Gotta have that third temple.

UK/France/Spain, Settler Colonialism, and Fascism. Germany literally learned it from watching them do it first.

Foreign policy needs consensus. So the EU can not force Germany to do anything in terms of foreign policy.

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

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.

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.

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

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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.

It is definitely an unlikely hypothetical due to both sides having allies/etc and yeah, the logistics. It would kind of be like Russia declaring war on something like… Paraguay. The problems with logistics are mostly the same on both sides though, it’s just a matter of figuring out how they would fight. From there, and yes, there’s a lot to think about to get to that point… but, if they were determined to fight and everyone else was determined not to intervene, Israel has a pretty clear advantage in terms of military might whichever metrics you look at.

The real interesting piece is the Spanish Navy… as in Spain does have a legitimately impressive navy and even though it’s a long cruise, they could probably get to Israel with it whereas Israel does have a navy, but to my knowledge, the only area where they really excel there is with submarines. Israel would be completely outmatched in the Mediterranean if they could figure out how to fight in it.

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.