and they agreed to have IAEC inspectors all the way up their asses. undoing the deal with them was a monumental blunder.
I don’t miss him because he was bloodthirsty psychopath about the drones. Didn’t he kill an American citizen once? Anyway, the Iran deal was really good. One thing I don’t fault him over.
I don’t miss Obama, per se, just not having to look at the news every day to see what new crazy shit we were getting up to. Politics have been such team sports, especially with the right. And we’ve gone off the rails with basic facts even, which makes having a normal conversation about what’s going on impossible with certain people.
Propaganda is a hell of a drug, and I want off the train we’re on.
Yeah people used to say the same about bush II and he was a bad president. I hate when people say stupid shit like that, like yeah trump is way beyond the pale of bad presidents but dont miss some dogshit neoliberal like let’s have some self-respect
Another shitty aspect of this is that probably a majority of our ability to get a deal done bloodlessly like this is, for better or worse, due to the implicit threat of the massive power imbalance of our militaries. If you are negotiating with someone who is kind and smiling and sincere and they have a squad of fucking jacked dudes armed to the gills standing behind him also smiling… well negotiating may seem like the preferable thing at that point. And, in this case, the sincere man genuinely agrees to come to an amicable and sustainable solution from that is good for all parties, so it worked out.
But then a petty stupid egotist with a complex about everything the sincere man did comes in an rips up the deal and acts like a lunatic basically no matter what you do. So rather than try to create a bullshit new deal with someone who will only accept absolute capitulation under threat of war, you stand your ground and prepare for war. War comes and… turns out that, at least when this stupid manchild and his idiot crew are in charge, and once they have fired a ton of their non-cis straight white male officers and soldiers, their disorganized and poorly led military is pretty fucking ineffective. They are also extremely easily swayed by financial risks, for oil in particular, and it takes next to nothing for you to leverage your position next to the primary channel for the world’s oil shipments to bring that shit to a stand still.
Now you have taken some licks from bombings, and there is still an ever looming threat of nukes. But now you are sitting across from this petty stupid egotist and there doesn’t seem to be as overwhelming of a threat there anymore. And now they are coming back at you with deals that are not just that you unconditionally surrender. Now they are desperately offering you control over the shipping channels you only hijacked due to this war they started, a monetary payout, and essentially the same terms otherwise you already had. Fuck man, why the fuck wouldn’t you hold out longer and see what else this stupid prick will offer you?
It is absolutely not a good moral stance that we have long decided to negotiate with the world by might and threat. And ends do not justify means. But on the odd occasion, some good did come of it. Whatever hope there ever was of that happening again though… it just got thrown out the window. If Iran can barely inconvenience your oil supply chain and make America roll over, why would anyone sitting across the table ever take that threat seriously again?
My hope is that, if anything good comes from this, it will be that less priority will be put on military power in the future (after we are done with this regime, obviously) as it will no longer be as impactful as it used to be in negotiations. But I am not holding my breath for that.
Keep in mind his “Look forward, Not Back” attitude when confronted with torture and other criminality from the W crowd likely emboldened the current pack of degenerates and directly led to today’s events. “Hey the spineless Weimarcrats wouldn’t even go after them with evidence of torture…we can do whatever we want!” That being said he was light years better than the pedophile in office currently.
Yeah there’s a direct line from obama acting like we didn’t need to hold anyone accountable to trump not being held accountable today.
I feel like that line kinda started when Ford pardoned Nixon. That began a longstanding tradition of not holding politicians to account for their actions while in office, which has since been emboldened by subsequent presidents and now the Supreme Court’s ruling on official presidential acts.
I’m not saying he was perfect. I’m not saying that we shouldn’t criticize past political leaders. I’m not saying he did nothing wrong. I’m not saying Democrats are great. I’m not saying Democrats are the entirely of the left, and yes, I’ve heard that the Democrats aren’t the left because they are capitalists, for the context of this comment I’m using “the left” as a more colloquial definition, on relation to the Overton window and so on, basically meaning “not conservatives”.
So if you’re going to respond to the following, please refer to the above first.
People say “the left needs to be more united”, and it does. But the problem we have is a constant purity battle. Everyone is silently judging each other, and more harshly, themselves, for who’s got the better morals.
We then fall into this trap where, when someone from “the left” fails to meet our moral standards, to sometimes literally any degree, we have to point it out. After all we like accountability, transparency, and we would hate to be hypocrites, right? This can range from “X did war crimes” to “yeah but X said a slur once in the 90s and even though it wasn’t considered a slur then by a lot of people it is now”
The end conclusion is “No one is good enough. Everyone has failed you. Our side is weak. Our side is hypocritical. I, the commenter, am morally better for pointing out this flaw. I’m in the know. I know what’s right and wrong and I speak truth to power.”
Conservatives… Don’t do this. They either clap or jeer. They don’t care for nuance, thing is good or thing bad.
So when conservatives see the “bad” people admitting they are bad, there’s a bit of confusion then a sense of validation. It verifies what they think deep down, that everyone is secretly conservatives and so called “libruls” are just playing pretend to get votes or look better, and that real conservatives are just more honest. They think that, by criticizing our own side, we’re admitting that everyone is just as bad as Trump.
They think, and maybe for over are right, that we can never be happy.
I’m not saying we should lower our standards.
What I am saying is that we have certainly learned how to jeer, but maybe we should learn how, and when, to clap.
Tldr: Obama broke the race barrier and did a huge reform to healthcare in the country, good for him.
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He is one of the best presidents in US history.
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The orange Mongoose is one of the worst if not the worst.
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Obama bombed the ever loving shit out of the middle east.
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Obama deported more people from the US than Trump at the moment.
I would do almost anything to go back to the Obama era, seriously. But I don’t want anyone thinking I believe Obama was some kind of saint. He wasn’t. He simply did things better than Trump.
His immigration policy made more sense. He deported people who actually needed to be deported without resorting to modern-day concentration camps. He used military force in the Middle East, but generally for far more defensible reasons. He was a significantly better diplomat, and he certainly handled Iran better than Trump ever did, without throwing tantrums and shitting himself on national television.
What people really miss is not Obama. People miss competence, decency, and sanity.
As a part of the famous Democratic circular firing squad, I was extremely critical of most of Obama’s administration. But I voted for him twice, and I’d take him over Trump in a heartbeat.
Edit: autocorrect-induced typo
That’s a difference between left and right. Conservatives value in-group loyalty more than truth or consistency. They fall in line. Feels good in their brain.
This is an effective strategy, at least unless whatever objective reality they’re rejecting catches up with them.
No no, as a Brit, genuinely, I miss Obama. (As well as all the competence, decency and sanity.)
We want our American imperialists to be competent not an embarrassment.
people who actually needed to be deported
Do you mean extradited?
No. Why would I mean extradited?
He deported people who had illegally entered the country, people who were removable under U.S. immigration law because they had committed certain crimes in the United States, and, in some cases, people with criminal histories or warrants in other countries who were unlawfully present in the U.S.
There may have been individual extradition cases during the Obama administration, but extradition is a separate legal process from deportation. It isn’t really an immigration policy so much as a matter of international criminal justice and cooperation between governments.
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Also Barry Obama: Let’s spy on our allies and bug their phones.
All of that was set-up in 2003-2006 under the bush administration in response to 9/11 and came to light during that same administration.
Obama didn’t do much about it… However, he did eventually (second administration) declassify the FISA courts that Bush Jr. set up and him and his administration took steps to automate and improve the disclosure of such programs and other evil shit with the FOIA improvement act in 2016.
Oh I hated uAmerica for it but it was better than to be threatened with war and have cover ops run on your territory.
Dude, if Trump stopped murdering brown people, declaring random wars, enriching himself through blatant corruption, fucking the world economy with stupid tariffs and licking the boots of all dictators worldwide, and if he started properly supporting Ukraine, taking action against climate change and coming to his senses about NATO and all the international institutions he is about to destroy, he could read Friedrich Merz’s WhatsApp for all I care.
People wanted Bernie Sanders in 2016 and when he got pushed out, they went for Trump
Americans are fucking stupid
you really think the people who supported bernie voted for trump? maybe you are fucking stupid
That’s not what happened. Were you only following the 2016 election through memes?
The same thing happened with Germany. Everyone in the early 1900s was thinking that the Weimar Republic was going to birth the first socialist nation, and then they got the Nazi party instead.
Ends up that stagnation creates populist movements on both sides of the political divide, and often the centrist in government would rather throw in with the far right than cede power to socialist.
Man, that would be a heck of an alternative history…
Just imagine if hitler was never appointed chancellor, weimar became socialist, and the ripple effect it could have had on the rest of the world…
The Weimar Republic had to fight dirty to keep it from happening. They had to empower the Freikorps to violently break up leftist strikes and rebellions. Empowering the same extremist that would attempt to first overthrow them during the Kapp Putsch and then eventually successfully overthrowing them when they all joined the Nazi.
Political assassination of leftist politicians were overlooked and ignored, while attempts against right winged politicians were demonized and harshly punished. It’s very reminiscent of how the current US government treats right winged violence compared to the left.
History rhymes, man…
That’s a bullshit myth from Democrats because they couldn’t believe they lost to Trump.
Roughly 12% of Bernie primary voters voted for Trump in the general.
That’s right in line with the amount of Clinton primary voters in 08 that voted McCain.
And it’s a good bit fewer than the 14% of people that voted for Obama in 2012 that voted Trump in 2016.
Roughly 12% of Bernie primary voters voted for Trump in the general.
Makes sense though, Bernie did leagues better in conservative states than Hillary. Most people think Bernie was only relevant in super progressive states, when in reality Clinton won nearly every progressive state and Bernie outcompeted her in traditionally red areas.
Which is why a lot of political strategists believe that Bernie would have been able to beat Trump. People wanted a populist leader, when Bernie got kicked off the platform they sided with trump.
I agree with this. I don’t think that everyone people burned necessarily voted for trump but, I don’t think it translated to a vote for Hilary in the way the party expected it would. I know more than a handful of people who when Bernie lost the primary just lost all ambition to vote in that election cycle at all. It’s self destructive behavior sure but, it doesn’t change that it happened.
I voted for Bernie in the primary. He lost.
Okay but also what right does the US have to take most of their uranium in the first place?
None.
That’s why Obama proposed a deal where the US would do things and Iran would do some other things. Kinda like how I give the supermarket money and they give me icecream. I don’t have a right to take their icecream away, but we can trade for it.
Trumps idea was to say “no, we will not make any deals, because Obama touched it and now it smells”. Then he noticed that Iran wasn’t following the deal, panic, and start bombing.
Trump cancelled the deal. With no deal, there is no longer any reason for them to follow the agreements. Trump bombed iran for the same reason previous presidents have messed with it; Iran was attempting to subvert the american petrodollar, in this case by trading with china in chinese currency as opposed to USD, which would have prevented us from being able to sieze, tax, track or sanction it as it passes through US banks, and threaten the USD as the global reserve currency.
And what right do we have to sieze, tax, track, and sanction trade between Iran and China?
Seems to me that the best outcome for the rest of the world is for the USD to lose world reserve status once and for all, if it would calm our obsession with being nosey warmongering cretins. But then of course, we’re going to get more desperate and reactionary and violent in attempts to defend that status as it’s loss becomes more inevitable.
What did Iran get out of it cause seams like they just got sanctions and b.s restrictions. Not a fair trade or anything.
The JCPOA was, if you boil the 109 pages down to two sentences, basically
“If you heavily restrict uranium enrichment for 10 to 15 years, and don’t have anything weapons-grade, China, Europe, the US and Russia will actually do trade with you. If you don’t, we won’t.”
I still don’t see why the U.S has the right to make those restrictions with other countries.
It just sounds like extortion.
I mean, no country has the ‘right’ to trade with anyone. If I don’t agree with what another country does, it’s perfectly reasonable for me to choose to not trade with them or only agree to trade with them under certain circumstances. It’s not so much extortion as it is a ‘no shirt, no shoes, no service’ policy. Extortion is more using the threat of physical consequences to get someone to acquiesce to a position - essentially what the US is doing right now.
I mean wasn’t the threat of violence always implied though in this specific situation?
I mean the U.S said. Give us almost all of your energy resources, and we will let you trade with a few other countries.
And if you don’t then we won’t allow anyone who matters to do any business with you.
Then they also had other sanctions put on them when when they were giving them all that uranium. Like the individual citizen wasn’t allowed to use systems like PayPal. Which restricted them from doing international freelance work.
I knew an artist from Iran. He told me they also couldn’t get most companies to ship things there.
And couldn’t sell his art on platforms that used PayPal.
All these rules were to keep Iran and it’s people from prospering. This deal from the u.s was agreed upon by Iran out of fear. Not because it was mutually beneficial. That’s extortion.
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The majority are so terribly misinformed and catastrophically dedicated to their party.
It’s not entirely their fault. They’re raised on the propaganda machine from their first breath. That any of them can actually snap out of it is kind of impressive. Of course, not enough do, but it’s a shred of hope if you look at it right.
I’ve always longed for a system in which all political policies and structures are tested and the goal is the optimization of the HDI, GDPPP, and environmental impact. Unfortunately everyone seems quite dedicated to ideas from men who died long before the empiricism movement or before the modern technological revolution.
Now for your statement, I’ve known people to go from liberal to maga and vice versa. Laypeople seem about as idiotic everywhere and what’s left of educated people, half seem to over estimate their skills in fields that aren’t their expertise. In their expertise though they tend to have a very accurate understanding of what they know and what they don’t. Finally there’s the trolls who are aware but just want to fuck shit up for the lolz or just want to win their bets on kalshi.
America has two political parties and both are controlled by different foreign governments. Russia pays the GOP and Israel pays the DNC. There is a big difference in what people want and what choices they have and America hasn’t had a real choice in how the country works since the global financial disaster of 2008. No major player suffered consequences. Americans wanted corporate heads to roll and were not only ignored but then had to pay the banks to not suffer the consequences of their actions.
Trump is a symptom of voters making deliberately back choices to crash a system that doesn’t listen to them. Trump is basically the forest fire that kills the overgrowth and leaves only the most durable things behind.
It may not be a conscious choice to burn it all down but Americans are frustrated with not being respected or even heard by the people who ask for our votes. After Trump there will be regrowth and healing, new more durable institutions that will know how to protect against similar political and financial attacks.
America has two political parties and both are controlled by different foreign governments.
Sure, the blame falls on dirty foreigners. Americans are never at fault for what happens in the US. Horrible healthcare? It’s the Russian’s fault! ICE killing people on the streets? China! The largest prison population in the world? Eeeh… Peru?
Russia pays the GOP and Israel pays the DNC.
lol, you think AIPAC doesn’t fund republicans?
Americans do not own you shit
Americans also clearly can’t spell. Proof how terrible the US education system is.
Tell me again who in charge of the education department?
No no you just misunderstand our local vernacular. You see my compatriat here spelled everything exactly as they intended, their mistake was merely grammatical: They neglected a comma. Americans do not own! Because so many of us rent. Because we abolished slavery (Eventually). You shit. An observation of your gastrointestinal functionality. Better than you not shitting! An approval of your digestive health. L’chaim!
If the US was a random country just doing their thing I would agree. But you can’t play world police for 10 decades and then just say “I don’t want to play with you anymore”. By being a unipolar power in a world order you have a certain responsibility.
Can they just fuck off and sit in the corner eating crayons then and leave the rest of the world alone?
Hey Barry, are you trying to upset me right now, 'cause that’s what’s happening!
I do not miss Obama. He was a step in the right direction, and better than most candidates. He was a cool guy, very charismatic, improved relations with countries around the world, and brought some forward movement.
Unfortunately, like every other democratic president, they were soft on their opposition and continued pushing the status quo. Trump shouts down his enemies. His goons of ICE are running amuck. He’s pardoning Jan 6 terrorists. Trump made companies suck his dick. Trump is effective at getting his way, even if it’s all diaper shit. We got all this fascism and racist shit now.
Just like when we shrugged at the Confederates, Obama would have just told ICE to “Cool it bucko!”
So no. Don’t miss him or Democrats like him.
Trump is showing how much you can change if you try. Democrats like the status quo, at least we have proof now.
Mamdani is proof that better Democrats can get stuff done too.
I’d say he’s more proof that a sufficiantly strong popular movement can force the Democratic party to acquiesce to their will. The party serves more as a limiter on socialist politics.
Remember that to this day the top Democrat, who lives like 5 miles away from Mamdani in the same city, refuses to support him.
Remember that they tried to resurrect Cuomo to run as an independent against him when he secured the Democratic nomination.
Socialists can get stuff done. It’s just that due to the nature of the US political system they have to call themselves Democrats and submit to an anti-socialist Democrat gauntlet.
Yes, but… The Iran deal also economically enabled Iran to expand its ballistic missile program and funnel billions to proxies like the Houthis, Hamas, and Hezbollah. That in turn helped bolster Netanyahu in Israel. He handled Iran much better than Trump, but it caused a lot of problems as well.
Winning this war will both embolden Iran and deepen the regime’s paranoia in the future.
