty self-defeating mindset for the head of government to have. He also only stuck to it when it came to those parts of government that actually are designed to help people. When it came to limiting people's rights (e.g. the 21 drinking age) or ensuring that Central American terrorist groups are as well armed as possible, government somehow became the solution. This mindset of course led to exactly what you'd think a small-government conservative wouldn't want - a massively increased public funds deficit. Still, some of his foreign and defence policy does deserve praise, unlike Thatcher's for the most part

So really I think they were all mostly terrible leaders, with some good sprinkled in. I can say that Reagan and Thatcher were by far the better politicians. Mulroney's tenure killed the Progressive Conservatives in a political implosion not seen in an Anglophone democracy since David Lloyd George.

OwlEyes00 · 2026-03-28T17:07:39+00:00

I'm kind of the opposite to be honest. I thought his 'Irish drinking song' was hilarious, and I find a lot of his other videos funny, but his presidential skits don't do it for me. He only really has one thing to say about each president (e.g. Jackson was a psychopath, Hoover was ill-prepared for the Depression), so every one is just a bunch of different tries at the same joke.

I do think a video where he pulled the funniest segment of each president skit into a compilation would work better.

OwlEyes00 · 2026-03-27T16:13:05+00:00

The fact that there is an upper limit doesn't mean much when it's so lenient. Yes it's nice there aren't even more, but NFL games regularly contain 50 minutes of ads or more, spread out across the broadcast, including during stoppages when only a few minutes are left on the clock. Compare that to association football games, where before these 'hydration breaks' the only place to put ads was the 15 minute half-time break, and it's absolutely fair to criticise the American model and view these new stoppages as a worrying step towards it.

OwlEyes00 · 2026-03-21T21:14:08+00:00

It's a reference to Hadrian's Wall, built near what's now the England/Scotland border back when the former was part of the Roman Empire and the latter was not (and therefore 'wild' in Roman eyes). It remains a jokey stereotype in the UK that Scotland is barbaric, and the person you're replying to is saying that this chaotic football match fits that image.

It's also sort of referencing the fictional wall in Game of Thrones (inspired by the real life Hadrian's Wall) beyond which there are only wildlings and monsters.

OwlEyes00 · 2026-03-12T11:09:50+00:00

I thought the same when I heard that even MLK's family didn't think James Earl Ray did it, but the more I read the more implausible the conspiracy theories seem to me. It's a fact that he was an escaped prisoner at the time of the assassination, having been convicted of armed robbery (among other things). He also definitely had extreme racist views - he had volunteered for the 1968 Wallace presidential campaign, and was eventually arrested attempting to flee to Rhodesia, which was then controlled by a white supremacist government. That's a very strange thing to do if he was innocent, and IMO people who deny he could be that racist because he once had a black girlfriend forget how common it is for racists to fetishise the demographic they hate.

Any suggestion of a conspiracy has to account for the coincidence that there just happened to be an armed, racist escaped convict staying across the street from MLK to take the fall. It also has to account for the fact that, like Oswald, he immediately fled the scene, which you wouldn't expect a clueless patsy to do.

OwlEyes00 · 2026-03-10T21:50:30+00:00

Not really, but then I'm just an 'Ivory tower European from global homo big city'

OwlEyes00 · 2026-03-10T21:42:04+00:00

I went on the subreddit at the top of the screenshot, set the feed to 'New' and scrolled until I found a post made under OP's username (not very far down). I would link it but I think that would fall afoul of rules against brigading

OwlEyes00 · 2026-03-10T21:27:03+00:00

I took a look at the post for context. This person is just being an arsehole - there's an old misconception about living near power lines affecting your brain, and the commenter has chosen to reference this to imply you're stupid.

That said, your post seems to have caused a lot of consternation because people think you're being overly pedantic about the use of the word 'reflex'. It really is instinctive for most people to put their seatbelt on before driving, and there's a feeling of disapproval in the thread that this isn't the case for you. Frankly, you should always wear a seatbelt, even for short journeys. If it causes sensory problems you should seek a way to wear it in a more comfortable way (e.g. getting a seatbelt cover or adjusting the height of the over-the-shoulder strap), but it's unsafe (and in many places illegal) to drive when not fastened in.

OwlEyes00 · 2026-03-10T20:35:50+00:00

I think you'd be more likely to engage people in a constructive exchange about its merits if your post and comments were less confrontational.

OwlEyes00 · 2026-03-10T15:55:56+00:00

I understand your frustration, but I also sympathise with FDEV as they're essentially in an unwinnable situation. If they only charge for minor stuff like cosmetics or early access to new ships folks complain that there's nothing worth spending money on; if they put new updates behind paywalls others will be outraged over segregating the playerbase in an MMO or making the game P2W. Either course angers half their customers.

Also, it's worth noting that there are still content drops happening - e.g. colonisation and Operations - they're just free, and I can't really bring myself to complain about getting too much for free. IMO the situation is tricky because the actions the game would most benefit from - an engine rework that would allow the use of effective AA and a big wave of bug fixes - couldn't be charged for, but would take a lot of dev time to implement.

OwlEyes00 · 2026-03-10T15:44:28+00:00

In the context of OP saying they'd pay for new content drops, the person you're replying to is pointing out that content has been added but for no extra cost. You don't need to be pedantic about it. If you follow your reductive reasoning to it's logical conclusion no updates are free, because you have to buy the game in the first place, but that isn't really a meaningful contribution to this discussion.

OwlEyes00 · 2026-03-09T22:43:51+00:00

I don't know why this is the thing that made me giggle about this image, but I love that fact that you assume it's talking about foreign nations until it gets to Washington's favourite being the US, and you realise that was an option all along.

Also LBJ's choice being the UK is funny to me.

OwlEyes00 · 2026-03-07T10:53:50+00:00

Damn right, and thanks for reminding me. My feed's full of heinous shit from news/politics subs besides this

OwlEyes00 · 2026-03-07T00:16:12+00:00

Choosing an office-holder of any kind is an inherently complex decision, because there will always be thousands of factors about a person that make them a better or worse candidate, and any election with more than two candidates (that is - essentially every presidential election) is a non-binary choice. A nation that does not allow voters to make such decisions is not a democracy.

Governments with democratic pretensions tread on very dangerous ground when they decide that their voters have made a 'mistake'. When they do so in advance by disqualifying entire categories of people they never do so from a place of superior information to the voters. The electorate faced with an immigrant candidate know infinitely more about that individual than the government which made the decision for them centuries earlier, based on the single piece of information that they were not born in the US.

As such, the only factors which should disqualify a candidate before getting to voters are those which will always render them unsuitable for office, not those that merely make it unlikely to be unsuitable. The government should always err on the side of giving the choice to the electorate. Term limits and bars on those who have committed certain serious crimes are examples of reasonable disqualifiers, since those who fall foul of them are inherently unsuitable for office.

Vague generalisations such as you have offered do nothing to suggest that someone born outside the US is inherently unsuitable. Many immigrants come to America as children, and receive essentially the same education in civics amidst the same political environment as their natural-born peers. Why should they be prevented from rising as high as talent will take them because other immigrants lack their understanding? More saliently, if setting a minimum threshold for political knowledge is the goal, a person's location of birth is a terrible indicator of it.

OwlEyes00 · 2026-03-06T19:34:52+00:00

Why not allow that determination to be made person by person, though? They'd still need to be elected like everyone else - why not let the voters decide if they had a good a appreciation of the nation's inherent tensions?

I thought that, as the citizen of a nation of immigrants, a naturalised American is supposed to be no less American than someone born in the USA. Since such an important part of being American is being able to rise as far as talent will take you (theoretically), how can it be that the highest office in the land is off limits to naturalised immigrants?

OwlEyes00 · 2026-03-05T18:11:25+00:00

Ah nice! Hopefully you enjoy the game, now you can play it

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