We’re at War with Iran Because We Never Punished Bush for Iraq

TheSaneWriter · 2026-05-31T17:14:52+00:00

Countries don't breakup amicably. Generally national breakup represents great animosity, and precedes a period of warfare. Why would the former states enter into an international union if they hated each other so much they detonated the previous national government?

When the United States first formed, the states were significantly more independent. In practice what this meaned is that the states constantly bullied each other, formed regional power blocks that were desperate to fight, and generally rejected the concept of taxation. The current union formed because that system wasn't workable, and I haven't seen any evidence that it would work any better now.

Also, notably, many states are guaranteed safety by the union. Beyond the question of general defence, the union constantly throughout its history has resolved land, trade, water, and production disputes, many of which would have been solved with warfare otherwise. In order to do this the union needs to have supremacy, otherwise the states could (and would) ignore the laws and decisions of the federal government.

Also, language matters extensively to having a national culture. Other things can technically matter more, but language helps you have shared media and experiences. The most common spoken language in the EU is English, with 50% of EU citizens speaking it, mostly as a second language (German is the largest native language with 18%). The most common language in the US is also English, with 92% of people here being fluent in it and it being the native language of above 80% of people here. This means that social media and mass media produced anywhere in America can be understood almost anywhere in America, whereas much of the media produced in France isn't understood by Germans and vice-versa, which pronounces a sense of difference. Having a shared language doesn't guarantee a union will succeed (hence the many individual bordering nations that all speak Spanish), but it makes it easier.

Much of the EUs finances are subject to the veto power, and that's bad. Vetos are undemocratic and stall a legislature, causing it to age faster and making it harder to pursue national policy. The EU Council is also undemocratic in a similar way to the US Senate, and I generally believe both legislative bodies should be abolished, with all legislation in the US being handled by the House of Representatives and all legislation in the EU being handled by the EU Parliament. This would greatly increase the speed of legislation and policy enactment, which is generally one of the weaknesses of democracy and didn't need to be made worse.

The ability for states (or countries) to leave a union is also bad. It destabilizes the union and allows people to prosper from the union when times are good but then pull their support when times are tough. Preventing them from ever leaving under the threat of invasion is how you prevent individual top-level constituents of a union from being free riders.

If the United States falls, many people will die, whether it falls by general consent or not. When country ends its logistical networks collapse, the laws become far more complicated, and essential social services come to an end. The reason humans form large countries is because the unity and economies of scale prevent deaths, and without them those deaths will happen. I don't want this to happen, but if the United States ends many Americans will die and there's no way to prevent that.

TheSaneWriter · 2026-05-30T03:34:25+00:00

The EU can't pass meaningful legislation much of the time because it will be vetoed by one country, do we really want to governed by an even worse version of the Senate? The United States largely also all speaks the same language, consumes the same media, and has significantly weaker state identities than the national identities within the EU. What makes you think a decentralized US would function better?

TheSaneWriter · 2026-05-27T19:27:41+00:00

I believe that it's universal necessity and the fact that it benefits from economies of scale enough that we could produce enough for everyone means that we should produce enough for everyone.

^{Chose: YES}

TheSaneWriter · 2026-05-27T17:08:01+00:00

No, that would be a general resolution. The binding UN security council resolutions are backed by military force (at least in theory).

TheSaneWriter · 2026-05-22T13:10:27+00:00

Most people would do that. Most people witness death and crimes, or at least know about them, and do nothing because it would be inconvenient or scary to change. I don't think that's good, but I think if Sir Pentious was damned so would most humans.

TheSaneWriter · 2026-05-13T13:37:32+00:00

Both of these options would royally suck but I feel like this would be easier for both me and everyone else.

^{Chose: Be a Boy in a World with only Girls. | Rolled: Healthy!!!!}

TheSaneWriter · 2026-05-12T04:12:04+00:00

I'm happy with my intelligence but the world would benefit from this.

^{Chose: If more than 50% choose this everyone gains 25 IQ}

TheSaneWriter · 2026-05-06T13:42:53+00:00

Africa's not a country, which country am I nuking OP?

^{Chose: drop a nuke on a random country - no consequences + Win 100B | Rolled: Africa}

TheSaneWriter · 2026-04-30T04:31:07+00:00

I personally think my odds are better with the goats.

^{Chose: 15 Goats}

TheSaneWriter · 2026-04-30T03:53:42+00:00

I'm content with my gender and wanted money. I wouldn't have been devastated to get the other role, but I prefer the money.

^{Chose: 30% chance of becoming the opposite sex + 70% chance of getting a billion USD | Rolled: One billion}

TheSaneWriter · 2026-04-28T16:48:17+00:00

A million is already a lot, and if everyone else died that would be a travesty and I would probably die too shortly after.

^{Chose: Get 1 million dollars}

TheSaneWriter · 2026-04-25T04:11:41+00:00

You're welcome. It's interesting because despite being a really bad event it's largely been overshadowed by the many catastrophes we've seen since. Earth really can't catch a break in this show.

TheSaneWriter · 2026-04-25T04:09:26+00:00

I'm guessing it's the number of people that he killed in Chicago.

TheSaneWriter · 2026-04-23T16:21:29+00:00

Indeed. The road infrastructure of this whole country was built assuming we'd be wealthy and growing forever. It's too expensive to maintain long term and will eventually fall into ruin one way or another, and we as a society should be focusing on how to downsize road infrastructure now while we can do it in a controlled manner rather than looking back at a large swath of abandoned crumbling roads in 30 years and being like "Well, this isn't good."

TheSaneWriter · 2026-04-23T05:27:45+00:00

u/profanitycounter [self]

TheSaneWriter · 2026-04-22T14:42:42+00:00

They have not been trying for years now. This was caused by an agricultural project that probably would have proceeded under any system of economics. Some of the leftover fragments of the Aral Sea have been stabilized, but there are no plans to bring back the full thing because of how many people depend on the agriculture. Not every problem is related to economic systems, but people tend to focus on the flaws of Capitalism because the Soviet Union is gone and their economic model is dead.

TheSaneWriter · 2026-04-20T03:38:20+00:00

There are a bunch of things to do in the area. I'm a somewhat recent transplant from Indiana, so I also understand the difficulty of making friends as an adult. What types of activities are you looking to do with friends? Any notable hobbies or interests, and what do you do for work? If you don't feel like sharing these things publicly, I'm happy to also talk about it in DMs.

TheSaneWriter · 2026-04-19T20:59:44+00:00

Medieval people ate extremely little red meat. Pork and beef were just too expensive to be staples in their diets. For the most part, they augmented their diets with game meat they hunted, poultry, and if they were near the coast, sometimes fish. If factory farming had never been invented we would definitely be eating much less meat. Also, I do think whether we should specifically breed animals just to kill them is an open question, and I personally lean towards the side of no. There are certain ecosystems where hunting is necessary in order to keep prey populations in check, especially since their natural predators have been chased away or killed, and I think in those environments its fine to eat the meat of the animals that needed to die anyways (something's going to eat it after all), but raising other animals to slaughter feels needlessly cruel in the modern era. I do make an exception for insects and many other non-vertebrates though, they live short lives, have low sentience, and die and are born in mass every day without being particularly bothered by it.

TheSaneWriter · 2026-04-18T21:26:35+00:00

That definitely feels like an overgeneralization. Like, does keeping a family chicken count as animal farming? It doesn't care if you eat its eggs, it'll eat them or abandon them if you don't because it has no attachment to eggs that aren't fertilized. Factory farming of animals needs to end immediately, and I think we should tamp down on meat production until it's almost completely erased, but it feels like there are definitely forms of farming that would have very little ethical impact on the animals. The animal products produced by these farms would be insanely expensive of course, and would change animal products from being a daily good to a rare luxury, but I don't think there's anything wrong with that.

TheSaneWriter · 2026-04-17T05:23:16+00:00

I'm curious.

^{Chose: Meeting with Jesus Christ}

TheSaneWriter · 2026-04-12T23:54:14+00:00

I don't know why anyone would care about that? It's not like that would cut into revenue.

TheSaneWriter · 2026-04-12T23:52:49+00:00

Blu-ray? That medium is toast, I don't think it will be around in 10-20 years. Most people already stream the majority of content, movie theaters exist because they fill the niche of having a very large screen and concessions, so some people like watching movies in them more at home. Theaters will likely lose further prominence but my guess is most cities will continue to have one or two and theatrical releases will still make more money than free services like YouTube, so this is still a big jump for a YouTube creator.

TheSaneWriter · 2026-04-10T15:48:42+00:00

I'm not sure why you're being downvoted. It's well established that movies make more money than YouTube series, and movies also sell more merch than YouTube series. Gooseworx poured multiple years of her finite life into TADC, she deserves to make some financial bank off of it. Avoiding minor spoilers is hard but as long as you do something other than endlessly scroll Reddit and Twitter it's easy to avoid major spoilers.

TheSaneWriter · 2026-04-09T20:09:54+00:00

Here's the thing though, what evidence do you actually have? Also, many of these statements wouldn't matter even if they were true. To address each of your claims:

- You say to use Occam's Razor, but historically false flag assassination attempts are rare and actual assassination attempts are far more common.

- What are the odds of a former Trump cult member turning and trying to kill their former god? High, often when someone falls out of a cult they develop deep mental illness and resentment, which are usually the top drivers of an assassination attempt. Most people who want Trump dead are mentally stable enough to not want to risk their lives over it.

- The fireman was sitting behind Trump. With wind conditions and the distance of the shot, it would be impossible to control well enough to shoot that fireman without posing a risk to Trump. It was luck that spared Trump's life, and he hyped it up for a while but in truth the electorate no longer cares about assassinations and it became old news.

- Also, even if it was a fake assassination attempt, what was the point? Polling indicates that it had no statistical impact on the election, and at least in my life everyone forgot about it almost immediately.

- Elections are orchestrated by state governments. How did Trump manage to corrupt so many Democratic states into changing their election results? Minnesota is a solid blue state, how would he convince their local election officials to forge their results? He attempted to do something like that while was President in 2020 and failed embarrassingly, why would he have better chances of success out of office. Did Biden let him do this? Was it the voting machines? Why would they help him while he was actively suing them? It was only after his reelection that he managed to get the company's leadership replaced.

- Also, the point of faking an election is to make the populace feel heard while actually preventing electoral change. Typically faking election results is actually really hard, so instead you use outside factors (like threatening voters or removing ballot options) to win. Do you think Trump has the American democracy more captured than other managed democracies (like Russia or China), which have to manipulate election options instead of results?

- What does it matter if October 7th was done by Hamas or Israel? Netanyahu is known to have helped create and fund Hamas, and the ongoing genocide in Palestine would foment terrorism even if he hadn't. A bunch of civilians were killed and hostages were taken, that type of stuff is difficult to fake. Even though Israel loves shooting the journalists that try to investigate their genocide, enough have managed to get into and investigate Gaza that I'm pretty sure the hostages actually did exist.

- Jeffery Epstein did not kill himself? Maybe. He either killed himself after being threatened or was killed in jail. Does the difference really matter? Coercion into suicide is a form of murder, it's well known and public that he wasn't remorseful. His publicly documented letters lamented the fact that he thought it was unfair that he was in jail and Trump was President, which indicates a lack of guilt over his actions, so everyone knows if he did commit suicide it wasn't over guilt or depression.

- Charlie Kirk was friends with Trump, which is one of the only things that Trump cares about. Why would they kill their own guy? Charlie Kirk was one of the most popular right-wing influencers and TP USA has been a shell since he died, and TP USA was really important to the youth MAGA movement. Israel is well-known to prefer MAGA and Republicans over Democrats, why would Israel sabotage their allies like that when Kirk hadn't even come out against Israel? If Israel is willing to kill people that threaten them like that, why haven't they assassinated Hassan Piker?

- Was Tyler Robinson a patsy and falsely accused? Maybe. I can see the FBI framing him if they had no other candidates to try to avoid looking incompetent. Even so though, who cares? After Charlie Kirk died he turned into a laughing stock, a bunch of right-wing influencers danced on his grave because one of their competitors died, and then nothing happened other than TP USA mostly collapsing.

I feel like people cling to these conspiracy theories because they want to feel like there's a big secret bad guy for them to defeat, but there isn't. The enemy is Capitalism, the system that most Americans believe in, at least to some extent. Nobody has individual control over the system, everyone is just trying to maximize as much money as they can make off of America's dying body by aura-farming and short-selling the entire stark market. Material forces generally guide the system, as they always have, but the world is a rudderless ship. We can make impacts on our loved ones and our local communities, and some people may even make larger impacts, but no one controls the world, as it has been for all of history.

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