Leo Gura

The problem with Islam is that is has always been intertwined at its root with building a Muslim caliphate and political conquest. So the politics is intertwined with the religion, which makes for bad religion and bad politics.

It's not about quantity but quality. You don't wanna know what kinda porn conservatives consume.

What's crazy is that Islam recognizes as valid all the major Jewish prophets and they believe in the same God as Jews. Yet they treat Jews like aliens.

That's cause that's what communism is in practice. It was acheived. It's just a dish no one likes the taste of once they have a bite.

It was a liberal democracy in its ideals from the 1700s, but the actualization of those ideals takes a lot of time and is far from ideal.

Leninist Communism is literally defined as "the dicatorship of the proletariat". So yeah, it's dictatorial. People hate it. And water is wet.

Yeah, that's how Americans treated the Native Americans. Push them out until they die out.

Kanye West says the same. Classic antisemitic trope.

No they can't, because Islam is not compatible with Marxist communism. You can try to astroturf it for a while, but it will fail, as it did.

Don't conflate what happens inside Palestine with what happens inside Israel. Of course they do! Liberal democracy is about how you treat your own citizens, not foreign minorities.

Everyone in Afghanistan is religious. There is no meaningful secularism there.

"West" is not a geography, it is a value system and mindset. That's why Japan is considered "West". Israel is a Western secular liberal capitalist democracy. It does respect human rights of its citizens within reason. Most Israelis immigrated from Europe and brought with them European values and norms.

These people are Christian ideologues so they cannot make sense of basic history because it would contradict their ideology. You can't make sense of reality as a dogmatic Christian. These people think Hitler was a socialist! They couldn't pass an AP high school history exam.

He has always been for containment, he just doesn't think Russia is a big enough threat to be worth containing. Mearsheimer is a hegemonist. He thinks the US should rule the world.

Because Israel is a "Western" nation and all the Arab nations are not. The US wants a Western foothold in the Middle East. Religious alignment is also a huge factor. Christians are more aligned with Jews than with Muslims. So in a sense this is a war of religions. The US also has a big population of wealthy powerful Jews who have outsize influence in US politics. Israel is also an important ally to the US for hunting down Arab terrorist networks. US and Israel probably share a lot of sensitive intelligence.

No, that underestimates how strategic and intelligent terrorists are. Hamas is very calculated in its strategy, it is not about random aimless violence. There are even quotes of Palestinian leadership saying stuff like: It is better to kill 1 Jew in the city where everyone can see it vs killing 10 Jews out in the desert where no one will see. The purpose of the violence is to create as much public attention as possible. Because they know they cannot kill all the Jews with terrorist attacks. They aren't stupid about that. Terrorism is a rational policy, not an irrational one.

Yeah, but the Soviets were spreading communism to Afghanistan. The Muslim locals did not want to live under a secular communist puppet regime. It is proper for Islamists to be in charge of Afghanistan. Most of the population are Islamist there. Soviet communism is out of place there. It was the Afghans' choice to fight for their independence from Soviet influence. Just like how Ukrainans choose now to resist Putin's influence. If Afghans wanted communism they could have just accepted it peacefully. But obviously that would have been a bad choice for them. Debunked?? It literally happened in dozens of nations. Communism was a global movement that spread like cancer, infecting dozens of nations like North Korea, Cuba, the Middle East, Asia, Eastern Europe, etc. Lenin's whole thing was international communism, gaining a foothold in Russia and then spreading to cover the whole globe. That's what the whole Cold War was about. Stalin tried to inflitrate every nation he could with his commuist influence and stage communist revolutions across Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. Many of these revolutions failed, or were stopped with the help of capitialist powers.

That's really none of our business.

But China isn't invading anyone. And Taiwan is part of China. You can have a policy where the US does not interfere with any foreign nation unless that nation invades an internationally recognized nation, at which point the US will supply that nation with funds for its own defense. If China invades the Philippines then the US could intervene, otherwise the US does not need to interfere with China. This notion of US world hegemony simply cannot hold. Fundamentally it isn't fair. No one nation has sovereignty over the world. So a foreign policy based on that notion must ultimately fail. This is just a recognition that multipolarity is the natural and fair state of the world. You can't just bully everyone to align under you. It won't work and it breeds injustice, resentment, and hatred.

The US was fighting a Cold War against the spread of Soviet Communism. That was mostly done by funding local opposition. That was pretty smart strategy overall, given how disasterous communism was. I don't fault the CIA for that. The spread of communism was a major problem. It was spreading like a cancer. It's hard to give a general answer. But in general what you do is deescalate by not making aggressive moves, and very importantly you have to be open to genuinely hearing their perspective, you have to really want to understand their greivances, rather than just insisting that that you are good and they are evil. Once the other side feels heard there can be genuine compromise. This is exactly what Israel refuses to do.

That's actually not true. I just read a book about this. The CIA did not fund Al Queda. The CIA funded anti-communist local Afghans fighters. Al Queda and Bin Laden were self-funded and had no cooperation with Americans. Bin Laden was not a local, he just larped around the local Afghan fighters. Bin Laden had less than 100 fighters in Afghanistan while the local Afghan fighters were 100,000+. The CIA did quite a good job hunting after Bin Laden long before 9/11. The CIA understood the Bin Laden threat back in the mid 90s, long before 9/11. He was just hard to catch.

I doubt it. The CIA is actually pretty smart. They knew that invading Iraq was an insane idea. The heads in the CIA opposed the Iraq War. They were forced into it by Cheney and his minions.

I hope Americans are not stupid enough to put troops in the Middle East again.

But it has been successful in highlighting the injustice of how Israel treats Palestinians. Of course terrorism does backfire too.

I don't think that's true because most governments try to hide such things. Even the Nazis were not announcing their gas chambers to the world. They hid it. Torture and rape is also hidden and denied by most nations. So the purpose there is something else.